The Memory Collector: The emotional and uplifting new novel from the bestselling author of The Other Us

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Heather says, her volume rising again. ‘Why didn’t anyone ever tell me?’ A rush of pure hatred for her mother leaps through her like a flame. She wants to throw things, to scream so loud that Mrs Rowe in the top flat will get worried and call the police. She picks up a mug, feeling the smoothness of the china under her fingers, and imagines hurling it towards the kitchen units. It’s only the fact that this was precisely the sort of thing her mother used to do that stops her.

Faith is looking confused. ‘You don’t remember?’

Heather’s fingers grip the mug tighter. The urge to launch it towards the opposite wall is almost overwhelming now. ‘I was six!’

‘But I remember things from when I was that age, and less traumatic things, too. I always thought those sorts of memories – the ones accompanied by strong emotion – were supposed to be the clearest.’

Heather makes an incredulous little cough of a laugh. ‘Wasn’t the fact I’ve never once in my life mentioned it a bit of a giveaway?’

Faith eyes the mug in Heather’s hand with a concerned expression, which only makes Heather want to fling it all the more. ‘I suppose I assumed you just didn’t want to talk about it. You’ve got to admit, you’re not big on sharing, are you?’

Heather slumps into one of the chairs surrounding her tiny, two-seater dining set. The mug falls from her fingers and totters for a second before making contact with the tabletop, landing gracefully on its base.

‘Why?’ she whispers, more to herself than to her sister. ‘Why would you think that? Why would you never even think to mention it?’

Faith looks helpless. Heather realizes she’s never seen her sister look helpless before. ‘Well, none of us talked about it. We just… didn’t.’ She pauses and frowns before carrying on. ‘Okay, maybe that’s not true. I remember Dad and Aunt Kathy talking about it a couple of times after it happened, but if they ever mentioned it to Mum she just shut down or got hysterical. I learned very quickly not to raise the subject.’ Faith looks long and hard at the table before raising her eyes to meet Heather’s again. ‘I loved Mum, despite all her flaws, but she was a very controlling person.’

Heather can’t help laughing. Is her sister living in a parallel universe? ‘What are you talking about? She had no control over anything! Do you not remember how we lived? It was chaos!’

‘The freaking out, the meltdowns. That was her way of avoiding things she didn’t want to face, and making sure we didn’t bring them up again. If that’s not being manipulative, I don’t know what is. She might have seemed weak, but she controlled us all.’ Faith lets out a long, memory-laden sigh. ‘She was a master at it.’

Heather stares at her sister. What she has said is shocking, something Heather had never considered, but even more shocking is the expression on her face. It’s calm. Not serene and at peace, but accepting. If Faith really feels that way, why isn’t she shouting and screaming with the unfairness of it? That’s what Heather wants to do.

This is all Mum’s fault, she thinks, feeling venom pulse through her veins. How things are between me and Faith, the shoplifting, everything… And now I find she’s landed me in this mess, too.

She turns to her sister. She only has one point, but she’s going to keep hammering it in until Faith understands. ‘It doesn’t matter what Mum was like. We’ve been grown up and out of that house for years now. You should have told me.’

Faith sits down on a chair and pulls her hand through her hair. ‘I was only nine myself,’ she says quietly. ‘And all I know is what I remember from back then. To be honest, I haven’t thought about it in years.’

This makes Heather’s spine stiffen. ‘The most horrible, momentous thing that’s ever happened to your little sister and you don’t even think about it? How very telling.’

‘Don’t be like that.’ Faith sighs wearily. ‘I did used to consider mentioning it, but I really wasn’t sure if it would help. I mean, help you, if it was all dredged up again. Sometimes you just seem so…’ Her expression softens, begs forgiveness for what she’s about to say. ‘Fragile. And I suppose, to some extent, I did block it out, bury it. I don’t know if you’ve realized it, but our family is very good at that kind of stuff.’

Heather sits down across from her sister. Yes. Very good, she thinks, and all the energizing adrenaline begins to leak away. ‘So what do you know? I went missing… Did I wander off and get lost? What?’

Faith takes a moment. Heather can see her eyes making tiny movements, as if she’s pulling up memories and facts from a dusty drawer in the back of her brain. ‘You were taken.’

Heather breathes the word, echoing her sister. ‘Taken.’

Faith looks worried. She nods.

‘You mean… kidnapped?’

‘Sort of.’ Faith’s voice is scratchy and dry. ‘“Snatched” is what I remember hearing people say. I don’t think there was a ransom or anything. Nothing like that.’

