The Memory Collector

by Fiona Harper

  ‘Oh, no, I don’t… I mean… he doesn’t. Not that I’ve heard anyway. He’s a good neighbour.’ And she shoots a look across at him and is rewarded by a burning sensation in her cheeks.

  Thankfully, the rest of the group are in an ebullient mood and the conversation quickly sweeps by Heather. She stands there on the fringes of the group, sipping a beer that someone handed her, and smiling shyly every now and then when someone says something funny. She doesn’t mind that she doesn’t know any of the people they’re referring to or that she doesn’t get the in-jokes. It’s nice to stand out here in the sunshine and feel… well, as a thirty-two-year-old woman ought to feel. Just for a moment, she forgets about the faceless house in Hawksbury Road with the new driveway. She forgets about the toy giraffe that rode all the way home in her handbag.

  ‘So, what do you do, Heather?’ the guy with the ginger beard in the stripy T-shirt asks. She wants to call him Isaac, but she’s not sure that’s right.

  ‘I’m an archivist.’

  ‘You work in a library?’

  ‘Yes, well, sort of, I’ve moved all over the country since I qualified, but I’m from this area originally. I moved back when I got a job covering maternity leave for someone at the V&A. Now I work at a stately home.’

  ‘Cool,’ Tola says. ‘I love that museum. Which bit do you work in?’

  ‘Um, I’m not…’ Okay, maybe this isn’t as easy as she’d first thought, but Tola and T-shirt Man have open, enquiring looks on their faces. They don’t look as if they’re scanning the garden for someone more interesting to talk to, so she carries on. ‘I finished there about a year ago and was lucky enough to find another contract within commuting distance, so I didn’t have to pack up and move away.’

  Jason comes up behind her. She knows it’s him from the smell of hickory smoke and the way the whole of her back warms up as he gets closer. ‘What’s this I’m overhearing about packing up and moving away?’

  She turns to look at him. He’s frowning instead of looking hopeful, which surely has to be a good thing. ‘Oh, no one!’ she says quickly. ‘I was telling…’ – there’s a pause where she realizes she still doesn’t know T-shirt Man’s name – ‘your friends about my job.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘I work at Sandwood Park in East Sussex. It used to belong to a famous author but his widow died recently and the whole estate was left to a private trust.’

  ‘They didn’t have any kids to leave the house to?’ Tola asks.

  Heather smiles. This is nice, having people interested in what she’s saying. Slightly giddying, in fact. She can’t resist keeping it going by sharing a bit of gossip. ‘Well, yes, actually, they did, but the wife decided not to leave her beautiful Arts and Crafts home to any of her two remaining children or five grandchildren. She left specific instructions to her solicitor to that effect, saying she didn’t trust her offspring not to rip out half the walls, replace the grand conservatory with sliding glass doors that fold up like a concertina, or make a swimming pool out of the rose garden. So she left them nothing but the ashes of their dearly beloved family pets: three dogs, two cats, and a guinea pig.’

  ‘Ouch!’ Tola says, laughing.

  Heather feels as if she’s floating inside. She made another person laugh; she had no idea she could do that.

  This leads to some bantering back and forth about jobs, during which Heather learns that Jason is an ‘heir hunter’ like that programme on daytime TV. His firm, based in central London, tracks down the beneficiaries of unclaimed estates and reunites them with their inheritances. For a commission, of course.

  Someone new saunters up. ‘Hey, Jason. Great barbecue,’ the guy says. ‘Is Alex coming? I haven’t seen him in ages.’

  Something odd happens then. Jason’s normally affable and friendly demeanour cools to freezing point and he gives the intruder a stony look. ‘No. Alex isn’t here.’ And then he just walks off, leaving the rest of the group looking awkwardly at each other.

  ‘Well done, Jack,’ Damien mutters.

  ‘What?’ the new guy says, looking most perplexed. ‘He and Alex have been best mates for years. I thought they’d have patched things up by now.’

