The Memory Collector

by Fiona Harper

  THEN

  Heather is running around the garden because her mummy has told her she needs fresh air. But the air doesn’t feel very fresh today. It feels a bit hot and sticky and if Heather runs around too much it makes her head wet and then her hair sticks to her face. But the air is even hotter indoors, so she keeps running, trying to make her own breeze. Every now and then she gets tired so she flops down on the grass, and then when she feels better again she jumps up and carries on.

  But she can’t be looking where she’s going properly. Her mummy says she does that a lot, because she’s always bumping into things in the house and knocking them on the floor. She thought it’d be okay out here because there aren’t any piles, but when she runs under the big tree near the fence one of its roots pops up from underneath the ground and trips her up.

  Heather lands flat on her face and her nose hits the grass and she gets mud in her mouth. At first, she doesn’t think she needs to cry, but she realizes she does after all and tears begin to run down her face. She doesn’t move; all her attention is taken up with the crying. Nobody comes. Nobody pops their head outside the back door to check on her or see what all the noise is about. When there are bigger gaps between her wet, snuffling sobs, she pushes herself up onto all fours and gets up. There is blood on her knee from where the tree tripped her up. She starts crying again. Loudly.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  Heather hears the voice but she can’t see anybody. She quietens, swallowing her tears.

  ‘Hello?’ the voice says again. It sounds worried. ‘Is anyone there? Are you hurt?’

  Heather nods. Her lip wobbles. She turns to where the voice came from. It sounded like it came from near the fence. She takes a few steps then stops because she still can’t see anyone. All she can see is the tree.

  ‘You tripped me up!’ she says, putting her hands on her hips. ‘With one of your long underground fingers!’

  There’s a laugh. ‘I don’t think I did!’ the voice says, but it doesn’t sound like it’s making fun of her. She stares at the tree, trying to catch it out, but it doesn’t move. She knows it doesn’t really have eyes, but she gets the feeling it’s staring straight ahead, ignoring her.

  ‘Hello?’ says the voice.

  Heather turns to see a face appear over the top of the fence. It isn’t the tree talking, after all. It’s a lady. ‘Hello,’ Heather says. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m Lydia,’ she says. ‘I’m your next-door neighbour. I just moved in a month ago. I hear you playing in the garden sometimes.’

  Heather starts to run away. Her mother is always telling her off for being too noisy. She says Heather chatters too much and sometimes she tells Heather to go out into the garden because she just can’t think. Heather didn’t realize she might get in trouble for being noisy out here as well.

  ‘Wait!’ the lady shouts after her. ‘It’s okay. I like hearing you singing away and talking to your imaginary friends.’

  Heather stops and turns round. ‘You do?’

  Lydia nods and then she looks down and spots the blood on Heather’s knee. ‘Did you hurt yourself?’

  ‘Yes. The naughty tree tripped me up!’

  Lydia laughs again. ‘So you believe me now?’

  Heather nods. ‘You seem like a nice lady. I don’t think you’d go round tripping little girls up on purpose.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Lydia says, and her voice is a little bit scratchy like Heather’s is sometimes when she catches a cold. ‘Where’s your mother?’

  Heather jerks her head in the direction of the house. ‘In there.’ Her mother is always in there, but she doesn’t tell Lydia that because her mother says what happens inside their house is secret and they mustn’t tell anyone about what it’s like inside. Especially strangers.

  ‘Well, it’s been lovely talking to you. What’s your name?’

  ‘Heather.’

  She smiles. ‘That’s a pretty name for a pretty girl. Well, Heather, I think you’d better go and find your mother. That cut looks as if it needs cleaning.’

  Heather looks down. There’s a fat red dribble running down her shin and there are smears of earth on her knees. She runs off and calls out for her mother.

  She calls and calls, but Mummy doesn’t shout back. She tries to get in the back door but it’s shut tight. She runs back to the tree in the corner of the garden. ‘Lady? I mean, Lydia? Are you there?’

  The lady’s face appears over the top of the fence again.

