The Forgetting

by Hannah Beckerman

His attentiveness was unlike anything she’d experienced before. He’d listened intently to everything she’d had to say and asked questions in order to hear her opinions, not – like so many other men she knew – so that he could glaze over until it was his turn to speak again. His genuine interest in her thoughts and feelings had been almost revelatory.

‘Semantic memory is recall of facts. Common knowledge, if you like. It’s different to episodic memory, which is an individual’s personal history.’

And yet Dominic was fantastic with Leo: loving and affectionate, engaged and nurturing, wanting to pass on his passions and interests to their son even at Leo’s young age.

‘It’s not easy to acknowledge that your parents hated you so much that they wanted to eradicate every trace of you.’

As she held her son in her arms and rocked him back to sleep, she thought about the events Dominic had just described – like scenes from a horror film which, once viewed, could never be forgotten – trying and failing to understand how any parent could enact such cruelty on their child.

the thought of sharing a bed with a man whom I can no more remember than if I’d met him for the first time two days ago – fills me with such overwhelming panic that my lungs seem to shrink, my chest contracting, the walls of my throat narrowing until I am struggling to breathe.

And all the time he talked – with every question he answered, every new piece of information he offered – I felt as though I was drifting further away from myself.

The sequence feels both entirely familiar and yet disquietingly foreign, as though we are characters in a play acting out a well-worn scene, but it is our first day of rehearsals and we haven’t quite found our rhythm yet.

I need to prove to myself that I can do this, that I can leave the house without supervision or misadventure. I cannot stay cooped up indoors, locked inside a mind that seems determined to keep my past from me.

‘Memory recovery isn’t something that can be rushed. We just have to be patient and let your brain have time to heal.’

I know that tonight, when Stephen gets home, I need to ask him about the rest of my family. I’m ready to find out more about who else was in my life before the crash.

I tell myself to calm down; moments of intimacy – however small – are inevitably going to feel strange with a man I cannot remember.

‘Your parents died in a car crash when you were twenty-one. They’ve been dead for eighteen years.’

My parents are dead. I do not remember them dying. I don’t remember anything about them at all.

The decision was there without her consciously having taken it: ignore the message, don’t tell Dominic, spare him yet more anger and upset. If both she and Dominic ghosted all Imogen’s communications from now on, surely she’d get the message and leave them alone.

I have discovered that I am an only child, that my parents had me late in life, that I have no extended family. I am nobody’s daughter, nobody’s sister, nobody’s cousin, nobody’s niece. It is knowledge that has left me with a feeling of profound incompleteness: as though I am somehow unfinished, just a fraction of a whole.

‘Sweetheart, you can’t keep moaning about the fact that most of your friends have already lost all their baby weight if you’re eating forty-two pounds of cake every month.’

She and Dominic had never discussed having a second child, and it hadn’t occurred to her that he – at nearly fifty – would want another. In truth, she had no desire for more children. She loved Leo fiercely but she’d known by the time she was six months pregnant that one child would be enough for her.

Thoughts of parenthood – the death of my parents, my own inability to conceive – have developed a gravitational pull, drawing me back, again and again, to a sense of impotent grief.

I find myself craving the silence and solitude that only a few moments ago I had found oppressive.

Livvy paused, knowing the topography of this conversation was littered with mines. In the early months of their relationship, Dominic had seemed to revel in the warmth of her family; he’d been charming and funny, and her parents had adored him from the outset. It had seemed to Livvy that he’d embraced the opportunity to be part of a functional, loving family. But more recently she’d been aware of snatches of resentment creeping in, moments when Livvy’s closeness to her family seemed to emphasise Dominic’s estrangement from his. And after the events of the past fortnight – his mother’s reappearance, his father’s death – those occurrences seem to have been exacerbated further.

She could hear the defiance in her voice, wished there were no need to defend one part of her family against another.

‘My parents always warned me: be careful who you have kids with. Mortgages, joint bank accounts, marriages – you can extricate yourself from all of it. But have a child with someone and you’re linked to them for the rest of your life.’

A crater opens up in my chest. And then my grief seems to spill over, and I start to cry, cannot stop, dare not stop, because if I stop the world will be quiet again, and I will have to face the enormity of what has happened.

In four weeks’ time, they would be in London, at an address where Imogen would not be able to find them. All Livvy had to do was to keep her mother-in-law at bay for another month, and then she would never be able to turn up on their doorstep again.

I hear his words, but I cannot believe them, cannot conceive that there is life beyond such a loss.

‘I think I’m scared that whatever I find out will be bad. And what if Stephen tells me everything and I still don’t remember? Where do I go after that? Maybe it means I’ll never remember anything for myself.’

But sometimes being scared of something is precisely the reason you need to do it.

I have no friends, no family, no wider network on whom I could rely. It is Stephen who knows everything. Stephen who looks after everything. Stephen who looks after me. Without him, I would be lost. He is all I have in the world.

‘Your husband left me a message to say you were feeling better and no longer required therapy. I just wanted to check in with you before discharging you. It’s entirely your decision, of course, but most patients who’ve suffered amnesia do find a course of therapy helpful.’

‘Well, obviously every case is different and it’s difficult – and often unhelpful – to generalise. But if a patient is coping well day-to-day, then learning about their past shouldn’t be disadvantageous. It’s all about the brain rediscovering old neural pathways and making new ones.’

Three days ago, I thought Zahira’s suggestion absurd. I felt certain that all Stephen’s decisions were in my best interests. Now I do not know what to think, what to feel. Where to turn.

I read letter after letter until my eyes are aching. I try to catch my breath, but it is as though a thousand tiny dust motes are trapped in my throat. Because in my hand is a stack of love letters. Letters containing intimate details about Stephen’s life. Letters addressed to ‘my darling’, filled with outpourings of devotion.

All these letters have been written while I have been married to Stephen. And yet none have been written by me. Every single one is signed with the same elegant flourish. The same graceful fountain pen. The same two-syllable name. Signed by a woman I have never heard of before. A woman called Livvy.

‘I hate to say this, but a man never hurts a woman only once. There’s always a second time.’

Stephen doesn’t want me to remember anything about my past. He is fully invested in my amnesia. Because if I do remember, there is a risk that I will find out, not for the first time but the second, that he is being unfaithful to me.

‘But if that’s me – if I’m Livvy Nicholson, and that’s my child – then where’s my baby now?’

‘Stephen’s not dangerous. He wouldn’t hurt me.’ Even as I say it, there is a voice inside my head, whispering, probing, like a finger jabbed into the flesh of an arm: Are you sure?

I realise I am scared of him – of who he is, who he might be – and I have no idea where the feeling comes from, only that it is coiling in my stomach like a threatened snake.

The muscles in Stephen’s jaw clench. ‘I did it because I love you.’ He holds my gaze and it is written clearly on his face: the deluded belief that it is true.

‘This isn’t what love looks like, Stephen. Love is about wanting the best for somebody, not imposing your will on them. It’s not about cutting them off from everything and everyone they care about. You don’t love me. You don’t know the meaning of the word.’

My therapist, Lena, has said that regaining my memory is a bit like gluing back together the broken pieces of a china cup: there may always be the odd hairline fracture if you look closely enough, but with sufficient care in the reconstruction, those chinks should be barely visible to the naked eye.

two women every week in the UK are killed by a partner or ex-partner. How over half of all women killed are the victims of someone with whom they’ve been in a relationship. They are the kind of statistics I wish I could unlearn but know I never can.

‘Dominic has already stolen months of your life from you. It’s up to you now whether you let him steal your future.’