  Tola shakes her head and rolls her eyes. ‘Really? What parallel universe are you living in? I know Alex was caught between a rock and a hard place, but once you break Jason’s trust like that, there’s no coming back from it. Don’t you remember what he was like about Caleb and the whole bike incident?’

  Jack’s eyes widen. ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘It’s as bad as that? I didn’t know.’

  Heather feels as if she’s eavesdropping, even though she is not. She should really walk away, but she’s too hungry for information about Jason to do that.

  ‘Well, when you factor in there was a woman involved…’ Tola adds darkly.

  All of them glance over at the barbecue, where Jason is now flipping burgers so hard that one falls on the ground.

  Damien sighs. ‘He’s a great bloke, but he’s got to get over his knight-in-shining-armour complex. It might work in the storybooks, but in real life those girls he keeps trying to rescue are the kind of women who’ll really do a number on you.’

  Tola flips her long braids over her shoulder. ‘Are you saying you’re not the rescuing type? What if I needed you to rescue me?’

  Damien pulls her to him with one arm and plants a kiss on her lips. ‘You’re much too feisty to be anyone’s damsel in distress,’ he tells her, and Tola obviously approves of his answer because she grins at him.

  ‘You’d better believe it!’

  The whole group laughs, which causes the cluster of people nearby to turn and join in. Heather merges into the group with them and listens to the stories about other people’s lives – what they do, who they love, who they don’t love any more and would, therefore, love to shame on Twitter, if it wasn’t beneath them.

  The group are all in stitches about someone’s tale of a drunken-holiday tattoo when Jason calls her over to the barbecue. ‘Sausage?’ he says, brandishing a plump offering with a pair of giant tongs. She nods. She even smiles. ‘We could do this again some time over the summer,’ he adds. Heather must look a bit panicked because he laughs and adds, ‘Don’t worry! I’m not going to be filling the garden with people every weekend. I meant, now that I’ve got this barbecue, I might as well use it. You could join me for burgers and sausages one evening. Or if I get really adventurous, maybe even a chicken drumstick or two?’

  Heather flushes. ‘I couldn’t let you do that—’

  ‘Yes, you could,’ he replies, interrupting her so cheerfully that she can’t seem to mind. ‘Because I’m hoping you might be able to bring a salad or something. I’m good with meat but hopeless with vegetables. It’s not that I can’t cook them, just that everything ends up looking… well, not very pretty. I don’t have that artistic touch.’

  Heather lets out a little laugh. ‘And you think I do?’

  He smiles, and this one isn’t a full-on grin like the other ones, more of a playful one, like they’re sharing a secret. ‘I think you look like the creative sort – a girl who has a bit more going on under the surface than anyone else knows.’

  Damian’s words from earlier flash into her brain: Jason’s mysterious girl.

  Her smile doesn’t dim, but she feels something deflate inside. If only you knew, she thinks, but she’s glad he doesn’t know because, if he did, he wouldn’t be inviting her for burgers and drumsticks in the garden, and she thinks she might rather like that.

  He looks away as he searches the plastic table set up next to the barbecue for something. ‘Gah!’ he says, frowning. ‘Run out of plates.’ He glances back up towards his flat and then back at Heather. ‘Think I brought down every one I owned. Don’t suppose I could borrow a few off you, could I? I’ll even wash them up afterwards!’

  ‘Um…’ Heather stutters. ‘I’m not sure—’

  He places her sausage back on the edge of the grill rack, as far away from the heat
as possible. ‘I’ll come and get them, if you like? Save you lugging them all the way out here.’ And he heads off towards the French doors before Heather can say anything.

  Panic mode snaps in. That same thing that always thumps in Heather’s chest when anyone gets too close to her flat. She doesn’t even like the postman pushing things in through the letterbox, and is always relieved when she sees his red fleece strolling back down the driveway, even though she knows her territorial reaction is stupid.

  She runs after Jason, neatly intercepting him and standing at the threshold of her living room, barring his way. She stretches one arm across the open doorway. ‘It’s fine. I’ll get them. You need to keep an eye on the barbecue anyway.’

  Jason smiles at her. A slightly perplexed one this time. ‘I’m here now. No problem at all.’

