The Memory Collector

by Fiona Harper

  She feels as if everything inside her is straining towards him, even as she grips her handbag tighter against her body with her elbow. He must see her hesitation, because then he adds, ‘Or there’s always good old instant. I make a mean cup of instant, even if I do say so myself.’

  The contents of the handbag burn hotter against her torso and she looks helplessly at him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispers, ‘I can’t today…’ and then, before he can begin to unpick her shabby excuse, she turns and heads for her door. It’s only when it’s closed safely again and she’s leaning against it that she feels her pulse start to slow.

  She exhales loudly. Jason Blake. He’s been living here for a few months now, and every time she bumps into him she feels like this. She thought it would wear off after a while, but if anything it’s getting worse.

  She shakes her head, trying to dislodge the image of him, his long limbs relaxed and easy, his brown eyes smiling at her, and then she opens her eyes, pushes herself up so she’s bearing her whole weight on her feet again, and walks down the hallway to her living room.

  Just being in here makes it easy to breathe again.

  The living room of her flat is at the back of the house, leading onto a long, narrow garden that all the tenants share. She walks over to the large bay window with the French doors and stares outside. Jason moans that the garden is stuck in the 1950s. He hates the two thin flowerbeds flanking each fence, with the concrete path down one side, but Heather quite likes it. It’s soothing.

  Also soothing is this room, her oasis. It has the minimum of furniture – a sofa, one armchair and a bookcase. A TV and a small dining table with a vase on it. She doesn’t believe in owning things that don’t get used regularly. They’re a waste of space and energy and emotion.

  She likes the way she can stand in the middle of the room, close her eyes, and know that nothing is within touching distance. She does that now – closes her eyes – and the feeling of space, of knowing the walls are white and unmarked, that all of the books in the bookcase are perfectly lined up, that the fake hydrangea in the vase on the table will never drop a dry, dead petal, helps her to feel more like herself.

  But then the handbag under her arm begins to burn again and she remembers she has one last thing to do. She walks back through the hallway (more white walls, no photos or prints to break up the space) and past the kitchen (sides swept clean of every crumb, all the teaspoons curled up behind each other in the cutlery draw), and stops outside a door.

  Heather doesn’t think of this room as her second bedroom. It’s the flat’s second bedroom, foreign territory in her little kingdom. She stares at the brass knob for a few seconds. She can feel the calm she generated only a few moments ago in the living room starting to slip and slide, but she knows she has to do this. It’s the only way.

  The long key sits waiting in the lock and she turns it, bracing herself against what she is about to see, against what she will try very hard not to look at before she shuts the door again, and then her hand closes around the doorknob, cold and slick, and she twists it open.

  It feels as if the contents of the room are rushing towards her, as if they’re all fighting, climbing, spilling, falling over each other to reach her first. It takes all her willpower not to stagger back and run away.

  From floor to ceiling, all she can see is stuff. Her mother’s stuff, crammed into the room in teetering piles. Stuff that came from her old family home, a house that Heather had not been allowed inside for years and never wanted to visit any more anyway. All this clutter is hers now, left to her in a will she didn’t even know existed and was shocked anyone was able to find. The cardboard boxes, the old suitcases, the plastic containers and carrier bags. All of it. All those things filled with stuff she doesn’t want and doesn’t care about. Just looking at it makes her want to go and take a shower.

  She looks to the front of the hoard, to where there is a two-metre-square patch of carpet, holding out like a plucky little beach against the tide of belongings surging towards the door. Down on one side is a small chest of drawers. Piles of old newspapers and magazines threaten to slide off it when she tugs open the middle drawer, but she does it quickly, trying to kid herself that she’s doing it on automatic, that she’s really not taking any of this in.

  The drawer is full of her guilt. She quickly pulls the tiny corduroy shoes from her bag and stuffs them inside, pushing down assorted baby hats, rompers, stuffed farm animals and blankets – all with the price tags still attached – to make room for the latest addition. Then she shoves the drawer closed again, backs away into the hallway, and shuts the door so hard her own bedroom door rattles in sympathy.

