Purple Prose by Liz Byrski

wrapped in a shawl. Soon I am a toddler and then a little girl. Many of these are in colour, and quite a few of them are badly faded, blotched or discoloured. It makes me feel I’m viewing an artefact in a museum.
    I look for the purple paisley dress. I look through every page of this album and then through the next one (1973 to 1985). There is no purple dress. When I think about it, if there had been a photo of me in this dress then I probably wouldn’t have forgotten it for over forty years. It’s a disappointment not to see the dress, but looking through the photos is surprising. I see that, in fact, my little sister and I were very similar as children and that both of us look sweet in the photos. Perhaps she is slightly prettier, but often it would be hard to tell us apart except that I am older and taller than her. Our matching dresses are smart, too, and suit us. They don’t look at all like hand-me-downs. There are photos of me in several very pretty, obviously new, dresses – a cornflower-blue dress, a red and white pinafore, a chocolate-brown dress with a very smart belt – that are later handed down to my little sister. It’s true that I am more likely than my siblings to look self-conscious in the photos or turn away slightly but, actually, there are many good photos of me. It seems strange to recognise this after remembering myself for all these years as the plain one in the family, wearing other people’s cast-offs.
    As for my purple dress, I’m now beginning to doubt myself. Is it confabulation, borne from a desire to have been, just once, someone special? It’s not hard to invent memories and rewrite your past. A writer, especially, is often tempted to fill in forgotten details and then may wonder if their imagination is functioning partly as memory anyhow.
    As Drusilla Modjeska has noted, imagination and evidence vie for ascendancy in memoir, and memoir itself, she suggests, is as much ‘a mapping of a mind’ as the recreation of experience. 2
    The purple paisley dress is now part of my family story whether it actually existed or not.
8
    A small parcel comes for me, postmarked Cambridge. It is from my oldest sister and she has sent something just for me. I am eightyears old and this is the first time I remember her being away from home. Inside the parcel is small card with an Arthur Rackham illustration of Alice in Wonderland and a lilac silk handkerchief. It is the finest handkerchief I have seen. It is so soft and smooth and the colour is like the foxgloves that grow in our garden. Does this mean my sister hasn’t forgotten me?
9
    I am having dinner with friends in an outside courtyard. Pink bougainvillea grows up the walls and some of the flowers lie on the ground, faded to a dusky pale purple.
    â€˜Look,’ says my friend to me, ‘your shoes match the fallen blossoms perfectly!’
    It is at this point that I remember that other moment, thirty years earlier, when I wore purple sandals and nail polish. It’s as if I had lost the memory of that evening until now, because, although I have thought about the man and my relationship with him quite often in the intervening years, I have never before remembered that evening of the fight, the way he took off my sandals, the mixing of his laughter and desire, my anxiety and desire.
    Richard Holmes says, ‘There is a goddess of Memory, Mnemosyne; but none of Forgetting. Yet there should be, as they are twin sisters, twin powers, and walk on either side of us, disputing for sovereignty over us and who we are, all the way until death.’ 3 I believe that Mnemosyne was the mother of the nine Muses and so I like to think that Calliope (the Muse presiding over eloquence and epic poetry) in particular would have been close to her troublesome Aunt Forgetting.
10
    On winter evenings, my sisters and I undress in bed, tossing our day clothes onto the floor and pulling on our brushed-cotton nighties under