Dion: His Life and Mine
Read Dion: His Life and Mine Online
Authors: Sarah Cate Anstey
Copyright © 2013 by Sarah C Anstey
All rights reserved
Cover design by Annette Chown
Image fotolia.com
This book is copyright material and must not be copied,
reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed
or publicly performed or used in any way except
as specifically permitted in writing by the author,
as allowed under the terms and conditions under
which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by
applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised
distribution or use of this text may be a direct
infringement of the author’s rights and those
responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
This is a work of fiction and is not intended to be used
as an authority on the properties of plants
or the use of herbal medicine.
Chapter Two
Bo
d
y of a man, hea
d
of a bull, heart of gold
Chapter Three
A Tall Dark Handsome Dream
Chapter Five
Simple Blind Faith
Chapter Six
That Wedding Photograph
Chapter Seven
A Mountain of Mas
Chapter Eight
The Birth of Libertia
Chapter Nine
Good News Comes in Threes
Chapter Ten
Meeting the In-Laws
Chapter Eleven
Crete Revisited
In honour of the artistic achievements of Dionysus, the Kingdom of Athens has decided to hold an annual festival and competition.
King Theseus would feel privileged if Princess Ariadne of Crete and her sons accepted the hospitality of Athens and attended the inaugural event.
It is a typical formal invitation from one Royal House to another. Still, one might have expected a little more warmth; Theo is my brother-in-law. Although, considering my sister and I have barely spoken in over twenty years, it is practically oozing with affection. There is some irony that my first crush is paying such a tribute to my only love. I suspect his son has had more to do with it. I hear he proclaims, as many others have over the years, he is Libertia’s greatest fan and Dion is his idol.
There is a certain photograph of Dion that has captured the populace and has been reproduced on postcards, t-shirts, key-rings, unofficial biographies, posters ... It was taken for an interview he did here, on Crete, shortly before he left this world. He is staring straight at the camera with one of his guitars obscuring part of his face. He’d cut his hair short, the day before, to signify a ‘new start.’ It is a beautiful photograph and used to be my favourite; now it cruelly reminds me that I have aged alone, without him and others I loved. Some say ‘never go back’ but I have found it can help me to move forward. And so I have decided to accept the invitation and go back through the years.
I can’t deny, i
t would be good to get some things off my chest. Put some stories straight. I’ve waited long enough. There have been a lot of rumours about me: ‘bad mother’, ‘runaway, wayward daughter’, ‘junkie wife’ are the favoured stories people tell about my life, they’re the ones that have made the most money; for others, not me. And there have been even more rumours about Dion. A whole industry sprung up after his death; articles, books - dissecting his talent, fuelling his legend and betraying his beliefs.
None of them can explain Dion:
Was he a myth? - Or merely a man? Everyone seems to have a ‘true story’ about him. But whose truth is it? It certainly wasn’t his. Now it’s time to tell Dion’s story and mine.
Ariadne, Crete.
The Cretans
My father, as you’ve probably heard, was a king. In fact, he wasn’t just a king; he was a Tyrant with a capital T. Being a girl I was mostly ignored, unless he needed a pretty distraction for visiting statesmen. Sure, then it would be all smiles: “Have you met my beautiful daughter? She’s a real firecracker, don’t know what I’d do without her, great cook too.” But hours, days before, I would be put through my paces. “Don’t eat that! I don’t want the Ambassador from Sparta thinking I breed bloated women.” Or “Don’t go outside, or your skin will look like that of a farmer’s wife.”
When he was a new king and a handsome young man, my father had set the gossip columns astir by marrying the much sought-after Princess Pasiphaë. My mother was so beautiful that people thought she must be the daughter of the sun, or so the Cretan News claimed. They had the perfect courtship followed by the perfect wedding - according to
Yiasas!
,
which had an exclusive deal and the photographs to prove it. When we were much younger, and still believed in fairy tales, my sister and I would get out the wedding trunk with all the trinkets of the day and rifle through the endless scrapbooks filled with press cuttings and wedding photographs.
“What a magical day!” I would say, holding up a group photograph of everyone we had been told to love, or at least pretend we respected, smiling and dressed exquisitely. “Mum looked so happy!”
“Well Dad was gorgeous!” Phaedra would say. I would nod in agreement staring at the good-looking young man, whose smile was unknown to me, as Phaedra sighed dreamily “I hope I marry someone just as handsome!”
So, you see, even their daughters were fooled. When things started to go badly, Phaedra and I would visit the trunk more and more, but, when things got worse, I abandoned it, just as our parents abandoned each other. Sometimes, we would find my mother’s wedding ring next to the sink, carelessly forgotten. Phaedra and I would find it and take it back to her. My mother never thanked us, but looked at us accusingly, before putting it back on her skinny finger saying: “Of course, how stupid of you Pasiphaë, the statesman from somewhere or other is coming to discuss such and such and you must play your part, keep up your appearance.” She never wore her perfect diamond engagement ring. She didn’t know where she had lost it and didn’t seem to care. My father never took off his wedding ring. It was a symbol after all, if not of love, then something.
