每日英语有声小说-在我入睡‪前‬ 有声师姐Memory

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I am lying down. I have been asleep, but not for long. I can remember who I am, where I have been. 
I can hear noise, the roar of traffic, a siren that is neither rising nor falling in pitch but remaining constant. 
Something is over my mouth- I think of a balled sock- yet I find I can breathe. 
I am too frightened to open my eyes. I do not know what I will see. But I must. I have no choice but to face whatever my reality has become.
The light is bright. I can see a fluorescent tube on the low ceiling, and two metal bars running parallel to it. 
The walls are close by on each side, and they are hard, shiny with metal and perspex. 
I can make out drawers and shelves stocked with bottles and packets, and there are machines, blinking. 
Everything is moving slightly, vibrating, including, I realize, the bed in which I am lying.
A man’s face appears from somewhere behind me, over my head. He is wearing a green shirt. I don’t recognize him.
‘She’s awake, everybody,’ he says, and then more faces appear. I scan them quickly. Mike is not among them, and I relax a little.
‘Christine,’ comes a voice. ‘Chrissy. It’s me.’ It’s a woman’s voice, one I recognize. ‘We’re on our way to the hospital. 
‘You’ve broken your collarbone, but you’re going to be all right. Everything’s going to be fine. He’s dead. That man is dead. He can’t hurt you any more.’
I see the person speaking, then. She is smiling and holding my hand. It’s Claire. 
The same Claire I saw just the other day, not the young Claire I might expect to see after just waking up, and I notice her earrings are the same pair that she had on the last time I saw her.
‘Claire—’ I say, but she interrupts. ‘Don’t speak,’ she says. ‘Just try to relax.’ 
She leans forward and strokes my hair, and whispers something in my ear, but I don’t hear what. It sounds like I’m sorry.
‘I remember,’ I say. ‘I remember.’
She smiles, and then she steps back and a young man takes her place. 
He has a narrow face and is wearing thick-rimmed glasses. For a moment I think it is Ben, until I realize that Ben would be my age now.
‘Mum?’ he says. ‘Mum?’ He looks the same as he did in the picture of him and Helen, and I realize I remember him, too.
‘Adam?’ I say. Words choke in my throat as he hugs me.
‘Mum,’ he says. ‘Dad’s coming. He’ll be here soon.’
I pull him to me, and breathe in the smell of my boy, and I am happy.
I can wait no longer. It is time. I must sleep. 
I have a private room and so there is no need for me to observe the strict routines of the hospital, but I am exhausted, my eyes already beginning to close. It is time.
I have spoken to Ben. To the man I really married. We talked for hours, it seems, though it may only have been a few minutes. 
He told me that he flew in as soon as the police contacted him.
‘The police?’
‘Yes,’ he said. 
‘When they realized you weren’t living with the person Waring House thought you were they traced me. I’m not sure how. I suppose they had my old address and went from there.’
‘So where were you?’
He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. ‘I’ve been in Italy for a few months,’ he said. ‘I’ve been working out there.’ 
He paused. ‘I thought you were OK.’ He took my hand. ‘I’m sorry…’
‘You couldn’t have known,’ I said.
He looked away. ‘I left you, Chrissy.’
‘I know. I know everything. Claire told me. I read your letter.’
‘I thought it was for the best,’ he said. ‘I really did. I thought it would help. Help you. Help Adam. 
‘I tried to get on with my life. I really did.’ He hesitated. ‘I thought I could only do that if I divorced you. I thought it would free me. 
‘Adam didn’t understand, even when I explained to him that you wouldn’t even know, wouldn’t even remember being marr

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‘Mike?’ I say. ‘I do understand, you know. It must have been difficult.’
He looks up at me. ‘You do?’
‘Yes, of course. I’m grateful to you for coming for me. For giving me a home. For looking after me.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. Just think where I’d be if you hadn’t. I couldn’t bear it.’ I sense him soften.
