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

‘Can Megan come for tea one day?’ Heather hops from foot to foot because she’s really excited about the idea. ‘I’ve been round to hers loads.’

Her mother sighs and looks around the living room. ‘I don’t think so, darling. Sorry. Maybe when I get the house straight.’

Heather looks down at her shoes. Ever since the hide-and-seek incident, the whole family wears shoes indoors all the time. ‘But you said the same thing after the summer holidays…’

Her mother stops rummaging in a pile of clothes that has just come back from the launderette. The washing machine is broken, but her mum gets cross if her dad mentions getting someone round to fix it.

‘I said “no”, Heather. Now run along. It’s teatime soon.’

Heather crosses her arms. ‘It’s not fair! Megan says that proper best friends go round each other’s houses, and Katie Matthews asks her to tea nearly every week. If we don’t let her come here, she might just end up being Katie’s friend instead and I’ll be left out.’

‘Heather! Just go and find something to do! I’m trying to find your PE kit, and you know you’ll be upset if I don’t, so you need to let me do this now and we’ll talk about it later. Understood?’

‘Understood,’ Heather mumbles, reversing back through the rabbit trail and going to find Faith, who’s in the kitchen cooking their tea. Now Faith’s eleven, she’s allowed to do things like that.

Heather climbs over some plastic bags tied at the top when she gets to the hallway. They weren’t there yesterday. They’re full of dollies. But these dollies aren’t pretty ones like Cassandra. A Barbie with no clothes on is sticking out the top of one bag and her hair has been cut funny. It looks rough and fluffy, not smooth and silky like it does when they come out the box. She’s also missing one arm. Heather guesses her mother must have been to the charity shop again on one of her ‘rescue missions’. She gets the dollies so she can fix them and make them better, then she’ll be able to give them to the hospital or to poor children.

Heather thinks her mummy must be a very good person to do something like that; she just wishes there weren’t so many of them. There are bags and bags now, lining the hallway and the landing. Some even creep into Faith’s room, but Faith keeps putting them back outside again. Not where anyone will notice they’ve reappeared, of course. She finds a spot somewhere else and hides them so their mother won’t get upset she moved them.

Faith is cooking chicken nuggets and chips in the oven. They have to do everything in the oven at the moment because the bit on top doesn’t work.

‘Go and find the ketchup,’ Faith says when she sees her younger sister. She’s looking a bit cross, but Faith always seems to be cross these days. Their mother says it’s because she’s almost a teenager. Faith says it’s from living in a dump like this.

Heather climbs on top of some boxes full of pots and pans to reach the cupboard where the ketchup lives. She pulls the bottle out, but it’s empty apart from some red sludge at the bottom. ‘It’s all gone,’ she calls to Faith.

Her sister sighs dramatically. ‘Keep looking. There’ll be another one back there. You know how mum likes to stock up.’

Heather throws the empty bottle on the floor with the rest of the rubbish, then stands on tiptoes to reach further into the cupboard. The box wobbles a little but she manages to stop herself from falling by holding onto the cupboard door. There’s another bottle in there, and it’s half-full with ketchup, but round the top it’s green and fluffy. ‘Shall I throw this one away too?’ she asks.

Faith shakes her head. ‘Put it back for now. Mum will want to check it if it’s not properly finished.’

‘But it’s yucky!’

‘I said she’d want to check it. I didn’t say it’d make sense,’ Faith says. ‘There’s only one thing for it – we’ll have to break into the emergency rations.’

Heather jumps down from the boxes, smiling. ‘Cool! I know where Mummy keeps them!’ She goes to the drawer by the back door and opens it. Inside are hundreds and hundreds of tiny packets – sugar, salt, pepper, salad cream, vinegar – just about anything you can find in a café or a restaurant. Mum always puts loads in her handbag when they go out to eat (which is getting to be more and more, with the top of the oven being broken) because she says it’s part of what they pay for when they pay for the food, and you never know when they’ll come in handy. When Heather got up this morning, she didn’t know today was going to be that day. It’s kind of exciting!

She reaches into the drawer, feeling the sachets slide through her fingers, enjoying the shifting colours as she searches for the ketchup ones. It’s kind of like looking for buried treasure. By the time Faith gets the nuggets and chips out of the oven Heather has six sachets clutched in each hand. Faith serves up their food and carries the plates through to the living room. They have to squish up together to fit into the space on the end of the sofa, but they don’t mind. At least this way they can watch cartoons while they eat.

