Purple Prose

by Liz Byrski

  ‘I tell you what, the people who were there, there’s no one left alive now. My mates are all dead. One of my mates said afterwards, “You couldn’t find any young men between sixteen and twenty in Kal after that. They’d all bolted!” ’

  ‘Right. So you reckon men between sixteen and twenty were the ones who were burning and –’

  ‘Oh yeah. All over the world, it’s the same age, no bloody brains …’ He laughed then and I could see the tension of the story leave him for a moment. ‘I was six, you see? Six. And I can remember that bloke saying to my mum, “We’re gonna give those Dings some hurry up tonight, Mum.”

  ‘There was another bloke too. Everyone reckoned he was getting slingbacks from the Dings so they burnt his house down too that night. And while they were burning his house down, he was trying to put it out with his garden hose and someone chopped off his hose with a bloody axe. That’s the truth. But of course it goes back a lot further than that. Hoover, the bastard. He sacked all the Aussies from the mines and kept the Dings and Slavs on. Bloody well cut their wages and increased their hours! It’d been bothering the Aussies for a long, long time. Twenty years. You know how that is?’

  ‘Mmm. Yeah, I get that … hang on, hang on: Hoover?’

  ‘Yep, took off and became president of the United States, didn’t he. Left all that bloody trouble behind. Jesus Christ, that’s the truth. It’d open your bloody eyes, eh?’

  He finished up at this point, took off his glasses, wiped his eyes and put his glasses back on. I turned off the recorder.

  Then he said, ‘You know, two days later me and my mum were looking out the front window at these Italian women walking down the road, in the middle of the road they were, with wheelbarrows full of tents and cooking pots and clothes and water bottles and things. Those women’s faces were as black as the clothes they wore … from the soot, you know, from sorting through their burnt out houses. Me and Mum was watching the women, and I remember her crying. Mum had tears streaming down her cheeks.’

  None the wiser about the Great Southern pigeon racing fraternity that day, I drove home with Ray’s book about pigeons and some rather chaotic thoughts. Kalgoorlie Race Riots? Hoover? Pigeon lung? I kept thinking about those homeless women walking with all their worldly possessions, their faces as black as the clothes they wore, to the outskirts of Kalgoorlie where they set up a refugee camp by themselves.

  Not long after talking to Ray, I was to have an unexpected interview with a third pigeon fancier, during a trip to Bali.

  In a small room off Hanoman Street, Ubud, the tattooist pauses his needle from my foot and looks at me.

  ‘You alright, sista?’

  I nod but he had already felt my leg twitching as his gun hit nerves and pressure points. I am sweating, lost in a strange world of low-level, insistent pain.

  ‘We have a quick break,’ he says.

  It’s early evening. The noise and heat is intense. Scooters, jeeps and taxis beep and roar by, ferrying people between the day and the night. Street-side, the tattooist smokes, his bare hands streaked in the powdered flock from his plastic gloves. His little brother comes to sit with us on the bench, waves his fist at his leonine dog to squat on the concrete at his feet.

  ‘Selemat mallam, guark,’ says the little brother, looking at the outline of a crow on my foot.

  ‘Good evening, crow?’ I ask him. ‘Is that what you say?’

  ‘Yes, guark, a crow,’ he smiles. He is softer, younger than his brother. ‘I like birds.’

  ‘What is your best bird?’

  ‘Pigeon. I have plenty of pigeons.’

  ‘You have pigeons? Do you race them?’

  He looks confused.

  I say, ‘You know … ah … competition?’

  ‘Ahh, yes! All around Bali. Very fast birds. When I was little –’ he holds his hand a metre above the ground, ‘I have lots of pigeons. My mother say, “Take birds away! Too many pigeons!” So I took them to the market and sold all the pigeons. The next day, they all come home!’

  ‘Ha! Homing pigeons. So you had money and pigeons!’

  ‘Yes!’ He laughs. ‘Now, I have fifteen pigeons. I sell them every week at the market. Sometimes they do not come back but most times, I get my pigeon back and I sell them again.’

