Purple Prose

by Liz Byrski

  11

  Undoing the past, too, is what the memoir writer does as she creates her narrative. Memoir asks: what is the shape of a life? And in answering that question, the memoirist reforms the past as she creates her patterning. Like the fabric maker, she weaves her warp and weft, assembling her artefact. If she doesn’t like the look of it, she can unravel and recreate it. If I wanted to, I could completely wipe out the story of the man who saw my purple sandals, or change it so that he seemed less ambivalent about me and I more fulfilled by my experiences with him. I could perhaps turn my purple toenails into a powerful statement of confidence and passion. But I avoid this temptation because memoir, to me, is not just about remembrance and reflection but also about mourning.

  12

  In London, I tell my cousins about the purple velvet scrap and ask if they know anything about our grandfather’s business. They know very little more than me. It seems that after serving in World War I, my grandfather took a job as an office boy in a firm of textile merchants who dealt in silk and woollens. Before long, he worked his way up the firm, developing new designs and adding colours. He was one of the first London traders to turn to artificial silk or rayon and to screen-printing rayons. According to my family, he was ‘rather a Fabian’ and felt that not only rich people should have coloured prints to wear. He also supplied parachute material for the troops during World War II. One of my cousins shows me a sepia photograph of my grandfather, his five brothers and their mother. The men are all dressed in suits with white flowers in their lapels and the mother, who was blind by that time, is dressed in a long dark dress. No one now remembers the occasion of this photo.

  All life stories are fragmentary but it seems wrong that the pieces passed on may be arbitrary. Lloyd Jones writes, ‘Foundations come in all forms – texture, language, heritage, entitlement. Some things are buffed to be remembered while other things fall away.’4 We may never know what things have fallen away or why.

  There are things we don’t tell others, that we keep silent with us to the grave. They may be a dark secret but often I think they are just small things, moments we want to hold close and never share, thoughts that come in the night but melt away by day, events that no longer hold any energy, that seem to have happened to someone else. We live many lives in one lifespan; so, too, our memories can seem to belong to a previous self.

  13

  The man who admired my purple sandals disappeared from my life. Later – many years later – he returned for a brief moment to ask forgiveness. His voice was still silky and rich, his hands now silent.

  14

  Where my mother has trouble remembering the past, my son has trouble forgetting. Not only does he remember many more dates and phone numbers and facts than most people, he also remembers people’s exact words, even years later. If I say, ‘Remember how you used to cry when it rained?’ he will reply, ‘Yes, and on the fourth of April two thousand and five you said to me, “It rains on the just and the unjust,” because you were annoyed that I was upset about the rain.’ Or if I say, ‘It’s a long time since we’ve been at this part of the river for a swim’, he might say, ‘Yes, Mum, we were here on a Sunday last January and we saw dolphins and I had a chocolate ice cream,’ and he will probably remember how many times and when we have been in this place over the past few years.

  His mind is so full of facts and words that sometimes he can bring nothing useful to the fore. If he remembered less, he might find navigating each day easier. It is as if his autobiographical memory seems to work differently from mine and many other people’s. Most of us, in remembering the events and feelings of our life, remember first times and unique times. We are interested in specific events only in so far as they contribute to meaning and a comprehensive story of the self that puts us at centre stage. For my son, other events and facts may be equally important to those that place him at the centre of his own story. This makes our discussions about the past very interesting, because he remembers quite different things from me and I find myself reviewing my take on earlier events we have shared. This is going to be a godsend when I’m my mother’s age!

  Interestingly, both failing to remember and failing to forget make imagining the future difficult. We use our memories to make decisions about the present and shape a projection of our future. A blank past creates a blank future and an over-cluttered past seems to have a similar effect.

  If ‘memories always have a future in mind’,5 I wonder what my son’s limited forgetting suggests about his vision of his future.

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  The purple paisley dress from the 60s sits in my mind as a memory. The image is very clear, and carries with it a strong emotional charge of mourning. If autobiographical remembering is ‘mental time travel’ as Tulving suggests,6 then this feeling could be a response to the loss of the past – imagined or otherwise – or the loss of forgetting. For something may be forgotten for good reason – what we would call repression or denial. Adam Phillips notes, ‘There is haunting and there is discarding; and it is not always within our gift to decide which is which.’7 Once discarded, now it haunts.

