Dying Embers and Shooting Stars

By Maggi Sale

A chance remark by a sensitive daughter to her depressed mother sparks off this fulsome story. Unresolved issues, that have been haunting Margo for most of her adult life, are vividly recalled as she is catapulted into an intense psychological journey over a period of five days. Her re-awakening mind becomes increasingly aware that it has been set on automatic pilot for some years and little, further purpose is served by her accrued defences. In the process of review, she begins to recognize the psychic supports that have been with her all along and is somewhat surprised, as was the writer, at their identity.

Internal landscapes range from a childhood in Scotland, to adulthood in Central Africa; from a stable village home, to a precarious city flat; from the wild, West Coast of Scotland, where gulls fly, to the wild streets of Glasgow, where gangs rule. The personal issues are explored with candour and pathos; but there is just as much genuine humour shared in the unfolding of these very human, and universally-recognized, life-situations.

With its graphic imagery and flesh-and-blood characters, the story draws the reader into mystic worlds. The Author shines a light on the inner life and perpetual interconnectedness of all things and all beings. Ultimately, it is a tale of resilience and growth; insight and healing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Apr 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9781452570310

Maggi Sale

Retired inner-city Social Worker and senior Grandmother on the Scottish Council of Grandmothers Circle the Earth. Celtic Hospitality prevails in Maggi's Glasgow home where the Global Exchange Youth of the World refer to her as Bumma. She truly is one of Jock Tamson's Bairns and invites you to join her.

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Copyright © 2013 Maggi Sale.

Interior Graphics by Gwen Sale

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The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4525-7030-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-7032-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-7031-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013904469

Balboa Press rev. date: 3/25/2013

Contents

Part 1

Chapter 1 …… Monday pm

Chapter 2. Tuesday Morning.

Chapter 3. Wednesday

Chapter 4. Thursday am.

Chapter 5. Thursday pm.

Chapter 6. Thursday Evening

Chapter 7. Early hours Friday Morning

Chapter 8. Friday Dawn

Chapter 9. Friday Fore-noon

Part Two

Dedicated to

my grandchildren’s grandchildren.

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Part 1

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Life does not accommodate you; it shatters you.

Every seed destroys its container,

or else there would be no fruition.

(Florida Scott-Maxwell)

I want to beg you

as much as I can,

to be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart.

And try to love the questions

like locked rooms and like books that are written in an obscure foreign tongue.

Do not seek the answers which cannot be given to you,

because you would not be able to live them.

And the point is, to live everything.

Live the questions now!

Perhaps you will then,

Gradually without noticing it,

live along, some distant day, into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke

(1875-1926)

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Chapter 1 …… Monday pm

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T HERE WAS NOTHING to indicate that anything of significance was about to shift in the bowels of her being as Margo slowly pushed her sleeping grandchild through the animated groups of Christmas shoppers. She and her daughter shared a heavy silence as they weaved through the crowds who were thronging the streets of the small Scottish market town. She was immediately brought up short however, when her daughter happened to mention that Margo’s former-best friend and her former-lover had together given a housing reference for her former-husband.

He had returned, unexpectedly, from South Africa the previous week, having been molested by two Rottweillers, and was now homeless, jobless and wifeless…..again! Margo suddenly, and very unwillingly, felt caught up in a web of life from which she had thought she was well and truly, and gratefully, free. And the information left her feeling strangely disturbed! The painful, simultaneous tightening in her chest and the pit of her stomach, had her casting her attention around to locate the nearest Public Convenience. Evacuation was certain….but in which direction, she was unsure!

Her compassionate daughter mentioned, on her return, how ‘queer’ it was how things sometimes transpired; her trained, perceptive eyes checking out the effect of this news on her apparently hard-shelled, but super-sensitive, Cancerian mother. She was aware, as were few others, that the onset of this dark, winter season heralded several emotive triggers, anyone of which could sorely test her mother’s resolve to see it through without the crutch and comfort of anti-depressants. The anniversary of a loved one had already been effectively dealt with, a week or so before; the event shared within the family as they each remembered their mother, wife, sister, aunt, daughter and friend in their own unique way. The other triggers, due at the end of the week, were for Margo to face, and deal with, alone…… as always. Her stomach churned at the thought of their annual return, trailing as they did, perpetual ribbons of regret and sorrow.