  It stars to ebb away then, the itchy, scratchy feeling she’s been having all day, the one that made her go into Mothercare in the first place. She sinks to the floor, her back against the wall, and stares at the brilliant-white gloss of the door she’s just closed, trying as hard as she can to let its clean blankness blot out the knowledge of what lies behind it.

  CHAPTER THREE

  NOW

  It’s a double-edged experience for Heather as she leaves her flat on Sunday morning and heads off to her sister’s in Westerham. On the one hand, it’s a relief. Even though she does her best to ignore it, there’s a radar-blip deep inside her, always pulsing – the awareness of all the stuff lurking behind the faceless door of her spare room – but its intermittent throb lessens in intensity and frequency as she joins the A21 and heads out into north Kent. On the other hand, she’s out there. Exposed. And the locks on her doors, the ones keeping all that stuff safe and secret, seem flimsier with each mile she travels from home.

  It only takes half an hour to get to Faith’s. The red-brick Victorian houses, pre-war semis, and chunky blocks of flats of Bromley slowly give way to fields and hedgerows, country pubs and rows of flint cottages. Faith says Mum and Dad used to bring them to the little commuter village when they were kids. Before the divorce, obviously. Before things got so crowded in their mother’s head. But Heather doesn’t remember that. She doesn’t remember very much of her childhood at all.

  She used to think everyone was like that, that anything before the age of thirteen was just smudges of sound and scent and colour in people’s memories, like the inkling of a dream after waking, but she’s since discovered that some people have crystal-clear memories of their early years: who their first teacher was, what kind of cake they had for their best-ever birthday, stories their parents used to tell them before they went to sleep.

  She doesn’t worry about this, though. Mostly because she doesn’t want to remember any of it anyway. The tiny snatches that do try and poke through the fog aren’t that pleasant.

  All except one. The holiday with Aunt Kathy at the seaside. Lovely Aunt Kathy with her dark curls and her red coat. Heather doesn’t mind letting that one come.

  She’s smiling when she pulls up outside Faith’s house, thinking of candyfloss, jeans rolled up over pale calves, and icy water on her toes, of running out of reach of the waves and then back again, just to tease them into catching her once more.

  Faith’s front door opens before Heather is fully out of the car, and her sister stands there, waiting. She isn’t smiling but she isn’t cross either. Just neutral, accepting the monthly visit as she always does.

  Faith is three years older than Heather. She has the same gradually darkening blonde hair that won’t keep a wave, no matter how deft she is with the curling tongs, the same grey eyes. They are exactly the same height, but her sister has always seemed taller. Heather has never quite been able to work out why.

  Heather follows Faith inside. Her brother-in-law, Matthew, wanders into the hallway from the kitchen, wiping his hands on a tea towel, and gives Heather a proper smile. ‘I keep wanting to do a roast, but there’s never enough time after church, so I’m afraid you’re stuck with slow-cooker casserole again,’ he says with a smile.

  Heather nods and smiles back. She likes Matthew. He always treats her as if she
’s just another one of the family. Normal, in other words. Lots of people would shrug off that label, thinking it boring, but Heather would love to embrace it. For a couple of hours a month, Matthew makes it seem as if that might be possible.

  But then Heather thinks of the chest of drawers in her spare room, the one containing all her dirty secrets in pastel colours, and she starts to doubt herself again. She doesn’t let Faith or Matthew see it, though. She keeps smiling, she says the right greetings and asks after the children, whom she can hear stampeding in another part of the house. They’re the only reason she keeps this monthly ‘duty’ date with her sister. She can feel her heart thudding in anticipation of seeing them again.

  As if on cue, they come thundering down the stairs at the sound of an unfamiliar voice in the hall and then stop short, staring at her shyly, as they always do at the beginning of a visit. Alice is six and Barney is three. She wants to go and hug them so much. She yearns to feel their tiny arms around her. She wants to rest her chin on their soft hair and just breathe them in, but now they’re all standing there staring at each other and the moment to lean in naturally for a cuddle has passed.

