The Memory Collector

by Fiona Harper

  Arms come round her and squeeze her tight and, for once, no one tells her off for listening when she shouldn’t have been.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  NOW

  Jason has a motorbike he keeps in the garage, but they don’t go out to breakfast on that. Instead, he opens the door of his little white MG sports car for Heather. He calls it ‘vintage’; she thinks it could probably be more accurately labelled ‘rusty’. He’s doing it up, he tells her. By the summer it’ll look as good as new. Heather smiles but doesn’t believe him. Her mother used to say that sort of thing all the time.

  Despite the fact a section of the A2 has been moved and widened and now has a couple of Costas and M&S Food shops at the petrol stations, the little truckers’ café that Jason takes Heather to on the old road is bustling. Burly men in thick jackets tuck into full English breakfasts and massive mugs of tea. The smell of frying bacon when they walk through the door is incredible.

  ‘What do you fancy?’ Jason says, smiling at her as they nab a table and sit down.

  She finds it very hard to come up with a sensible answer, but eventually she manages to tear her eyes off him and fix them on the menu. She picks the first thing she sees. ‘Sausage butty.’

  ‘Good choice,’ he says. ‘Fred is famous for his sausages.’

  ‘Fred? You know the owner? Do you come here a lot?’

  ‘Yep. My grandpa used to bring me here when I was little. Kind of became a habit on a Saturday morning.’

  He smiles at the scrawny-looking waitress as she approaches. She must be seventy if she’s a day, Heather thinks. ‘Usual?’ the waitress asks Jason.

  Jason nods. ‘And a sausage sarnie for the lady, and two large teas.’

  Her stomach gurgles in anticipation of breakfast. She had no idea that staying up half the night and battling floods could make a person so hungry. Jason is leaning back in his chair and his eyelids are growing heavy.

  ‘Thank you again for rushing to my rescue last night,’ she says, and sees him jolt upright and refocus on her.

  He shrugs, looking a little embarrassed. ‘It’s what good neighbours do.’

  She nods.

  ‘It’s what friends do,’ he adds.

  Heather’s eyebrows rise. They’re friends? She hasn’t had one of those in a while. Work colleagues, yes. Acquaintances, sort of. But no proper friends. The girls at school made sure of that. And by the time she’d finished school and moved on to university, she’d just got out of practice. She can’t help smiling softly to herself. This feels nice. A little bit scary, but nice.

  The waitress brings their food and Heather peels the thick, white bread back so she can add sauce. The ketchup is in little packets, so she avoids those, preferring the HP anyway. As she’s dolloping it over her sausages, Jason puts down his knife and fork and grins. ‘We have to stop meeting like this,’ he says and takes a great glug of tea.

  Heather frowns, puts the sauce bottle back down and carefully reassembles her sandwich. ‘What do you mean? I’ve never been here before.’

  ‘I mean…’ He swallows a mouthful of fried egg so he can talk properly. ‘I mean that sausages seem to be a common theme.’

  She stares down at her breakfast then looks back up at him. She doesn’t get why that’s significant. He just shakes his head and looks a bit goofy. ‘Don’t mind me. Sleep deprivation. It’s a killer. I was trying to be funny.’

  ‘Oh.’

  He chuckles softly. ‘That bad, huh?’

  Heather takes a bite of her sandwich and chews thoughtfully. When she’s finished, she says, ‘We’ll just have to find another way to ketch-up.’ Jason stares at her. She looks away. Oh hell. That was the wrong thing to say. She starts to try and dig herself back out of the hole she’s created. ‘Ketchup… Catch up?’

  He doesn’t say anything, and she’s afraid to turn back and look at him, but when she can bear the silence no longer, she does, mainly because the brown sauce is starting to run down her finger and she needs to put her sandwich back on her plate so she can wipe it with a paper napkin.

  ‘Eggs-actly,’ he says and his mouth twitches.

  Her eyes widen and she makes a soft huffing sound, a laugh cut short by surprise.

  Jason is smiling as he continues to dig into his breakfast, eyes on his plate, and Heather watches him as she makes short work of her sandwich. Every time a bit of the peppery, soft sausage hits her taste buds she wants to smile.