As the three generations passively, and distractedly, window-shopped together under the bright Christmas streetlights, she confided in her daughter that she was ‘struggling a bit’ without the support of the medication, knowing the depth of that understatement, even as she uttered it. Feeling the familiar panic rise, Margo quickly fabricated the need to do some personal shopping and left her daughter to head home alone, pushing the still-sleeping toddler in her buggy.

With her heart pounding in her throat, and the tears threatening to draw the attention of the passing shoppers, she watched her two most precious beings disappear into the Christmas crowds, repeating to herself, like a Mantra, ‘It’s all right. It’s all right. Everything will be all right,’ until the rising panic subsided, her teeth stopped grinding and her jaw slowly relaxed, allowing cold air to penetrate as far as the pit of her abdomen.

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LATER, IN HER daughter’s home, the rest of the evening dragged, as Margo went through the motions of playing happy families amid her ex-husband’s pathetic invitations to inspect his extensive, suppurating wounds, which were still receiving daily attention from the District Nurse. But she did, in spite of herself, feel genuine compassion for a man of his retirement age who, in the space of a less than a year, had been flung out of China because of his affair with one of his students; had been flung out of Switzerland for attacking his second wife; and had finally been forced to leave South Africa following the Rottweillers’ attack. She noted wryly that the first two evictions involved infidelity and violence, the psychic scars of which she, herself, still carried. ‘Little change there, then!’ she inwardly, and bitchily, mused.

Margo chose not to reveal to him that she now knew of this odd alliance of her former female friend and male lover in procuring Grace and Favour Housing for him. As always, the loud silence of unspoken angst stymied any possibility of spontaneous conversation around the beautifully-prepared table in her daughter’s home. Margo’s heart bled for her first-born, who had always been the mediator within the family, knowing that her efforts were to little avail. It was a quarter of a century since Margo had shared any significant dealings with this man and her memories of their shared life, spanning seventeen years, were not good; and she couldn’t feign otherwise.

She tried to breath through the rising tension that formed a hard lump under her breastbone and focus instead on small talk with her three grandchildren whom she loved dearly but seldom saw during these short, dark days of winter. Although her village home was only fifteen miles distant from her daughter’s home, Margo rarely visited it as she normally lived and worked nearly eighty miles to the north. A real and conscious concern for her individual impact on the Planet curtailed more regular trips and she longed for the day when she could move to her rural retreat on a permanent basis.

With undigested food threatening to return to her plate, she eventually made her excuses of having to make an early-morning start to return to her work in the city. In truth, Margo craved the opportunity to be alone in order to consider the implications of this apparently innocuous information, provided a scant hour ago by her firstborn.

Why had it so strangely, and unexpectedly, disturbed her?

As she took her leave from the only man that she had ever married, she enquired whether he had enough ready cash while he waited for his Welfare Benefits to be calculated. Margo had been formally assisting him by phone in this process since his premature return. She held genuine concern for his plight, and sincere relief that the father of her four children had at least escaped the ignominy of ending up as a dog’s dinner. Her dutiful, concerned daughter had mooted the idea within the family that they might each take turns in accommodating their wounded parent when he returned from Africa, but Margo had quashed that suggestion without qualms. She knew that she personally lacked the generosity of spirit, or forgiveness perhaps, to welcome her former husband to either of her homes for anything longer than a weekend of family gathering, when only superficial socialization was required.

She had worked hard, bloody hard, for what she had achieved, in spite of him. And although her two properties were of little economic value, they represented a degree of independence and control over her own affairs that she valued greatly. And she did not intend to give it up lightly. More importantly, she knew at first hand, as well as professionally, that the learned-helplessness of the male was a subtle but potent force and she did not want her gentle-hearted daughter falling prey to it.

