The Memory Collector

by Fiona Harper

  Heather sits down on the sofa, resting her elbows on her knees as she thinks about this. How odd. She actually wants to do this. And not just to help herself; she wants to do it for her mother. It’s as if now the real culprit for her messed-up life has been identified, she can direct the anger in the proper place. She stands up and nods. ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘You’re right. Let’s do it.’

  ‘Now?’

  She gives a helpless sigh. ‘I’ve got to do something or I’ll go mad.’

  For a moment Jason looks perplexed, but then he shrugs. ‘Okay.’

  They head back towards the spare room. Although it was only moments ago that Heather was throwing the contents into the hall, she hesitates when she sees the mess of boxes, crates and bin liners.

  The closer she gets, the less air there is. Without the lovely, liberating anger to power her on, the old neuroses are creeping back. She gets that heart-fluttery feeling, the one she’s starting to recognize now, and clutches onto Jason’s arm. She is not going to have a panic attack in front of him. She is not!

  ‘I-I’ve seen some shows on hoarding,’ she says, desperately trying to work out how to breathe and talk at the same time. ‘What they do… is… the person, the hoarder, stays in one place, and the team bring things to them so they can say yes or no. I-It’s quicker…’ She takes a big gulp of air. ‘Do… Do you think we could do that?’ Suddenly, touching any of it seems an impossibility.

  Jason’s frowning too. ‘Okay,’ he says again. She has a horrible feeling he knows what’s going on inside her head and is being nice. She’s not sure which is worse – this feeling of being as transparent as glass or the fact he must be pitying her. ‘Where do you want to start?’

  He’s looking past the doorway towards the chest of drawers that hides all her worst, pastel-coloured secrets. Heather points to the boxes on the hall floor, forcing him to look in the other direction. ‘There. We’ll start there.’

  She leans against the wall and slides down it until her bottom meets the floor. Jason rights the box nearest him and opens the cardboard flaps. He picks out a sheaf of papers and holds them out for Heather to see. She shakes her head – they’re bank statements from her mum’s accounts, all closed during the probate process – and Jason starts a pile on the floor to the other side of him.

  They keep going like that for a while. The first two boxes are all papers: more statements, insurance certificates (although Heather doubts anyone would have paid more than 20p for her mother’s house if it had burned down), endless receipts. She keeps very little, only her mother’s birth certificate, which makes her wonder where her own is. She’s never seen the original, only a copy that her mother gave her in her twenties when she complained she didn’t have one.

  By the time the third box is done, her chest is no longer feeling tight and she’s started to chat with Jason about the contents. He reaches for a blue plastic crate, snaps the lid off and hands her the first item. It’s a toy rabbit with milkshake-pink fur and one floppy ear. ‘Was this yours?’ he asks.

  She stares down at it. ‘No. I don’t think so.’ She hands it back to him. ‘It can go.’

  ‘To the charity shop?’

  She nods and he starts another pile. ‘My mum used to collect things like this. She was mad about toys of all kinds.’

  Jason studies the rabbit. ‘Any idea why?’

  None. It strikes Heather that she has never asked that question before. When she was little, it was just what Mum did, and when she was older she didn’t really want to think about it.

  They work like this: Jason handing Heather an object, her handling it, experiencing it, and then passing it back to be put on one of the various piles. It’s slow work, but as the time creeps towards midnight, they get to the bottom of the last box that Heather threw out into the hallway. She stretches and is rewarded with a creak in her knee joint, then stands up.

  ‘We can’t do this all night,’ she tells Jason, who also gets up. ‘In fact, you didn’t need to do this at all. Thank you.’

  He smiles at her, but it is hijacked halfway through and turns into a yawn. ‘No problem.’

  ‘Why did you?’ Heather knows it makes her sound needy and unsure of herself to ask, but she’s not going to sleep tonight if she doesn’t know the answer.