  Thankfully, Alice saves Heather with one of her usual blunt questions. ‘Did you bring any presents for us? Aunty Sarah always brings presents.’

  Barney nods seriously as his sister watches on.

  ‘Barney wants to know if you’ve brought chocolate,’ Alice adds, translating her little brother’s gesture.

  Heather shakes her head, silently disgruntled with Matthew’s beneficent sister. ‘Sorry, no chocolate today, or toys.’ She risks a glance at Faith. ‘Mummy says you already have lots and lots of toys.’

  It happens then – one of those moments that rarely flashes between the two sisters. Just like Alice, Heather is able to translate the look her sibling gives her, an expression on Faith’s face, both knowing and grateful, that for once acknowledges their shared past, their shared hatred of extraneous stuff.

  ‘But I will play any game you want after dinner,’ Heather adds, hoping that the gift of quality time – something she would have killed for when she was younger – has not gone out of fashion in this era of brightly coloured electronic worlds accessed with the swipe of a chubby finger.

  Barney looks blank, but Alice pipes up. ‘I get to pick what game?’ she asks brightly, and Heather nods. Alice is pleased with this response. She smiles to herself and skips off towards the living room, leaving Heather to wonder if it’s right that a six-year-old should look quite so much as if she’s cooking up a plan.

  Heather follows her sister and brother-in-law into the kitchen, where pans are boiling on the hob and delicious smells are wafting from a large slow cooker. She watches her sister as she and Matthew bustle round each other, putting the finishing touches to the meal. When he puts an easy hand on Faith’s hip as he reaches past her for a wooden spoon, Heather looks away. It seems too intimate. Too much. Too much to watch, anyway. It’s been so long since someone of the opposite sex touched Heather that she can’t even remember if a man’s fingers have ever rested on her hip that way.

  Faith doesn’t even notice the affectionate touch, and that makes Heather sad. And maybe a little bit angry. She’s reminded of her mother, who amassed so much stuff that even her treasures were lost in the sheer volume of her possessions. This seems to be the same kind of wastefulness. Faith has also amassed much – but it comes in the shape of love and people, not things, so now the moments that would be treasured by Heather if she were in Faith’s place are buried and lost in the fullness of her sister’s life.

  Once again, it causes Heather to wonder how they turned out so differently. Is it just that she’s broken, damaged, in a way that Faith never was? And how could that be, after the childhood that they both endured?

  She waits for Faith’s mask to slip, prods the robustness of her sister’s smile each time it appears. But either Faith is much, much better at this game than Heather is, or her sister has attained the thing that has eluded Heather all her life: she’s moved on. She’s over it.

  If that’s the case, Heather isn’t sure whether to worship her or hate her. Faith knows, you see. She knows what’s behind Heather’s façade. She has an understanding that can never be gained from a distance, by studying and logical analysis. This is knowledge that comes from experience, from being flung in the mess and the chaos and struggling through it to come out the other side. Even though they frequently think to themselves that they would rather just cut each other loose so they no longer have to deal with each other, it is this shared struggle that binds the two sisters together. Another thing to blame their mother for.

  As the aroma of the cooking chicken intensifies, wrapping the country kitchen in a herby fog, Faith marshals her troops. ‘Come on, you lot! Time to lay the table.’ They snap to attention and set to work without a word of communication. Matthew grabs the crockery out of the cupboard and Alice helps with the knives and forks, although Matthew has to switch them all around when she’s finished. Even Barney has been given a job, and he carefully puts coasters next to each setting.

  The table looks lovely, with Faith’s blue and white Calico china and a jug full of flowers from the garden in the centre. Faith’s family are lovely too – the kids are just naughty enough to still be adorable as they whine about the casserole having mushrooms and refuse to eat their peas, and Matthew sometimes looks across at his wife and smiles. Not for any reason that Heather can see. Just because.

  It makes her feel as if there’s a gaping hole in her chest, one that is only lightly papered over by her summer blouse and, as she eats the buttery mashed potatoes and creamy sauce, she imagines what it would be like if this were her dining table, if it were her husband sitting at the head, smiling at her. She wants it so much it almost makes her gasp.

