12 December 2024
Feathers
Part 12
The story so far: Maryam and Joe have decided to move in together to prepare for the birth of Maryam’s child, but the cottage is not yet ready.
Maryam’s parents expected she would get a flight home as soon as her exams were over. But while other students trundled cases, backpacks and French horns out of Sallies for their summer migrations, Maryam hadn’t booked a flight. She didn’t know how to tell her parents what had happened, and so she knew she couldn’t go home. Her mother would guess within an hour of her landing. Instead, she told her parents she had been invited by a friend – her academic sister – to spend some time with her family over the summer. And that was true so far as it went because Maryam had got in touch with Lizzie and asked to go and stay with her in Perthshire.
While Lizzie was indeed her academic sister, she was approaching 40, old enough to be her mother. She lived in a village among hills and woods where her husband Zach was minister of a number of communities in and around Blair Atholl. At a Freshers Week event, a library tour, she told Maryam that she was bored working in a charity shop, arranging her life around coffee mornings and her husband’s criss-crossing the parish for meetings. They didn’t have children. She’d been a primary school teacher but it hadn’t worked out. And so, on a whim, she’d applied to study Biology at least for a year to see if she’d like it, going home at the weekends. Maryam enjoyed chatting to someone a little calmer than her other new friends and introduced her to the third years who’d adopted her. “Would you like to have a daughter who’s 38?” said Lizzie.
She even made it to Raisin shenanigans though, as befitting her great age, forbore from partaking in shots at 6.38 am. At the foam fight their parents dressed them as local birds – Maryam was an oystercatcher, Lizzie a seagull. But afterwards the academic family fizzled out in a lack of parental interest in their fledglings, and Maryam no longer saw Lizzie, never even bumping into her. She missed the presence of someone older in her world, who didn’t judge her, especially as she’d never felt so young as she did now, a girl going to be a mother.
Lizzie was surprised when Maryam messaged her, but used to waifs and strays showing up and didn’t ask for details. She said, “You’ll find I’ve changed since we last met.” Maryam, who recalled what she’d learned on Instagram, didn’t let on how much she understood.
Visitation, on a 12th Century silver chest believed to hold relics of John the Baptist, Cattedrale di San Lorenzo, Genoa
Yours,
Donald.
Revd Dr Donald MacEwan
Chaplain