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

CHAPTER ELEVEN

NOW

Heather stays in her flat for hours. She doesn’t even go into the living room. She stays in the kitchen, caught between wanting to turn the radio up loud to block out the sounds of the barbecue outside and not wanting to turn it on at all, in case Jason hears it and it reminds him what a nutjob she is.

Sometimes, she goes to the window in the far corner of the kitchen. If she leans over the counter, just to the point where her stomach starts hurting, and presses her face against the cabinet above the kettle, she can see him standing near the barbecue, tongs in hand.

He’s still smiling, still chatting to his friends, but every now and then he glances over towards her French doors and his expression darkens.

He must think she’s a freak.

Only when it’s dark and the last stragglers have shouted their goodbyes from the driveway as they saunter back to their cars or nearby Shortlands station does Heather creep back into her living room. She closes the curtains then switches on a single lamp.

She reaches for the TV remote and the screen leaps into life. Football is on, highlights from a match earlier that day, so she hits the button over and over, searching for something to watch – through the comedy and drama channels, through the ‘plus ones’ of the terrestrials, until she ends up in the nature, reality and crime section of the channel list. It’s there that an image freezes her thumb mid-air.

It’s one of those awful programmes about compulsive hoarders. Not the jaunty, pretend-it’s-comedy kind where they make neat freaks go and clean their houses, but the kind that interviews people, sends in crews of trained professionals to help. Usually, Heather doesn’t venture this far up the channel list, precisely because she doesn’t want to see this sort of thing, but until a moment ago she was caught in a trance of button-pushing, rhythmically pressing to soothe herself instead of tapping in the number of her favourite movie channel and jumping straight over this section of programming.

She makes herself put down the remote and crosses her arms to stop herself picking it up again. You deserve to watch this, she tells herself, because this is what you came from. This is who you are.

The episode features a man who’s car obsession has raged out of control. His whole two-acre property is filled with rusting wrecks, some of them so far gone they’re not even recognizable as vehicles, yet he still refuses to let the TV helpers cart them away, just in case some part in the depths of their bellies might be useful to him some day.

The other subject of the programme – she didn’t realize there’d be two – is a young mother. Yes, this looks much more familiar: clothes stacked to the ceiling, piled so high they’ve created mountains of fabric; papers and books stuffed in every available hole, and rubbish filling in the gaps. Apart from the fact the voices are American, when Heather looks at the shots where they show the house and not the people, it could have been their family home on Hawksbury Road twenty years ago.

There’s a kid in the family, a daughter with wiry brown hair and glasses. Heather pauses the TV as the camera zooms in on the girl and takes in the haunted look in her eyes, the silent plea for someone to help, to get her out of there.

They might come, she tells the girl inside her head. They might take you away to somewhere clean and uncluttered, but you’ll never be free. Sorry, kid. No happy-ever-after for you.

Even the Dad reminds her of her own father. He has that same trapped expression, the one that says he stopped fighting about the mess long ago. The professionals buzz around, offering advice. Don’t they know it’s hopeless? That even if they get the place spotless, it’ll be just as bad in a couple of years?

Heather reaches for the remote in disgust. She can’t watch any more of this fairy story.

But then the TV shrink asks the husband where it all started, why he thinks his wife is driven to this. Pain crosses his features and he shrugs. ‘I guess it was when we lost our son, Cody. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. It was nobody’s fault but Selena blamed herself.’

A picture of a cute little baby with chubby cheeks and a gummy smile pops up on the screen.

‘She started buying things, getting ready for the new baby,’ he continues. ‘We’d been trying for a second one for five years by then and she was so excited. I knew she was going a little overboard, but I couldn’t begrudge her. I really couldn’t. And then, somehow, after… we lost him… she didn’t stop. She just kept buying more and more baby stuff. At first she would say we were going to try again, but after a couple of years it became obvious that was just an excuse.’ He sighs heavily. ‘I just don’t know how to help her, and I don’t know if I can take any more.’

Heather’s stomach has been sinking ever since the man started talking about babies. She doesn’t want this. She doesn’t want to feel this rush of empathy for the woman, to share in her pain for the child that will be forever missing from her life, so when the mother has a meltdown because someone wants to throw away a ratty baby blanket covered in cobwebs and mouse droppings, Heather grabs at the opportunity to turn the warm feeling sour.

‘You have a child!’ she shouts at the screen. ‘You have one left that didn’t die and you’re losing her in a pile of junk! Why don’t you think of her for a change? Think about what this is doing to her?’

It feels strangely good to hurl the words at these stupid people who can’t hear her, people who are flushing their lives down the toilet and won’t get off their sorry backsides to do anything about it. So instead of switching over, she suspends her disbelief as the house is cleared and the families are shown happy and smiling at the end of the episode, and she watches the episode after that too. Apparently, the channel is having a bit of a marathon this weekend.

The next one features an older lady who started hoarding after her beloved father died, and a waste-of-space woman who can’t see that seventy cats in one cluttered house is too many. Heather shouts at her, too. Why not? There’s no one here to see, and she’s really starting to enjoy herself. It’s two in the morning before she crawls into bed.

She lies there, her duvet tucked neatly under her arms and her pillows arranged just so under her head, and she stares at the high ceiling of her bedroom. As much as she doesn’t want to, she can’t stop thinking about those people on the television, particularly that baby.

That was the common thread in a lot of cases, wasn’t it? Loss. At least five of the eight people in the episodes she watched had lost someone, either through death or divorce, even children being given up for adoption. Someone had been taken away from them, without them expecting it and without their permission, and to fill the hole they’d started to shop and store and collect.

Is that what her mother had done? If you’d have asked Heather a month ago what her mother could have lost that would make her start behaving that way, she would have shaken her head and said there was nothing, no rhyme or reason to it. But now she knows better.

It was me, she thinks. The thing she lost was me. But somehow, even though she came back, her mother behaved as if Heather had never returned and she never threw another thing away for the rest of her life.

Heather thinks of the photo she gave to Faith for Alice, of how everything looked normal and clean. Christmas 1991. Only seven months before the date on the newspaper report. Is that the key, then? Is her being ‘snatched’ what started it all?

She closes her eyes, not so much to welcome sleep but because she’s stemming the tears that are pooling there, and lets out a long, ragged sigh.

Even when she was little, she’d always been afraid, from the way her mother talked to her, sometimes even the way she looked at her, that maybe everything had been her fault. Now she knows she was right.

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