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

said, and she nodded. ‘It’s why I’m here at university,’ she said. I remembered her telling me she was studying fine art. ‘I’ll end up a teacher, of course, but in the meantime one has to dream. Yes?’ I laughed. ‘What about you? What are you studying?’ I told her. English. ‘Ah!’ she said. ‘So do you want to write novels or teach, then?’ She laughed, not unkindly, but I didn’t mention the story I had worked on in my room before coming down. ‘Dunno,’ I replied instead. ‘I guess I’m the same as you.’ She laughed again. ‘Well, here’s to us!’ she said, and as we toasted each other with coffee I felt, for the first time in months, that things might finally be all right.
    I remembered all this. It exhausted me, this effort of will to search the void of my memory, trying to find any tiny detail that might trigger a recollection. But my memories of my life with my husband? They had gone. Reading those words had not stirred even the smallest residue of memory. It was as if not only had the trip to Parliament Hill not happened, but neither had the things he told me there.
    ‘I remember some things,’ I said to Dr Nash. ‘Things from when I was younger, things that I remembered yesterday. They’re still there. And I can remember more details, too. But I can’t remember what we did yesterday at all. Or on Saturday. I can try to construct a picture of the scene I described in my journal, but I know it isn’t a memory. I know I’m just imagining it.’
    He nodded. ‘Is there anything you remember from Saturday? Any small detail that you wrote down that you can still recall? The evening, for example?’
    I thought of what I had written about going to bed. I realized I felt guilty. Guilty that, despite his kindness, I had not been able to give myself to my husband. ‘No,’ I lied. ‘Nothing.’
    I wondered what he might have done differently for me to want to take him in my arms, to let him love me. Flowers? Chocolates? Does he need to make romantic overtures every time he’d like to have sex, as if it were the first time? I realized how closed the avenues of seduction are to him. He can’t even play the first song we danced to at our wedding, or recreate the meal we enjoyed the first time we ate out together, because I don’t remember what they are. And in any case, I am his wife; he should not have to seduce me as if we have only just met every time he wants us to have sex.
    But is there ever a time when I let him make love to me, or perhaps, even, want to make love to him? Do I ever wake and know enough for desire to exist, unforced?
    ‘I don’t even remember Ben,’ I said. ‘I had no idea who he was this morning.’
    He nodded. ‘You’d like to?’
    I almost laughed. ‘Of course!’ I said. ‘I want to remember my past. I want to know who I am. Who I married. It’s all part of the same thing.’
    ‘Of course,’ he said. He paused, then leaned his elbows on the desk and clasped his hands in front of his face, as if thinking carefully about what to say, or how to say it. ‘What you’ve told me is encouraging. It suggests that the memories aren’t lost completely. The problem is not one of storage, but of access.’
    I thought for a moment, then said, ‘You mean my memories are there, I just can’t get to them?’
    He smiled. ‘If you like,’ he said. ‘Yes.’
    I felt frustrated. Eager. ‘So how do I remember more?’
    He leaned back and looked in the file in front of him. ‘Last week,’ he said, ‘on the day I gave you your journal, did you write that I showed you a picture of your childhood home? I gave it to you, I think.’
    ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I did.’
    ‘You seemed to remember much more, having seen that photo, than when I asked you about the place where you used to live without showing you a picture of it first.’ He paused. ‘Which, again, isn’t surprising. But I’d like to see what happens if I show you pictures from the period you definitely