  But Heather doesn’t give in. She doesn’t back down. Jason can’t see it, but she’s bracing her hand even harder against the doorframe. She shakes her head.

  You can’t come in, she tells him silently. No one can ever come in. Even though she knows her kitchen is spotless and her set of lovely white plates with the broad grey border are neatly stacked in a clean, white cupboard. She can’t have him this close to That Room. It’s making her feel sick just thinking about it. Her blood starts to pound in her ears.

  ‘You know what?’ she says suddenly. ‘I’m not sure about that sausage anyway. I hadn’t planned on…’ She stops, gathers herself a little, pulls herself tall and looks him in the chin because that’s as far north as she can manage. ‘Thank you, but I think I’d better be going now.’ And she steps back and closes the doors in his face, then turns and runs to the kitchen where she throws open the cupboard and stares at her plates, all neatly stacked and in pristine condition. For the first time ever, she gains no solace in that.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  NOW

  Heather stays in her flat for hours. She doesn’t even go into the living room. She stays in the kitchen, caught between wanting to turn the radio up loud to block out the sounds of the barbecue outside and not wanting to turn it on at all, in case Jason hears it and it reminds him what a nutjob she is.

  Sometimes, she goes to the window in the far corner of the kitchen. If she leans over the counter, just to the point where her stomach starts hurting, and presses her face against the cabinet above the kettle, she can see him standing near the barbecue, tongs in hand.

  He’s still smiling, still chatting to his friends, but every now and then he glances over towards her French doors and his expression darkens.

  He must think she’s a freak.

  Only when it’s dark and the last stragglers have shouted their goodbyes from the driveway as they saunter back to their cars or nearby Shortlands station does Heather creep back into her living room. She closes the curtains then switches on a single lamp.

  She reaches for the TV remote and the screen leaps into life. Football is on, highlights from a match earlier that day, so she hits the button over and over, searching for something to watch – through the comedy and drama channels, through the ‘plus ones’ of the terrestrials, until she ends up in the nature, reality and crime section of the channel list. It’s there that an image freezes her thumb mid-air.

  It’s one of those awful programmes about compulsive hoarders. Not the jaunty, pretend-it’s-comedy kind where they make neat freaks go and clean their houses, but the kind that interviews people, sends in crews of trained professionals to help. Usually, Heather doesn’t venture this far up the channel list, precisely because she doesn’t want to see this sort of thing, but until a moment ago she was caught in a trance of button-pushing, rhythmically pressing to soothe herself instead of tapping in the number of her favourite movie channel and jumping straight over this section of programming.

  She makes herself put down the remote and crosses her arms to stop herself picking it up again. You deserve to watch this, she tells herself, because this is what you came from. This is who you are.

  The episode features a man who’s car obsession has raged out of control. His whole two-acre property is filled with rusting wrecks, some of them so far gone they’re not even recognizable as vehicles, yet he still refuses to let the TV helpers cart them away, just in case some part in the depths of their bellies might be useful to him some day.

  The other subject of the programme – she didn’t realize there’d be two – is a young mother. Yes, this looks much more familiar: clothes stacked to the ceiling, piled so high they’ve created mountains of fabric; papers and books stuffed in every available hole, and rubbish filling in the gaps. Apart from the fact the voices are American, when Heather looks at the shots where they show the house and not the people, it could have been their family home on Hawksbury Road twenty years ago.

  There’s a kid in the family, a daughter with wiry brown hair and glasses. Heather pauses the TV as the camera zooms in on the girl and takes in the haunted look in her eyes, the silent plea for someone to help, to get her out of there.

  They might come, she tells the girl inside her head. They might take you away to somewhere clean and uncluttered, but you’ll never be free. Sorry, kid. No happy-ever-after for you.

  Even the Dad reminds her of her own father. He has that same trapped expression, the one that says he stopped fighting about the mess long ago. The professionals buzz around, offering advice. Don’t they know it’s hopeless? That even if they get the place spotless, it’ll be just as bad in a couple of years?