The pressure on my arms and shoulder lessens and is accompanied by a subtle yet definite sensation of stroking that I find almost more distasteful but I know is more likely to lead to my escape. 
Because escape is all I can think of. I need to get away. 
How stupid of me, I think now, to have sat there on the floor while he was in the bathroom to read what he had stolen of my journal. 
Why hadn’t I taken it with me and left? Then I remember that it was not until I read the end of the journal that I had any real idea of how much danger I was in. 
That same small voice comes in again. I will escape. I have a son I cannot remember having met. I will escape. 
I move my head to face him, and begin to stroke the back of his hand where it rests on my shoulder. ‘Why not let me go, and then we can talk about what we should do?’
‘How about Claire, though?’ he says. ‘She knows I’m not Ben. You told her.’
‘She won’t remember that,’ I say, desperately.
He laughs, a hollow, choked sound. ‘You always treated me like I was stupid. I’m not, you know. I know what’s going to happen! You told her. You ruined everything!’
‘No,’ I say quickly. ‘I can call her. I can tell her I was confused. That I’d forgotten who you were. I can tell her that I thought you were Ben, but I was wrong.’
I almost believe he thinks this is possible, but then he says, ‘She’d never believe you.’
‘She would,’ I say, even though I know that she would not. ‘I promise.’
‘Why did you have to go and call her?’ His face clouds with anger, his hands begin to grip me tighter. ‘Why? Why, Chris? We were doing fine until then. Fine.’ 
He begins to shake me again. ‘Why?’ he shouts. ‘Why?’
‘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 bac

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It ends there. Frantic, I fan through the last few pages, but they are blank, scored only with their faint blue lines. 
Waiting for the rest of my story. But there is no more. Ben had found the journal, removed the pages, and Claire had not come for me. 
When Dr Nash collected the journal- on Tuesday 27th, it must have been- I had not known anything was wrong.
In a single rush I see it all, realize why the board in the kitchen so disturbed me. 
The handwriting. Its neat, even capitals looked totally different from the scrawl of the letter Claire had given me. 
Somewhere, deep down, I had known then that they were not written by the same person.
I look up. Ben, or the man pretending to be Ben, has come out of the shower. 
He is standing in the doorway, dressed as he was before, looking at me. I don’t know how long he has been there, watching me read. 
His eyes hold nothing more than a sort of vacancy, as if he is barely interested in what he is seeing, as if it doesn’t concern him.
I hear myself gasp. I drop the papers. Unbound, they slide on to the floor. ‘You!’ I say. ‘Who are you?’ 
He says nothing. He is looking at the papers in front of me. ‘Answer me!’ I say. My voice has an authority to it, but one that I do not feel.
My mind reels as I try to work out who he could be. Someone from Waring House, perhaps. A patient? Nothing makes any sense. 
I feel the stirrings of panic as another thought begins to form and then vanishes.
He looks up at me then. ‘I’m Ben,’ he says. He speaks slowly, as if trying to make me understand the obvious. ‘Ben. Your husband.’
I move back along the floor, away from him, as I fight to remember what I have read, what I know. 
‘No,’ I say, and then again, louder. ‘No!’ He moves forward. ‘I am, Christine. You know I am.’
Fear takes me. Terror. It lifts me up, holds me suspended, and then slams me back into its own horror. Claire’s words come back to me. But it’s not Ben. 
A strange thing happens then. I realize I am not remembering reading about her saying those words, I am remembering the incident itself. 
I can remember the panic in her voice, the way she said fuck before telling me what she’d realized, and repeated the words It’s not Ben. I am remembering.
‘You’re not,’ I say. ‘You’re not Ben. Claire told me! Who are you?’
‘Remember the pictures though, Christine? The ones from around the bathroom mirror? Look, I brought them to show you.’
He takes a step towards me, and then reaches for his bag on the floor beside the bed. He picks out a few curled photographs. 
