My Mother Divinity [Unedited]

Chapter Six

The tea is lukewarm - obviously not left long enough to boil on the stove, and such is the curse of human impatience. I keep worrying about Amon and Brodie and which tent they're going to buy, and how long we have before the ship takes off from Scrabster. I tap my toes gently against the hardwood of the floor.

"Chamomile was your favourite," George informs me, "but now you just take what you can get." He seems apologetic for the situation with the tea but I'm just glad I've been given something liquid - something safe to drink. They've prepaid for freshly-baked oat cookies.

"You come here often?" I ask softly. The two men glance at each other with fondness - maybe they met in a coffee shop or at least, whatever the modern-day equivalent is. I don't bother looking into it.

"The woman that runs the place got us our jobs around these parts, about nine months or so back now. With all the superstitions going about, the poor lass was getting called a witch for all the incense she lit, clothes she wore and weird art she hung up on the walls, but we didn't mind that. We just wanted to get to know the community, and what a lovely place it is despite everything that's happened." George pulls his tea towards him which is already cloudy with milk and adds some crusty-looking sugar, two spoonfuls worth. He gives it a quick stir and stares into its whirlpool.

"And what did happen?" I ask. "With your daughter?" Maybe it's an invasive place to start but I don't think I've adopted a polite reputation as of yet, and my lack of memory for these people might be serving me well in the way that I don't have to care about what they think of me. I can speak how I like and they can always choose not to answer if it makes them uncomfortable.

Lenny hasn't touched his black tea and now he leans back further into his chair, folding his arms determinedly over his chest. "A terrible thing, it was. It happened just a year ago."

"We looked for her everywhere, you see," George adds, "for months, all up and down the country. But there's no GPS anymore, no cars, no security cameras, no cops that bother to do their job right now that murder's an accepted element of human life. When people go missing, nobody cares to look for them apart from their close relatives and, if you're lucky, a friend or two. Humans are so bloody selfish but in this day and age, I suppose you have to be."

"It was down in the Borders," Lenny says, "where we used to live, neighbours with your mum. By this point, you'd long gone and every time we asked about it, Sally would clam up. That's one thing I can't tell you - where or why you went off when you were eighteen, because you were always a bit of a closed book and Sally didn't seem to want to talk about it at all. In retrospect, we should have pushed her more."

"I didn't have a good relationship with her?" I guess, only marginally upset. They look like they don't know how to answer that without offending me.

"I wouldn't say that," Lenny goes on, "but who knows what goes on behind closed doors?"

"And the rest of my family?"

"We never knew your dad and you were an only child. You made good friends with some of the kids in school but mind this is going back a decade and even they had no clue where you'd run off to when you graduated."

"And nobody thought to look for me?" For the first time, I feel a tinge of rage build up in the back of my head. It's easier to blame the people who let you go rather than asking yourself why you left, so maybe that's why I want to reach out and grasp their hands and demand why they didn't watch me closer. Some friends. But I can see the comment makes them miserable and no doubt they're thinking of their daughter who they failed to find. "I'm sure you did the best you could."

But I really just want them to get to the point. A woman puts down some steaming cookies on a plate in front of us. "Go ahead," George encourages me, then with a low cough: "No offence but your friend didn't look like he had all the money left in the world."