Half smiling, Heather sat down on the foldaway chair and sifted through the bits and pieces. It looked like she’d actually rescued an old abandoned crafting set of Heather’s, one of the expensive packs of multicolored clay she had campaigned for one birthday, and with it she’d been making jolly napkin holders festooned with holly and snowmen. Next to the finished pieces was a Post-it note with the address of a nearby old people’s home. Had she intended to give them to the retirement home as part of their Christmas fair? They had gone to it many times when she was a kid, buying cakes and talking to the old dears. Heather picked up one of the napkin rings and slipped it on to her finger. She’d done a lot of work on these, had been halfway through making another. What made someone put down their cozy crafting project and think about ending their life instead?
The texture of the smooth clay against her fingers reminded her of the times she had tried to make things herself. The clay was tough to mold straight out the packet, so you had to warm it up in your hands, but Heather’s small fingers had never been much good at it. Abruptly, she remembered sitting in this very room with her mother, newspapers spread carefully over the carpet, and small plates in front of them both. Her mum had taken each piece of colored clay and warmed it in her own hands first before passing it over to Heather, so that she could make something out of it …
Heather put the napkin ring back, her hand shaking. Nikki was right, she told herself. I can’t know what Mum was going through. I’m seeing mysteries where there are none.
Even so, as she left the room, turning back to look again at the industrious little table, the sense that something somewhere was deeply wrong wouldn’t quite leave her.
Heather spent the next day moving around the house, making notes and wondering at how much stuff people accumulate around them. At lunchtime she heated up the stew Lillian had left her, eating it from a big bowl in front of the television. It was tasty and thick, but by the end of it she felt faintly ill, and she wondered if she’d waited too long to heat it up—if some ingredient in it had gone off. She washed up the dish diligently, just in case Lillian called back for it.
There was so much to think of with every room; what to do with clothes, knickknacks, old photographs—even boring things like bed linen and curtains. And with every room came a new cascade of memories, as though every space was packed with ghosts from her childhood. Most of them were not as pleasant as playing with modelling clay on the floor of her bedroom, either. And as she stood in the door of the bathroom, remembering a blazing row that had resulted in Heather kicking the bath so hard she had to go to the hospital, she wondered why on earth she hadn’t brought someone with her to do this. Terry, her housemate, had even offered to help, but she had turned him down automatically. Nikki, too, she was certain, would have been glad to shoulder some of this unpleasantness.
What was that about? Was she worried Terry would have judged her for this ordinary, suburban childhood? Or, was she more afraid of him seeing her in a vulnerable state?
Going through the paperwork and shifting things around had tracked dust all over, so she dragged the hoover out and pushed it—somewhat unenthusiastically—around the living room. As she was chasing down a few errant hairs, the edge of the nozzle smacked against something solid underneath the sofa. Reaching down, she tugged the blockage out and was surprised to see it was a book, and quite an old one by the looks of it. She rubbed the dust and fluff off, and frowned at the cover. It was a collection of fairy tales, a battered old paperback, and on the front was a large black wolf, its jaws agape to reveal every one of its lethal teeth.
“Weird.” She chucked it on the sideboard and finished up.
Dumping a sack of recycling outside, by the front door, Heather took a deep breath of cold, autumnal air. Out here, when she had been around seven or eight, she had sat with her new magnifying glass, burning little holes into dried leaves and pieces of paper, whatever she could get her hands on. Ants, she had discovered, popped when you burned them with the magnifying glass, and she’d spent an entertaining afternoon creating lots of tiny shriveled bodies on the path until her mother had come outside and caught her at it.
Heather had been banned from the garden for a week, at the height of summer, and she still remembered her simmering fury so clearly it made her cheeks feel hot. Trapped in her room, she had taken to other petty forms of destruction—breaking the plates her sandwiches arrived on, tipping her mother’s perfume down the bathroom sink. She had been so angry then—and that had only made things worse.
That’s why I didn’t want Terry with me. Who would want their adult friends to see the child they once were? Standing in the cold, Heather felt a fresh wave of anguish move through her.
“The ghosts are just too bloody loud.” She