‘Look!’ he says, and when I shake my head he takes the first one and, glancing at it, holds it up to me. ‘This is us,’ he says. ‘Look. Me and you.’ 
The photograph shows us sitting on some sort of boat, on a river or canal. 
Behind us there is dark, muddy water, with unfocused reeds beyond that. 
We both look young, our skin taut where now it sags, our eyes unlined and wide with happiness. 
‘Don’t you see?’ he says. ‘Look! That’s us. Me and you. Years ago. We’ve been together for years, Chris. Years and years.’
I focus on the picture. Images come to me; the two of us, a sunny afternoon. We’d hired a boat somewhere. I don’t know where.
He holds up another picture. We are much older now. It looks recent. 
We are standing outside a church. The day is overcast, and he is wearing a suit and shaking hands with a man also in a suit. 
I am wearing a hat which I seem to be having difficulty with; I am holding it as if it is in danger of blowing off in the wind. I am not looking at the camera.
‘That was just a few weeks ago,’ he says. ‘Some friends of ours invited us to their daughter’s wedding. You remember?’
‘No,’ I say, angrily. ‘No, I don’t remember!’
‘It was a lovely day,’ he says, turning the picture back to lo

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I look at the next page with dread, fearing I will find it blank, but it is not. Monday, 26 November
He hit me on Friday. Two days, and I have written nothing. For all that time, did I believe things were all right?
My face is bruised and sore. Surely I knew that something was not right?
Today he said that I fell. The biggest cliché in the book and I believed him. Why wouldn’t I? 
He’d already had to explain who I was, and who he was, and how I’d come to be waking up in a strange house, decades older than I thought I should be, 
so why would I question his reason for my bruised and swollen eye, my cut lip? And so I went ahead with my day. 
I kissed him as he left for work. I cleared up our breakfast things. I ran a bath. And then I came in here, found this journal, and learned the truth.
A gap. I realize I have not mentioned Dr Nash. Had he abandoned me? Had I found the journal without his help? Or had I stopped hiding it? I read on.
Later, I called Claire. The phone that Ben had given me didn’t work- the battery was probably dead, I thought- and so I used the one that Dr Nash had given me. 
There was no answer, and so I sat in the living room.
I could not relax. I picked up magazines, put them down again. I put the TV on and spent half an hour staring at the screen, not even noticing what was on. 
I looked at my journal, unable to concentrate, unable to write. 
I tried her again, several times, each time hearing the same message inviting me to leave one of my own. 
It was just after lunchtime when she answered. ‘Chrissy,’ she said. ‘How are you?’ I could hear Toby in the background, playing.
‘I’m OK,’ I said, although I wasn’t.
‘I was going to call you,’ she said. ‘I feel like hell, and it’s only Monday!’
Monday. Days meant nothing to me; each melted away, indistinguishable from the one that had preceded it.
‘I need to see you,’ I said. ‘Can you come over?’
She sounded surprised. ‘To your place?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Please? I want to talk to you.’
‘Is everything OK, Chrissy? You read the letter?’
I took a deep breath, and my voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Ben hit me.’ 
I heard a gasp of surprise. ‘What?’
‘The other night. I’m bruised. He told me I’d fallen, but I wrote down that he hit me.’
‘Chrissy, there is no way Ben would hit you. Ever. He just isn’t capable of it.’
Doubt flooded me. Was it possible I’d made it all up? ‘But I wrote it in my journal,’ I said.
She said nothing for a moment, and then, ‘But why do you think he hit you?’
I put my hands to my face, felt the swollen flesh around my eyes. I felt a flash of anger. It was clear she didn’t believe me.
I thought back to what I had written. ‘I told him that I’ve been keeping a journal. I said I had been seeing you, and Dr Nash. I told him I knew about Adam. I told him you’d given me the letter he’d written, that I’d read it. And then he hit me.’
‘He just hit you?’
