Purple Prose (22 page)

Apart from the haystacks, Monet's ultraviolet lily ponds are the works of art that continue to reverberate in memory long after that WA exhibition all those years ago. What is lost in reproduction, apart from their size – reaching from top to bottom of the gallery walls and equal in width – is their sheer vitality and presence. Viewed from a platform with a hundred other visitors, my gaze fell into purple watery depths, reflecting willow fronds and drifting cloud, the whole studded with the budding yellow counterpoint of
Hemerocallis
lilies.
¹⁴
Even in that crowded room, it took my breath away, and perhaps only now do I understand the enormity of its impact: to glimpse momentarily another way of being on the periphery of light.

bruise
/bruz/
v.
(bruised, bruising)
– v.t.
1.
to injure by striking or pressing, without breaking the skin or drawing blood.
2.
to damage (fruit, etc.) by applying pressure, without breaking the skin.
3.
to injure or hurt superficially;
to bruise a person's feelings.
4.
to crush (drugs or food) by beating or pounding.
5.
to scratch or mark the surface of (leather or rock) usually for decoration.
– v.i.
6.
to develop a discoloured spot on the skin as a result of a blow, fall, etc.
– n.
7.
an injury due to bruising or contusion.
8.
a damaged area on a piece of fruit, etc., due to bruising [… ME, from OE
brysan
crush]

Macquarie Dictionary

Only a few months after he told me, I was cycling home from a friend's place when I hit the curb and flew over the handlebars. I don't know if it was the wine, or my bike light not working, but in the morning, I was all sorts of sore. A bruise budded on my thigh. Throughout the week, it spread around my upper leg and down to my knee, pinking then purpling. Then it did this amazing retro thing with mustard yellow. I didn't cover that bruise. Instead, I wore it like a medal. In my short denim skirt, I showed that bruise off. It instigated sharp, sucked-in breath and comments like, ‘J-eeezhas, Jacq, what happened?' People reached out to touch it but drew back. I was proud of that bruise and, for a long time after, I wondered why.

Now I know. To me, that bruise represented the internal bruise I'd suffered when my husband of eighteen years told me that he didn't love me anymore. No one can see those kinds of bruises. You carry them around inside you and knock them against the hard edges of life. Jim and I had been spending some time apart –
a ‘trial separation' the psych called it. I was trying to make a decision. My husband was not going to change. Could I live with that and practice ongoing acceptance? If I couldn't, it was time to leave and move on. She made it sound easy.

We meet after sunset at Cable Beach foreshore. It is a blood-orange sky and the lighthouse to the south strikes a flash-pulse that matches one out of every ten of my heartbeats. I sit side-saddle on the railing, back to the beach, swinging my foot. Jim straddles the railing like it's a horse. I take a deep breath and say, ‘I can't make a decision until I know where I stand. My feeling is that you don't love me anymore.'

Jim is unusually quick in his response. ‘Yep,' he says, ‘that about sums it up.'

Ouch! Striking without breaking the skin or drawing blood. Bruise, right? Big bloody bruise.

I paraphrase the whole thing again just to make sure he hasn't misunderstood the question, but nope, he got it right the first time. He lists reasons that seem so flimsy and unsubstantial. I listen and the foot that is attached to my leg keeps swinging while my world tumbles down around me.

Before he leaves he asks, ‘Are you alright?'

‘Sure,' I say in a small voice. It is all I can manage.

We all bruise. It's inevitable, isn't it, that people will bruise us. We know they will, because we've been bruisers ourselves. Girls are particularly good at landing blows on soft places with pointy words and deeds. I've been bruised by lots of people. Truth be told, I've done a lot of bruising back although I try hard, very hard nowadays to limit that. There's enough bruising being done in the world without me adding to it.

I used to think that some of us are like mangoes and bruise
easily, while others are of the potato variety and can take a bit of a pounding. It's a character-type thing. But my observations have revealed that we can morph from potatoes to mangoes, and vice-versa. Most of us develop tough skins at some stage in our lives. But there are times when we peel off our armour or allow people to get in. We expose our soft, squishy side to people we feel we can trust or people we want to trust. We thrust our vulnerability at them, whether they like it or not, and say, ‘Here you go, welcome to the Inside Me.'