  ‘I can’t find my mummy,’ Heather says tearfully.

  ‘Do you want me to come and help you look?’

  Heather nods.

  ‘Come to the front of the garden, then,’ Lydia says, ‘but don’t go out the gate, okay?’

  Heather nods again and then does what she’s told.

  A few moments later she opens the gate and Lydia appears from behind the overgrown hedge that separates Heather’s garden from the street. She’s wearing a lovely yellow and white shirt with daisies on and her hair is tied back in a headscarf. She takes a pair of big, thick, leathery gloves off and holds them in one hand. ‘Right. Shall we try the front door first?’

  ‘Okay!’ Heather runs up to the door and pulls at the handle, but it won’t open.

  ‘What’s your last name?’ Lydia says, coming up behind her.

  Heather pushes her fringe out of her eyes and looks over her shoulder. ‘Lucas.’

  Lydia presses the doorbell, but when no one comes she raps on the door loudly. The knocker falls off in her hand. ‘Oh,’ she says, and puts it down on the little ledge next to the door, then she curls up her hand and knocks with her knuckles. ‘Mrs Lucas?’ she calls out. ‘Mrs Lucas?’

  Nothing.

  Lydia tries the door, but it doesn’t open for her either. ‘It seems to be locked. Do you have a back door?’

  Heather shows her the way. She likes being helpful. Lydia calls and knocks there, too, but nobody answers. ‘How odd!’

  ‘She’s probably just gone shopping,’ Heather says with a shrug. The lure of new treasures is the only thing that’ll make her mother leave the house, so that’s where she must be.

  Lydia’s forehead creases up and her lips press together. ‘Well,’ she says and holds out her hand. ‘Maybe you’d better come over to my house until she gets back. We’ll see if we can get that knee cleaned up. How long is your mother gone when she goes shopping?’

  ‘Oh, ages. It’s her favourite thing. Sometimes she visits all three charity shops on Chatterton Road on her way to the Co-op and then goes in them again on the way back.’

  Lydia holds out her hand and Heather takes it. They go out of Heather’s front gate and into the garden next door. It’s so beautiful that Heather stops in her tracks when she sees it. Everything is neat and tidy and there are hundreds and hundreds of roses. It’s almost a shame to go inside.

  Lydia takes Heather into her kitchen and sits her on a wooden chair, then she gets a cloth and cleans up her knee. The red dribble has grown and grown until it went all the way down to Heather’s sock, and Lydia dabs at it until it’s just a pink smudge.

  ‘You’re very brave,’ she says. ‘You didn’t make a squeak.’

  Heather looks at her. She doesn’t know what to say to that. It did hurt, but she kept all her squeaks inside, the way she always does. She looks around Lydia’s kitchen. It’s very nice. The cabinets are soft yellow and there’s lots of wood and the floor is ever so clean. There’s not a plastic bottle or an empty food carton in sight. Heather wonders where she keeps all her rubbish. Maybe she has one big room for it instead of spreading it out all over the house?

  ‘Would you like an ice cream?’ Lydia asks.

  Heather’s head bobs up and down furiously. Lydia goes to her fridge and fetches her an ice cream with chocolate round the outside and a stick to hold it with.

  ‘Do you want to eat it out in the garden?’

  Heather’s mouth is full so she shakes her head. As much as she’d like to smell the lovely
roses again, she prefers being in the pretty kitchen. She sits on the chair and swings her legs while she eats her ice cream. Lydia just moves around, putting things in cupboards, washing things in the sink. Every now and then she looks over her shoulder to check on Heather, and smiles. Every time Heather smiles back.

  When Heather is finished she licks the stick as hard as she can to get all the chocolate off, and then she throws it on the floor and stands up.

  Lydia frowns. ‘Lolly sticks don’t go on the floor,’ she says. ‘You have to put them in the bin.’

  Heather stares back at her.

  ‘My bin is by the back door. You pop open the top by putting your foot on the pedal.’

