The Memory Collector

by Fiona Harper

  ‘Show her,’ Claudia says, and Heather pauses a heartbeat before revealing the doodle in the back of her English book. ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Oh, my God!’ Tia exclaims, her eyes lighting up. ‘That’s Awful Adams!’ At the cue from their leader, the backing singers gather round and make appreciative noises; one of them even giggles. ‘Awesome!’ she adds. ‘Have you got more? Can you do anyone else?’

  Heather shakes her head. ‘I suppose I can try…’

  Tia’s smile is white and perfect and dazzling. ‘Well, bring them to me when you do,’ she says, looking straight at Heather for a whole two seconds, and then she turns her attention to Claudia. ‘We’re going into town to get McDonald’s. You coming, Claudie?’

  Claudia practically glows at the attention. ‘Sure,’ she says, casting a sideways glance at Heather. ‘Why not?’

  And that’s how it happens. That’s how Heather ends up strolling down the road into Sidcup like she’s one of Tia Paine’s gang. Her spine grows taller and she flicks her hair back behind her shoulders the way the others do as they wait at the pedestrian crossing. The backing singers don’t even bat an eyelid. Heather can see that Claudia – or Claudie, now Tia seems to have coined that nickname for her – is quietly trying not to burst with glee.

  Claudia’s using her, she realizes. Heather is her ‘in’. But she doesn’t mind one bit, because it’s her ‘in’ too. This is what Heather’s been waiting for. She’s so full of hope and sunshine when the group arrives at McDonald’s that she gets flustered and takes ages to tell the guy behind the counter what she wants. She’s only got £1.50, so the choice isn’t extensive. She ends up with a Sprite and fries, but they could have served her deep-fried floor sweepings and she wouldn’t have cared.

  The gang sit around a couple of tables, taking up more space than a group of six girls actually need to. Every time a group of boys in school uniform enter for their dose of junk food, the backing singers giggle and silently check with their leader before sighing over them or mocking them. Most of the boys only give the girls a cursory glance, as if they’re too cool to be impressed by grammar-school uniforms, but one gang shouts over.

  ‘Give us a chip then, gorgeous!’ the ringleader directs at Tia.

  She flicks her hair and looks away haughtily. ‘Ugh! As if I’d take a second look at anyone from St Joseph’s,’ she mutters. ‘Dream on, comprehensive boys.’

  Heather smirks, copying the other girls, and prepares to flick her hair again – she’s getting quite good at it now – when she sees this mouthy loser isn’t some anonymous boy. It’s Patrick Hull from St Michael’s. Instead of flicking her hair away from her face, she lets it fall forward like a curtain. She sits silently, shaking and willing him away, dreading the sudden shout of ‘Hobo!’ when he inevitably spots her. Oh, God. She’d been ‘Hobo Heather’ throughout the whole of primary school. Moving to Highstead was supposed to free her from that.

  But the gods must be smiling down on her, because he just makes a lewd comment and his mates all snort and giggle and then swagger off to get their cheeseburgers. Heather breathes a sigh of relief, and when she’s sure they’re far enough away she lifts her head again.

  The girls tip their chins up and head out back onto the dusty High Street. ‘Let’s go to Boots and look at the nail varnish,’ Tia says and walks off in that direction. Heather hesitates. She doesn’t live round here and, unlike Tia, she doesn’t have a Mercedes-driving au pair to act as her personal taxi service either. She should have been at the bus stop, waiting for the 269, ten minutes ago.

  She doesn’t say her goodbyes, though. How can she? This is Tia Paine and her gang! Even the Year Nines and Tens are nice to her because of her uncle. She can’t risk doing anything to make Tia think she’s uncool.

  Walking towards Boots, they spot another Highstead uniform across the road. ‘Oh, look! There’s Fatty,’ Tia sniggers. ‘She’s in my form. Total loser.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Charlotte says. ‘She needs liposuction!’

