Purple People Eater

The year I turned six I had a dream whose contours are hazy. I call it my white dream. A dream in which there was nothing as far I could see, only halls of white.

Halls without walls given there was no perspective other than an unfathomable whiteness. As if I was in a scene from 2001 Space Odyssey only I did not see that movie until I was in my late teens at university. 

Then when I turned twelve in my first year at secondary school, one of the nuns taught us the notion of infinity and my dream came back with its colourless depth. 

Around this time there was a popular song on the radio. My brothers sang it in the car on long trips. They sang it after my mother applied gentian violet to school sores that ran along my arms and legs. Contagious lesions that formed into crusty sores.

I picked off the crust as soon as it formed which made things worse. The gentian violet was as loud as my dream was white, and embarrassed me even as a little person, especially when my mother applied it to my face. 

She was a one eyed, one horned flying purple people eater.

I cringed at my ugliness. At a time when the poems we learned at school extolled the beauty of nature, of young women and the beauty of God and his saints, most especially his mother Mary.

All my role models were beautiful, or so I believed as a child intent on blending in despite the purple swatches on my skin.

Red came next after my younger sister fell on the edge of a tin toy truck whose side carriage had pulled away from its mechanism and acted as the torn lid of a tin can.

Like a blade it cut through her hand so deeply she needed stitches and a huge white bandage that covered her to her elbow. She was three then and the cutest of all. 

My mother told the story of walking along the street, this sister in her pram. Passers-by bent down to admire the baby and my mother fearing for me the toddler at her side.

No one paid attention to me and it was as if my mother could detect inadequacy forming in my young mind even then. She talked of my moon shaped eyebrows and shell-like ear lobes.

‘Your best features’ she said often into my adolescence and like my white dream and the gentian violet and red of blood, my life was punctuated by words and expressions that carried the weight of the unspoken. 

You might be ugly, my mother implied, looking as you do, just like your father with none of the attractions of my side of the family.

You have his long face and sand coloured hair. None of the raven hair of my mother and her family or the soft round faces, the dimpled cheeks, the olive complexion so admired in the days when people were not so scared of getting skin cancer as today.

I slip between the distant past and the present. The dogs won’t leave me be. It’s the last weekend with my daughter away and given they have only me and my husband for company, the dogs are more demanding than usual. The one who loves to come into my writing room in search of used tissues which she munches on, as the tastiest of treats. 

‘You’ll die of tissue congestion, ‘I tell her, but it makes no difference. See a tissue and she will chomp on it. Whereas the smaller dog whose hearing is that of a sense detector hears things no one else can detect from kilometres away and when a noise enters her orbit she lets out sudden unprovoked yelps as if death is upon her and she must put a stop to it as loudly as possible. 

The man I married is colour blind. Red, green colours he cannot detect at all, and for the rest he guesses the colour of objects by whatever shade of grey, white or back shows up.

As genetic maladies go, it’s not the worst but for those of us not colour blind we imagine it’s hideous. 

It’s all he has ever known and only becomes a problem when he’s tackling photographic scenes where colour is a feature.

His brothers and father were likewise colourblind. This affliction, carried within the male genes, is carried along the female line but plays out in the boys. 

A cruel one that. Two of our grandsons are now colour blind. We predicted this might happen given their mother our daughter is a carrier but presumably her husband also carries the relevant gene.

Otherwise, according to the laws of epigenetics something needs to happen for genes to manifest as they do in bodily transformations. 

A life without colour is hard to imagine even as I grew up in the black and white world of television where it was easy to use your imagination to see the colour of Dorothy’s red shoes or the yellow banana in a monkey’s hands.

To see the green of the hillsides and the brown of mud, the pink of a strawberry ice cream cone. 

When mother Perpetua urged us to choose thread for our embroidered doilies she told us about the way colours could come together or clash.

Blue and green should never be seen without a colour in between. Orange and pink a definite no-no. Purple and yellow together, the papal colours, also signified an unhappy childhood.

I took this at face value, the way you do in childhood, and chose those two-colour threads for the flowers in my doily in the hope someone might notice things were not great at.

In my imagination we walk through the streets of the city. On Collins Street on our way to Parliament house we enter one of the tall buildings there and alert the authorities to this fact.

The thought of doing so, the idea these unknown grown-ups would look down and pay attention to me and my sister offered the comfort of escape.

If I could alert them to what was happening behind the four walls of our house in Camberwell, the way our father did things we knew were not right. 

Then they would walk with us through the front door of the house and they would speak to our parents, especially our father and take him away.

They might put him in prison, and he would stay for a long time until we were grown-ups and then he could no longer hurt us the way he did when we were little and frightened when things stretched like the images in my mother’s three mirrored dressing table. 

When you stood in the centre of that dressing able and folded the two side mirrors over yourself you could see the back of your head stretching in size on an on through one reflected imagine into the next. 

Infinity, as the nuns taught us, has no end and when you’re a child and can see no way out of the dilemma in which you find yourself, your dreams take you into a place of falling where there is no bottom to bash up against, no place where your body might finally splatter, only the endless fear of when that might be, but it never comes.