Before I Go to Sleep (46 page)

‘Ben,’ I say. ‘You’re hurting me.’

He hits me then. I hear the sound of his hand against my face before I feel the flash of pain. My head twists round, my lower jaw cracks up, connecting painfully with its companion.

‘Don’t you ever fucking call me that again,’ he spits.

‘Mike,’ I say quickly, as if I can erase my mistake. ‘Mike—’

He ignores me.

‘I’m sick of being Ben,’ he says. ‘You can call me Mike, from now on. OK? It’s Mike. That’s why we came back here. So that we can put all that behind us. You wrote in your book that if you could only remember what happened here all those years ago then you’d get your memory back. Well, we’re here now. I made it happen, Chris. So remember!’

I am incredulous. ‘You
want
me to remember?’

‘Yes! Of course I do! I love you, Christine. I want you to remember how much you love me. I want us to be together again. Properly. As we should be.’ He pauses, his voice drops to a whisper. ‘I don’t want to be Ben any more.’

‘But—’

He looks back at me. ‘When we go back home tomorrow you can call me Mike.’ He shakes me again, his face inches from mine. ‘OK?’ I can smell sourness on his breath, and another smell, too. I wonder if he’s been drinking. ‘We’re going to be OK, aren’t we, Christine? We’re going to move on.’

‘Move on?’ I say. My head is sore, and something is coming out of my nose. Blood, I think, though I am not sure. The calmness disappears. I raise my voice, shouting as loud as I can. ‘You want me to go back home? Move on? Are you absolutely fucking crazy?’ He moves his hand to clamp it over my mouth, and I realize that has left my arm free. I hit out at him, catching him on the side of his face, though not hard. Still, it takes him by surprise. He falls backwards, letting go of my other arm as he does.

I stumble to my feet. ‘Bitch!’ he says, but I step forward, over him, and head towards the door.

I manage three steps before he grabs my ankle. I come crashing down. There is a stool sitting tucked under the dressing table and my head hits its edge as I go down. I am lucky; the stool is padded and breaks my fall, but it causes my body to twist awkwardly as I land. Pain shoots up my back and through my neck and I am afraid I have broken something. I begin to crawl towards the door but he still holds my ankle. He pulls me towards him with a grunt and then his crushing weight is on top of me, his lips inches from my ear.

‘Mike,’ I sob. ‘Mike—’

In front of me is the photograph of Adam and Helen, lying on the floor where he had dropped it. Even in the middle of everything else I wonder how he had got it, and then it hits me. Adam had sent it to me at Waring House and Mike had taken it, along with all the other photographs, when he’d come for me.

‘You stupid, stupid bitch,’ he says, spitting into my ear. One of his hands is round my throat, with the other he has grabbed a handful of my hair. He pulls my head back, jerking my neck up. ‘What did you have to go and do that for?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I sob. I cannot move. One of my hands is trapped beneath my body, the other clamped between my back and his leg.

‘Where did you think you were going to go, eh?’ he says. He is snarling now, an animal. Something like hate floods out of him.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say again, because it is all I can think of to say. ‘I’m sorry.’ I remember the days when those words would always work, always be enough, be what was needed to get me out of whatever trouble I was in.

‘Stop saying you’re fucking sorry,’ he says. My head jerks back, and then slams forward. My forehead, nose, mouth all connect with the carpeted floor. There is a noise, a sickening crunch, and the smell of stale cigarettes. I cry out. There is blood in my mouth. I have bitten my tongue. ‘Where do you think you’re going to run to? You can’t drive. You don’t know anybody. You don’t even know who you are most of the time. You have nowhere to go, nowhere at all. You’re pathetic.’

I start to cry, because he is right. I am pathetic. Claire never came; I have no friends. I am utterly alone, relying totally on the man who did this to me, and tomorrow morning, if I survive, I will have forgotten even this.

If I survive
. The words echo through me as I realize what this man is capable of, and that, this time, I may not get out of this room alive. Terror slams into me, but then I hear the tiny voice again.
This is not the place you die. Not with him. Not now. Anything but that
.

I arch my back painfully and manage to free my arm. Lunging forward I grab the leg of the stool. It is heavy and the angle of my body wrong, but I manage to twist round and heave it back over my head where I imagine Mike’s head will be. It strikes something with a satisfying crack, and there is a gasp in my ear. He lets go of my hair.

I look round. He has rocked backwards, his hand to his forehead. Blood is beginning to trickle between his fingers. He looks up at me, uncomprehending.

Later, I will think how I should have hit him again. With the stool, or with my bare hands. With anything. I should have made sure he was incapacitated, that I could get away, get downstairs, even far enough away that I could open the door and scream for help.

But I do not. I pull myself upright and then I stand, looking at him on the floor in front of me. No matter what I do now, I think, he has won. He will always have won. He has taken everything from me, even the ability to remember exactly what he did to me. I turn, and begin to move towards the door.

With a grunt he launches himself at me. His whole body collides with mine. Together we slam into the dresser, stumble towards the door. ‘Christine!’ he says. ‘Chris! Don’t leave me!’

I reach out. If I can just open the door, then surely, despite the noise from the club, someone will hear us, and come?

He clings to my waist. Like some grotesque, two-headed monster we inch forward, me dragging him. ‘Chris! I love you!’ he says. He is wailing, and this, plus the ridiculousness of his words, spurs me on. I am nearly there. Soon I will reach the door.