He had been castigating the bloody system for as long as she had known him. She had initially found it fascinating in the heady, student days of the early sixties when social revolt was in the air and she had hung on his every word with a sense of admiration and awe. Now, his vacuous, repetitive blustering and pontificating sounded like an old cracked record. Every time he started a predictable moan with This bloody system…, Margo found her eyes rolling heavenward, pleading for patience to refrain from responding with, Tough! You’re dependant on it now, so just get on with it!

He always had been a glass-half-empty man and had shown few signs of changing this negative attitude throughout his life. Margo was aware that she had given him the benefit of the doubt on countless occasions but he had rarely reciprocated positively; and it had almost broken her. He was that volatile mixture of highly-developed intellect and stunted emotional growth. He had demanded more of her time and attention than that of their four children, for most of their marriage. When it was finally over, there was enough energy released in her to take on the world of Nuclear Power, Energy and Weapons……. and she had done so, with relish!

His parting shot as he had finally accepted that she was indeed impervious to his negative machinations, and inured to his manipulative threats, was that he had singularly failed to transform her from a sow’s ear to a silken purse.

‘And thank Christ for that!’ she defiantly responded as she had resolutely walked away from the Solicitors Office, a quarter of a century before.

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WITH THE TOWN lights and the busy evening traffic at last behind her, Margo settled into the comforting, rural darkness punctuated only by the odd swooping bat held in her headlights and the trail of cat’s eyes which led her homeward to solitude and safety. The fifteen-mile journey to her quiet village home was just long enough for her to give headspace to one of the other protagonists in this trio of torment that had so rocked her equilibrium.

Her Irish friend was Margo’s first real adult relationship, outside marriage, and she was everything that Margo would love to have then been; attractive, vivacious, and full of Gaelic charm and wit when she spouted forth in her entrancing, musical lilt about her latest ‘love’, real or imagined. Sometimes it was the well-hung, gay guy across the street, who wore a kilt with no underpants, whom her friend fancied that she could make see the error of his ways; at others, a recalcitrant Catholic Priest who occasionally shared her friend’s bed, swapping comfort and absolution as appropriate!

Margo had never known such hilarious and liberating laughter as when they had shared the latest chapter in her friend’s fanciful, if fruitless, love life. For the first time since childhood, free from the demands of very young children, she was experiencing a fulsome friendship that she both treasured and relished. It sustained her through dark days of self-doubt and it lightened her load as she faced and dealt with the grave decisions arising from the end of her marriage and the effects on her children. Tea and tears were shared on tap. Margo had truly loved her friend and blessed the day that good fortune had brought the beautiful Colleen into her ken.

But all good things come to an end, so it seems! No sooner had the Solicitor’s Letter arrived on her doormat formalising her Legal Separation, when the gay Coleen added Margo’s newly-released husband to her bed-post! While having no objections to their relationship in principle, Margo pondered deeply on what it said about their five year friendship …. and found herself grieving more for its loss than her seventeen year marriage. She subsequently referred to her, jokingly, and with perhaps a little hint of cattiness, as her ‘sperm sister’.

It didn’t go down at all well! The joke was cracked during the introductory session of a Further Education class where the pecking order of respectability was still being established! The other mature students were primarily middle-class housewives seeking purpose and distraction, from their boring, conventional lives. The stony silence that emanated from the group, together with her friend’s open-mouthed, wide-eyed expression, suggested that Margo had perhaps over-stepped the mark a wee bit! She had never been fully forgiven for the disclosure of too much information in such august company, and her erstwhile Irish friend maintained a frosty distance for the duration of an entire academic term! Meanwhile, Margo tentatively started to explore a relationship with herself….and didn’t find it wanting!