  ‘That’s so cheeky! Don’t you get pigeon buyer come to your house with big stick?’

  He shakes his head. ‘Another man sell them for me.’

  His brother, smoking, watching the street with the kind of detached cool that only tattooists possess, stubs out his cigarette in the bakelite ashtray and nods me inside.

  It seems that I am now the proud owner of a book about pigeons.

  I rang Ray a few weeks after he’d told me the story of the Kalgoorlie race riots. I begged him for a longer loan of his book because I hadn’t finished reading it yet. Also I’d promised him a copy of my own book, Salt Story, in return for his allowing me to interview him.

  ‘Keep the pigeon book for as long as you like,’ he said on the telephone. ‘I’ve been a bit sick anyway. Been in hospital. Had a minor heart attack apparently. That’ll open yer bloody eyes, won’t it!’

  ‘Sorry to hear that, Ray. I won’t stay long. I’ll just knock on the door and drop off my book.’

  ‘Nah, mate. It’s too cold for me to go out today. Just put the book on the back veranda for me.’

  The weather was rancid that day and it started hailing as I drove to Ray’s house. I parked in the driveway and hunched around through the chill to the back of the house, past brightly painted concrete gnomes, potted geraniums and cast-iron garden chairs. I left my book, wrapped in a plastic shopping bag, under the veranda clothesline. The plastic sandals he’d worn the last time I’d seen him lay beside the doormat, the imprint of his feet pressed into them.

  Five days later, his death notice was in the local paper.

  Ray had told me that he was the last person alive who had witnessed the Kalgoorlie race riots. I’m not sure if he was right about that, but I reckon he’d be close. His passing away, he being a man with whom I’d had a cursory but … what is the word … instructive? … enlightening? conversation with just once, reminded me of those pigeons who were given medals after World War I, for carrying one small but vital story strapped to their bodies. Ray wasn’t a loved one to me. We’d not even shared a cup of tea but he told me that story because he wanted someone to remember it.

  I rang the president of the Albany Pigeon Racing Association and told him of how I’d first encountered Dante and then Ray.

  ‘Oh yeah, we lost a lot of birds that day,’ said Ed, referring to the club’s two hundred pigeons that didn’t make it home from the Laverton race.

  He was a tough talker and his speech cadence reminded me of the racehorse trainers from my adolescence. But he was also keen to emphasise the humanitarian aspects of pigeon racing. ‘It breaks our hearts to lose so many birds. It really does.’ I knew that it only takes a single piece of footage of cruelty or negligence to go viral on the internet, and that he was carefully selecting the information he gave to me.

  ‘You know when you were camping and found Dante’s loft number on the internet?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, sixty years ago you would have been receiving pigeons with messages, Sarah. The thing is, what we are doing looks like a silly old hobby, but when the world goes back to bows and arrows, when everything breaks down … well, we lost a lot of birds that day but we have to press on. We have to maintain the old knowledge and not lose it. We have to press on because one day, you never know, hey? One day pigeons may be the fastest way of communication that we have. Again. It’s really important that we continue.’

  His dystopian vision both amused and impressed me. It struck me that whenever I started talking pigeons with strangers, some kind of witchery occurred. Stories occurred, retellings that hardened into narratives over the years. Stories about stories even. We harbour stories; they are strapped to us in the same way as pigeon fanc
iers strap stories to their birds’ legs. As soon as people realise you are listening, they will unfurl a tale and hand it to you. It’s just the way it is.

  ‘I will tell the club this story,’ said Dante, the day after I’d returned from finding purple feathers floating in a gnamma hole at the peak of Mount Waychinicup. ‘That woman who climb the mountain and find my bird. Is a magnificent story.’

  With thanks to Dante Salvadore, Ed Shilling, the tattooist’s brother at Bali Bagus Tattoo, and Ray Barrass (dec.) for sharing their stories with me.