  Heather looks across at the girl. She’s not fat, not really. Just not as rake-thin as Tia and her gang, who are all as leggy as young show ponies. The girl walking on the other side of the road looks miserable. Lonely. Heather can’t say anything to defend her, though. As much as she feels for the girl, she’d do just about anything not to swap sides of the road and be standing there with her while Tia’s gang laughed at them both.

  ‘I heard she lives on that housing estate,’ Henri says, ‘you know, that one with the dirty grey houses in Orpington, the one where the gyppos run riot.’

  Summer laughs. ‘She probably goes out burning cars on an evening with the rest of them.’

  Heather feels like scum as she clamps her lips together and remains silent. It can’t be easy coming from a tough background and going to Highstead. While a place at the school is supposed to be based on academic ability, there’s an awful lot of posh girls here, probably because their parents can afford the private tutors to hothouse them into passing the notoriously hard entrance exam.

  ‘Hey, Fatty!’ Summer calls across the street. ‘Why don’t you go back to your council house and snog those gyppos you love so much!’

  The girl had seemed frozen for a few seconds, but now she turns and runs. She’s too far away to see clearly, but somehow Heather knows tears are streaming down her face.

  When the girl disappears into the alleyway that leads to Morrisons’ car park, Heather stops watching. She turns to find Tia looking at her, a hardness in her eyes and a question on her lips. ‘Heather, is it? Where do you live?’

  ‘Bickley,’ Heather manages to stammer.

  ‘Where in Bickley?’

  ‘Do you know Blackbrook Lane? Near there.’

  Tia smiles, satisfied with the answer. ‘My aunt lives in Bickley. It’s nice.’

  And by ‘nice’ Heather guesses she means ‘expensive’, which a lot of it is, and Heather isn’t going to reveal that her house is the one letting the whole neighbourhood down.

  She gets home late that night. Really late. It’s getting dark by the time she walks through the front door, but her mother doesn’t say anything. Heather’s not even sure she realized she wasn’t in the house. She probably thought her daughter was tucked away in the mess somewhere, doing her homework.

  She goes to her dad’s the next day and dumps her school bag, along with her bag full of clothes for the weekend, on the top bunk in the bedroom she shares with Faith.

  ‘New bag?’ Faith says, looking it over.

  ‘Yes.’ Heather can’t help smiling to herself.

  ‘What are you looking so smug about?’ Faith asks, suspicious.

  ‘Nothing,’ Heather says, hugging her secret to her. Pretty soon she’ll be one of the popular girls and Faith won’t be able to order her around any more. Heather wants to be just like Tia Paine, even though she’s a bitch. She wants to not care. She wants to be the one everyone looks up to for a change, and she doesn’t care if she has to sell her soul to a pre-teen devil with perfect teeth to accomplish that.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  NOW

  As they pull into Hastings town centre, pausing at a traffic light, Jason turns to Heather and yells, ‘Do you want to go straight to the address?’

  ‘No!’ The rumble of the engine is so loud she shakes her head as well. The helmet is heavy. She’s ready to be rid of this constricting thing over her face, ready to breathe again. However, she’s not ready just yet to ring on Patricia Waites’s doorbell.

  Jason seems to understand this, because when the light turns green he heads towards the seafront instead of into the curling and climbing streets of the old town. There’s a car park at the eastern end of the beach, past the old fishermen’s huts huddled together, tall and foreboding with their windowless, black-painted clapboard. He takes Heather’s helmet from her and stows it in a lockable box behind the back seat, and without discussing where they are going they both turn towards the town and start walking. When they reach th
e amusement park, Jason asks, ‘What do you want to do first?’

  Heather looks around at the dodgems and helter-skelter, then further to the sea beyond. ‘Wander round, get a feel for the town?’ She sighs. ‘I don’t remember being here.’

  ‘Not at all?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ She starts walking. She wants to see the beach, unobstructed by all the tourist traps. Maybe that will help. Jason falls into step beside her. ‘But I don’t remember much from when I was little. I always thought it was because I just didn’t have the kind of memory that retained things from the past, but since I found out about… Well, I’ve been wondering if it’s because I blocked it all out.’ She pauses for a moment, chews on the corner of her lip as a new thought comes her way. ‘Maybe this is why. Maybe this place kick-started the habit.’