But the wound of parting had gone deep …..and had painfully evoked old childhood hurts. Twenty years may have passed, but the sense of loss and betrayal, from such a trusted quarter, still lingered. The realisation that their treasured friendship was irrevocably over had hit Margo hard at the time and she had publically broken into inconsolable sobs in the same market-town street where she had walked earlier in the evening with her daughter and grandchild. While fumbling with her keys in the dark outside the door of her village home, Margo, older, wiser and made of sterner stuff, wondered wryly whether her husband and subsequent lover were aware that they had shared a common ‘comfort stop’, albeit at different times! Knowing both men intimately, as she did, Margo was quite sure that the coquettish Colleen was about the only thing that her two ex-partners might have had in common!

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‘What happened to your fucking head, woman?’

LATER, IN THE sanctity and silence of her village home, gazing into the dying embers of an ancient woodstove, Margo attempted to unpick the complex feelings that she had felt earlier in her daughter’s home on contemplating the full-circle return of a man whom she had variously adored, loved, tolerated, feared, loathed and eventually, pitied.

She still bore his name, a quarter of a century after their divorce, which bemused her feminist friends. But the name that she was born into was just as patriarchal so why revert to that? His name at least identified her with the four beautiful people who had resulted from his insatiable sex-drive and her naive desire to be earth-mother, in a vain attempt to placate a judgmental God.

She could handle the passing of outgrown roles. She was now neither anyone’s daughter nor, more sadly, anyone’s granddaughter. It was quite acceptable nowadays to be an ex-wife, but it disturbed her to consider just how many other redundant relationships she owned, especially amongst her peer group and siblings.

Was life trying to tell her something?

‘You are the common, and negative, denominator in that lot, woman, so you must be doing something wrong’ …..the ever-vigilant, internal Judge observed. The sharp, punishing sting as Margo pulled the sensitive quick from her nail bed made her wince; but she ignored the blood that flowed painfully and freely from her thumb ………and continued compulsively chewing.

Her stove-side musings brought little resolution. She poked aggressively among the embers, bullying them back into life. ‘She was just being paranoid; she was just being egocentric; she just felt excluded from the action as usual and her nose was out of joint; she was once again the villain-of-the-piece and it was all her fault!’

‘Christ! That old demon! I thought you had buggered off years ago.’

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MARGO’S TORTURED MENTAL process wasn’t helped by the intruding sounds and heavy footsteps of the former lover who still lived next door. He had bought the adjoining terrace after declaring that he, couldn’t live without her. Having just rid herself of one manipulative male, she had wisely refused to allow another besotted one move in under the same roof as her and her four youngsters. So, the next best thing, as he saw it, was to buy the adjoining house from her recently widowed neighbour, at a knock-down price ……for cash! Margo had felt quite embarrassed, at the time, when she observed his aggressive purchasing tactics. But he assured her that it was the way of the world and she, in her trusting naivety about such matters, had believed him.

He had subsequently used her home as a four-star, all-inclusive base for the next five years while he meticulously renovated his own. He powered the whole project, at little cost to himself, from a long extension cable through a hole in their joint wall leading to Margo’s electricity meter which he had fixed. He had manfully eaten her out of house and home while ejecting, cuckoo-like, each of her adolescent youngsters, in turn, with his fastidiousness and meanness. To their cost, she had obstinately refused to see any of this for the duration of his long, seven year sojourn.

Suffice to say that Margo had blindly seen him as ‘the love of her life’, who had a wonderful, sonorous, singing voice, volubly appreciated her excellent cooking and actively supported her Work on behalf of the Planet. Any other growing doubts were quickly quashed when she elicited the likely approval of her deceased father who would surely have appreciated her lover’s practical nature, fastidious attention to detail and his well-stocked and frequently used toolbox! She affectionately referred to him as her Troubadour!

From the vantage point of this quiet, dark room, lit only by a single candle and dwindling fire-light,….. and fifteen years distance in time and maturity…… Margo attempted to analyse just what degree of delusion and low self-worth had made that crock of shite, as described by her younger daughter, seem wonderful at the time!

