The Memory Collector by Fiona Harper

Author:Fiona Harper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2018-11-05T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

BAG

It’s a pretty ordinary handbag. It’s black, and not even real leather. It has three flashy gold zips on the front (mostly for decoration, it has to be said) and no discernibly useful pockets. Even though I’ve seen at least three other girls at my school with one exactly like it, I love it to bits.

THEN

Heather hitches her bag onto her shoulder and walks purposefully across the playground towards the school gates. When she first started at Highstead Grammar, she had a massive backpack, one her mum had actually gone out and bought for her, saying she was so proud she’d got into Highstead. Heather was pleased too, but not for the same reason as her mother.

Most of the kids from Heather’s primary school have moved on to secondary schools in the Bromley area, but grammar schools have a wider catchment area and Highstead is just outside Sidcup town centre. It’s even under a different local education authority from her last school. Nobody here knows her.

It doesn’t make the kids any less vile if they decide you don’t fit in, though. It didn’t take Heather long to work out the backpack was a huge mistake, even though it was on the uniform list. The older kids – especially the Year Eights, seeking to establish their dominance – pick on the Year Sevens for having them. Heather has started to get nervous every time she nears a group of older girls because she’s seen them hook someone by that little carrying strap at the top of their backpack when they walk past, yanking them backwards and wrenching their shoulders. Then they laugh and say ‘sorry’ with their eyes narrowed, daring their target to retaliate. It only had to happen to her twice before she told her mum that she’d lost her backpack in the house somewhere. Not a complete lie, because it is in the house – Heather buried it very carefully in what used to be the spare bedroom.

Her dad asks her about the state of the house every weekend when she goes to visit him at his flat, and she just shrugs and says it’s pretty much the same. This is also not a lie – she’s getting rather good at fudging the truth these days – because if she took a picture of the house in Hawksbury Road each Saturday, it would look pretty much the same as it had the previous week. What she doesn’t tell her father is that it’s almost as bad as it was before he left.

Two years is all it’s taken for it to get that way. Two years! Doing that huge clear-out accomplished nothing. If anything, her mother’s problem has escalated.

Her mum made her promise not to tell and at the time Heather agreed, but that was more than a year ago, when it was only the dining room and a couple of the bedrooms that had filled up. She wishes she hadn’t said it now but a promise is a promise, isn’t it? And if she tells, her father will make her go and live with him.

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