Having lived on an island all his life, and ruling it for half, my father thought of himself as one and needed nothing, and certainly nobody, else. As a charming prince and handsome king, he had his pick of mistresses and he wasn’t as choosy as he had been for a wife. If you had a pulse and you were female, you’d do. He wasn’t loyal to them and they weren’t loyal to him. Most of them ran off to the mainland, selling their stories for thousands before finding careers as glamour models and contestants on any programme which had any vague reference to ‘celebrity.’ I guess it’s a career path of sorts.
After producing the required heir and two daughters to barter and gain alliances with, my father didn’t have much use for my mother. I remember hearing her sobbing and him shouting. Peeking through a crack in the great wooden door of his office, I saw him pick up one of the trophies he had won for hunting, when he was younger and fitter. I was afraid he was going to hit her with it. Instead, he caressed it. “My wife should be like my trophies,” he told her, “polished and mute.” Unless he couldn’t be bothered to pay for sex with trinkets and flattery, then my mother was required to be as noisy as she could and put on a good show.
My mother: lonely, confused and fed-up with island life, sought affection from other sources. At first from us, her children and from the loyal entourage who had come to live with her when she married, but who seemed to dwindle from year to year. Ambassadors from her father’s land dutifully checked to see if she was being treated well, but could do nothing about it if she wasn’t. They brought her presents of puppies and kittens and other animals, and these became my mother’s solace. My father’s spin-doctors were in rotation and every time an ambassador came to visit, a whisper of a sordid affair would begin humming. In the end it was better to make my mother out to be a seducing adulterous, animal-loving whore, than admit that my parents’ disastrous union had produced a dead son, two inconveniently living daughters and my brother, Asterius, the monster.
In reality, when Aster came along, my father was over the moon. Here was a second son and heir, a spare in case something should happen to his eldest and dearest (which it did) and to cancel out his two daughters. Attention was lavished on my mother during the pregnancy. We three older children had a glimpse of what my father must have been like during their courtship, which inspired such captions as:
He takes her hand, holds it gently; He is adoringly attentive; The happy couple walk as one; The newlyweds only have eyes for each other.
It was the happiest my family ever were. When my baby brother was born, he was everyone’s darling. My father doted on him and named him Asterius after his own father.
The Cretan Chronicle
nicknamed Aster, ‘Our Little Star’ and his first years, at least, were filled with laughter. My father stopped sleeping around and even moved back into my mother’s room. She would make jokes about his snoring or complain that he took all the covers. “You don’t need covers when you’ve got me!” My father would laugh, before kissing her. My older brother would make mock vomiting sounds and Phaedra and I would laugh, but secretly we were happy and couldn’t get enough of their affection for each other.
Then the ‘condition’ began to develop. We noticed bumps first, but weren’t too concerned. Toddlers are always falling over. But the bumps didn’t disappear, they got bigger and bigger. Before his left eye was hidden by a tumour, he was hidden from public view. Father’s spin-doctors made up a story about him being ill, practically the only truth they ever told. Aster’s upper body started developing a lot quicker than his lower body. Doctors, specialists were brought in, but after the initial shock caused by the boy’s appearance, they just shook their heads, sadly. Could nothing be done? Surgery? My mother begged, pleaded. But they all said that Aster was too young for the type of surgery he needed and even if it worked, it would affect his development permanently. The whispers became murmurs. Someone from inside had leaked the story. Reporters and photographers camped outside the palace, peeking their cameras through windows, hoping to catch a snap, which would cost Aster humiliation and earn someone else millions, for the photographs. Instead of ‘Our Little Star’, people thought up cruel names for him. One tabloid even held a competition. The worst, ‘Minotaur’: Minos’s bull, stuck. The rumour mill went into overdrive as to how this half-man, half-bull could have been produced. The same newspaper that had championed my mother during her engagement to my father, had earned millions from the exclusive rights to the wedding photographs, now printed an horrific exclusive:
Animal-seducing Queen has Pet Bull’s Child!
The fact that my father didn’t seek libellous action was taken as proof of his wife’s shame, but in truth, he had practically written it. All’s fair in love and the media.
The shock of her baby’s condition, the media’s backlash and the humiliation it caused, meant that my mother withdrew from us, the rest of her children. Hiding from the world, she added fuel to the already blazing fire of speculation.