  Heather’s not really sure what Lydia’s talking about, so she just blinks and keeps looking at her. Standing on a pedal that makes something pop up sounds like fun, though.

  ‘Heather, I would really like it if you put your lolly stick in the bin.’ Lydia says, and then she pauses, thinking. ‘Would you like me to show you how to do that?’

  Heather nods again. She enjoys being helpful, after all, and this is her second chance this afternoon.

  After Lydia has shown her, she asks if there’s anything else to throw away – stepping on the pedal was fun!

  Slowly, the sun goes down and it starts to get darker. They go and check Heather’s house again and Lydia knocks on the door with her fist really loudly. Just as she’s about to give up, a car pulls up outside.

  Heather runs to her father when he gets out of the car, and he gives her a big hug, lifting her off the ground, but then he sees the lady from next door and he walks up the path towards her. She smiles, introduces herself and tells him all about the tree and the ice cream and all the knocking on the door.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ Heather’s daddy says. He puts his key in the door and lets it swing open just enough for Heather to squeeze through but not enough for Lydia to see what’s inside. ‘Run along, Heather, and I’ll get you some tea.’

  Heather hesitates for a moment then squeezes through the gap in the door. Before she gets all the way through she turns. ‘Thank you for the ice cream,’ she says to Lydia, ‘and for letting me play with the pedal.’

  They look at each other, smiles in their eyes, just for a moment, but then Heather’s daddy follows her inside and closes the door so Heather can’t see the nice neighbour lady any more.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  NOW

  All this time Heather thought there weren’t any answers. Maybe that’s why she never bothered to ask any questions in the first place. But now she knows the answers she’s seeking are hunkering down in her spare room, tucked into the back of another photograph album, or stuffed inside a coffee tin, or possibly even stored in the sort of folder that’s actually meant for organizing important papers.

  There must be more newspaper clippings, more information in there. Her mother’s philosophy had definitely been: why have one of something when you can have fifty? Why on earth would the one exception to that habit be something to do with her daughter’s disappearance? It wouldn’t. The information is in there; Heather just knows it.

  The only problem is, even though the answers are whispering to her from behind the closed door, even though they are calling her name, she’s not sure she wants to listen to them. What if something truly awful happened to her while she was missing? Things she can’t even bring herself to name or imagine? Does she really want to know? Would it make her life any better? And even if she’s curious, having to open that door and hunt through the shameful hoard is something she really doesn’t want to do.

  So Heather does nothing. For two whole weeks. She’s very good at putting things off when they’re too painful to deal with, or stuffing them down and closing the lid on them.

  After work one evening, she pops into the Waitrose by Bromley South station to grab some vegetables for dinner. It’s busier than normal in there, full of people like her, grabbing a few bits they need before heading home. Maybe that’s why the urge hits. Because she knows there’s less chance of being caught, that she won’t be a lone figure in the wide aisles, and many of the staff will have been called to the tills.

  Heather goes down the toiletries aisle to grab a bottle of shampoo, but once that’s in her basket she looks up and spies the section at the end of the row. Nappies, wipes, brightly coloured sippy cups and jars of food. She starts walking towards it.

  No, no, no! She shouts inside her head. Not now. Not here. Besides, it’s too soon. It shouldn’t be happening again yet. Walk away. Walk away!

  But her compulsion is a contrary and angry god requiring sacrifice; asking for mercy is too much. Her inner protestations are heard and discarded.

  She walks up to the display and browses, against her own will, taking on the guise of a busy working mother just off the train from central London about to pick up a few essentials before she heads off to pick her little darlings up from the childminder.

  Her eyes fix themselves on the jars of organic baby food. They’re small enough to slide into a pocket quite easily, aren’t they? She could just pick one up and turn it over, pretending to look at the list of ingredients, then palm it like a magician, hiding it up her sleeve then dropping it into a pocket.

  And before she’s even finished that thought, she’s done it. The jar is weighing her jacket down on one side.