  He steps forward, far too close for comfort of any kind, and looks down at her. ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but I like spending time with you.’ And before Heather can say anything his hand cradles her jaw and he leans in for a butterfly-soft kiss.

  Why? Heather whispers again inside her head. Not that she’s complaining, but it all seems too good to be true. Maybe this is all just a dream and she’s going to wake up in her bed soon, sheets tangled around her legs, heart beating hard.

  ‘Get some rest,’ Jason says as he turns and heads for the door. Heather nods and he closes it softly behind him and is gone.

  She breathes out then turns her attention to the open spare-room door. Her fingers are on the handle, ready to pull it closed, but she stops. And then she lets go and steps inside. She doesn’t want to stop, she realizes, even though Jason isn’t here any more to hand her the objects.

  She’s touched at least a hundred now, all without hyperventilating, so maybe she can do a few more on her own? Now she’s started scratching this itch, she needs to keep going, to keep chasing it until she gets that lovely ‘ah’ moment of relief. Itch stopped. Room cleared. So she sits down on the rectangle of clear floor that’s been exposed by the evening’s work, pulls a box towards her and looks inside.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  NOW

  Heather only intends to sort through one more box, to prove to herself she can do it, but somehow she can’t stop. The clock marks the hours. One. Two. Three…

  It’s a slow process, not at all how she’d sort through her own possessions, which she does on a regular basis, discarding with brisk efficiency anything that even hints at being useless. She needs to lift each item out of its box carefully, the same way a bomb-disposal expert might handle a suspicious device, and slowly turn it over, viewing it from all angles.

  At first it’s more papers: mostly craft magazines, lots of them to do with knitting and crochet, despite the fact her mother never did get around to learning those skills. It’s easy for Heather to discard these things. Patterns she saves for the charity shop, the magazines go on a pile for recycling. But down at the bottom of a box she discovers a knitted toy. She stares at it for a moment, puzzled, and then clear as day, a memory pops into her mind. It’s so vivid and unexpected that she lets out a gasp.

  She remembers someone giving this to her.

  She can visualize a hand presenting her with it, a soft voice saying she might like it. It’s a little knitted angel that fits in her hand, its dress and wings snowy white and its hair duckling-yellow. There’s a loop of wool attached to the back of its head, which suggests it’s a Christmas decoration, but now she remembers clutching it to herself and refusing to let it go, insisting that it was a dolly and it was going to live in her pocket. Her teacher at school, Miss.… something… had read them a story about guardian angels, and Heather had got it into her mind that if she could keep this on her person at all times, even tucking it into the elastic at the sides of her knickers while she slept, it would keep her safe.

  She looks down at the slightly grubby angel. Her halo is crooked, which is probably fitting. You didn’t do a very good job, did you? she silently tells the doll, but she hesitates as she reaches for the charity-shop pile. The angel dangles above it by her string for a few seconds, and then Heather snatches her up again and puts her in one of the empty boxes she’s saved for the ‘keep’ stuff that’s not paperwork. Up until now it’s been empty.

  That’s the end of that box. She checks the clock: 3.28 a.m. She really should go to bed, she thinks, but she reaches for a plastic crate without a lid. Maybe just one more.

  The first item she picks up makes her laugh. It’s a framed print,
a painting of one of those old-fashioned teddy bears with the jointed limbs sitting on a bed. You can just about see the edge of a frilly pillow behind him. The bear is looking away and down, black eyes staring. It had been one of her mum’s favourites. But the thing that makes her laugh is her father’s voice in her head: ‘Looks like he’s constipated!’ he’d always said. Her mum had scowled at him when he’d said that.