  Don’t get too carried away, a little voice in her head warns. He said ‘friends’, nothing more.

  Heather does her best to absorb that fact, not to hope for more than she could ever have, but it’s surprisingly difficult. She feels warm, light. Not alone. And those things are very hard to feel sensible about.

  When Jason has wiped the last of the egg from his plate with his toast, he pushes it away and leans back. ‘Time to get bac-on the road,’ he says, smiling most unapologetically at his awful pun.

  ‘What in your old banger?’ she shoots back, surprised at how fast she’s getting the hang of it.

  ‘Ouch!’ Jason chuckles. ‘Muffin’s wrong with my car, I’ll have you know.’

  Heather opens her mouth to say muffins aren’t even on the menu for breakfast here, but instead of arguing, she just tries to give him a tenner from the purse tucked in her jeans pocket. He won’t hear of it.

  When he’s put his wallet away, he says, ‘Time to go ham!’

  Heather groans. ‘That’s not even a breakfast food!’

  ‘Yes it is!’

  They argue whether continental breakfasts can really be included in this pun-fest all the way out to the car. She climbs inside, aware she is close enough to smell the fabric conditioner on his clean T-shirt as he drops into the driver’s seat and folds his long legs into the car.

  ‘We’d better curry up,’ he says. ‘I had a text from Carlton saying he was going to get there bright and early to check the damage.’ He pulls out of the car park and heads for home.

  Heather thinks about the mess in her hallway, the fact her landlord will see it, and her sausage sandwich rolls in her stomach, but before the panic has a chance to settle in, another thought hits her. ‘Hang on… Curry? For breakfast?’

  Jason just smiles as he keeps his eyes on the road. ‘Of course. Straight out of the foil container after a takeaway the night before. Breakfast of champions.’

  Heather shudders. ‘Cold curry?’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’ve never had takeaway for breakfast?’ Now it’s his turn to sound astonished.

  ‘No,’ she replies seriously. ‘I have. Plenty of times.’ She thinks of the empty pizza boxes and plastic containers with snap-on lids that had littered her mother’s kitchen. After the oven had broken down completely, sometimes scavenging for leftovers from the takeaway meal the night before was the only breakfast available. ‘Just not for a very long time.’ She’d promised herself she’d never live like that again. It just hadn’t occurred to her that normal people did it by choice.

  Neither of them can think of any more puns after that, and Heather’s eyes are feeling gritty and tired, the lack of sleep catching up with her. The two of them slip into silence as the pale grey sky turns peachy-yellow and the car rumbles back into the fringes of the city.

  When they get back, it’s seven o’clock and Carlton is pacing around outside the house, barking into a mobile phone. He ends the call abruptly as Heather and Jason emerge from the car and growls at his now-silent phone. ‘Bloody cowboy!’ he remarks as they approach the front door. ‘Wants to charge me a ton for coming out last night, even though it was his shoddy work that failed in the first place! Well, if he expects me to pay him more, he’s got another think coming!’

  Heather tries to keep as far away from Carlton as she can as she heads inside. He reminds her of a pit bull – round-headed, meaty and almost always snarling. The only time he doesn’t talk that way is when he knocks on her door for what always seems to be an invented reason; then he’s all syrupy sweet
and calls her luv and darlin’. She’s not sure which side of him she dislikes more. She’s not scared of him, but she would rather limit her interactions with him as much as possible.

  This time, though, she is not going to be able to make her escape so easily. ‘Alright, angel,’ he says as she attempts to slide past him. ‘Had a look in your flat. Carpet in your spare room’s gonna have to go, I’m afraid.’

  ‘You’ve been in my flat?’ Heather stammers. ‘Without me there?’

  He jangles a bunch of keys at her, one of which she assumes is a duplicate for her flat. She knows he has one, of course, but he’s always promised she’d be there if he came in – something in the tenancy agreement. ‘Emergency, innit?’ he replies. ‘Anyway, I’m going to send a couple of my boys round to rip it up, either today or tomorrow.’

  ‘I don’t care about the carpet,’ Heather says quickly. ‘Leave it.’ All she cares about is getting that stuff in her hallway back inside the room and shutting the door.

