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

She takes the photo album into her living room and lays it on the desk – a coffee table would have been the perfect spot, except Heather has no coffee table. What’s wrong with a shelf or a side table to put your mug on? A coffee table would fill up the centre of the room, rob her of that perfect, precious space in the centre of the rug. She leaves the album there, then goes back to the spare room, removes the key and carefully places it in her desk drawer. For some reason, it just doesn’t feel safe leaving it in the door any more. She then makes herself a cup of camomile tea.

When that is done, she fetches the album and sits down on one end of her sofa. As Heather turns the first few pages, the sense of uncleanness at having been in the spare room fades. When she tries to think back to her childhood, which isn’t often, most of it is just a big white fog, yet here it is – all the things she can’t remember – in colour prints, yellowing a little with age. They come rushing up off the page to meet her.

There’s her mum and dad together, actually looking happy. She’d seen her dad smile like that when he’d met Shirley, but she’d forgotten he must have looked at her mother that way too once upon a time.

How odd. The only thing that drifts through the fog when she dares to look into it are raised voices and soft male sobbing. He left when she was still in primary school, and he had just got to a place where he couldn’t take it any more. She doesn’t blame him for leaving. Who in their right mind would have wanted to stay?

She looks at the photos on the opposite page. One draws her curiosity enough for her to peel back the protective layer and prise it from the gluey lines holding it down. On the back, hastily scrawled in biro, it says ‘Kathy and Heather, Eastbourne (1994)’. Heather places it back down and smooths the cellophane over the top. They’re standing against some metal railings at the seafront. It’s sunny, but obviously windy. Aunt Kathy is smiling brightly at the person behind the lens, and so is the little girl next to her, but her hair is being blown forwards over her face so Heather can’t even see her own features. She’s holding a mint-choc-chip ice cream, though, so she doesn’t seem to care about the wind.

Mint choc chip. I used to love that, she thinks. How did I forget?

That holiday with her aunt is the one bright oasis in the pearly fog of her childhood, the one thing that stands out, bold and colourful. She remembers those two weeks as if they were yesterday – except she doesn’t remember this photo being taken. Never mind. The rest is still clear: building sandcastles with complex moats on the beach, fish and chips under one of the shelters on the pier after a sudden cloudburst, crazy golf… Oh, how she’d loved the crazy golf, even if it took fifteen attempts to get each ball in the hole. But Aunty Kathy hadn’t minded, she’d been patient and encouraging and had never once hurried her along.

The little girl in the photo looks happy. Heather knows it must be her, but she doesn’t recognize herself. This girl looks as if she might grow up to be someone nice, someone with a good job and maybe a decent man to love. Not a freak who can’t even go into her spare bedroom without having an epic meltdown.

Heather’s eyes go dull and she stops smiling. Aunty Kathy. She hasn’t seen her favourite aunt since her childhood. Yet another casualty of her mother’s addiction. Heather closes her eyes. Her mother had been selfish, so selfish. Driving everyone who loved her away. Sometimes it had seemed as if she was on a mission to make everyone hate her.

Heather shakes her head and opens her eyes again. She’s not going to think about that now, because far from recoiling from the other memories leaping up at her from the pages, she’s actually enjoying this. She doesn’t remember seeing any of these photos before. Probably because this album had been buried under two tons of crap in her mother’s house for most of her formative years, and since Heather had taken custody of the belongings… Well, let’s just say she hadn’t wanted to go there.

But these photos are safe. They’re two-dimensional, stored behind cellophane so they’ve stayed clean and nice. Not like the rest of her mother’s stuff, which is too rich with memories, too immediate. Her mother always said she had to keep most of her stuff because the objects were her memory keepers. She’d pick up something – an ornament or a book, even a piece of Tupperware for the kitchen – and she’d be able to reel off all sorts of details about the item: when she’d bought it or who had given it to her, along with a story. There were always stories.