After Jim declared he didn't love me anymore, I went back to the place where I'd been boarding and played Scrabble with a friend. I put down a seven-letter word on the triple word score – ‘bruised' – and scored a whopping eighty-three points. For about ten seconds, this made me feel better. Twenty seconds, when she assured me she wasn't going easy on me. Twenty seconds of not hurting at this stage of the separation game is good. Baby steps …

I tossed and turned that night. I got up with the sun and walked from the beach to the port. I shared my journey with a big dog that refused to ‘Go Home!' Maybe it didn't have a home. In my sleep-deprived delirium I told myself that the dog was there to protect my heart, at which point, he took off into the dunes and I never saw him again. A small, stripey fish swam alongside me for the rest of the way and I made sure not to scare off this travelling companion by imposing grand titles on it like ‘Heart Protector'.

I hitched a ride back home with a chopper pilot and we shared break-up stories. His wife had suffered from postnatal depression.

‘I knew something was up when she said the sand was black,' he told me.

The birth was traumatic. In the middle of the night, she'd tapped him on the shoulder and told him it was time to go to hospital.

‘ “Yeah, yeah,” I told her, “just like last time and seventeen hours later you had the baby. Wake me in the morning.” '

She'd pointed to the baby's leg dangling from between her thighs.

‘She screamed the bloody hospital down. They couldn't do a caesarean coz the baby was stuck in the birth canal, so they broke her pelvis to get him out.'

In the end, the doc unscrewed the forceps and used them like salad servers to dislodge the baby's head. They dislocated his shoulder to get him out and when he reached the outside world, he was purple. The doctor put the baby on his lap and tried giving it oxygen but, in all the confusion, the hose had been dislodged and oxygen was hissing unchecked from the bottle.

‘I hooked it up, watched Mick turn pink and thought, finally, everything would be okay. A few months after, she said the sand was black and, you know what? Her mother fucking agreed. She patted her bloody hand and said, “Yes, darling, it is,” and things were never right after that.'

He dropped me off at my driveway. With the car door open and the engine running, we talked some more.

‘She left me with the kids and ran off with another bloke,' he said.

I asked him what helped soothe the bruising that comes with being left and unloved.

‘Fishing,' he told me, without thinking. He shook my hand before driving away. ‘Good luck,' he said.

It was like I was going into battle.

I tried sleeping again, without any luck, so I decided I'd tackle the mound of dirty washing. The place I was staying didn't have a machine. I'd made arrangements with a woman across the road that ran a B&B to wash my clothes. It took three visits.

When I arrived with the first load, Cathy asked me how I was
going. I burst into tears and told her, ‘Jim doesn't love me anymore.'

This prompted an eco cycle–long conversation.

‘You know what, Jacq?' she finally asked as I piled the wet load into my basket.

‘No,' I said, ‘what's that?'

‘At times like this I try and embrace the Buddhist concept of love. Do you know what that is?' She waited for me to stop and listen. ‘Embrace the enemy. Wish them all the love that you would wish onto yourself.'

Through my mind flashed an image – me standing, feet planted, forearms crossed in front of my face, fists clenched.

‘No deal!' I muttered out aloud, pegging up my first load. ‘No deal!' All I could think of was how I wanted to bruise Jim back. Hurt him as much as he'd hurt me.

During my second visit to Cathy's washing machine, she asked again how I was going.

‘Not great,' I told her. ‘I've spent the last two hours crying.'

She looked at me. ‘You know what, Jacq?'

‘No,' I sniffed. ‘What?'

‘There are some people in the world that need to learn to cry more and there's others that need to cry less.'

On my last visit, Cathy caught me in the driveway trying to make a quick getaway with my coloureds.

‘How you going, Jacq?' she asked.

‘I only cried once!' I announced proudly.

‘That won't last,' she shook her head. ‘You'll go up and down and this will go on for years and years.'