The best bit is opening up the little packets and squeezing out the ketchup from the inside. It feels like they’re being fancy. There are still two or three each left over when they’ve finished eating.

Faith grins at Heather as she rips open another one. ‘Look, Heather! It’s like blood.’ She says the last bit in a creepy voice that makes Heather’s spine feel all tickly, and when Faith presses on the packet so the ketchup oozes out, she does a laugh that goes mwah-hah-hah! and makes Heather giggle, so Heather tears open one of her packets and does the same.

After that they can’t stop. They both keep ripping and mwah-hah-hah-ing until they’re laughing so hard they’re in danger of missing their plates and decorating their legs instead.

But then the air in the room goes instantly cold. Heather and Faith freeze.

‘Girls! What on earth do you think you’re doing?’

Heather drops her last unsqueezed ketchup packet onto her plate, where it lands in the big blob of pretend blood she’s been collecting.

‘Just eating our tea,’ Faith says. ‘I cooked chips and nuggets for me and Heather.’

Heather’s mother hasn’t got time to be impressed by that; she’s too busy staring at the twisted and torn wrappers littering the girls’ plates. ‘Where did you get those?’ she says, and her voice sounds all quiet and quivery.

‘From the ’mergency draw,’ Heather says helpfully. ‘The other ketchup was fluffy.’

Their mother’s expression changes to the one she wears when she’s trying to explain something and keep her temper at the same time. ‘Those… those… They’re not for you to use! They’re to be kept there. Just in case.’

‘But it was “just in case”, Mummy!’ Heather explains.

Their mother shakes her head, closes her eyes. ‘You don’t understand.’ And then her eyes snap open again and she looks at Heather. ‘How many did you take? How many?’

‘I… I…’

‘How many, Heather!’ She’s shouting now and Heather can’t seem to make the counting bit of her brain work.

Faith stands up. ‘Don’t shout at her! It’s not her fault. I told her to get them. And there were twelve, okay? Just twelve. And there are hundreds left in there!’

Their mother runs down the hall. The sisters put their plates down on the sofa and follow. Inside the kitchen, their mother wrenches the drawer open. The packets rustle and slide over each other as she sticks her hands inside and moves them around, counting softly.

She goes still and lifts her head up. ‘Right. Girls, get your coats on. We’re going to the Harvester for tea.’

The girls look at each other, big grins on their faces. That’s really fancy! But then Faith stops smiling. ‘But we’ve just eaten our tea,’ she says, looking confused.

‘Don’t get cheeky with me, young lady!’ Mum yells. ‘I need to get a dozen more and then it’ll all be okay again. You did say it was twelve, right?’

They both nod, but neither moves, and then their mother’s expression stops being hard and angry and she starts to look as if she’s about to cry.

‘Sorry, girls. Sorry, my babies.’

She comes and puts her arms round them and pulls them to her, one in each arm. ‘I tell you what, you don’t need to eat more tea – just dessert. How about that? An absolutely giant ice-cream sundae if you like. With sprinkles! And I can pick up more sachets to replace the ones we’re missing.’

She lets go of the girls, and all three of them are excited now.

‘Is Daddy coming?’ Heather asks.

‘No, poppet. He’s working late again tonight.’

Faith sighs. ‘He’s always working late,’ she grumbles.

Their mother’s eyes get that shiny look again, but then she smiles and says, ‘All the more for us, then! Go on, go and get your coats!’

Heather starts to run towards the piles near the front door. She thinks that’s where she left hers, but then the doorbell goes and everyone freezes. Both sisters turn and look at their mother. She puts her finger to her lips and motions for them to come towards her. Quietly. It’s hard to do, because everything underneath their feet is crunchy, but they’ve had plenty of practice.

‘Hello?’ a voice calls through the front door. ‘Mrs Lucas?’ The man knocks loudly. Heather starts to feel scared.

Her mother points at the next room, near the big table that’s always full of all her important papers. There’s a space down the side and both girls instinctively head for it and crouch there.

The letterbox clatters. The man must be peeping through it. ‘Mrs Lucas? I’m just here to read the electric meter… Are you there?’