She had thought that she had landed on her feet when he wheedled his way into her life and rescued her from the years of tension and violence in her marriage. She had been attracted through their common interest in all things ‘Green’ and he could quote Schumacher’s, Small is Beautiful- verbatim. And he did! Ad infinitum! It may have been the oddest chat-up line on record, but it had worked for her! It didn’t take her long, however to discover, by his own admission, that it was virtually the only book that he had ever read; laboriously mouthing each word and committing it to memory for later impressive regurgitation.

She tenderly recalled the moment, perhaps one of the few of real honesty that they had ever shared, when he had admitted to her just how terribly threatened he felt by her perpetual reading and studying. Margo had felt so touched by the underlying sense of exclusion and neediness expressed by his disclosure that she had shut her books, abandoned her Accrued Credits and given up any aspirations for a Degree through the Open University

Instead, she had devoted herself to shovelling brown rice and beans and bagging-up sticky Dark Muscovado Sugar, which became the bane of her bloody life! She supported him financially, with her time, energy and expertise, in a Workers’ Wholefood Co-operative that gave meaning and purpose to his life after years as a faceless Insurance Inspector, which he hated. She convinced herself that, in equal tandem with him, she was doing her bit to change public attitudes to the International Politics of Food. She believed that every hour, standing in cold village halls facing rows of cross-armed and cross-faced beef-farmers’ wives, trying to convince them of the evils of factory farming and the virtues of vegetarian lifestyles, was worth it ……and only possible since he had come into her life because he provided the transport and financial expertise.

The regular Wholefood Presentations invariably followed a long day in the shop, educating the public in how to remove the fart-power and toxins from red-kidney beans. While her lover sat in the back-shop, ‘doing’ the books, Margo packed the sticky samples of glace cherries and Lexia Raisins for later sale. He, meanwhile, had his Tea, and later took his nap, which he always needed after eating, at the back of the meeting hall while she attempted to ‘Save the Planet’ from the front.

As the polite applause, which heralded the end of her diatribe, quickly dissipated, some unseen puppeteer pulled her Troubadour’s strings and her dozing doyen was dynamically swung into action. With his perfectly tuned guitar in hand, to match his perfectly modulated voice, he would leap up to command the stage and lift the mood from guilt-laden moralizing, on her part, to seductive Scottish Balladeering on his.

As a Women’s Institute Meeting was probably the closest that many of these rural wives ever approached to experiencing a Rave, she couldn’t blame them for just falling short of throwing their voluminous knickers at him; because Margo had been every bit as blinkered and besotted with him as they were! She could now perhaps understand where her silly, girly, trusting, naively-grateful heart had been, during that self-imposed period of bemused banality, spanning seven whole years, but ‘what happened to your fucking head, woman?’

Margo cringed with her shoulders up at her ears as she remembered one occasion, when considering the pros and cons of remaining in their failing relationship, that she would ‘miss the large paper sacks that he brought home from the shop to use for re-cycled rubbish’. And she had pathetically thought of that as a PRO! Margo felt aghast as she recalled the ‘totally absent’ mindset of those days. Even her erstwhile Irish friend, genuinely concerned for her state of mind, had wittily pleaded with her to waken up and smell the coffee!….long before the said cliché eventually became popular! The earnest plea was lost on Margo however, as she only ever drank tea.

It took an eventual enforced and prolonged stay in the local hospital, following a Hysterectomy, to give Margo the space and perspective that she needed. She was allocated a single room to recover from a stinking, life threatening hospital-borne infection and to shield the other patients from the obnoxious stench that emanated from every orifice. And it was just what she needed to see the Light! She would be eternally grateful to the much-maligned, National Health Service for the clinical botch-up which had almost cost Margo her life, but had crucially saved her sanity.

Her enforced isolation, with meals provided, was the closest thing to a holiday she had had in many years. It gave her the peace, quiet and opportunity to take stock of her life to date; and she didn’t like what this honest appraisal revealed! She was truly shocked at her own self-delusion that she had been living a life of worth and purpose, as she reviewed the previous five wasted years during which her own children had almost given up on her, mesmerised as she had been by a calculating, crooner who had even hated her cat!

