Hex

by Jenni Fagan

Your cell is several floors below the city. It is far below footfall, or taverns, or flats; below beds, or kitchens, or hugs, or hope, or church, or prayer, or freedom, or laughter, or air; below shuttered windows, or dogs asleep in front of fires. It is so far below the seasons they might as well not exist. There is only one kind of weather in here – freezing cold and cloaked in darkness. The air is stagnant.

Over three hundred tailors worked on Anne’s wedding dress. It is all spectacle. Weddings, births, hangings. There is a bloodlust in humans. Let’s watch a girl hang to death! The King is showing all his might! Who would fight a man who has taken down the Devil himself?

A woman’s voice is a hex. She must learn to exalt men always. If she doesn’t do that, then she is a threat. A demon whore, a witch – so says everyone and the law.

My grandmother’s house smelled of lavender. Sunlight came through her kitchen window each afternoon, and it would land on her armchair, and I would sleep there curled up warm as a cat when I was a child.

We try to look bigger than we are sometimes. At other times we have to be smaller than we are. We do other things. Try to take down governments. Make great art. Keep others. Work without anyone noticing what we do for whole lifetimes sometimes. We hold hands. Drink too much or not at all. We traverse boundaries whilst looking ordinary. We give beauty and patience and science and our talent and our hearts and what was once firm in our bodies – we bestow our lives to this world, most often unseen.

We take our chances if we go out after darkness. We often walk down the middle of the road at night. – Same. – We know that every close or alley or road might appear like it has an exit, but it may in fact be one without end. – Aye. – If the State wanted us less dead, they’d do more about our murders.

How much money your family has, or the colour of your skin, those make up an unfathomable number of ignored murders. It might depend on what day it is, if there is a big news story elsewhere, or there are no gratuitous details for people to read over their morning coffee, then it probably still won’t capture the news.

Girls learn to shine in secret. We learn there are many reasons not to draw the eyes of men towards us; and if we do, there can be no gain in it. We dip our head first. We are meant to not raise our gaze, and that has been bored into us for centuries. We are meant to never let a look appear too direct. Don’t be confrontational. Play nice – so nobody kills you.

Put those heels away. That click, click, click, click is Morse code for rapists. It says their sentences will be lenient or non-existent. If only she didn’t wear stilettos. If only she didn’t walk through a park. If only she didn’t go out at night. If only those smart, brilliant sisters had realised police officers would later take selfies by their dead bodies.

A storm arrives at the exact second when a girl learns she’ll never be free.

There is not a storm on earth has not come from a woman. The earth and skies and stars and galaxies and light and dark itself are all our mother. It is she who birthed us.

How come you know so much, Iris? – Smart women taught me. – How’d they teach you? – They wrote the stories they were not meant to, were published by others who broke rules to do so, they sang the songs they were not meant to sing, stole time to make paintings that left breadcrumbs for those of us who came after them, so we might follow them through the forest and try to get out the other side; they acted in films, on streets, in bars, or I just listened, cleaning loos alongside them, or sat next to a stranger who’d chat away: those are all women who taught me.

Will you do something for me, Iris? – Aye. – At noon on the fourth of December every year, will you come to Castlehill and bring me a rose? Will you lay it down and say, This is a rose for Geillis Duncan, who held my hand and made me smile and left this world long before me and was my friend a long, long time ago? – Aye, I will. – A rose – grey as the whisper of a tornado? – What other!

Once upon a time there was a world, and it was hung up to spin in a universe without explanation. It was so stunning. Outer space curled around it in black so it would better shine. Stars travelled to gaze upon it from all different parts of the galaxy. Many of those stars died hundreds of thousands of years before. Light is a time-traveller. All things are possible. One day many years after the dinosaurs had gone and the fires had cooled and set to stone and the ice had carved her valleys and melted into great vast lakes, there was a first girl and she was born from nothing – a pearl in the sea – atoms – particles.

In a matter of hours my voice won’t exist any more, nor my hair being tugged by a breeze, nor my limp as I go to church. I won’t ever see my family or friends or the sunlight making the fields in East Lothian blaze. I won’t pluck and roast a chicken. I won’t gut a fish or peel potatoes. I will not wake early to worry before the start of day.

Going outside to die. That’s what it will be. I haven’t been free to walk outside for ever so long, and I wish I could just walk away from the guards and the King’s men and the hangman, just go to the baker and buy a warm roll and take it back to my sisters and eat it and hug her wee fat baby and drink tea and listen to her talk about nothing. The baby will never know me now. No family is allowed to see me here. I wonder if they’ll come to watch? I hope they don’t.

Aye! A witch-pricker’s finger can be pointed at any one of us. It chose me. There is a hangman’s noose. There are cells and locked doors. We all know it. They belong to the people who own all of us. It’s true the witch-pricker picked us out one by one, but he did not point with his finger. It is a chicken bone (boiled clean) that pokes out from his shirt-sleeves.

One of the men asked if I would give him my . . . eyes. He smelled of alcohol, and he asked if I’d pluck my own eyes out and hand them over and go away a blind girl forever more, and to my shame, because I was in so much pain and they wouldn’t stop, I said, Aye! The man laughed at that. Laughed and laughed.

See if there was a devil, I’d have wed him just so he’d kill all the ones that hurt me – don’t they think about that? I’d have demanded fire and brimstone for my wedding gift.

Men want to kill – they do – and it just so happens this t...

I must be sorry, therefore I am. Those were my allocated words, given at birth, pinned on my crib so I’d know. Since I learnt them, I just rotate them.

The Bass Rock turns pink when the sun goes down, and it is so pretty it’s hard to believe it is really a prison.

All that, and the only sins I lay with were the ones they put upon me. My whole life no man had ever touched me until they came to bruise my skin and break body and mind.

I would like to reassure you that five hundred years from now the fine line of misogyny no longer elongates from uncomfortable to fatal, yet I cannot.

Ever since the first of days, woman was told she was here solely to serve and obey, to bend and twist, to hide the sharp tip of her tongue. God help her if she is a mirror. If she reflects back at them what they are without even trying.

I am cold, I am tired, I am frightened. None of this is because I lay with any devil. There is no fallen angel to give credit for any of this. There is just hunger and pain and the sad realisation that my life will not end with a husband, or grandchildren, or even my own babies. There will be no home with a hearth that I can decorate with willow baskets and flowers, no doorstep to clean, no meals to cook, no clothes to mend. Instead there will just be an early and long dark descent into nothing. The nothing we all try to avoid. I did not think it would arrive so soon. I miss my family!

Silence is complicity. Non-action is a form of approval. I will not be passive.