But Mrs Lucas doesn’t answer him. Instead, she runs to where her daughters are hiding and squats down beside them, holding them tight. As they all close their eyes and wait for the man to go away, Heather realizes there probably isn’t going to be any ice-cream sundae tonight after all, and probably no chocolate sprinkles either.

CHAPTER TEN

NOW

It’s much later in the afternoon when Heather gets back to her flat after visiting her old house in Bickley. She goes into town for a cappuccino, sits outside her favourite café and watches the people march up and down the pedestrianized section of the High Street.

This is a mistake.

Because eventually she joins them, and then Mothercare pulls her inside, and by the time she’s feeding pound coins into the parking machine in The Glades shopping centre a squashy toy giraffe is tucked securely in the side pocket of her bag.

She’s really glad to get back to her flat, her sanctuary. She stows her contraband in the forbidden drawer and hurries into the living room, ready to perform her breathing ritual, but when she finds her usual spot in the middle of the rug and looks up she gets a shock.

Instead of flat, green grass and regimented borders, she’s met with a garden full of people. And there’s Jason in the middle of them, flipping burgers on a barbecue and swigging Coke from a bottle. He looks completely at ease as he smiles and chats with a group of guys.

Heather is completely infuriated, but she knows she has no right to be. When they’d bumped into each other in the hallway a couple of days ago, he’d told her he was having his housewarming thing this afternoon. The weather forecast was good for once, he’d said, so he’d decided to go for it. It’s not Jason’s fault her thoughts have been so tangled lately that the information got lost inside her head.

As if he knows she’s staring at him, he turns and looks at her, meets her gaze and smiles. She waves back. His smile grows wider and he makes a beckoning motion. She has no choice but to follow his tractor beam, to unlock the French doors and walk outside. She doesn’t look to the left or the right, doesn’t pay attention to the other bodies or the curious glances she’s getting. She just walks straight towards him.

‘Hi,’ he says softly, once she is standing in front of him.

‘Hi,’ she says back.

‘Want a burger?’

She nods, even though she has no idea if she’s hungry or not. It’s not a fancy affair, no lettuce or pickle, just a charred piece of meat stuck inside a floury white roll with a blob of ketchup. It tastes like heaven.

‘Glad you could make it,’ he says as Heather takes another bite. ‘I wasn’t entirely sure you were going to put in an appearance.’ And before Heather can say neither was she, he steers her towards a group of people. ‘Here, let me introduce you to the gang.’ Her mouth is too full of burger to object.

‘This is Damien, my partner in crime from my university days, and this is his girlfriend Tola.’ More names fill Heather’s head as he goes round the group, all instantly rejected and lost – her brain’s storage drive is too full – but she pulls her cheek muscles into what she hopes is a smile and nods with each introduction.

‘So,’ says Damien (the one name she can remember), ‘you’re Jay’s mysterious girl downstairs.’

Heather’s eyebrows rise. She’s mysterious? That sounds a lot more interesting and romantic than the truth: that she is Jason’s terminally damaged girl downstairs, the one who’s on the verge of being arrested for petty theft. She doesn’t disabuse Jason’s friend of the notion, though. She learned right from childhood that most people don’t look too far below the surface and anything they superimpose on you is invariably better than the reality. These assumptions create a useful shield, one she does her best not to dislodge.

‘Put on a good face,’ her mother always said when they left the house. So no one would guess, so no one would know. Even social services hadn’t guessed the horror that lay inside the detached house in a ‘nice’ area for years. And Heather has cultivated this approach in her adult life, carefully painting a veneer of Perfectly Normal on top of her real self.

‘Oh, I’m not mysterious at all,’ she says.

‘How long have you been living here?’ Damien’s girlfriend asks.

‘A couple of years,’ Heather replies, feeling as if she’s giving something away she shouldn’t. Her mother taught her that information was to be hoarded just as much as belongings. It wasn’t until Heather was almost a teenager that she realized not everyone shared this mindset, that some people live their whole lives spilling everything out of their mouths with no thought for the consequences.

‘Oh well, don’t let Jason here keep you awake late at night when he gets maudlin and decides to play his Smiths albums back to back,’ Tola adds, sticking her tongue out at their host.

‘Oh, no, I don’t… I mean… he doesn’t. Not that I’ve heard anyway. He’s a good neighbour.’ And she shoots a look across at him and is rewarded by a burning sensation in her cheeks.