  They’ve reached a part where the path curves close to the pebble beach, and Jason stops, shoves his hands in his jeans pockets, and stares out to sea. The day is bright, but the water isn’t the glaring blue of the postcards – more grey with an underlying hint of green. ‘That’s hardly surprising. I know there are patches of my childhood I’d quite happily lose in the fog of time.’

  Heather comes to stand beside him. Usually he looks at her a lot – an understanding smile here, a glance of concern there – but now he keeps his gaze steadily fixed on the horizon. ‘Was it really bad?’ she whispers.

  ‘No… Yes.’ He exhales heavily. ‘It’s hard to explain. Not all alcoholics are raging idiots who can’t hold down a job and who beat their families up on a nightly basis.’

  They start walking again, down onto the stony beach and towards the sea. The tide is out and the pebbles undulate towards the surf in loose terraces. Heather knows she’s being nosy, but she can’t help herself. She doesn’t get to talk to people about their lives much – not the important stuff anyway – and she didn’t know how thirsty she was for it. ‘What was it like?’

  ‘On the outside, he looked like a pretty normal guy. He had a decent job, although maybe he could have climbed higher if he hadn’t been drinking – the fact he often got passed over for promotion was one of the things that used to really set him off. But even with that, even though many of his colleagues must have known he liked a drink or two, I doubt many of them ever guessed the extent of the problem.’

  Heather’s stomach swirls with pity. She knows that feeling. ‘It’s horrible, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘As a kid in a family like that? You’ve got this huge secret: one you didn’t ask for, one you would do anything to be free of. It’s like your parents have dumped it on you, asked you to carry it for them, then they forget it’s there, just leaving you to lug it around for the rest of your life.’

  They’ve reached the shore now. Any closer and Heather’s trainers will get wet. Jason watches the surf juggle the smaller pebbles for a moment, then meets her eyes, relief clearly plastered across his features. ‘Exactly.’

  They spend a moment looking at each other, sharing something neither of them can put into words, then Jason sets off again, strolling parallel to the waves, and Heather catches up with him. The slope of the beach means they’re almost at eye level with each other.

  ‘He could be nasty – there’s a reason people are called “mean drunks” – but when it boiled down to it, it was the things he didn’t do rather than the things he did. After I was about eight, he was never at a football match, never at a concert…’

  Heather smiles. ‘You sing?’ She likes that about him.

  Jason coughs. ‘Um… let the cat out of the bag there a bit. My next sister up is a dance fanatic, and my mum used to take me along to her lessons with her to keep me out of my dad’s way.’ He flashes her a winning grin. ‘I’ll have you know I’m a pretty competent tap-dancer.’

  ‘No way!’ Heather is really laughing now, unable to stop herself shaking with it.

  ‘Way,’ he says, but he doesn’t look embarrassed. In fact, he looks a little bit proud.

  ‘Didn’t that just give the kids at school a reason to torture you?’

  ‘I didn’t care who knew. I enjoyed it and I was good at it.’ Heather’s shaking her head as well as laughing now. She doesn’t believe him, and Jason knows this, because he grabs her by the hand and runs back up the beach, dragging her along behind him. By the time they reach the path he’s laughing too, and they’re both so breathless from slipping and sliding on the stones she can hardly believe that he releases her hand, pulls himself up straight and launches straight into a routine, tapping with his thick biker boots and ending with a spin. A couple of old ladies walking past give him a round of applause and he bows, lapping it up.

  ‘Okay, okay, you’ve convinced me,’ Heather gasps, hardly able to get the words out between laughs. When the giggles die out she’s left with a sense of wonder. He’s like her in some ways, but in others he’s so very, very different. ‘That was really quite impressive,’ she tells him. ‘I could never do anything like that.’

  ‘I didn’t think I could before I tried. I used to join in at the back while my sister did the class, and eventually my mum said I might as well do it too. Jess still hates me because I got better marks than her in our Grade 2 exam.’

