Purple Prose (24 page)

Here is a story that begins in a Victorian primary school ground. A dog cocks its leg and pisses over the new girl's skirt. I take the new girl home where my mum sponges her skirt down with soap and warm water. They were hard days, I remember. Days of asphalt, grazed knees, taunts, teasing, corporal punishment and playground equipment that burned skin and broke bones. My friendship with Sarah Taylor and the pine forest surrounding the school were the only soft things available to me. Lying on a bed of brown, scented needles, we talked, laughed and shared secrets; but that all changed at high school. New friends found Sarah and her new friends didn't like me very much. That's when my problem story took over.

My Invisibility story consisted of one lonely lunch after another on the back step of a side entrance, far away from the netball courts, school oval and smokers' alley. Then, one lunchtime, my phys. ed. teacher, Carmel Morello, stopped to chat. Carmel Morello wore Adidas runners, skorts and those ankle socks with bobbles on the back. Her legs were smooth, muscular and tanned. She had a shiny, honey-brown bob, a cute up-turned top lip and dimples. Her cheeks were coloured and covered with that soft, peach-like fuzz. Lunchtimes together, when she was on duty, soon became a regular gig. We spoke mainly about gymnastics. She'd been a gymnast herself. We both loved Nadia Comaneci. Remember that sassy, young Romanian gymnast in the white leotard with the ponytail who made the double-tucked back salto executed from a handstand on the upper bar look like a walk in the park? After a month or so, Carmel Morello opened up the gym for me. I had it all to myself and tumbled around to my heart's desire. My story of Invisibility stopped being my main story. You know the rest.

But my Invisibility narrative is always lurking around on the
sidelines. It recognises vulnerable moments and infiltrates its way into my life in insidious ways. I have learnt to be vigilant but also to tease it too. Problems possess us. They love seriousness. They get worried when you don't treat them with gravity. I can highly recommend laughing at problems.

When I first met Jim, I'd got sick of my former partner's fraternising and was living as a single mother with our preschool-aged son. I was amazed when the handsome, eligible bachelor on campus sat on my desk and asked me to take him camping at Easter. When he proposed to me, one year later, I didn't think to ask myself: Is this man right for me? Does he have the personality and the characteristics that I can grow old with? Are the things I like about him going to get us through those tough patches?

Instead, I turned to my Invisibility, gave it the forks and told it, ‘See, you're wrong, I must be special and interesting.'

My giddy excitement at being valued blinded me to what was obvious to others, my mother especially. I'd overlooked the fact that the man I'd married did not put a high value on communication. We moved at a different pace to each other, rarely were we in time. And although we had a shared sense of humour and love for the underdog, our life priorities couldn't be more different. Sometimes this can work but in our case it didn't. His resentment and withdrawal added fuel to my problem story. I broke plates and hit out. And then it all ended up at Cable Beach with me swinging my leg and him telling me he didn't love me anymore.

I am thrilled when people take themselves out of the pigeonhole I've put them in and plonk themselves somewhere else. Ecstatic when they divvy themselves up and put themselves into multiple pigeonholes. Better still, kick apart those pigeonholes altogether. It's these kinds of experiences that have built great characters
in my writing. I have a character in my novel
Red Dirt Talking
whom I'm particularly fond of; his name is Maggot and he is a garbo. Maggot has tatts and dreadies. He philosophises. He speaks eloquently, quotes poetry and is widely read. Some readers say to me that Maggot is an ‘unbelievable' character. My response? ‘Truth is stranger than fiction.' I've filled notebooks as testimony to that saying.

The other day, I had coffee with my friend who finds it hard to chuck stuff out.

‘You look happier,' she observed. ‘Lighter.'

I told her I had became less wrapped up in why Jim didn't love me and was focusing more on who did love me and why. ‘I feel like I've moved the goalposts and changed the relationship I have with that particular problem.'

She knew what I meant. She'd been going through a bit of shit herself and we often talk about how hard it is to change the way you look at things and stop thinking of yourself as a certain type of person.

Bruises fade with time. Nowadays I've ditched the Bruise Inventory and become a love-story bowerbird. Not love between people because that's been done to death, but stories about things that sustain people when the people in their lives let them down or don't meet their expectations. Here's the beginning of mine:

This love story happens in the steamy tropics. It involves fruit and a certain degree of flexibility but it's not what you think …

That's as far as I got, but basically it's set during the months before I left the family home to begin the tumultuous decision-making
process of leaving or staying with Jim. I was doing a weekly yoga class held on the deck of the local café. Every week I placed my mat in the same spot under a peach-mango tree. When I was supposed to be practising shavasana, I looked up into the leaves of that tree. I watched it flower, I observed a small, green dot form from the flower. The dot grew from a kidney shaped bean into a fully-fledged mango, bright tangerine with a rosy flush. At the end of my last class, the teacher picked the mango and gave it to me. I ate it for breakfast, threw the seed into the garden, packed the car and drove away.

The mango, like the tide, reminds me that people fall in and out of love and the world goes on regardless. Somehow, for me, this is comforting.

I live in Melbourne and most of my clothes are black. Wearing black is an unwritten law one doesn't easily put aside, especially in writing enclaves and other avant-garde circles where the inner-city suburbs of Carlton and Brunswick are home to black-clad warriors of every age. Black is also the literary establishment colour and although I rarely cross this hallowed threshold, or consider myself a paid-up member, I do my best to abide by the ‘bylaws' of bookish circles and my adopted city. Add to this the absurdity of walking down the Paris-end of fashionable Collins Street without showing a predilection for black!

Ten years ago, when I first came to Melbourne, I eased into my new tribal colours without any shilly-shallying. Farewelling Perth's magnificent beaches, cotton clothes and deep suntans, I said
Guten Tag
to Melbourne's European-like autumns and winters. In Melbourne, black and I adopted one another; I felt reborn, although discreet touches of red, burgundy and purple were permitted to signify that I was not trapped in perpetual mourning and I never deserted my footy colours, remaining true blue to the irreconcilably ugly yellow and blues of my West Coast Eagles, in the good years – and the bad. But let's put black to bed for the time being.

Investigating my purple past in search of inspiration led me to recently conduct a wardrobe inventory. Patches of purple soon emerged: purple shoes and hats, mauve gloves, scarves and – the pièce de résistance – a magnificent aubergine-coloured,
anklelength woolly coat from the 70s. On top of the pile I reverently laid my most recent purple purchase, a hooded raincoat bought for five dollars from my local drycleaner who, after waiting six months for its absentee owner to return, eventually released it into my eager hands: a perfectly legal, if somewhat opportunistic transaction. So I slowly came to realise that a purple portfolio had been with me for years; purple lurking in the background, silent, regal and as enigmatic as purple should be. The evidence mounted that, once upon a time, I had made a pact with purple.

How had this come to pass, I wondered? How had this penchant for purple slowly dislodged the reds and burgundies that I was once so fond of and which, I hasten to assure any Muslim Urdu readers, had nothing to do with wine or ‘booze' – although
Sharab
may sound like Shiraz to the uninitiated. Oh
haraam, haraam
!