  Do You See What I See? – Tracy Farr

  The American Modernist artist Ad Reinhardt wrote in his 1957 manifesto that ‘colours are an aspect of appearance, so only of the surface’.1 Reinhardt left colour behind from that point, and painted only in shades of black. ‘There is,’ he wrote, ‘something wrong, irresponsible and mindless about colour, something impossible to control’.2

  For twenty-odd years I worked as a scientist. Writing scientific papers – responsibly, mindfully – could sometimes feel like painting only in shades of black. Perhaps that’s why I turned to fiction: to let control and responsibility slip. I write fiction not only from my own lived experience, but from what I imagine the experience of others – real or invented – might be. Rather than mindlessness, it’s a case of putting myself in the mind of another. I listen with their ears, dress in their clothes. But it’s not just appearance and surface: I see what they see. And what I see is in sharp focus, and full, blazing technicolour.

  My first published fiction was a very short story called ‘The Sound of One Man Dying’. In just five hundred words the main character, Gwen, reviews her own life and struggles to comprehend death after the loss of her husband.

  Gwen had been trying for some months to hear the sound of Alan’s death. To smell it, to taste it, to see it. She had thought the colour for it was yellow, for a time, early on. His mother had been disturbed … when Gwen wore the old yellow bridesmaid dress to his funeral … [Gwen] had decided within days after the funeral, though, that Alan’s death had deepened to dark purple.3

  That story’s clashing flash of yellow deepening to purple (like a bruise unmaking itself) is evidence that among my obsessions in fiction is colour, and its ability not just to signify, but also to disturb. My interest in colour is part of a broader interest in sight and perception, and many of my short stories concern themselves centrally and specifically with sight: with visual arts, with ways of seeing, and with sight’s loss.

  The nameless first-person narrator of my short story ‘The Blind Astronomer’ is not me, although she is like me in some aspects. She works as a scientist, as I did when I wrote the story; her aunt, like mine, is an artist. Her description of herself could be me, describing myself:

  I have a love of colour, in clothing, hair and nail colour, favouring bright, clashing colours, choosing them for the ways the juxtaposing colours assault my eyes. Peacock blue with clashing pink, blue and green should never be seen, stripes with florals, hair dyed flame red, fingernails painted the colour of spring grass. Aunt told me I dressed like a blind woman, not meaning it as the compliment for which I took it.4

  In the story, the narrator skips out of the astronomy conference she’s attending, to go drinking. It’s that particular type of drinking and general misbehaving that happens at conferences (the scientific conferences that I went to, at least).

  I slipped away early with some like-minded friends, and we headed from the hotel bar to a rib joint downtown to a student bar by the river to I don’t know where. I woke up with my head resting on the toilet seat in my hotel bathroom, and left Minneapolis later that day with a hangover that lasted all the long way home to New Zealand.5

  That two-day hangover was mine in real life. But the real-life conference – in the northern hemisphere summer of 1993 – had plant biology, not astronomy, as its subject; and home for me, then, was Vancouver, not the New Zealand of the story. Our boozy real-life night ended up, after that ‘student bar by the river’, at First Avenue, the Minneapolis nightclub made famous by Prince – the Purple One – and the setting of much of his 1984 film Purple Rain.

  Life fuels fiction; fiction holds truths that sit, waiting to resurface – waiting for an invitation to write about purple – and to connect.

  I take colour – its beauty, what it adds to my view of the world – as a given, a constant, as fundamental. But how constant is it? Does purple for you look the same as purple for me? And when I say purple, do I mean the same as you do, when you say purple? That’s the question that preoccupies me: do you see what I see?

  At the heart of that question lies this: what is colour?

  For us, now, in the twenty-first century, the physical properties of colour are well documented; hue, saturation, and brightness are objective, quantifiable, measurable. But still, our interaction with colour is essentially psychological: colour is an attribute of experience, ‘a construction of mind’.6

  Isaac Newton recognised that colour is not a property of things but is generated by the eye and mind: ‘Rays … have no Colour. In them, there is nothing else than a certain power and disposition to stir up a sensation of this Colour or that’.7 Newton sought to understand colour by measuring light, by separating the objective, quantifiable, mechanical behaviour of light from the subjective experience of it. He split light through a prism, shone it onto a wall and observed the colour spectrum it made. Then he remade white light by bringing the colours together.