  ‘Nah. Might as well do it now, while we’ve got the other work to do. Then I won’t have to remember to do it if you move out.’

  ‘H-how long do you think it’ll take before it’s all sorted out?’

  He gives her one of those half-huff, half-shrug things builders and plumbers are really good at. ‘Dunno. I’ve got a specialist firm coming with dehumidifiers and what have you to dry it out. No point putting the carpet back down again until the floor underneath is dry. Maybe about a week?’

  A week? Suddenly, despite the sun rising above the edges of the valley Shortlands nestles in, Heather shivers. ‘Um… I’m…’ She looks around wildly, then spots her car. ‘I’ve got to get to work!’ she announces.

  ‘Really?’ says Jason, who’s been listening to the whole exchange. ‘Won’t your boss let you even have the morning off after something like this? Surely you could ask for special leave?’

  She shakes her head, even though she’s pretty sure she could get the time off if she wanted to. ‘I’m behind. And it’s all done with lottery funding. It’s not responsible to hang around here when there’s nothing I can do.’ Her fight-or-flight response seems to have kicked in again, and Heather has never been much of a scrapper. This is the ideal excuse.

  ‘Listen, let me give you my mobile number,’ Jason says and holds out a hand for her phone. ‘That way you can at least keep me updated.’ She pulls it out of her cardigan pocket and hands it to him. A few quick taps and it’s done. She resists the urge to check her contacts to see it sitting there next to Faith’s number and the details for a few of her current and past colleagues, the only other numbers in there. ‘Text me when you get a chance and then I’ll have yours too,’ he says, obviously taking Heather’s jitters for being in hurry.

  ‘Thanks,’ she says and then, not being able to think of anything else to say, she slips past Carlton and dashes into her flat.

  The first thing she does is get ready for work. The damp-smelling boxes stacked in her hall are neat now, with none of their contents spilling out, but that doesn’t mean Heather wants to walk past them. Thankfully, her bedroom is at the front of the flat, opposite the front door, so she puts her head down and heads straight for it. After getting dressed, she pulls a weekend bag out from the shelf in the wardrobe and starts throwing things into it.

  She’s really not sure if she just lied to Jason or not. All she knows is that she needs to get out of this place, and she needs to do it now.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  NOW

  Heather arrives at the Central Library in Bromley, a huge concrete monstrosity on the brow of a hill which can be seen for miles around. Built in the Seventies, it is just about old enough to start being ‘retro and edgy’ instead of ‘old-fashioned and ugly’ by those who know about such things.

  She’d managed to reduce her boss, Cherie, to speechlessness when she phoned from a service station on her way to work that morning and asked for a personal day to deal with the flood. She’s never taken a day off before, not even for a holiday. Once Cherie had recovered from the shock, she’d sputtered her commiserations and told her to take as much time as she needed.

  Heather reasons to herself that she didn’t exactly lie to her boss. While not dealing directly with the flood – she shivers just thinking about those boxes stacked in her hallway, no longer contained and quarantined, like cancer that has spread and started to infect the healthy tissue of her home – she plans to deal with the ‘repercussions’ of the flood, so that counts.

  More has been lost than carpeting and old cardboard boxes. Precious information was destroyed in the plumbing palaver. Thankfully, after turning round and heading her car back towards Bromley, she had a bolt of inspiration. Given her job, she should have thought of it days ago, but somehow she was just so focused on ‘that room’ that she didn’t see the alternatives.

  She heads upstairs to the library’s local studies area and pauses in front of the large filing cabinets housing the microfilm collection. There it is. Bromley and Chislehurst News Shopper 1991–94. The metal drawer slides open easily and she scans the boxes for the one she wants: June to July 1992. She pauses, just staring at the little cardboard box, before she plucks it out and heads to one of the microfilm readers.

  Heather is not a stranger to these machines, so it doesn’t take long to load it up. Thankfully, the library has invested in more modern technology: film readers hooked up to a PC rather than the bulky old ones with their own screens. She scrolls horizontally through the pages, fast at first and then more slowly until an image slides by. Even though it shoots past before her finger can react, her brain fires off a signal: this is the one. She clicks the mouse button and the page rolls back into view again.

