Before I Go To Sleep: A Novel by S. J. Watson

Author:S. J. Watson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780062060570
Publisher: HarperCollins US
Published: 2011-06-14T10:00:00+00:00

Tuesday, November 20

It is morning. Ben has suggested that I clean the windows. “I’ve written it on the board,” he said, as he got into his car. “In the kitchen.”

I looked. Wash windows he had written, adding a tentative question mark. I wondered if he thought I might not have time, wondered what he thought I did all day. He does not know I now spend hours reading my journal, and sometimes hours more writing in it. He does not know there are days when I see Dr. Nash.

I wonder what I did before my days were taken up like this. Did I really spend all my time watching television, or going for walks, or doing chores? Did I spend hour after hour sitting in an armchair, listening to the ticking of the clock, wondering how to live?

Wash windows. Possibly some days I read things like that and feel resentful, seeing it as an effort to control my life, but today I viewed it with affection, as nothing more sinister than the desire to keep me occupied. I smiled to myself but, even as I did, I thought how difficult it must be to live with me. He must go to extraordinary lengths to make sure I am safe, and even so must worry constantly that I will get confused, will wander off, or worse. I remembered reading about the fire that had destroyed most of our past, the one Ben has never told me that I started, even though I must have done so. I saw an image—a burning door, almost invisible in the thick smoke, a sofa, melting, turning to wax—that hovered, just out of reach, but refused to resolve itself into a memory, and remained a half-imagined dream. But Ben has forgiven me for that, I thought, just as he must have forgiven me for so much more. I looked out of the kitchen window, and through the reflection of my own face I saw the mowed lawn, the tidy borders, the shed, the fences. I realized that Ben must have known that I was having an affair—certainly once I’d been discovered in Brighton, even if not before. How much strength it must have taken to look after me—once I had lost my memory—even with the knowledge that I had been away from home, intending to fuck someone else, when it had happened. I thought of what I had seen, of the diary I had written. My mind had been fractured. Destroyed. Yet still he had stood by me, where another man might have told me that I deserved everything, left me to rot.

I turned away from the window and looked under the sink. Cleaning materials. Soap. Cartons of powders, plastic spray-bottles. There was a red plastic bucket and I filled this with hot water, adding a squirt of soap and a tiny drop of vinegar. How have I repaid him? I thought. I took a sponge and began to soap the window, beginning at the top, working down.

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