But Heather doesn’t want those memories; she doesn’t want that talent. On some level, she misses her mother, grieves for her, but that is obscured by the overriding sense of fury that engulfs her every time she thinks about her. So selfish. And then to leave things so Heather had to inherit what was left of her crap, had to take responsibility for it. She never asked for that burden and she doesn’t want it, and she can’t even go and shout at her mother for her final self-absorbed act, for once more protecting her stuff more than caring about what was good for her own flesh and blood.

Heather takes a deep breath and refocuses on the photograph album. Not thinking about that, remember? It only ever makes her miserable, and it’s a wonderful revelation that there were some happy things that happened in her childhood, evidenced in the smiles and laughter caught on these pages.

There’s a snap of a few older people at what looks like a birthday party. She thinks two of them might be her grandparents – her father’s parents – but she’s not sure. They both died when she was very little. And thinking of little… the next page reveals a picture of her and Faith taken at Christmas. They’re wearing matching woollen jumpers in a horrible shade of orange, but they are hugging onto each other and doing their cheesiest grins for the camera so their faces are all teeth and hardly any eyes. It makes her smile.

But then she notices something, and the joy slides from her face.

The room behind them… It’s empty.

Well, not actually empty, but… normal. She can see a wall painted in magnolia. An actual wall. Heather’s not even sure she knew what colour the walls were in some parts of her family home because, as far as she could remember, they’d always had things stacked against them.

Heather stares at the picture, unable to tear her eyes away. It’s a shock to realize her mother’s house hadn’t always been that way, although, if Heather didn’t studiously avoid thinking about her mother in every waking moment, maybe she’d have worked this out by now. After all, she can’t have been a hoarder from birth. It had to have started somewhere. For the first time, Heather asks herself when.

The problem is that she hadn’t been able to talk to her mother about her hoarding. Even as an adult, if she’d tried to raise the subject, her mother would get defensive and cross. ‘There’s nothing wrong with a bit of clutter,’ she used to say. ‘I’m a collector, that’s all.’ And Christine Lucas had been right about that. She’d collected everything as far as Heather could remember: newspapers, old plastic pots, clothes – lots and lots of clothes – every toy Heather and Faith had ever owned, even though many were broken and unwanted by their owners.

There had been the china ornaments, cutesy little things – unicorns and fairies, covered in glitter – that had made Heather want to gag. Worst of all were the dolls. Even now, when Heather thinks of the frilly dresses, the porcelain faces with staring blue eyes, it makes her shiver.

But there seems to be none of that in this photo. From the outside, and at a distance of more than twenty years, these two girls look as if they come from a normal, happy family.

She can’t resist pulling the cellophane back, even though it tears a little in the corner, to check if there’s writing on the back of the print. There is: ‘Faith and Heather, Christmas 1991.’ Heather does the maths: Faith would have been eight, just about to turn nine, and she would have been five.

She turns the page. This one is close enough to the back of the album that the spine creaks and shifts, pulling the pages behind it open, and some things fall out the back of the book: more photographs and a couple of hand-drawn birthday cards from her and Faith to their mum. This makes an odd warm feeling flare in Heather’s chest. Normally, she hates the idea of her mother keeping anything, especially if it had sentimental value – because everything she owned had sentimental value, even the bags of rubbish that had filled the kitchen so they could no longer cook in it, let alone eat at the table – but this is something she can understand. Somehow, it helps her breathe out.

The other crap in the pile quickly erodes the sensation: grocery receipts from fifteen years ago, a pizza-delivery flyer that must have come through the letterbox, and numerous newspaper cuttings, carefully clipped and folded in half. Heather prepares to tuck it all back inside the cover of the photo album, but before she does so she checks the newspaper articles, just in case something of more value is hiding inside. She’d like to feel that warm feeling again, even if it confuses her a little.

One article is about the discovery of Roman ruins in nearby Orpington, another about the opening of the massive shopping mall that now takes up most of Bromley town centre. Heather refolds and discards them. Maybe these were saved in the earlier days of her mother’s hoarding? Later on, she didn’t bother being this organized, cutting things out and folding them; she’d just kept the whole newspaper.

