She was more cunning than millions of men; she was more clever than millions of gods; she was more shrewd than millions of akhu-spirits. There was nothing of which she was ignorant in heaven and earth … So-and-so born of so-and-so lives, the poison having died, through the speech of Isis the Great, mistress of the gods. Egyptian Spell, found at Deir el-Medina3 Here at the summit of ‘Colomendy’, the luxury rest home in Cardiff Bay, my mother’s powers are failing. And she knows it. Strange though it seems to seek out truth in the temple of forgetting, this is my one resource. We must speak. Here’s the last vestige of light before the dark. Salvatore’s mystical mumbo-jumbo tells me nothing. It turns my stomach, the prattle of an inveterate fabulist. One thing is sure: he has stalked me all my life. Is it too late to turn to Elise? Even before her current withdrawals from memory began, for decades we kept stumm, by mutual consent, about Dad.