When, at last, she was allowed hospital visitors again, her youngest son was forced to witness the tearful, guilt-ridden outpouring of self-disgust as Margo attempted to make sense of her newly-recognised wilful blindness. He may have been barely fourteen, but five years living alone with his father, since the breakup of their marriage, had toughened up her youngest child and catapulted him into a maturity beyond his years. He had survived the traumatic transition from being the baby of a large family to being an only child in charge of a mentally unstable parent who lived in domestic chaos. Was it any wonder that her bemused child had turned to the Stars for consolation?

Even as he comforted her with a compassion more fitting of a trained counsellor, he called on her own Cancerian attributes which, he assured her, would see her through this awful, mind-blowing realisation of her own folly. He had had his own recent experience of his volatile father and now at last understood what had led to the inevitable breakdown of their family life. And Margo knew, in the marrow of her bones, that this child had borne the biggest brunt of it! She felt truly humbled by his mature insight and strength of character as he pleaded with his distraught mother that she shouldn’t be so hard on herself. If you ever write a book Mum, you could title this chapter of your life with the Troubadour as, At least he never hit me!" It hadn’t been her teenage son’s intention to make his post-operative mother laugh to her core, but before he left the ward, Margo had to call on the nurse to check the stretched-to-bursting stitches on her suppurating wound!

this wanton act of common sense

WHEN SHE RECALLED the hilarious dénouement, which both epitomized the problematic relationship with her Troubadour, and heralded its long-overdue end, Margo rolled backwards from her cushion in front of the woodstove and fell spread-eagled on the floor in helpless laughter.

With her college books firmly back in hand, she had agreed to work at the Wholefood Co-operative within a month of her hospital discharge on condition that she did not attempt to lift the 50K bags of brown rice from the back of the delivery trucks. She returned to the shop from lunch one day to find her erstwhile lover at the rear of the counter, concentrating intently on two separate piles of pulse. An orange pile of lentils sat on the right; a green pile of split peas sat on the left. In the middle, was a mixed pile of orange lentils and green peas.

She stood stock-still with a baffled brow distorting her face as she tried to make sense of the surreal scene before her. She was watched, in turn, by the darting eyes of the other part-time worker who was sizing up the situation with the concentration of a cobra.

‘What are you doing?’

That’s obvious isn’t it? (There was no break in his concentration as he spoke). I’m sorting out this mess.

‘Mmm!…………. I can see that. But why?’

"Because he dropped a seven pound bag of red lentils into the green split-pea sack as he was spending more time charming the female customers than watching what he was doing. That’s why!" he grumped.

Margo looked round and surveyed the huge open sacks, full to the brim with every known pulse and grain from every corner of the globe. They lined the walls of the shop and were slightly off-set against each other, two or three deep. She never tired of re-arranging them for maximum colour effect and enjoyed the compliments that resulted from her artwork that showed country of origin and suggested recipes. Sometimes, to her creative satisfaction, it resembled a huge, gaudy Kaffe-Fasset tapestry.

True enough, as her lover had grumpily informed her, there was indeed a deep funnel in the green-split peas, which must have briefly held the offending red lentils because there, skulking at the bottom, were a couple of orange recalcitrants that he had missed when he had scooped out the bulk of them. Margo graciously assisted his arduous, time-consuming task by picking up the two, tiny interlopers with her fingertips and placing them meticulously on the orange pile. She was rewarded with a wide appreciative smile as her erstwhile lover wrongly concluded that her apparent co-operation was welcome evidence that she was, once again, succumbing to his nit-picking values!

(Her Troubadour was actually very beautiful when he smiled and, with the knowledge of her planned intention, Margo felt like a real bitch when she serenely returned his gesture).