Thankfully, the rest of the group are in an ebullient mood and the conversation quickly sweeps by Heather. She stands there on the fringes of the group, sipping a beer that someone handed her, and smiling shyly every now and then when someone says something funny. She doesn’t mind that she doesn’t know any of the people they’re referring to or that she doesn’t get the in-jokes. It’s nice to stand out here in the sunshine and feel… well, as a thirty-two-year-old woman ought to feel. Just for a moment, she forgets about the faceless house in Hawksbury Road with the new driveway. She forgets about the toy giraffe that rode all the way home in her handbag.

‘So, what do you do, Heather?’ the guy with the ginger beard in the stripy T-shirt asks. She wants to call him Isaac, but she’s not sure that’s right.

‘I’m an archivist.’

‘You work in a library?’

‘Yes, well, sort of, I’ve moved all over the country since I qualified, but I’m from this area originally. I moved back when I got a job covering maternity leave for someone at the V&A. Now I work at a stately home.’

‘Cool,’ Tola says. ‘I love that museum. Which bit do you work in?’

‘Um, I’m not…’ Okay, maybe this isn’t as easy as she’d first thought, but Tola and T-shirt Man have open, enquiring looks on their faces. They don’t look as if they’re scanning the garden for someone more interesting to talk to, so she carries on. ‘I finished there about a year ago and was lucky enough to find another contract within commuting distance, so I didn’t have to pack up and move away.’

Jason comes up behind her. She knows it’s him from the smell of hickory smoke and the way the whole of her back warms up as he gets closer. ‘What’s this I’m overhearing about packing up and moving away?’

She turns to look at him. He’s frowning instead of looking hopeful, which surely has to be a good thing. ‘Oh, no one!’ she says quickly. ‘I was telling…’ – there’s a pause where she realizes she still doesn’t know T-shirt Man’s name – ‘your friends about my job.’

‘Which is?’

‘I work at Sandwood Park in East Sussex. It used to belong to a famous author but his widow died recently and the whole estate was left to a private trust.’

‘They didn’t have any kids to leave the house to?’ Tola asks.

Heather smiles. This is nice, having people interested in what she’s saying. Slightly giddying, in fact. She can’t resist keeping it going by sharing a bit of gossip. ‘Well, yes, actually, they did, but the wife decided not to leave her beautiful Arts and Crafts home to any of her two remaining children or five grandchildren. She left specific instructions to her solicitor to that effect, saying she didn’t trust her offspring not to rip out half the walls, replace the grand conservatory with sliding glass doors that fold up like a concertina, or make a swimming pool out of the rose garden. So she left them nothing but the ashes of their dearly beloved family pets: three dogs, two cats, and a guinea pig.’

‘Ouch!’ Tola says, laughing.

Heather feels as if she’s floating inside. She made another person laugh; she had no idea she could do that.

This leads to some bantering back and forth about jobs, during which Heather learns that Jason is an ‘heir hunter’ like that programme on daytime TV. His firm, based in central London, tracks down the beneficiaries of unclaimed estates and reunites them with their inheritances. For a commission, of course.

Someone new saunters up. ‘Hey, Jason. Great barbecue,’ the guy says. ‘Is Alex coming? I haven’t seen him in ages.’

Something odd happens then. Jason’s normally affable and friendly demeanour cools to freezing point and he gives the intruder a stony look. ‘No. Alex isn’t here.’ And then he just walks off, leaving the rest of the group looking awkwardly at each other.

‘Well done, Jack,’ Damien mutters.

‘What?’ the new guy says, looking most perplexed. ‘He and Alex have been best mates for years. I thought they’d have patched things up by now.’

Tola shakes her head and rolls her eyes. ‘Really? What parallel universe are you living in? I know Alex was caught between a rock and a hard place, but once you break Jason’s trust like that, there’s no coming back from it. Don’t you remember what he was like about Caleb and the whole bike incident?’

Jack’s eyes widen. ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘It’s as bad as that? I didn’t know.’

Heather feels as if she’s eavesdropping, even though she is not. She should really walk away, but she’s too hungry for information about Jason to do that.

‘Well, when you factor in there was a woman involved…’ Tola adds darkly.

All of them glance over at the barbecue, where Jason is now flipping burgers so hard that one falls on the ground.