So there we were, the Cretans: tyrannical father, the doomed eldest son, bull-humping mother, her hideous son and the two daughters, who would likely go the same way as their mother. Phaedra still sought solace in the trunk and, at first, expected me to join her. But the times of looking through the old wedding photographs were over, just as any childish dreams we had had of our parents’ marriage.
During my adolescence, I kept out of the palace as much as possible. It was as if laughter and happiness had been locked up along with Aster. I used to go for long rambles, anything to eat up time. Once, whilst I was looking out to sea, I heard a noise and, turning too swiftly, slipped on the gravel surface and fell twisted, grazing my leg badly and spraining my ankle. The noise I had heard had been a dog. It was soon followed by its mistress. Although I had never seen her, I recognised her: the mysterious, evil witch who lived alone on the edge of society. As she knelt next to me and took my ankle in her hands, I realised that my father had a hand in her reputation.
“Does this hurt?” I answered her with a wince. “Not broken then. Some bellis perennis should do the trick.”
“Bellis perennis?” I repeated. She pointed to a patch of flowers next to my foot.
“Oh, daisies” I said.
“Daisies to the ignorant, bellis perennis to you. Treat herbs with respect and they will repay in kind,” she said, scrunching up the flowers in what seemed to be a very disrespectful way and applying them to my foot. She helped me to her cottage and ordered me to take the pressure off my foot, while she brewed hot tea, which smelt strange and tasted even stranger.
“Which one are you? The oldest or the youngest?” she asked, watching me sip my tea.
“I’m the oldest girl, if that’s what you mean.”
“Take my advice. Grow up fast.”
I nodded and carried on sipping the tea.
“And how is your Pa these days?”
“The same,” I shrugged.
“Still a bastard then?”
“He speaks very highly of you too.”
“I’m sure he does. ‘Hell hath no fury as a woman scorned’, but a snake bite isn’t as vicious as a man turned down, no matter how politely it’s done.” And so I learned how she had earned her reputation.
In the early days of his courtship of my mother, my father had picked out Bris, when playing the part of the dutiful suitor became too much for him. Instead of giving in to his advances, accepting his trinkets and his flattery or lying back and thinking of the mainland, money and fame, Bris had slipped something called ‘tanacetem partheniem’ into my father’s cup. Whilst he spent the night snoring, instead of groaning with his own pleasure, Bris had slipped down the drainpipe and made for the wood. Since that night, she had lived in seclusion, a hermitess in the forest, amongst her plants and away from prying eyes. This suited both her and my father’s depiction of her.
So she hadn’t quite turned him down politely.
“He had a good night’s sleep, which he wouldn’t have had if I’d been in the mood.”
After an hour, the daisies had done their trick. I readied to leave and thanked Bris.
“Those over there,” she said, pointing to a clump of green.
“What?” I asked.
“You wanted to know what tanacetum parthenium is. It’s those over there.”
I blushed. The bit about being able to read minds was obviously true. Ignoring my embarrassment, Bris went on.
“The ones next to them are henbane. They soothe inflamed eyes and joints, if taken carefully - or they can cause convulsions.”
“Which ones? Those?” I asked, pointing.
“No, the ones on the other side. That’s chicory. Never mistake henbane and chicory.”
“Why?” I asked, “What does chicory do?”
“It’s hallucinogenic,” Bris said, shutting the door.
And so began my herbalist training. I learnt the art of herbs and their secret powers from Bris. She cured my adolescent skin with wild rose pelargonium and early broken hearts with chickweed. It was, however, through my mother that I discovered nepeta. One day she was late down for breakfast. We were obliged to meet as a family at meal times. My father started getting angrier and angrier and demanded she be brought down. I volunteered to get her. She was lying on her bed, half-dressed, distraught and just kept murmuring:
“They’ve gone, he’s taken them away, my babies,” over and over again. Just as I was about to question her, Ilia, her maid, came in carrying a bowl of warm water and a towel.
“What’s going on Ilia? What’s she talking about?”
“Her cats Madam,” Ilia said bending down and gently washing my mother’s face and arms, “they’ve all gone missing.” At this my mother moaned.
“Mother, we can’t do anything about it now. It’s breakfast and you know what father is like about meals. But if you come now, I promise I will go out myself and find all your kittens.” At that, she rallied a little and came down for breakfast. By the bottom step she had transformed into the composed mistress of the house. Father didn’t blast her in front of the servants; he was the only one who was going to benefit from any inside information.
After breakfast, when my mother had retired to her rooms, I slipped out to find the cats. I made my way to Bris’s cottage, hoping that she may have some idea what to do or where to look. In a clearing I saw little clumps of furry balls. I went to the nearest one and was terrified to see that it was completely immobile. They all were. I was just sitting on a clump of grass, wondering how I was going to get ten different varieties of cats of different ages shipped over by lunch time when I heard footsteps approaching.