The other worker, meanwhile, had taken refuge in the archway connecting the back-shop and he watched intently as Margo donned her clean, wide, apron and approached the counter with intent. He was a Buddhist teacher and not normally given to uncontrolled mirth. On this occasion, however, he stood with both hands clamped fast to his gaping mouth. Tears flowed copiously over his fists as he anticipated Armageddon. He was a very perceptive Buddhist teacher with a keen sense of what was to come! Knowing this, Margo deliberately avoided his eye and clenched her jaw as she set about her self-imposed task in a quietly determined fashion.

The first sweep of her right arm took the orange pile! The second sweep with her left, took the green! As their combined colours now looked very similar to the unsorted pile in the middle of the counter, she swept that too into her gathered apron and tipped the whole lot into the sack of multi-coloured broth-mix where they instantly and miraculously, disappeared!

The Buddhist teacher, who wore a calliper on his right leg, a legacy of childhood polio, had poor balance at the best of times and, on this occasion, his hands were other-wise engaged from the usual task of keeping him upright. Occupied as she was with the task in hand, Margo didn’t actually see what happened to him; only the cataclysmic aftermath! A finely balanced pyramid of re-cycled toilet tissue had apparently exploded and engulfed the said Buddhist teacher who was now lying face down, in a very undignified manner, pounding the floor with his closed fist, his hilarity only mildly muffled by the absorbent mass on which he was lying. Self-preservation, and an honest regard for his loss of face, had averted Margo’s eyes from the Troubadour’s doubtless shocked and bewildered expression as she executed this wanton act of common sense.

(The Buddhist teacher vainly attempted, on more than one occasion over subsequent years, to share his observations of the event with her; but it had inevitably degenerated into the same inarticulate, tear-strewn and mirth-laden meltdown!)

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MARGO HAD RETURNED to work, reluctantly cutting short her planned convalescence, because her planned work-replacements, one after another, had refused to work with her moody and exacting lover. Only the Buddhist teacher had stayed the course as he was totally unfazed by the obsessive antics of the Troubadour. She was stopped in her tracks one day when a young, highly intelligent woman had demanded to know, as she flounced out of the shop after only three weeks employment, "Just what heinous crime did you commit in a previous life that makes you believe you have to put up with that?" Margo didn’t know the answer! But she was fairly sure that her old demon did!

Her books however were still where she had left them five years previously and they welcomed her home! She ignored the voluble sighs that emanated from her exasperated lover each morning as he drove them both the fifteen miles to work in his old and noisy Morris Minor while she took the opportunity to read; and she no longer restricted her reading material to Wholefood Publications while she was in the shop. He didn’t dare complain because Margo was willing to swap her time in the shop for food instead of cash which was a better deal than that rightfully demanded by the other workers. So he swallowed his ire by biting his bottom lip while she blew life into grey cells that had been on a five year Sabbatical with Rip Van Winkle.

She and her Irish friend went back to full-time study at the local college but sadly parted at the gates as Margo fell foul of the rules governing social niceties! She may not have been picked for the ‘team’ but she did lose her fear of computers and came top of the class in Sociology and Psychology. Excluded from the Coffee Club because of her total failure at small talk, she instead discovered the joys of speed-walking around the college perimeter at lunchtime and practicing Tai Chi after classes in the evening.

Meanwhile, her poor lover was on a hiding to nothing, as Margo revelled night after night with references, graphs and academic papers. He retired next door to his bachelor pad earlier and earlier just to get away from the distracting competition. It was no great loss not to join him now, although he had been a beautiful, gentle and considerate lover in the beginning and had done much to heal the sexual wounds of her marriage. On reflection of this, Margo felt thoroughly ashamed of herself when she recalled his last invitation, as he retired to bed, to join him next door to watch the Snooker, on the only small television between the two houses. This had been the highlight of their joint social life for over six years and he had taught her the finer nuances of the colourful game. She knew every tactical move and Margo could trace, on the screen, the preferred passage round three cushions for the perfect safety shot. Her photographer’s eye could differentiate the subtle tones and shades and she could place every coloured ball on or off its spot.