  Almost without thinking, they begin walking again. Jason looks around. ‘Do you remember any of this?’

  Heather looks towards the pier. Normally it’s the first place she’d head for on a trip to the seaside. For some reason, piers draw her like a magnet. She always walks right down to the end, leans on the railings, and stares out to sea. She feels a tug inside, prompting her to do just that, but she ignores it. This isn’t just a nice day out. She’s here for a reason, and this pier isn’t going to give her answers because she’s never walked on it before. A fire destroyed most of the Victorian structure about ten years ago and the renovated pier is oddly sparse and minimalist. Whatever memories might have been jogged by the pier went up in flames.

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘I don’t remember anything.’

  Once again, an image of a red coat pops into her head and she curses herself for not cataloguing and sorting and carefully storing her own memories, as she does for those of others as part of her job. It horrifies her to think that she’s like her mother in this respect, discarding them carelessly or leaving them to rot and decay until there are only fragments left. She sighs. ‘I think I’m ready now.’

  ‘To go to the address?’

  She nods. That’s why they’ve come here, after all. She can’t put it off forever.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  NOW

  Just as Heather and Jason reach 14 Hill Croft Road she feels a drop of rain on her head, which is odd because the sky, while populated by large puffy clouds, is bright blue directly above them. She has no idea where it can be coming from, but over the next few seconds she feels another couple of drops and, as a cloud wanders in front of the sun, it begins to spit in earnest.

  Number 14 is an ordinary-looking Victorian terraced house with bay windows and a slate roof. It’s part of a row of four others that are very similar, and all four have been plastered and painted white. There are wrought-iron railings and no garden in the front, just concrete steps leading down to another bay window and another front door. Heather guesses the house has been split into flats. The whole building isn’t that large, so each flat must be tiny.

  ‘14c,’ Jason says. ‘That must be the bottom one. Are you going to knock?’

  Heather stares at the door. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you want me to?’

  ‘No,’ she says sharply, and then immediately apologizes. She’s so used to snapping at Faith when she’s overwhelmed and irritated that she just does it on automatic. ‘I mean, I think I need to do it on my own. I just need… a moment.’

  He nods, steps back a little. Heather isn’t sure whether it’s because he’s trying to give her some room or because she was short with him. Cold air rushes in to fill where he was standing and she hugs herself.

  ‘Okay,’ she
says and starts to move, even though she feels anything other than okay, even though she feels anything other than ready.

  She makes her way carefully down the concrete stairs and rings the bell before she freaks herself out. The chime booms out like Big Ben. Heather almost bolts, but the door swings open. She finds herself looking at a young woman in jogging bottoms and a crop top, holding a baby on her hip. ‘Yeah?’ she says, looking warily at Heather.

  ‘Um… Hello.’

  Heather stalls after those first two words. The woman stares back and begins to close the door, her eyes narrowing further. Heather holds out a hand as if to stop her, but she isn’t brave enough to actually make contact with the door, so her hand stays aloft and useless, only a hint of her intention.

  ‘I don’t suppose you know someone called Patricia Waites?’ she says in a rush, the narrowing space between door and frame squeezing the words out of her. ‘She used to live here.’

  The gap closes further. ‘Sorry. Don’t know ’er. Only been ’ere six months.’

  And then it’s shut. Heather turns and walks back up the stairs to where Jason is waiting for her. She shakes her head as she reaches him, even though he must have heard the exchange.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  She nods, but she realizes she may be fibbing again. ‘This is what we expected, isn’t it? We knew it was a long shot. I mean, I knew…’ She looks away, embarrassed she’s inadvertently included him in her thought processes this way.

  They turn and walk back towards the seafront. Jason suggests a cup of tea and they sit in a nice little café near the amusements that has bleached wooden walls and colourful prints of boats and the sea hanging above the powder-blue tables. Despite the cheerful décor, Heather doesn’t feel her spirits brighten one bit. This feels like defeat.

  When their individual teapots are empty, Jason stands up. ‘Come on.’

  Heather looks up at him. She’d just like to slump a little longer on the table.