  Heather’s still smiling as she puts it in the box along with the angel. She thinks the print is ugly, but she likes the fact she can hear her father when she looks at it. It makes her feel connected to him in a way she never does on those awful Skype calls of Faith’s. But then that warm feeling is flushed away with an icy sensation. That’s what her mother did, didn’t she? She saved things because they connected her to places or people or experiences. Heather almost picks the box up and empties both angel and frame onto the ‘discard’ pile, but at the last moment she stops herself. Two things, she reasons with herself. That’s not going overboard. There’s fifty times that in the piles for recycling, chucking, and giving away. This is what normal people do: they have a few treasured possessions that carry happy memories. It’s just her mother’s urge for this raged out of control, got way out of balance. She breathes out, puts the ‘keep’ box down again, and carries on sorting through the crate.

  Nothing else prompts a memory, which is kind of disappointing and kind of a relief at the same time. Mostly, it’s knick-knacks wrapped in newspaper, and the odd soft toy (because they seem to get everywhere). Nearly all of it ends up on the charity-shop pile.

  Down at the bottom of the crate she finds a long rectangular box made of stiff card about half a metre long. A shiver goes through Heather as she turns it over, even before she can properly see its contents through the cellophane on the front.

  Cassandra.

  Her chestnut curls are still perfect and glossy, baby-blue eyes haughty and unblinking, her porcelain features unblemished by the passing of time. Heather reaches out and touches the doll’s cheek. For a moment she thinks the panic is going to come. She feels her chest tighten and her pulse start to trot, but she breathes deeply and closes her eyes, blocks the sight of the little usurper out. I can do this, she tells herself. It’s just a doll.

  She’s patient with herself, waits until she feels she’s got a handle on it, and then slowly opens her eyes and looks into Cassandra’s blank, blue stare. ‘I hated you,’ she says to the doll. ‘I think I still do.’

  However, she doesn’t put her on the ‘discard’ pile. She starts a new one – eBay. Her mum had always insisted the doll was a collector’s item, and now it’s time to find out for sure. As well as making a few quid from it, Heather gains a sense of pleasure from the idea of selling Cassandra. Of seeing her formally pass from the ownership of the Lucas family into another, while Heather still remains.

  Having put the doll to one side, she reaches in for the last couple of objects. Photo albums! She’d almost given up hope of finding any more. She picks the top one up and opens it. The pictures overlap and there are places where her mother has added in tickets or postcards, giving it a scrapbook kind of feel. Heather stares down at the smiling faces and thinks how talented her mother was, how artistic. It’s ironic that the very possessions she hoarded because of their creative possibilities were the same things that stopped her expressing those gifts.

  The first album seems to be from about when Heather was eight. Once again, there are hardly any pictures of the house, mainly just holidays and outings, but she supposes that many family albums before digital cameras and selfies must look this way. She remembers using a camera her mother had found at a boot fair as a teenager, and how knowing she only had twenty-four exposures to capture what she wanted made her think extra-hard about what views, what subjects, were worthy of her attention. Now she can snap a million things a day on her phone. It almost seems careless. Wasteful.

  She puts the album in the ‘keep’ box and picks up another. Wow. In this one she barely looks old enough to be at school and there’s a picture of Faith in their primary-school uniform. She guesses her sister must have been about eight, which would make her five.

  Heather sits up straighter. This would have been before, then. Before the abduction. Before the hoarding. She studies the photographs carefully, looking for clues, even though she’s not exactly sure what they’d look like. However, there’s very little to go on.

  She was hoping to find more pictures of inside the house, partly to confirm what she already suspects: that her mother’s hoarding was triggered by her disappearance, but partly out of pure curiosity. She’d hated living in that house, thought it ugly and messy and disgusting, but standing across the road from it a few weeks ago has caused her to think differently about it. Once upon a time it must have been lovely. A proper, happy family home.

  Another memory pops into her head. It’s just as clear and immediate as the previous ones, but not as surprising. This is one of her mother and father laughing together on Christmas morning. She and Faith are on the bottom of their bed, opening their Christmas stockings, and Mum is smiling at Dad because he’s put a miniature bottle of Baileys in hers and he’s holding an identical one he’s just fished from his own.

