Читать книгу The Memory Collector: The emotional and uplifting new novel from the bestselling author of The Other Us - Фиона Харпер - Страница 15

CHAPTER EIGHT

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?

And why did she never ask these questions of her mother while she still had the chance?