I thought of all the things he’d called me, the things he’d accused me of. ‘He said I was a b***h.’ 
I felt a sob rise in my chest. ‘He- he accused me of sleeping with Dr Nash. I said I wasn’t, then—’
‘Then?’
‘Then he hit me.’
A silence, then Claire said, ‘Has he ever hit you before?’ I had no way of knowing. Perhaps he had? It was possible that ours had always been an abusive relationship. 
My mind flashed on Claire and me, marching, holding home-made placards- Women’s rights. No to domestic violence. 
I remembered how I had always looked down on women who found themselves with husbands who beat them and stayed put. 
They were weak, I thought. Weak, and stupid. Was it possible that I had fallen into the same trap as they had? ‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘It’s difficult to imagine Ben hurting anything, but I suppose it’s not impossible. Christ! He used to m

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The first entry is dated. Friday, 23 November, it says. The same day I met Claire. 
I must have written it that evening, after speaking to Ben. Perhaps we had had the conversation I was anticipating, after all. 
I sit here, it begins, on the floor of the bathroom, in the house in which, supposedly, I woke up every morning. 
I have this journal in front of me, this pen in my hand. I write, because it’s all I can think of to do.
Tissues are balled around me, soaked with tears, and blood. When I blink my vision turns red. Blood drips into my eye as fast as I can wipe it away.
When I looked in the mirror I could see that the skin above my eye is cut, and my lip, too. When I swallow I taste the metallic tang of blood.
I want to sleep. To find a safe place somewhere, and close my eyes, and rest, like an animal.
That is what I am. An animal. Living from moment to moment, day to day, trying to make sense of the world in which I find myself.
My heart races. I read back over the paragraph, my eyes drawn again and again to the word blood. What had happened?
I begin to read quickly, my mind stumbling over words, lurching from line to line. 
I don’t know when Ben will get back and can’t risk him taking these pages before I have read them. Now may be my only chance.
I’d decided it was best to speak to him after dinner. We ate in the lounge- sausage, mash, our plates balanced on our knees- 
and when we had both finished I asked if he would turn the television off. He seemed reluctant. ‘I need to talk to you,’ I said.
The room felt too quiet, filled only with the ticking of the clock and the distant hum of the city. And my voice, sounding hollow and empty.
‘Darling,’ said Ben, putting his plate on the coffee table between us. A half-chewed lump of meat sat on the side of the plate, peas floated in thin gravy. ‘Is everything OK?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Everything’s fine.’ I didn’t know how to continue. He looked at me, his eyes wide, waiting. ‘You do love me, don’t you?’ I said. 
I felt almost as if I was gathering evidence, insuring myself against any later disapproval. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Of course. What’s this about? What’s wrong?’
‘Ben,’ I said. ‘I love you, too. And I understand your reasons for doing what you’ve been doing, but I know you’ve been lying to me.’
Almost as soon as I finished the sentence I regretted starting it. I saw him flinch. 
He looked at me, his lips pulled back as if to speak, his eyes wounded. ‘What do you mean?’ he said. ‘Darling—’
I had to continue now. There was no way out of the stream into which I had begun to wade.
‘I know you’ve been doing it to protect me, not telling me things, but it can’t go on. I need to know.’
‘What do you mean?’ he said. ‘I haven’t been lying to you.’
I felt a surge of anger. ‘Ben,’ I said, ‘I know about Adam.’
His face changed, then. I saw him swallow, and look away, towards the corner of the room. 
He brushed something off the arm of his pullover. ‘What?’
‘Adam,’ I said. ‘I know we had a son.’ 
I half expected him to ask me how I knew, but then realized this conversation was not unusual. 
We have been here before, on the day I saw my novel, and other days when I have remembered Adam too.
I saw he was about to speak, but didn’t want to hear any more lies. ‘I know he died in Afghanistan,’ I said.