  Heather rests the album on her lap and leans against a stack of crates, smiling, but then tears begin to roll down her face. It isn’t long before she’s hiccupping and sobbing, unable to stop the tide.

  She has no idea why she’s crying. Absolutely none. There was just this overriding sense of relief and joy at remembering that, once upon a time, they’d been a normal family.

  She continues looking through the photographs, poring over each one, and as she turns the penultimate page, a face catches her eye. She doesn’t know why she’s drawn to it. It’s a group photo taken outside, possibly in their back garden before it got really overgrown, as there are blurs of out-of-focus colour in the background that must be flowers. Her mother and father are in the centre, and she and Faith are in the front. Faith seems to be eating a hot dog and there is a smear of yellow mustard down her white T-shirt, so maybe they were having a barbecue. There are a couple of adults she doesn’t recognize: two men and a woman. It’s the woman who snags her attention. She’s doing one of those open-mouthed smiles at the person behind the camera, as if she’s been caught in the middle of a laugh, and one arm is draped over young Heather’s shoulders. Heather herself is squinting into the lens and grinning, her fringe long and covering her eyes, and she seems perfectly happy to have this stranger’s arm around her.

  Heather turns her attention back to the woman, takes in her dark waves, her smiling eyes. She turns the page, the last in the album, and scans the four photos grouped together there, and instantly spots a picture of the same woman outside their house in Hawksbury Road.

  She’s wearing the red coat.

  It’s exactly as Heather remembers it, even after all these years. It shocks her that, while her memory has been so lacking in some points, it has been crystal-clear and accurate about this coat.

  Well, almost. Because when Heather stops marvelling over her prodigious recall of the red coat and looks carefully at the face sticking out the top, the horrible suspicion that has been floating around in her head since she had that ‘flash’ of the red coat on the pier in Hastings finally finds somewhere to land.

  This isn’t her Aunt Kathy. This is her. Patricia Waites. And she’s not in faraway Hastings but standing outside Heather’s old house in Hawksbury Road, smiling at her from inside her own mother’s photo album.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  SKIP

  Yellow, battered, ugly. The skip is covered in chipped paint and filled with junk. Someone must be clearing out a house, I think, probably because somebody died. It’s sad to see a lovely wooden chair with barley-twist legs upended, one of the struts snapped, showing pale fresh wood beneath the warm varnish, like a broken bone showing through ripped skin. Was it thrown in there because it was smashed or did the act of discarding i
t do the damage? It must have been picked with care, maybe bought along with others like it, but now it lies upside-down and lonely. While my mother is drawn to skips like a moth to a flame, I don’t like them. Too much hope dies in their rusty interiors.

  THEN

  The next few weeks are like a dream for Heather. Claudie becomes her mentor and guide as they both seek to become part of Tia’s core group instead of extras Velcroed on at the sides. Claudie knows when to approach the knot of girls, when to look excited and when to look coolly disdainful. Heather absorbs all of this information like a sponge.

  October is blown away and November arrives. Christmas lights start to twinkle in the shops in town. Heather gets a strange, sparkly feeling too, something she’s never felt before, and it grows each day with the morning frost, getting thicker and more robust.

  She feels hopeful.

  Not about Christmas, because her mother has never really celebrated it. Where would they fit a Christmas tree in this house, anyway? And there’s never enough money for proper presents, despite the fact her mum spends squillions on TV shopping channels, claiming it means she’ll have the right gift for any occasion, should the need arise. Of course, she never actually gives any of them away. But this year Heather doesn’t mourn these things, because her life outside the house is bright and shining, making up for all of it.

  One Sunday afternoon, she’s sitting on her bedroom floor, huddled up next to the radiator with her duvet draped around her like a cloak. The stuff usually acts as insulation, especially in the summer when the house is boiling hot, but there’s a cold snap at the moment and everywhere else in the house the tall piles are blocking the radiators, stopping the heat from circulating.

  ‘Heather!’ her mum calls up the stairs. ‘I need you!’