  She pays for the things in her basket, smiles at the girl on the till, then walks out of the shop and into the warm summer evening. The trains are pulling in and out of the station on the other side of the car park, the people spilling out of them and carrying on about their business as if nothing has just happened. She jumps in her car and drives away, refusing to look back.

  When she gets home, she runs into the kitchen and unpacks her shopping, putting each item away neatly, and then she reluctantly pulls the jar of baby food from her pocket. She puts it on the centre of the kitchen table and looks at it.

  She doesn’t know what to do. Usually, she’d creep into the spare room and hide her ill-gotten gains in the chest of drawers. But this is baby food. It can’t go in there. Chests of drawers are for clothes and accessories, maybe even other miscellaneous items, but not food.

  Oh, my God, she thinks. I just stole baby food! What’s wrong with me?

  She still can’t bring herself to go and hide it with the other stuff, though. Putting things where they aren’t supposed to go is what her mother used to do. She can’t take even one step down that path. But she can’t leave it standing in the middle of her kitchen table, either. It has to go. Out of sight, where it can’t torment her.

  There’s only one other option.

  Heather walks over to the cutlery drawer and pulls out a teaspoon, then she twists off the lid of the jar, sits down, and begins to eat.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  NOW

  Heather washes the jar carefully once she’s finished eating. It made her want to gag a couple of times, but she managed to get it down. She’s not sure why it had that effect on her. It was a pudding – apple and cinnamon – so it should have been quite pleasant.

  The following morning she hides the jar in the recycling bin and tries to pretend it never happened. It doesn’t work, though, because she can’t stop thinking about how hard she’s tried not to turn into her mother. Despite all her efforts, she’s sliding down that same path, faster and faster, and there’s nothing she can do to stop herself.

  She described her mother’s life as miserable, isolated, driven by her compulsions. Is hers really any better? Different location. Different compulsion. But it all feels horribly familiar.

  Heather inhales slowly then lets the breath out again, measuring it, keeping it calm and long. There’s only one thing to do. She can’t hide from the past any longer.

  She gets up, retrieves the spare-room key from the desk and stops in front of the blank white door. Then, slowly, carefully, she slides the key into the lock, turns it, twists the doorknob, and walks inside.

&nb
sp; The only way to do this is to not think of the contents of the room as a whole, but to mentally break them down into chunks, so that’s what Heather does: she focuses on the bookshelf where she found the first photo album, fixes her gaze on it and gingerly walks through the mess towards it.

  There are two more albums there, along with a big cardboard concertina folder. Just those three things. She can manage those, surely?

  And it seems to be going well at first. She picks up the folder and tucks it under one arm and then reaches for the first album, intending to hold it flat in her upturned hands so that she can balance the second one on top, but when she pulls it out, the second album topples over.

  It’s like the first crack in a dam.

  The rest of the items on that shelf start to slide, piece by piece, onto the mess below, then a cardboard box balanced on top goes, vomiting its contents into the growing chaos. Lying on it is a tacky unicorn figurine that was one of her mother’s favourites. Heather’s heart starts to pound. She holds out a hand to stop a second box going, dropping the concertinaed folder as she does so. Now the peaceful equilibrium of the hoard has been altered, it’s like a beast awakened, and this one is roaring, demanding appeasement, demanding sacrifice.

  Heather has nothing to give it. Only herself. And the beast reaches for her. She feels the dread creeping into her bones, starting at her toes and working its way up. Her heart begins to drum and her skin becomes cold and clammy. There’s a weird tingling in her knees as her stomach rolls over three times in succession.

  It’s coming. Coming to get her. She can feel it. The glittery unicorn stares back up at her, nostrils flared, teeth bared. She can’t stand to look at it any more, to hear its hollow laughter in her head. She has to get out of there. Now.

  She pulls her hand from the pile of boxes, and gravity stakes its claim immediately. It seems as if the whole left-hand side of the room is about to slide and fall. She grabs for the folder, managing to nab it by the corner of its cover, clutches the first of the two photo albums to her chest, and bolts.