want to touch it. She doesn’t want to touch any of it.
So she doesn’t. She just keeps moving, walks over the top of the contents of the spilled box. It was what her mother did when she was alive, after all. When the ‘rabbit trails’ were devoured by the growing hoard, she’d just walk over the top, changing the topography of the house from flat carpeted floors into hills and mountains of rubbish. In her later years, they’d grown so huge that in some places they were four or five feet deep, and spaces that should have been doorways had turned into crawl spaces.
However, when Heather’s foot crunches on one of the photo frames, one that’s just a wooden surround, already having lost its glass, memories come flooding back, things that have nothing to do with this room, this hoard – the lack of light, the perpetual twilight caused by the skyscraper piles, the sting of cat urine in her nostrils and the particular smell of dirt that’s built up over years not months. A sob escapes her, but she thinks of Alice and pushes forward.
Blindly, she throws the black sacks full of clothes out of the way until she spots a ragged cardboard box, one so weak and old it might disintegrate if she tried to lift it. So she grabs the forest-green spine of what looks like a photo album, clutches it to her chest and retreats as fast as possible. It’s only when the door is safely shut behind her, the key turned in the lock, that the swirling feeling in her head stops.
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