  Unbidden, a picture of Jason pops into her head. She wants to swipe it away again, because it feels foolish to have him there, even though it’s only within the private confines of her own mind, but she can’t quite bring herself to do it when she sees the way he’s smiling at her. However, her imagination falls down when it comes to filling Alice and Barney’s seats. It seems, even in her fantasies, she can’t allow herself to hope quite that much. She snaps back into the real world to find Faith looking at her, weighing her up, and Heather starts to resent her sister just a little bit more.

  How did you do it? she wants to yell. How did you manage all this? It’s just not fair.

  And why hasn’t she whispered her secrets to Heather? Why has she guarded them so closely, so jealously? Surely sisters are supposed to share? Only maybe they don’t, Heather thinks bitterly, when you grew up in a home where everything was defined by what you possessed.

  When they’ve finished the main course, Heather tells Matthew to sit as she clears and stacks the plates and takes them into the kitchen. Heather always finds this part of the afternoon wearying. Faith will be cross if she doesn’t offer to help, but when she does, Faith just shoos her back into the dining room.

  Alice is showing off a bracelet made of neon plastic beads she made at a friend’s party, and is insisting her aunt has a better look, so Heather slides into her sister’s empty seat to do just that. It’s nice, being there, Matthew on one side, Alice next to her and Barney opposite and, as she listens to her niece chattering away, a warm feeling spreads through her chest.

  But then Faith returns with the apple crumble to place in the centre of the table. She stops short and shoots her sister a territorial look. Heather slides off the chair and skulks back to her seat next to Barney, and Faith is reinstalled upon her fashionably distressed oak throne.

  When dessert is finished, they all tramp dutifully in the direction of the study. It’s time for Faith’s weekly Skype call with their father, who currently lives in Spain, and when Heather is here she’s expected to show some family spirit and join in.

  Heather hates it. Not that she doesn’t love her father – she does – but it feels like she’s playing a p
art for the black pinhole at the top of the computer monitor. Say ‘cheese’, everyone. Pretend you’re one big happy family!

  Matthew sets up the connection and moments later Heather sees her father’s smiling face, while Shirley, their stepmother of more than fifteen years, bustles around in the background, leaning in for a wave, but then discreetly disappearing. Probably to dust something. From the sublime to the ridiculous, Heather thinks, although she understands why Shirley’s military cleanliness must be soothing for her father.

  ‘Hey, there!’ their father says, and Faith gets the kids to tell him what they’ve been doing at school and pre-school respectively. They have some finger painting and spellings to show him, all prepared and laying ready on the desk. Faith fills him in on the wonderfulness of her domestic life, turning the taste of the custard that accompanied the apple crumble a little sour in Heather’s mouth, and then, before Heather can think of anything to say or plan an escape route, it’s her turn. She smiles weakly at the camera.

  ‘Hi, Dad,’ she says, feeling her sister’s eyes on her, monitoring her levels of family participation and judging her accordingly.

  ‘Hey, Sweetpea,’ he replies, using the nickname he gave her that everyone else has forgotten. ‘How’s work?’

  Heather breathes out. Work is a safe subject. Work is good.

  ‘Going well. I’ve only got about four months left of this contract now, though, so I’m on the lookout for another post.’

  ‘Anything on the horizon?’

  She shrugs. ‘There’s a senior archivist position in Eltham I’m interested in, but I’m not sure I’ve got enough experience yet, so we’ll see. In the meantime, I’m enjoying the work at Sandwood Park.’

  ‘Ah,’ her father says, nodding, then goes on to quote the first line of a novel. ‘That’s one of his, isn’t it?’ he adds brightly.

  Heather nods. Sandwood Park used to be the home of the celebrated author Cameron Linford. His widow died recently and donated the house to a private trust. It’s due to be opened to the public in a month or two, and it’s Heather’s job to sort and catalogue the masses of documents chronicling the couple’s life: diaries, letters, financial ledgers, and photographs.