Damien sighs. ‘He’s a great bloke, but he’s got to get over his knight-in-shining-armour complex. It might work in the storybooks, but in real life those girls he keeps trying to rescue are the kind of women who’ll really do a number on you.’

Tola flips her long braids over her shoulder. ‘Are you saying you’re not the rescuing type? What if I needed you to rescue me?’

Damien pulls her to him with one arm and plants a kiss on her lips. ‘You’re much too feisty to be anyone’s damsel in distress,’ he tells her, and Tola obviously approves of his answer because she grins at him.

‘You’d better believe it!’

The whole group laughs, which causes the cluster of people nearby to turn and join in. Heather merges into the group with them and listens to the stories about other people’s lives – what they do, who they love, who they don’t love any more and would, therefore, love to shame on Twitter, if it wasn’t beneath them.

The group are all in stitches about someone’s tale of a drunken-holiday tattoo when Jason calls her over to the barbecue. ‘Sausage?’ he says, brandishing a plump offering with a pair of giant tongs. She nods. She even smiles. ‘We could do this again some time over the summer,’ he adds. Heather must look a bit panicked because he laughs and adds, ‘Don’t worry! I’m not going to be filling the garden with people every weekend. I meant, now that I’ve got this barbecue, I might as well use it. You could join me for burgers and sausages one evening. Or if I get really adventurous, maybe even a chicken drumstick or two?’

Heather flushes. ‘I couldn’t let you do that—’

‘Yes, you could,’ he replies, interrupting her so cheerfully that she can’t seem to mind. ‘Because I’m hoping you might be able to bring a salad or something. I’m good with meat but hopeless with vegetables. It’s not that I can’t cook them, just that everything ends up looking… well, not very pretty. I don’t have that artistic touch.’

Heather lets out a little laugh. ‘And you think I do?’

He smiles, and this one isn’t a full-on grin like the other ones, more of a playful one, like they’re sharing a secret. ‘I think you look like the creative sort – a girl who has a bit more going on under the surface than anyone else knows.’

Damian’s words from earlier flash into her brain: Jason’s mysterious girl.

Her smile doesn’t dim, but she feels something deflate inside. If only you knew, she thinks, but she’s glad he doesn’t know because, if he did, he wouldn’t be inviting her for burgers and drumsticks in the garden, and she thinks she might rather like that.

He looks away as he searches the plastic table set up next to the barbecue for something. ‘Gah!’ he says, frowning. ‘Run out of plates.’ He glances back up towards his flat and then back at Heather. ‘Think I brought down every one I owned. Don’t suppose I could borrow a few off you, could I? I’ll even wash them up afterwards!’

‘Um…’ Heather stutters. ‘I’m not sure—’

He places her sausage back on the edge of the grill rack, as far away from the heat as possible. ‘I’ll come and get them, if you like? Save you lugging them all the way out here.’ And he heads off towards the French doors before Heather can say anything.

Panic mode snaps in. That same thing that always thumps in Heather’s chest when anyone gets too close to her flat. She doesn’t even like the postman pushing things in through the letterbox, and is always relieved when she sees his red fleece strolling back down the driveway, even though she knows her territorial reaction is stupid.

She runs after Jason, neatly intercepting him and standing at the threshold of her living room, barring his way. She stretches one arm across the open doorway. ‘It’s fine. I’ll get them. You need to keep an eye on the barbecue anyway.’

Jason smiles at her. A slightly perplexed one this time. ‘I’m here now. No problem at all.’

But Heather doesn’t give in. She doesn’t back down. Jason can’t see it, but she’s bracing her hand even harder against the doorframe. She shakes her head.

You can’t come in, she tells him silently. No one can ever come in. Even though she knows her kitchen is spotless and her set of lovely white plates with the broad grey border are neatly stacked in a clean, white cupboard. She can’t have him this close to That Room. It’s making her feel sick just thinking about it. Her blood starts to pound in her ears.

‘You know what?’ she says suddenly. ‘I’m not sure about that sausage anyway. I hadn’t planned on…’ She stops, gathers herself a little, pulls herself tall and looks him in the chin because that’s as far north as she can manage. ‘Thank you, but I think I’d better be going now.’ And she steps back and closes the doors in his face, then turns and runs to the kitchen where she throws open the cupboard and stares at her plates, all neatly stacked and in pristine condition. For the first time ever, she gains no solace in that.