Free Before I Go to Sleep by S. J. Watson

after a few more minutes, and the tension lifted. I waited until he was snoring softly and slipped out of bed and here, in the spare room, sat down to write this.
    I would like so much to remember him. Just once.
     

Monday, 12 November
     
    The clock has just chimed four; it is beginning to get dark. Ben will not be home just yet but, as I sit and write, I listen for his car. The shoebox sits on the floor next to my feet, the tissue paper in which this journal was wrapped spilling out of it. If he comes in I will put my book in the wardrobe and tell him I have been resting. It is dishonest, but not terribly so, and there is nothing wrong with wanting to keep the contents of my journal a secret. I must write down what I have seen. What I have learned. But that doesn’t mean I want someone – anyone – to read it.
    I saw Dr Nash today. We were sitting opposite each other, on either side of his desk. Behind him was a filing cabinet, on top of which sat a plastic model of the brain, sliced down the middle, parted like an orange. He asked me how I’d been getting on.
    ‘OK,’ I said, ‘I suppose.’ It was a difficult question to answer – the few hours since I had woken that morning were the only ones I could clearly remember. I met my husband, as if for the first time though I knew it was not, was called by my doctor who told me about my journal. Then, after lunch, he picked me up and drove me here to his office.
    ‘I wrote in my journal,’ I said, ‘after you called. On Saturday.’
    He seemed pleased. ‘Do you think it helped at all?’
    ‘I think so,’ I said. I told him about the memories I’d had. The vision of the woman at the party, of learning of my father’s illness. He made notes as I spoke.
    ‘Do you still remember those things now?’ he said. ‘Or did you when you woke up this morning?’
    I hesitated. The truth was I did not. Or only some of it at least. This morning I had read my entry for Saturday – of the breakfast I shared with my husband, of the trip to Parliament Hill. It had felt as unreal as fiction, nothing to do with me, and I found myself reading and rereading the same section, over and over, trying to cement it in my mind, to fix it. It took me more than an hour.
    I read of the things Ben had told me, of how we met and married, of how we lived, and I felt nothing. Yet other things stayed with me. The woman, for example. My friend. I could not recall specifics – the fireworks party, being on the roof with her, meeting a man called Keith – but her memory still existed within me and this morning, as I read and reread my entry for Saturday, more details had come. The vibrant red of her hair, the black clothes that she preferred, the studded belt, the scarlet lipstick, the way that she used to make smoking look as though it was the coolest thing in the world. I could not remember her name, but now recalled the night we met, in a room that was shrouded in a thick fug of cigarette smoke and alive with the whistles and bangs of pinball machines and a tinny jukebox. She had given me a light when I asked her for one, then introduced herself and suggested I join her and her friends. We drank vodka and lager and, later, she held my hair out of the toilet bowl as I vomited most of it back up. ‘I guess we’re definitely friends now!’ she said, laughing, as I pulled myself back to my feet. ‘I wouldn’t do that for just anyone, you know.’
    I thanked her and, for no reason I knew, and as if it explained what I had just done, told her my father was dead. ‘Fuck …’ she said, and, in what must have been the first of her many switches from drunken stupidity to compassionate efficiency, she took me back to her room and we ate toast and drank black coffee, all the time listening to records and talking about our lives, until it began to get light.
    She had paintings propped up against the wall and at the end of the bed, and sketch books littered the room. ‘You’re an artist?’ I