The last one is yet another clipping from the Bromley and Chislehurst News Shopper, the free local paper that used to come through the door. Sadder, though. ‘Hunt For Missing Bromley Girl Continues,’ the headline reads. Heather takes a moment to look at the child in the photograph taking up a quarter of the report. It’s a school picture with a mottled blue background. The girl has a uniform on – a white shirt with a green and blue striped tie – that looks too big for her, as if she’s still trying to grow into it.

Something flashes in the back of Heather’s brain. She recognizes these colours, this uniform. St Michael’s Primary. That was the school she and Faith had gone to. Maybe that’s why her mum had kept this clipping, because of that sense of connection? Something about the story had made it personal. Maybe Heather had known her, been at St Michael’s at the same time?

She looks more closely at the girl and decides that if they had been in the same year, maybe they would have been friends. The girl has neat long, blonde plaits. Her fringe is a little too long but there’s a mischievous twinkle in the eyes peering from underneath the silky strands. Heather smiles. I hope they found her, she silently wishes, I hope she was okay.

She gets ready to fold the article up and store it away with the other ones, but as she moves the paper, something catches her eye:

Police are asking for anyone local who might have been in the Fossington Road area on Friday, 3rd July, around three in the afternoon, to contact them, in case they saw something relevant to the enquiry.

Heather wonders what she was doing on 3 July. She checks the date at the top of the page. The report is from 15 July 1992, almost two weeks later. Yes, she would have been six then, and at St Michael’s. Just finishing the summer term of her second year.

A chill runs through her. She was probably running around in the playground, or reading a book under one of the big horse chestnuts, completely unaware.

Hooked now, she carries on reading:

Her mother is begging anyone who knows anything to come forward. ‘We just want our little Heather back safe and sound,’ she says.

Heather.

Heather?

Deep down inside, she begins to quiver. It has to be a coincidence, right? Even though her name wasn’t massively popular at that time. But it was possible there was another Heather at the school. There had to have been.

Heather frantically tries to focus her eyes on the print at the top of the article, but she can’t seem to make her brain stay still enough to interpret what she’s reading. She closes her eyes and opens them again, resetting them, to see if that helps, and the opening paragraph slams into focus.

Heather Lucas, aged 6, has been missing for the past twelve days…

CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_27950987-117d-56d5-b1ef-d87de8452773)

NOW

‘Did you know about this?’

As her sister enters the communal hallway of her flat, Heather flies towards Faith waving the newspaper clipping wildly. Faith has arrived to collect Alice’s photograph. She backs up, tripping slightly over the threshold, and ends up on the porch.

Heather has been sitting inside all morning, holding the scrap of newsprint in her hands. Obsessing. When the door buzzer sounded, it had the same effect as a starter’s pistol. Heather knows she’s acting like a complete lunatic, but on one level it’s quite pleasing to see the look of shock and confusion on her sister’s face, rather than the well-worn eye roll and look of saintly forbearance. It’s an admission that something really, truly is wrong.

‘Did you? Did you know?’

Heather finally stops moving enough for her sister to see what she’s waving around. Faith’s eyes fall on the grainy photograph in the newspaper cutting and she goes pale. ‘Why don’t we go inside?’

Heather stares at her. She’s whipped herself up into such a tornado of fury that she hasn’t thought about how she’ll react if Faith actually answers in the affirmative. It’s only because she’s so flabbergasted that Faith manages to grab her by the arm and manoeuvre her inside.

‘Hey, Heather,’ a voice calls from the stairs. It’s Jason. But Faith bustles her past him and into her flat, glancing up at him with her mouth set in a thin line. Heather can’t unscramble her brain enough to say something sensible to him at the best of times, so maybe it’s a blessing in disguise.

She regains her language skills as Faith steers her into the kitchen. ‘You did, didn’t you?’ she asks, surprised at how calm and rational she sounds after her outburst only moments before.

Faith looks at her for a few seconds, then nods.