How did I mount my first assault on her?
It is one of those curious questions I often get asked and fail to understand. I want to protest but given the way Agnes looks these days, and her terrible croaking voice, and raucous one-way talking on and on and constant complaints, and her bad habits for too much wine and white spirit, and the foul smell of cigarettes on her breath. The askers are all incredulous. What was there to love? they ask, Just look at her now. And sometimes they make tired old jokes about covering her head with a paper bag and so on.
Time was, I always begin.
Once there was a time I used to tell her story to justify, and boasted of her beauty, and many have preferred to choose to see her that way. The seductress. You horny dog , the men said to me then. But to be honest they were only serving their own imaginations. They would want all the dull details of her anatomy, and layer by layer of skin and bone and tissue I would have to give it to them. Down to the imaginary centre that didn’t exist so that in the end there was always disappointment.
So these days I don’t tell stories of her previous youth or beauty. Nor of her wildness, although that was the other way the men have wanted my love-making story to go. The sea witch. How did I tame her? they used to ask. And their voices would grow as small as their cocks as they frightened themselves with their own words and thoughts of the cold grey sea. Those of them that claimed to know a thing or two would drone on about Sycarax and Mesalina, and sometimes it made them sound as brave as lions. They said they were entirely confident that they knew exactly what they were talking about, but I never felt their words dispel their fear. Deep down they stayed as scared as all the rest of them.
Comus her son was wild I admit, but he was not my child. The wine god was his father, and of course that ended badly as it generally always does. Substance abuse. So that when you look at Agnes now, I know it is hard to remember that once we used to call her, along with her like, implacable.
Impacable. And we said that word with love in our hearts.
… and now we have forgotten so much of what we once knew about the dark places of wisdom.
Story telling I admit I still feel a dreamlike quality with her, and that she was not – She was not the same as all the others, that is simply implacable like the rest of them. The difference was in her voice. It is strange I know hearing her grim Glaswegian crossed with Greek way of speaking now. But once upon a time before, when she was not unhappy and broken down like she is today, she looked and listened before she spoke to me and then her voice held my own words back to me as if on a gentle summer breeze.
So I loved her.
Before fate intervened. Fate. Just as I am broken as well by this all too much fore-knowledge I have been given. And broken by the raising of the three children who were born as our fruits, and especially the one ‘from a far place’ who comes between us, and follows after me with his inescapable spear.
Yes, it was her listening words that drew me in. Time was, I always begin.
