Free Purple Prose by Liz Byrski Page B

originally worn by my two older sisters. Sometimes the clothes were exactly the same (there was a pair of Chinese-style pink blouses I remember, which we always wore with green skirts and homemade hair bands of the same green) but other times the styles were the same but in different colours. In principle, I had no problem with wearing matching outfits with my little sister but in practice I could see that she was more attractive than me – cuter, funnier, prettier, more confident – and that it did me no favours. I wasn’t resentful of this because I adored my little sister but I was self-conscious about it.
    I’m quite sure that the purple velveteen dress was an original. It was made or bought just for me and there was no matching dress for my sister. This might have been one of the reasons it was special to me. Recreated now in my mind, I see it is also a beautiful piece of fabric – the balance of white, lilac, deep purple, black and lime green, the warm and the cold colours combined, the way the design is both soft and spiky, with its stylised leaf shape.
    I’m suddenly struck by the fact that the living room and kitchen in my house are decorated in white, black, purple and lime green. I don’t even like the colour lime.
4
    We use memories as a way of forgetting. What we remember allows us to forget other events and therefore create a coherent life story.
    But what if the forgotten comes to us, like a dream, a tear in the fabric of our life?
5
    I am twenty years old and wearing a lilac t-shirt, a white skirt with a broderie anglais frill and my new purple suede sandals. I have painted my toenails purple to match the sandals. I sit in a chair in my flat and a man kneels before me. Earlier, there has been a fight on the stairwell of the apartments across the way and I have watched anxiously from my balcony. The man strokes my thighs. He takes off my sandals, slowly, caressing me with his velvet voice and his eloquent hands.
    â€˜I like your matching toes and shoes,’ he says, smiling in such a way that I don’t know whether or not he is laughing at me for wearing purple nail polish. He pulls me to my feet and we walk upstairs to my bedroom, where he smiles again in the same and different ways.
6
    â€˜Did you see any of King George’s coronation, then, when you were ten?’ I ask my mother. ‘Maybe you saw them on their way to Westminster Abbey.’
    â€˜I’m not sure, dear,’ she replies.
    I show her some internet photos of King George VI in his coronation robe, which does indeed look very similar to the piece of purple velvet she has had all these years.
    I know very little about my mother’s father, only that he was a textile merchant in London and died when I was three years old.
    â€˜How did your father get this bit of the coronation gown?’ I ask my mother. She doesn’t know. Possibly it was my grandfather who supplied the purple velvet himself to the royal dressmakers. I think this is unlikely as I’m sure someone in the family would have mentioned this before now. We aren’t monarchists but it’s the sort of thing that would have been discussed. We decide that her father must have known the merchant who supplied the material to the dressmakers. As a textile trader himself, he would have known other traders. I can imagine a friend giving him a sample of velvet from the roll that the King’s Imperial gown was made and him passing it to his daughter as a keepsake. It must have been a potent symbol to a self-made man whose parents migrated to London from Eastern Europe before he was born and who grew up in the East End.
7
    At my mother’s house I go upstairs and look at her row of photo albums until I find the right one – dated 1963 to 1973. It is years since I’ve looked at this album. In fact, I can’t even remember when I last opened it. The first pictures of me are grainy black-and-white photos of a baby