‘But I was obviously found. Returned home. How… how long was I gone?’

Her sister looks pained. Heather suspects she’s not 100 per cent sure of the facts any more. ‘It seemed like forever at the time, but I think it was only a week or two.’

Heather swallows. Long enough. For exactly what she doesn’t want to think about.

Faith leans forward, looks genuinely distressed. ‘Mum was such a mess afterwards. She just… fell apart. Everyone was walking on eggshells. Even one mention could set her off and send her into a downward spiral for days.’

Heather nods. She knows what their mother was like.

‘I was cross with her at the time, but now I understand totally.’ Faith’s eyes fill. ‘If anything were to happen to Barney or Alice…’ she trails off, unable to finish.

Heather finds a lump in her throat, too. Losing a child, whichever way it happens…

‘You don’t know anything more than that?’

Faith shakes her head. ‘I’m sorry it’s come as such a shock. I would have said something if I’d known you had no memory of it, believe me.’

Unfortunately, Heather does, which leaves her with a ball of anger, curled up in the slingshot of her chest, with no one to fire it at. No one alive, anyway.

Faith looks at Heather. ‘What are you going to do?’

Heather just looks wordlessly back at her. She really has no idea.

CHAPTER EIGHT (#ulink_c7b8ee97-b8c8-5169-9e6c-d26c2c44a736)

NOW

The following Saturday, Heather gets into her car and drives to Bickley, an affluent area just a couple of miles away on the other side of Bromley town centre. It’s full of leafy streets, nice schools and even nicer houses. She drives down Southborough Road, then turns into a side road and stops her car halfway down.

She gets out and, not having parked at her exact destination, walks a little farther down the street. She stops opposite an Edwardian detached house but doesn’t cross the road. She doesn’t walk up the path and knock on the door; she just stares, arms hanging limply by her sides.

This is her childhood home, the house her mother lived in until just two years ago. She hasn’t been back down Hawksbury Road since shortly after that, and before her mother’s death, not for almost five years.

It’s a shock to see the overgrown rhododendrons stripped back at the front, cleared to make way for a driveway, she guesses, from the neat row of stone blocks lining the perimeter of a bed of flattened sand and the paving slabs piled up on the adjacent lawn. The house looks naked this way.

The ground floor is aged red brick, and the upper floors are covered in the original pebble-dash, now painted a gleaming white instead of mottled cream with pocks and holes in its render. The roof tiles are all uniform and lined in neat rows, with no cracks or mossy patches to be seen, and the satisfyingly heavy original front door is now a stylish dove grey with frosted panels at the top.

She and Faith had inherited the house, but they’d sold it as speedily as possible, probably forfeiting tens of thousands each because they hadn’t spruced it up at all. The only person willing to snap it up had been a developer. He’d boasted about building a block of flats, carving the spacious garden up into numbered parking spaces. Heather had happily pocketed the money, glad to be rid of the property, and had thought no more about it. But it must have niggled Faith because she’d kept tabs on the progress, done a bit of digging, and had eventually informed Heather that planning permission had been refused. The shark-like developer (the only thing Heather can remember about him was his teeth: overcrowded and slightly pointed) had put it straight back on the market without even mowing the lawn.

She supposes she must have known someone would buy it eventually, given the desirable location, despite the state it had been in.

It almost looks like a different house now, as if their life there has been erased, like a computer drive reformatted and written over. It will be as if her past, her childhood, never occurred. A new family will lay down their memories here now. From the quality of the work done so far, she guesses they’ll be bright, happy ones, and she silently hates them for it.

She isn’t quite sure why she drove here, only that she thought there might be clues, something ghostly left behind that would silence the questions that have been running round her brain since her discovery last week, but this is just a blank canvas.

But then Heather remembers that, even if you erase a hard drive, little telltale fragments are left behind, and as she continues to stare, the air around the house starts to shift and shimmer until she can almost see the Virginia creeper crawling back up the house, suffocating each window as it goes. The overgrown shrubs that almost obliterated the path and obscured the plastic storage crates and junk from passers-by begin to form like ghostly shapes in the garden.

She can imagine her mother sitting on the only seat in the house: one end of the sofa where she’d made a nest for herself, where she sat to watch the TV, slept and even ate. Heather takes a step forward until she is right on the very edge of the kerb, but she goes no further.

Why? It is a question she has never asked of this house before. In the past, she didn’t want to know. Recently she’s been so focused on the immediacy of her anger and hurt that she hasn’t looked for the root beneath it.

Why did things get this way, Mum? How did you come to do this to yourself? To us?