In response to his earnest invitation to join him, she viewed the book of statistics open for her essay on the comparative life expectancies in adjoining wards in Glasgow. She weighed up the choices on offer equally earnestly. Absolutely no contest! She declined graciously! He attempted a further enticement to join him by whiningly reminding her that it was ‘the Final!’ She firmly declined again, with perhaps a hint of a patronizing smile. On reflection she felt a bit of a heel as she recalled his crestfallen face, the drooped shoulders and the quietly closed door so as not to disturb her studies……But it was a black and white telly for fuck’s sake!

Some weeks later, he approached her, diary in hand saying that he had "really taken on board" the things that she had been saying about the sterility of their relationship and he wanted to ‘mend his ways’. Consequently, he planned to write in "time for spontaneity" at 3pm every subsequent Friday afternoon!

A year later, following Margo’s departure for the city to join her student children, and to complete her professional training, her erstwhile Troubadour shaved off his beard, gargled his throat and tuned up his tonsils. The new, younger handmaiden who was serenaded into his immaculate, soulless pad, moved out again in as many weeks as it had taken Margo years, when the former realised just how little of true value was actually on offer!

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MARGO PUT THE last of the logs on to the bed of hot coals and watched helplessly as an ancient slater ran for his life round and round the log before launching himself Sigourney-Weaver-style into the molten vat below.

‘Sorry about that, wee friend!’

She usually knocked the logs on the hearth to avoid such genocide but her pre-occupations with the ex-lover had distracted her from her normal practice.

‘Now see what you’ve made me do!’ she yelled unreasonably in the direction of the adjoining wall, simultaneously giving it the two fingers. She wondered why she was indeed giving her defunct relationship so much attention and concluded that it was because as a ‘mature’ woman that she had allowed herself to drift into his gentle trap.

Margo could easily understand and forgive the naïve and trusting idealism of a love-struck-and pregnant twenty-year-old who married in that state of ‘in love’ madness wherein lifetime decisions should never be made- but all too often are! But for an intelligent, worldly-wise woman and mother of four as she had been at the time; to put her life on hold for such a potage! There had to be an explanation which still escaped her; and until she found it, she knew that there could be little understanding or forgiveness; not of him, but of herself!

Apart from teaching her the finer points of Real Ale, Margo couldn’t think of much that she now missed in her Troubadour.

‘He did have a great singing voice though’…………. and she missed it still!

It had the quality of the dark Irish beers that she still enjoyed. She had been truly amazed at the virtual library of songs that he had carried in his large handsome head, learned by rote in the same way that he had memorized his one and only book. Some of them were long Ballads, which spanned the lives of their subjects. The twists and turns and tragedies of their life stories, lost in the mists of time and brought to life with the light and shade of his wonderful tones, had often brought Margo to tears.

She had never tired of listening to him.

But on reflection, from the vantage point of the self-sufficient woman she now prided herself in being, Margo could barely stomach the notion that she had allowed his beautiful, God-given musical gift to mask his meanness of spirit for so long. She couldn’t believe her good fortune when he had generously offered to buy-out her husband’s share in her house with an interest free loan only to discover that it actually resulted in him gaining Standard Security over an appreciating third of the value of her property!

Hearts don’t read small print!

But her wilful blindness was to receive yet another rude awakening before she finally let go of her delusions of a benevolent Troubadour on a Green mission! The Buddhist teacher, who regularly worked abroad, eventually disclosed to her that several years previously, he had assisted her Troubadour in setting up an off-shore, tax-free Bank Account which required a minimum of six figures to open!

Margo had sat open-jawed on receipt of this information in a state of abject dissonance while scrabbling through her mind trying frantically to locate some small recess where it would fit! There was just no consistency between this startling revelation of copious excess on one hand; and the man who would insist on cash in advance before collecting her children from the next village on a dark winter’s evening, on the other! He had taken her for a complete and utter mug, totally short-changed her for years