  I could ask my sisters if they remember this dress (I’m sure my brother wouldn’t), but what if none of them do remember it? Maybe I would have to delete this fragment from my story. What then would replace this particular haunting?

  16

  My mother is the last of her generation, just as my father was for his family. Like many of my generation, I wish now I’d asked her more when she was younger. There would have been silences and gaps – there is always the forgotten and the untold – but perhaps I would have gained a better sense of her and her parents’ lives. Soon, there will be no more tales. All we will have is our own faulty recollections and the family photo albums with their slanted stories.

  17

  Over the years, I seem to have collected many purple items – cushions, vases, clothes, jewellery and glassware. My brother made me two purple anodised steel speakers with jazzy purple covers. My sisters have regularly given me purple scarves and candles and personal items, the most recent being a stripey purple and black watch made of recycled 1930s bakelite.

  Purple, of course, is well known for its royal connection. But I have also read that purple is the colour of ambivalence (that combination of hot red and cool blue), of creativity, and of mourning. To me, purple is pure pleasure. And it seems right that pleasure may also encompass ambivalence, imagined and forgotten stories, and loss.

  ‘Is a Magnificent Story’: Interviews with Pigeon Fanciers – Sarah Drummond

  At the pinnacle of Mount Waychinicup lie several gnamma holes the size of bathtubs, carved into weathered granite by symbiotic relationships between weather and people. My friend and I were there, where granite boulders bigger than blocks of flats squatted among alpine gardens and stunted forests of marri. I knelt beside one of the holes and peered into the water. Tadpoles and strange beetles I’d never seen before swam around.

  I was thirsty. I put my hand into the water and just before I’d scooped it into my mouth I saw the feathers, circling in flotillas over the water’s skin. Tiny and iridescent purple, the feathers gleamed like an oil slick in a roadside puddle. The feathers changed my mind about drinking from the pool. Then the sight of a bird’s wing bones lying on the bottom confirmed it. A yellow glass bead glinted beside the bones.

  The peak is so isolated and difficult to get to that the only signs of humanity are ancient ones. And there lay a glass bead. In a pond. Tiny, shining feathers on the water’s surface. I reached down to the bottom of the pool and picked up the bead.

  The feathers, the bones and the bead. ‘It’s a pigeon’s leg ring!’

  I had visions of this doomed pigeon crashing into the mountain in an exhausted daze – or maybe it was killed by a raptor and taken to the peak to be eaten?

  That night in the cave, we lit a fire and cooked some kangaroo meat with garlic and mushrooms. As the sun set, the lakes and creeks sitting in the country below sh
one in the low light. We squatted in the dirt by the fire and inspected the leg ring with our headlamps. Then we got out our smart phones and started googling ‘Danriz. Loft #5’.

  Now you may think that googling a dead racing pigeon from a cave nestled into the top of a mountain is unusual, but it was quite sedate compared to the mother lode of pigeon fanciers we encountered on the internet that night. A YouTube clip, posted by the owner of our unfortunate pigeon, depicted his avian heroes posing coyly among graphics of sparkling rainbow fireworks and red love hearts, to the strains of that ultimate stalker song ‘Every Breath You Take’ by The Police. I recognised the purple feathers cloaking the birds’ throats. Seeing those feathers set to the music completely did my head in. The clip was unsettling but I kept returning to it like a dysfunctional lover. I wanted to understand such single-minded adoration, even fanaticism, for a pigeon.

  Over the next few days we explored the mountain and the one next to it, joined by a saddle of prickly hakea forest. We found a nineteenth-century sealers’ camp, the remains of a less-ancient marijuana crop, a white cross in a cave, close to the site where several narcotics detectives and the local whale spotter pilot had crashed in his Cessna in the 1990s. We became lost in the damp, mushroomy karri forest late at night and … well, all these things are another story. The whole time, I kept the pigeon’s leg ring in the coin pocket of my jeans. On returning to civilisation, I searched out the dead pigeon’s owner on the internet and rang ‘Danriz’.

