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

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.

CHAPTER TWELVE

       HORSE CHESTNUT

       The bark twists round, spiralling upwards, holding the tree in like a corset, then when it gets so high it can’t contain itself any more, it explodes into leaves, showering them out like a firework, only they never fall and reach the ground. Tall white flowers balance on the ends of the branches like fluffy candles, even though it’s the height of summer. When the breeze stirs the leaves, I can hear them whisper, ‘Just you wait until autumn. Just you wait until I drop my prickly fruit on the grass.’ For the intrepid hunter, prepared to part the flesh, there is a reward of hard, shiny treasure. I stare up into the branches, wishing the months away, because I know good things are on their way.

       THEN

      Heather is running around the garden because her mummy has told her she needs fresh air. But the air doesn’t feel very fresh today. It feels a bit hot and sticky and if Heather runs around too much it makes her head wet and then her hair sticks to her face. But the air is even hotter indoors, so she keeps running, trying to make her own breeze. Every now and then she gets tired so she flops down on the grass, and then when she feels better again she jumps up and carries on.