  By Newton’s reckoning, the spectrum held seven colours, all in a line from red through orange, yellow, green, blue and indigo to purple/violet. In his Opticks, Newton took that line of seven colours and curved it around to form a colour circle.8 To form that circle he had, in a sense, to disregard the physics: in Newton’s colour circle, short–wavelength–purple was no longer distant from long–wavelength–red; it became, instead, adjacent to it. Continuity and contiguity were created – beyond quantifiable, mechanical, objective sense – because the colour circle made perfect, intuitive, aesthetic and perceptual sense. It makes sense to us still, for purple to nestle between red and blue, to connect them.

  I learned the rainbow’s colours by the science-class mnemonic (‘Think of it as a name, Roy G. Biv.’) and so I see those seven colours when I look at a rainbow; the mnemonic itself forces their seeing, even if I cannot tell quite where to draw the line between orange and red, or blue and indigo. The Ancient Greeks saw only three colours in a rainbow: purple, yellow and red. Newton devised a seven-colour circle, while other theorists proposed stars, rays, spheres, tables and wheels as colour systems, with or without names, numbers or other codes to define each colour. Different colour systems have proposed (or enforced) symmetry, or emphasised asymmetry. All these models aimed to control or quantify colour objectively, to ‘articulate a coherent colour system’,9 but their differences only serve to indicate just how subjective colour is. Colour is not within a thing itself, but is in our perception of it: in eye, and mind; and, particularly, in language.

  Colour is only ever crudely mapped by words. A common theory of language evolution describes the simplest state, the most isolated societies, as using just two terms to encompass all colours: some version of ‘black’ and ‘white’ (or dark and light, or cool and warm). Red is added as the first ‘true’ colour; only over time are other colours named. It’s not, of course, that we don’t see or distinguish those colours we have no names for, but simply that ‘the colours we can name are lodged in our memory in a way that others are not. Nameable colours are the beacons by which we navigate colour space’.10

  Writer and critic A. S. Byatt has described the names of colours as being ‘at the edge between where language fails and where it’s at its most powerful’. Referring to historical, regional and linguistic differences and specificities of colour words (‘green and yellow in Ancient Rome probably meant blue’; ‘purple in French always means red’), she concludes that the interest to a writer is in knowing that:

&nb
sp; [readers] will have very quick physical reactions to [colour] words, and some of them will immediately see what you see, and some of them will see quite some other thing, and some of them almost won’t see anything. And this can lead you philosophically to think about the fact that really, truly no reader reads the same text as another reader.11

  The notion of purple – of what that word means (and its changes in meaning) through time and culture – offers an example of the depth and range, but also the slipperiness, of colour language. In the Ancient World, purple obtained from shellfish (Murex and others) was the most highly valued dyestuff. But lustre and glow were more important than hue (colour) in defining purple; even the very cost and preciousness defined a thing as purple. A dichotomous dark–light property of shellfish purple was much admired: ‘though it seems to be dark, it gains a peculiar beauty from the sun and is infused with the brilliancy of the sun’s warmth’.12 The best purple– red cloth was described as looking ‘dark by reflected light, but a fiery-red by transmitted light’.13 In later times ‘purpura was … the name of a silk fabric, not a colour … we find many “purples”, from white and yellow to blue and black, as well as red and green’.14

  The Ancient Greek idea of colour (chroma) was related to skin (chros) – the surface or appearance of a thing – but also to movement and change.15 Reflecting this, the most important colour-technology of the Ancient World – producing Murex purple – was multi-stage and complex, itself a process of transformation, development and change, producing a sequence of colours from yellow, yellow–green, green, blue–green, blue and red, to violet.16