  ‘Hello, I’m Sarah. You probably don’t know me. Um, I think I may have found one of your pigeons. Do you live in Albany? Do you have pigeons?’

  ‘Ah, yes, yes. You find my pigeon? Where you find my pigeon?’

  ‘At the top of the mountain, at Waychinicup.’

  ‘The mountain? At the top?’

  ‘Yes. At the top. I’m sorry. I didn’t find a live pigeon. I found feathers and bones of a bird and a leg ring, in a pond.’

  ‘Ahh, the peregrines …’ he sighed. ‘What number?’

  ‘Number? I don’t know. Loft Five?’

  ‘No, no. The blue ring.’

  ‘I only found a yellow ring.’

  ‘Oh, okay.’

  ‘You might know me. I used to sell fish at the Sunday markets.’

  His accent sounded Filipino and his name Dante echoed the impossibly romantic and deadly histories of Spanish conquistadors. The local Filipino community were great patrons of our stall. They liked to buy whole, fresh fish (and a fishmonger who has to fillet for hours on a Saturday appreciates a customer who prefers whole fish on a Sunday).

  ‘Fish? Not pigeon?’ Dante sounded confused. ‘You want to sell me fish?’

  ‘No. No! I want to give you the pigeon’s leg ring. I’ll drop it off tomorrow if you like. Where do you live?’

  Later that night, Dante sent me a text message: ‘Ah ok ako lang pala nakapag pauwi sa 1000km sa.wa. sikat ibon natin’ which I translated rather clumsily as, ‘Ah, okay homewards now SA 1000km. SA to WA. Famous bird.’

  Dante arrived home with his wife and children, as I parked on his verge the next day. He was a short, sturdy man with bushy eyebrows that made him look stern. In the YouTube clip he was wearing a short straw hat, Chilean style, but this day he was hatless and his hair was speckled with white. A Jack Russell rabbited around our feet. Dante showed me into the backyard, to the pigeon loft.

  ‘Three weeks ago, the club take three hundred birds to Laverton. One hundred birds came home.’

  ‘You lost two hundred birds?’

  ‘Yes, yes. The peregrines. They eat them. They eat only brains,’ he picked at his head with his fingers. ‘Only brains.’

  Two hundred pigeon brains.

  ‘How far is that? How long?’

  ‘They fly eight hundred and sixty-five kilometres. We set them at eight in the morning and the first three come home at six o’clock.’

  ‘I couldn’t drive from Laverton to Albany in that time.’

  ‘Yes. Very fast. We have big races in Adelaide. This bird, this is a famous bird,’ he pointed one out to me. The pigeon eyed me. A fine looking bird, sleek and muscular, its beautiful purple throat reminding me of the gnamma hole at the top of the mountain.

  ‘All over Australia, people come to race birds in Adelaide. We send them when they are babies. November thirtieth. Then July we race them from Marla or Coober Pedy, one thousand kilometres to Adelaide. That bird is a famous bird. He came –’ he holds up two fingers.

  ‘Second?’

  ‘Yes. Three thousand dollars prize.’

  I have to say that at this point I was dangerously close to becoming a pigeon fancier. I’d entered the murky world of a subculture previously beyond my ken. I was beginning to understand the theme song to his YouTube clip. Stalker song? I think not! Oh, can’t you see, you belong to me is really about the relationship between a man and his homing pigeon.

  ‘Can you tell me the name of the club president?’ I asked Dante.

  Dante put me in contact with an old man who knew a thing or two about racing pigeons. Days later, Ray and I sat in the sun outside his house. He was eighty-seven and had been in bed all week with the flu, so he was appreciating the warm air.

  ‘You want to know about pigeons?’ He handed me a book. ‘This is the best bloody book I ever read, mate. Got everything in it. Here, take it.’

  ‘They say I have a way with birds and animals,’ he said. ‘But specially birds. I’ve been racing birds for seventy years now. Since I was little. That’ll open your eyes, hey?’ We talked pigeons for a little while. He told me about his pigeon lung, a common pigeon fancier’s affliction. He talked of how young people weren’t interested in racing, how well the races used to be attended and not so much anymore. I followed him up the hill to his hutches where pigeons sat on the roofs, gleaming, iridescent, eyeing me cautiously.