  Heather reaches for the remote in disgust. She can’t watch any more of this fairy story.

  But then the TV shrink asks the husband where it all started, why he thinks his wife is driven to this. Pain crosses his features and he shrugs. ‘I guess it was when we lost our son, Cody. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. It was nobody’s fault but Selena blamed herself.’

  A picture of a cute little baby with chubby cheeks and a gummy smile pops up on the screen.

  ‘She started buying things, getting ready for the new baby,’ he continues. ‘We’d been trying for a second one for five years by then and she was so excited. I knew she was going a little overboard, but I couldn’t begrudge her. I really couldn’t. And then, somehow, after… we lost him… she didn’t stop. She just kept buying more and more baby stuff. At first she would say we were going to try again, but after a couple of years it became obvious that was just an excuse.’ He sighs heavily. ‘I just don’t know how to help her, and I don’t know if I can take any more.’

  Heather’s stomach has been sinking ever since the man started talking about babies. She doesn’t want this. She doesn’t want to feel this rush of empathy for the woman, to share in her pain for the child that will be forever missing from her life, so when the mother has a meltdown because someone wants to throw away a ratty baby blanket covered in cobwebs and mouse droppings, Heather grabs at the opportunity to turn the warm feeling sour.

  ‘You have a child!’ she shouts at the screen. ‘You have one left that didn’t die and you’re losing her in a pile of junk! Why don’t you think of her for a change? Think about what this is doing to her?’

  It feels strangely good to hurl the words at these stupid people who can’t hear her, people who are flushing their lives down the toilet and won’t get off their sorry backsides to do anything about it. So instead of switching over, she suspends her disbelief as the house is cleared and the families are shown happy and smiling at the end of the episode, and she watches the episode after that too. Apparently, the channel is having a bit of a marathon this weekend.

  The next one features an older lady who started hoarding after her beloved father died, and a waste-of-space woman who can’t see that seventy cats in one cluttered house is too many. Heather shouts at her, too. Why not? There’s no one here to see, and she’s really starting to enjoy herself. It’s two in the morning before she crawls into bed.

  She lies there, her duvet tucked neatly under her arms and her pillows arranged just so under her head, and she stares at t
he high ceiling of her bedroom. As much as she doesn’t want to, she can’t stop thinking about those people on the television, particularly that baby.

  That was the common thread in a lot of cases, wasn’t it? Loss. At least five of the eight people in the episodes she watched had lost someone, either through death or divorce, even children being given up for adoption. Someone had been taken away from them, without them expecting it and without their permission, and to fill the hole they’d started to shop and store and collect.

  Is that what her mother had done? If you’d have asked Heather a month ago what her mother could have lost that would make her start behaving that way, she would have shaken her head and said there was nothing, no rhyme or reason to it. But now she knows better.

  It was me, she thinks. The thing she lost was me. But somehow, even though she came back, her mother behaved as if Heather had never returned and she never threw another thing away for the rest of her life.

  Heather thinks of the photo she gave to Faith for Alice, of how everything looked normal and clean. Christmas 1991. Only seven months before the date on the newspaper report. Is that the key, then? Is her being ‘snatched’ what started it all?

  She closes her eyes, not so much to welcome sleep but because she’s stemming the tears that are pooling there, and lets out a long, ragged sigh.

  Even when she was little, she’d always been afraid, from the way her mother talked to her, sometimes even the way she looked at her, that maybe everything had been her fault. Now she knows she was right.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  HORSE CHESTNUT

  The bark twists round, spiralling upwards, holding the tree in like a corset, then when it gets so high it can’t contain itself any more, it explodes into leaves, showering them out like a firework, only they never fall and reach the ground. Tall white flowers balance on the ends of the branches like fluffy candles, even though it’s the height of summer. When the breeze stirs the leaves, I can hear them whisper, ‘Just you wait until autumn. Just you wait until I drop my prickly fruit on the grass.’ For the intrepid hunter, prepared to part the flesh, there is a reward of hard, shiny treasure. I stare up into the branches, wishing the months away, because I know good things are on their way.