As a child I recall, more than anything, the overlapping smells within Mrs. Grey’s salon.
     Rollers wrapped in remnants of colour rinsed hair, the apothecary like collection of chemicals and unguents, perfumes and potions, tinctures and lotions. The combination of which was heightened, sharpened, made more piquant by the acidity of that bright, mirror-thrown, boutique light.
     To my wide, hare pinned in headlights eyes the women within were terribly old.
Wrinkle carved, ancient and dreadful. They terrified me with their loose clacking teeth and with their harridan’s cackling.
      Long witch-like fingers thrust into spat upon hankies would ever insist upon
the scrubbing raw and flensing away of any trespassing blemishes or stains from my grubby-urchin cheeks and chin so that I grew to dread my mother led pilgrimages to this incandescently vivid, over-lit den of aged women.
     Something at the heart of a burgeoning pre-adolescence cried out that this coven was not a fit place for a man; despite being just a boy.
     I should be skulking amongst tree roots, down in the mire of the scum coated lagoon catching newts, grass snakes and toads; filth-ridden and invisible safe in the shadow of hawthorn and bramble.

                                                                        …

     Mrs. Grey went mad they said. I remember seeing her in the street while still too young to fathom the looks of delighted disgust, The aghast expressions of my elders and betters (some of whom had held court in that Circe-ian circle ever incanting social obituaries over their porcelain cauldrons) as she rocked on her haunches on the pavement, pissing.
     But it was her husbands eyes, tired beyond his years, pleading for her to just “come home” that told the harrowing tale of bottle, glass and pills that had taken her.
     And so on certain days I would watch my mother, her head bent forward as if at prayer, head and hair anointed and baptized (as I was never to see it elsewhere) as she talked up storms in teacups with curler-crowned crones, suffering the pungencies
of that Norn’s cave in silence – Earwigging - as the witches spun lies and gossip on threads long and thick enough to hang themselves.
     All the while, shielding my eyes from the glaring light, praying for the solitude, the warm familiarity of my own room and its comforting darkness.