His mouth shut, then opened again, almost comically. ‘How do you know that?’
‘You told me,’ I said. ‘Weeks ago. You were eating a biscuit, and I was in the bathroom. 
‘I came downstairs and told you that I had remembered we had had a son, even remembered what he was called, and then we sat down and you told me how he’d been killed. 
‘You showed me some photographs, from upstairs. Photos of me and him, and letters that he’d written. A letter to Santa Claus—

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The smell of petrol, thick and sweet. There is a pain in my neck. I open my eyes. 
Up close I see the wet windscreen, misted with my breath, and beyond it there are distant lights, blurred, out of focus. 
I realize that I have been dozing. I am leaning against the glass, my head twisted awkwardly. The car is silent, the engine off. 
I look over my shoulder. Ben is there, sitting next to me. He is awake, looking ahead, out of the window. 
He doesn’t move, doesn’t even seem to have noticed that I have woken up, but instead continues to stare, his expression blank, unreadable in the dark. 
I turn to see what he is looking at. Beyond the rain-spattered windscreen is the bonnet of the car, and beyond that a low wooden fence, dimly illuminated in the glow from the street-lamps behind us. 
Beyond the fence I see nothing, a blackness, huge and mysterious, in the middle of which hangs the moon, full and low.
‘I love the sea,’ he says, without looking at me, and I realize we are parked on a cliff top, have made it as far as the coast.
‘Don’t you?’ He turns to me. His eyes seem impossibly sad. ‘You do love the sea, don’t you, Chris?’ he says.
‘I do,’ I say. ‘Yes.’ 
He is speaking as if he doesn’t know, as if we have never been to the coast before, as if we have never been on holiday together. 
Fear begins to burn within me, but I resist it. I try to stay here, in the present, with my husband. 
I try to remember all that I learned from my journal this afternoon. ‘You know that, darling.’
He sighs. ‘I know. You always used to, but I just don’t know any more. You change. You’ve changed, over the years. Ever since what happened. Sometimes I don’t know who you are. I wake up each day and I don’t know how you’re going to be.’
I am silent. I can think of nothing to say. We both know how senseless it would be for me to try to defend myself, to tell him that he is wrong. 
We both know that I am the last person who knows how much I change from day to day. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say at last.
He looks at me. ‘Oh, it’s all right. You don’t need to apologize. I know it’s not your fault. None of this is your fault. I’m being unfair, I suppose. Thinking of myself.’
He looks back out to sea. There is a single light in the distance. A boat, on the waves. Light in a sea of treacly blackness. 
Ben speaks. ‘We’ll be all right, won’t we, Chris?’
‘Of course,’ I say. ‘Of course we will. This is a new beginning for us. 
‘I have my journal now, and Dr Nash will help me. I’m getting better, Ben. I know I am. I think I’m going to start writing again. There’s no reason not to. 
“I should be fine. And anyway, I’m in touch with Claire now, and she can help me.’ An idea comes to me. ‘We can all get together, don’t you think? 
‘Just like old times? Just like at university? The three of us. And her husband, I suppose- I think she said she had a husband. We can all meet up and spend time together. It’ll be fine.’ 
My mind fixes on the lies I have read, on all the ways I have not been able to trust him, but I force it away. 
I remind myself that all that has been resolved. It is my turn to be strong now. To be positive. 
‘As long as we promise to always be honest with each other,’ I say, ‘then everything is going to be OK.’
He turns back to face me. ‘You do love me, don’t you?’
‘Of course. Of course I do.’
‘And you forgive me? For leaving you? I didn’t want to. I had no choice. I’m sorry.’
I take his hand. It feels both warm and cold at the same time, slightly damp. 
I try to hold it between my hands, but he neither assists nor resists my action. Instead his hand rests, lifeless, on his knee. 
I squeeze it, and only then does he seem to notice that I am holding it. ‘Ben. I understand. I forgive you.’ 
I look into his eyes. They