  ‘But I can tell you another story if you want to listen. It’s all in here.’ He stabbed with his fingers at his West Coast Eagles beanie. ‘Have you ever heard of the Kalgoorlie race riots?’

  ‘No … I don’t think so.’

  ‘Nineteen thirty-four, mate. Bloody race riots. I was there. I remember it. It’s all in here.’

  There was an intensity to his words. I thought, my goodness, these pigeon racers are fanatics. Race riots? Did these guys really riot over their pigeons? In 1934?

  ‘Let’s go and sit down,’ I said. ‘Do you mind if I record your story?’

  ‘Nah, nah, mate. I’m happy to talk. You can tape whatever you like.’

  The recording, because I couldn’t work out how to do a voice recording on my phone in the seconds I had before he started talking, is a ten-minute video of a pigeon fancier’s sock in a black plastic sandal. This next piece is transcribed verbatim.

  ‘In Kalgoorlie about that time, they reckon they were doing slingbacks, you know? To make a bit of money on the side?’

  ‘Who? The pigeon owners?’

  ‘Nah mate! The Italians. And the Aussies. Anyway. That’s only half the story. This day … er, the bloke’s name was Jordan. And the Ding’s name was Mataboni, he was the one who owned the –’

  ‘Was that Maroni?’

  ‘Nah, Mataboni.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘He threw this bloke Jordan out of his pub, you know? But when he hit the ground, he was stone dead. And some stupid bastard yells out, “He’s got a knife!” but Mataboni didn’t have a knife at all but anyway, the game was on.’

  ‘So the Australian man was dead?’ I had realised by then that this story wasn’t about pigeons.

  ‘Yeah. But anyway, it was one of the best sporting families in Kalgoorlie, the Jordans. The game was on. So this Saturday morning, six or eight o’clock, a bloke, an Aussie bloke, he come to our place, said to my mum, “We’re gonna give the Dings the run around tonight, Mum.” You know … lucky for me I got it all in here. And that night it was on, mate. The Aussies burnt all their hotels down. We were kids. I remember it all. Then they burnt all their
houses down. All their shops down. Ah ha. Then anyway. There was a copper there and he’s taking all the kids’ names, you know? He couldn’t stop them, a lot of bloody maniacs, anyway, this is true. They were going along saying, “This one’s a good Ding”, “This one’s a bastard, we’ll burn his house down”, this is true. So they came to this house and this Slav is standing in front of his house trying to protect his family and the bastards shot him dead, see?’

  Ray shook his head. ‘My old mate, he said, “You can’t do that,” he said. He said that. They were his exact words. He said, “I don’t mind burning his house but I don’t wanna shoot no poor bastard.” They were the exact words he used to me. But he died years ago, so I’m using them myself now, see.

  ‘You may think it’s bullshit but it’s not bullshit, mate. This is the truth … but anyway … two days burning houses down and a bloke called Joe who had more testosterone than bloody brains, so all the Dings were down by the railway line building trenches to save themselves, dug themselves in and this bloke got his mates together and they pulled all these pickets off the fences and used them to charge them, they charged them just like in the war with bayonets. It’s true!’

  ‘That was nineteen thirty …?’

  ‘Nineteen thirty-four.’

  ‘Was that the same year as the Kristallnacht? You know, the night of the breaking glass, with the Nazis …?’

  ‘Nah, nah that was a few years later.’

  ‘Oh. Okay.’

  ‘Yeah well. There was other blokes see? Good blokes. My father was a violent man. You wouldn’t know it from looking at me but he was. Oh, but he was a violent bastard. Anyway, so that night, he got his twenty-two out the bloody corner behind the kitchen door and a packet of cartridges out the cupboard, I can see it now. Like it was the other night. I didn’t know he was gonna go out and find this Ding though and bring the poor bastard home, see? His best mate from up on the mine. So he brings him home and hides him under his bed for two days and two nights. I didn’t even know he was there. Two days he hid him. I’ll bet that’d open your eyes, hey?