Purple Prose Read Free Page B

who this person was.’
    In one sense, my mother was right. But she meant it in a differentway. She meant that explaining to my children that their uncle used to be a girl would be an impossible thing. Why? Kids are probably the best people to tell. They accept that almost anything is possible, even fairies.
    My mother was right only in the sense that, for me, the fact I am still holding on to the sister I used to have is the one thing I cannot say.

    I’m aware of how I must sound. As if I’m complaining, when it’s my brother who has had so much more to bear. It’s why I go along with the pretence that my whole childhood is an invention, a dream of weekend games, a story of lying beneath a purple quilt in a shared bedroom and having whispered conversations as we read the same Enid Blytons one after the other, about what boarding school might be like.
    My games were played, my conversations were had with a ghost-girl who still haunts me. My sister is a secret I must keep close, hidden in my heart. It is the only place where I can stop pretending, where I can remember that once, long ago, my sister really did exist.

    And then comes a breakthrough. My brother has moved back in with my parents for a short time. There is an issue to do with my parents’ unwillingness to explain to some of their old friends the new state of things with my brother. Of course, it isn’t a
new
state given it’s been this way for fifteen years but my parents are still unable to talk about it.
    I’m shocked. Driven by this, I reach out to my brother again and we begin an email correspondence. He asks what books my children would like for Christmas. I try to make sure he doesn’t rush into a rental tenancy that isn’t right for him. It is like thin ice, this correspondence. Shards of our renewed relationship mightbreak off at any moment. But there is also beauty reflected there, in the possibility of the ice strengthening, of not breaking, of a new world of love forming.

Maiden Aunts – Liz Byrski
    It’s on a cold grey afternoon, a couple of weeks before Christmas 1949, that I first meet the maiden aunts. I’m five years old and grumpy after the long drive from Surrey to the East End of London through the Blackwall Tunnel; Dad behind the wheel, Mum alongside him and me whining in the back. Dad pulls up outside a two-storey terraced house in Hackney, and I see a woman’s face looking out between the lace curtains.
    â€˜Aunt Lil’s spotted us,’ Dad says. He turns to me. ‘Best behaviour now,’ he says as the woman appears at the front door. ‘Can you remember their names?’
    I recite the names: Olive, Violet, Gladys and Lily. I’ve heard them often enough, always in this order, listed by my parents and their sister-in-law, my paternal grandmother. Until today I have only known one real aunt and one pretend one, and now I am getting a job lot of four. They are Dad’s aunts really, my great-aunts, but in my very limited experience aunts mean presents and so grumpiness turns to anticipation.
    Aunt Lil is short and thickset with fuzzy reddish hair flecked with grey. She is dressed entirely in black, with a white lace collar, and wears round spectacles with metal frames. When she bends to pat me on the cheek I notice that there is ink on the first two fingers of her right hand.
    â€˜Last time I saw you was at your christening,’ she says. ‘You were just a baby then.’ And she leads us in through the front door along a passage lined with pressed tin and painted in an ugly tobacco brown, through to a large room with French doors leading out to aneat patch of garden. There are comfy chairs, an upright piano, and yes – a huge aspidistra in a brass pot. From its perch in a cylindrical cage a large black minah bird glares at us with beady eyes. The round table is set for tea with fine china, plates of tiny triangular sandwiches, and a three-tier cake