And then it happens. I remember that night, all those years ago. Me, in this room, standing in the same spot. I am reaching out a hand towards the same door. I am happy, ridiculously so. The walls resonate with the soft orange glow of the lit candles that were dotted around the room when I arrived, the air is tinged with the sweet smell of the roses in the bouquet that was on the bed.
I’ll be upstairs around seven, my darling
, said the note that was pinned to them, and though I wondered briefly what Ben was doing downstairs I am glad of the few minutes I have had alone before he arrives. It has given me the opportunity to gather my thoughts, to reflect on how close I came to losing him, what a relief it has been to end the affair with Mike, how fortunate I am that Ben and I are now set on a new trajectory. How could I have thought that I wanted to be with Mike? Mike would never have done what Ben has done: arrange a surprise night away in a hotel at the coast, to show me how much he loves me and that, despite our recent differences, this will never change. Mike was too inward-looking for that, I have learned. With him everything is a test, affection is measured, that given weighed against that which has been received, and the balance, more often than not, disappointing him.

I am touching the handle of the door, twisting it, pulling it towards me. Ben has taken Adam to stay with his grandparents. We have a whole weekend in front of us, with nothing to worry about. Just the two of us.

‘Darling,’ I am starting to say, but the word is choked off in my throat. It’s not Ben at the door. It’s Mike. He is pushing past me, coming into the room, and even as I am asking him what he thinks he is doing – what right he has to lure me here, to this room, what he thinks he can achieve – I am thinking, You devious bastard! How dare you pretend to be my husband. Do you have no pride left at all?

I think of Ben and Adam, at home. By now Ben will be wondering where I am. Possibly he will soon call the police. How stupid I was to get on a train and come here without mentioning it to anybody. How stupid to believe that a typewritten note, even one sprayed with my favourite perfume, was from my husband.

Mike speaks. ‘Would you have come, if you’d known it was to meet me?’

I laugh. ‘Of course not! It’s over. I told you that before.’

I look at the flowers, the bottle of champagne he still holds in his hand. Everything smacks of romance, of seduction. ‘My God!’ I am saying. ‘You really thought you could just lure me here, give me flowers and a bottle of champagne and that would be it? That I would just fall into your arms and everything would go back to being like it was before? You’re crazy, Mike. Crazy. I’m leaving now. Going back to my husband and my son.’

I don’t want to remember any more. I suppose that must have been when he first hit me, but, after that, I don’t know what happened, what led me from there to the hospital. And now I am here again, in this room. We have turned full circle, though for me all the days between have been stolen. It is as though I never left.

I cannot reach the door. He is pulling himself up. I begin to shout. ‘Help! Help!’

‘Quiet!’ he says. ‘Shut up!’

I shout louder, and he swings me round, at the same time pushing me backwards. I fall, and the ceiling and his face slide down in front of me like a curtain descending. My skull hits something hard and unyielding. I realize he has pushed me into the bathroom. I twist my head and see the tiled floor stretching away from me, the bottom of the toilet, the edge of the bath. There is a bar of soap on the floor, sticky and mashed. ‘Mike!’ I say. ‘Don’t …’ But he is crouching over me, his hands around my throat.

‘Shut up!’ he is saying, over and over, even though I am not saying anything now, just crying. I am gasping for breath, my eyes and mouth are wet, with blood and tears and I don’t know what else.

‘Mike—’ I gasp. I cannot breathe. His hands are around my throat and I cannot breathe. Memory floods back. I can remember him holding my head under water. I remember waking up, in a white bed, wearing a hospital gown, and Ben sitting next to me, the real Ben, the one I married. I remember a policewoman asking me questions I cannot answer. A man in pale-blue pyjamas sitting on the edge of my hospital bed, laughing with me even as he tells me that I greet him every day as if I have never seen him before. A little boy with blond hair and a tooth missing, calling me Mummy. One after another the images come. They flood through me. The effect is violent. I shake my head, trying to clear it, but Mike grips me tighter. His head is above mine, his eyes wild and unblinking as he squeezes my throat, and I can remember it being so once before, in this room. I close my eyes. ‘How dare you!’ he is saying, and I cannot work out which Mike it is who’s speaking: the one here, now, or the one who exists only in my memory. ‘How dare you!’ he says again. ‘How dare you take my child!’

It is then that I remember. When he had attacked me all those years ago, I had been carrying a baby. Not Mike’s but Ben’s. The child that was going to be our new start together.

Neither of us had survived.

I must have blacked out. When I regain consciousness I am sitting in a chair. I cannot move my hands, the inside of my mouth tastes furry. I open my eyes. The room is dim, lit only by the moonlight streaming in through the open curtains and the reflected yellow streetlights. Mike is sitting opposite me, on the edge of the bed. He is holding something in his hand.

I try to speak, but cannot. I realize something is in my mouth. A sock, perhaps. It has been secured somehow, tied in place, and my wrists are tied together, and also my ankles.

This is what he wanted all along, I think. Me, silent and unmoving. I struggle, and he notices that I have woken up. He looks up, his face a mask of pain and sadness, and stares at me, right into my eyes. I feel nothing but hate.

‘You’re awake.’ I wonder if he intends to say anything else, whether he is capable of saying anything else. ‘This isn’t what I wanted. I thought we would come here and it might help you to remember. Remember how things used to be between us. And then we could talk, and I could explain what happened here, all those years ago. I never meant for it to happen, Chris. I just get so mad, sometimes. I can’t help it. I’m sorry. I never wanted to hurt you, ever. I ruined everything.’

He looks down, into his lap. There is so much more I used to want to know, yet I am exhausted, and it is too late. I feel as though I could close my eyes and will myself into oblivion, erasing everything.