Cold November Day ...

A cold, wet November day in Peterborough. "I promise," Ted swore on his mother's grave. But then, he swore on just about everything and, most of the time, not as pleasantly as a simple 'promise'.

I knew the pain Ted was experiencing. I had lost my mother in similar mysterious circumstances. At least Ted had a grave to pollute with his language. My mother had vanished without a trace almost ten years ago and I had nowhere to grieve her absence.

Of course, it was my dad who took it worse. When he wasn't drinking or plotting Mum's last movements and associated events on a highly detailed map, he did a weird thing with his newspaper. He kept folding it in and over itself, (he sometimes read it upside down), perhaps looking for clues to Mum's whereabouts, hidden in the finger-smudged newsprint.

Where had our mothers been taken? I wondered, as Ted and I walked from the grave back to the car. What had been done while they were away? And why had Ted had his mother returned when I had not? Too many questions and not enough answers. One thing was clear. The answers were not hidden down a crack in the pavement. I would go out into the world and find my mother, or the answers, in the forgotten parts of the globe.