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?
DOORBELL
The doorbell is old. Not horrible old, like one of those plastic boxes with a flat, round button that fools you into thinking it’s working but never produces any sound. No, nothing as cheap and deceitful as that. This bell was installed in the 1920s. It has a creamy domed Bakelite button set in a decorative brass surround. Even now it works, heralding the arrival of every visitor with a clear, self-confident ring. The sound can be heard in every dark and shadowy corner of our house.
THEN
‘Mummy, can I have Megan round for tea?’
Heather’s mother looks up from where she is digging in a pile of clothes. She’s trying to find Heather’s PE kit. Heather brought it home to be washed before the Easter holidays, but she’s been back at school for three weeks now and nobody can find it. Miss Perrins has said she’s very sorry, but she’s going to have to give Heather a red mark on her behaviour chart if she doesn’t have it for her next lesson. Heather really doesn’t want to get a red mark. She hasn’t had one yet, because she tries super-extra-hard to be good at school.
‘What?’ her mother says.
‘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
