The Lost Girls by Kate Hamer

Author:Kate Hamer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2023-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Mercy

1999

Over the coming days and weeks Mercy struggled to come to terms with her new reality. Most days, Delia was up and dressed and at the stove making breakfast by the time Mercy climbed down the ladder from her bedroom.

‘Scrambled, fried or poached,’ Delia asked. ‘Muffins, toast or cornbread. Bacon and maple syrup on the side?’

‘Sure,’ said Mercy in a small voice, climbing on the chair at the table.

‘But which then?’ asked Delia.

In some ways Delia felt truly born again, although not in the way her exceptional and unusual daughter, who had a heart like no other she had ever known, would mean it. This chance of a new life that had presented itself was so unexpected and unlooked for that it made everything seem to shine like it was being reflected in a silvered mirror.

From the point that Delia was on her knees with a gun sticking in the back of her head things had taken a turn that was, she now reflected with wonder, mundane and extraor­dinary at the same time. They’d gone down to Roanoke in the hope of buying enough stuff to set themselves up and do a little dealing, mainly in support of their own habits, which were getting difficult to manage. Delia had a small bequest left to her by an uncle who knew nothing of the turn her life had taken and they decided to use it to get them started.

In the event their contact, it transpired pretty quickly, had only summoned them there to rob them, but even as he was doing it in their motel room he was strung out, twitchy and paranoid. He yelled at them both that they’d informed on him, that they’d been having him followed, and Delia knew deep within herself he was only a hair’s breadth away from blasting both their brains out. Just at that point there was a knock at the door. The three inside, one standing, two kneeling, held their breaths in the semi-darkness of the room with its curtains drawn. Delia considered crying out but the certainty that doing that would lead quickly and directly to her death stopped her. This awful play that she seemed to be starring in was nothing, absolutely nothing like the one she’d envisaged when she was growing up, a teenager who fan-worshipped Madonna and who lived for a new episode of Friends coming out. Who wore bright scrunchies in her hair and sewed similar ones out of scraps of colourful fabric for all her girlfriends.

However their contact was so spooked by the knocking he fled through the bathroom window, taking all their money, and soon they fell into a terrible withdrawal that stranded them for days. They never found out who was knocking at their motel room door. Sometimes, Delia wondered if it could’ve been an angel.

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