This memory was sparked on the ski bus to Lake Louise, while listening to ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond’ with a butch of teenagers who thought it belonged to them.
The person I was fifteen years ago is unrecognisable today. I was a meek, dowdy, single mother, struggling to drag up two adolescent delinquents. Trailing out to work long hours at a job I loathed, returning home never knowing what to expect. Pouring over studies and always expecting that knock on the door from the local constabulary demanding I control my two sons, who towered over my five foot two frame. I thought I was doing the best for them working 70 hours a week and studying another 50. I was trying to give them a future, but they were neglected. ‘Please let me study’ I begged them. ‘It will be better soon.’ But they wanted my attention and they knew how to get it. I became so familiar with the constables I believed they considered inviting me to their Annual Ball. My life was out of control. Often, while driving home, my head full of mince, I considered a detour via a brick wall. Then the pain would disappear.
Desperate for relief from this awfulness, I was persuaded by a friend to visit a Tarot card reader. It cost £15, a £15 that would have bought cinema tickets for three.
The tarot women, small middle age with long hippy streaked grey hair, welcomed me into her room with a gentle voice. She looked qualified to deal with broken souls. She explained the cards, the layout and their interaction with each other. My past seemed spot on, stuff about property, a big change, a divorce but she could tell that from the lines on my face. Two out of the three female cards showed my strength, big deal. My future was rosy, great success, lots of travelling, yeah, yeah, how original. Then she moved to my present and one card in particular; a body lying on a slab with daggers suspended over it. That was me, she said, I was destroying myself, I had to be kinder to myself, start to take control. This is as bad as it gets, she said. My life had hit the bottom of a mine shaft, dark, it was up to me to crawl out. At the beginning of the visit I had hoped to discover a future love to dissolve my loneliness, but this one terrifying card took a grip. I had to take control; this was my mantra for my future and from that moment things started to turn around.
So what about the song? Two years after the tarot card reading I had been promoted, I had chucked my accountancy studies and settled for an easy BA at night school and I was running half marathons. The day I received my passport I knew I had it crack. I was taking my youngest son, Gary, on our first proper holiday since the divorce; a bus trip to see Pink Floyd perform at the Hockenheimring in Germany.
We joined the bus at Edinburgh Waverly. The average age on that bus was twenty despite my attempts to push that average up. When the first joint was burning even before we left the city limits I wondered if I was doing the right thing, but the crowd was jolly and The Floyd accompanied us the whole way.
The concert was spectacular up until the point I lost Gary; he dissolved into the thirty thousand strong crowds. After the final rousing encore, the crush back to the bus was so stifling the girl next to me had an asthma attack. The hunt for the bus ended with me dismayed to find no grinning son waiting for me. The bus driver was adamant he was leaving without Gary but I stood my ground and demanded he wait. Maternal instincts raging, I was prepared to lie in front of the wheels if needed. This was the first glimmer of the strength buried in me. Fifteen minutes later Gary bounced onto the bus, hyper and wondering what all the fuss was about.
On the ferry back home the son, who hated me for depriving him of his beloved father, thanked me. He admitted I had done the right thing and recognised I had no choice. But I have never stopped paying in guilt and handouts.
The one song from that concert that is burned in my mended soul is ‘High Hopes’, it sums up everything I tried to achieve while failing to realise what was important.
PS. Both boys survived their teenage years and are now coping with adulthood. I taped the Tarot card reading and listened to it the other day; almost everything she predicted for my future has happened.
Moira McPartlin is a Scot with Irish roots. She began writing and attending creative writing classes at Strathclyde University in Glasgow in 2000 as a release from a busy career in Finance. She writes shorts stories and poetry and has had work published in Storie, The People's Friend, and The Scottish Mountaineer. In 2006 she won the Mountaineering Council for Scotland annual poetry competition and for the past three years, has regularly contributed book reviews and articles to www.laurahird.com. She resigned from a global position in Shell Oil in October 2005 to concentrate on writing her first novel Torque which was completed in July 2007. She is currently working on her second novel and developing her website.
Moira has two adult sons and lives in Stirlingshire with her husband. She is a keen mountaineer and in 2006 compleated her round of Munros (Scottish mountains over 3000 feet high).
