Purple Prose by Liz Byrski Page B

I’d first encountered Dante and then Ray.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜You know when you were camping and found Dante’s loft number on the internet?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜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 fanciers 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.
    â€˜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.

Mary – Lucy Dougan
    for Larry, and for Sophie
    Lovely as they are, things lose infinitely from being preserved not used.
    Virginia Woolf,
Diaries
1
    It’s not a failure of imagination: think of Helpston as a village in a wooden box, thatched cottages, church, public house, cows, sheep, and enough figures to dress the set … Johns and Marys, all of them. The chain stretches back …
    Iain Sinclair,
Edge of the Orison
2
    Distaff (
n.
) a tool used in spinning; the female branch or side of a family; a woman’s work or domain
Faces
    At the hinge of spring and summer, the suburbs of Perth are a purple carpet. As barefoot kids we were always warned about the bees that might be hiding in this fallen profusion. Between those small bells, and the pavement lines, and the prickles, there was a lot of hopping about, a lot of staccato skipping. Our first child was born at jacaranda time. I remember the profundity of crossing the border from a single state to owning a body that had made another. The nurses came and drew a face on my chart – happy – sad – in-between? Mine always smiled. I understood that they were busy and had their systems, their checks, but at times I wanted to howl
I am not fucking happy
. This life-changing thing has happened to me and I am feeling any combination of bliss, pride, fear, sadness, awe, etc., all rolled into one. But happiness, no. In the early eveningsI would walk our baby to a big bank of windows at old St John’s and we would both look out to the jacarandas as far as the eye could see. I’d tell him this would always be his time of year, his estate, this purple slide to summer.

    We think, perhaps, that it is the ones to be born who are waiting, but it is our ancestors too. They reside now in