  While this photo is the same as the one on the clipping she found amongst her mother’s stuff, the text is different. This is from 8 July, the first issue of the weekly paper since her disappearance. Although she’s desperate to gather facts, she’s also terrified about what these grainy little words will reveal, so she closes her eyes, pictures Jason smiling at her over the top of a full English, takes a deep breath, and begins reading.

  LOCAL GIRL MISSING: Police ask for help from Bromley residents.

  Little Heather Lucas, aged 6, has been missing since 3rd July and Bromley police are asking anyone who might know anything about her whereabouts to come forward. The last positive sighting of Heather was by her teacher, Miss Julie Perrins, 25, who describes her as ‘an imaginative and sensitive girl’ as she left St Michael’s Primary School in Bickley at 3.15 p.m. last Friday. One or two parents say they may have noticed a little girl waiting alone in the playground that afternoon, but none can give a positive identification.

  Heather’s mother, Christine Lucas, aged 36, and her father, Stephen Lucas, aged 40, are beside themselves. ‘She’s the light of our world,’ Mrs Lucas sobbed. ‘I don’t know how we can carry on without her.’

  Heather stops reading then. She can imagine her mother, gluey-eyed and distraught at the doorstep, probably half-loving all the drama. Light of her world? Give me a break! Sometimes, her mother could go for days without seeing her in their hoarded house, and it had never seemed to bother her then.

  The shaking begins in Heather’s hands, the kind she has learned not to ignore, especially as Mothercare is only a minute’s walk from the library. She saves the story she has just read to a USB stick, along with a version of the one she found in the photo album, and a third, celebrating her safe return, then bolts out of the library and back to her car.

  She drives back towards Swanham, close to work for the next day, and checks herself into the Park Lodge Hotel, a budget place used by business travellers. Its name makes it sound much nicer than it looks.

  Her room is on the corner of the building, at the end of a long corridor, but she sees no one else as she walks down it, keycard in hand. Maybe this is the perfect way to live, she thinks as she unlocks her room’s door. It’s completely anonymous. Nobody wonders about her because no one ev
en notices her. No one is curious about who she is or what might happen behind the closed door of her room. For a moment she allows herself the luxury of imagining a future where it would just be her, a single suitcase of belongings, and a fresh hotel room with each new month. Bliss.

  She puts her bags down, removes her jacket, and breathes out. It’s a large room with lots of empty carpet and generic furnishings, but she feels more at peace here than she has anywhere else since she moved back to Bromley.

  She digs in her bag for the memory stick she took with her to the library. Now she’s feeling calmer, she’s ready to face its contents. She pulls her laptop out of her bag and settles herself at the desk, then pushes the USB stick into the slot and opens up a window.

  Just three PDF files. That doesn’t feel enough for a momentous event like this, does it? For something that changed the course of several lives forever. But then again, Heather has never kidded herself that she was very important in the grand scheme of things. Others may have whole books written about them, but maybe this is all that needs to be said about her.

  She re-reads the report from 8 July first, making sure the facts are clear in her head still, and then she gives the one she found in her mother’s things the same careful attention. She pauses, and makes herself a coffee with one of the complimentary little sachets of dusty-tasting instant granules and UHT milk. Readying herself, she clicks on the third file and watches it flash up in front of her.

  Still the same school photograph and no others. None of the joyful reunion with her parents.

  MISSING GIRL FOUND

  Missing schoolgirl, Heather Lucas, aged 6, has been reunited with her family after a traumatic and worrying sixteen days.

  Heather skips over the rehashed details of her disappearance and heads for the fresh information further down the column.

  Police found little Heather in the East Sussex town of Hastings, where she had been taken by her abductor. It is not clear whether they had been there the whole time or had been moving around in an effort to evade capture, but police received a tip-off from a holidaymaker. ‘I live in Beckenham,’ Mrs June Fallon, aged 67, told our reporter, ‘so I’d seen the story about the missing kiddy in the paper. Me and my friend Coral fancied a trip to the ice-cream parlour on the front, and that’s where we saw her.’