Those Purple Things
I’ve been having a clear-out. Here are some of the things I came across:
1. One dusty, silk-lined, brown leather glove.
As part of a pair, that glove was warm, a good fit (I have small hands) and half of a not inexpensive ensemble. But what use is one glove? A lone glove is a sad thing, a constant reproach to the absent other. Guess I could never bring myself to throw the survivor out. I kept thinking, hopefully, that I’d stumble across its mate.
2. An envelope with ‘Those Purple Things’ written on it.
Inside was a handful of tiny hard brown spheres. What the…? Seeds. One day, years ago, I saw some pretty flowers growing on a railway siding. I want some of those in my (future) garden, I thought. I had to climb a fence and cross two sets of rails. I picked them, dried them and harvested the seeds, but I never found out what they were called. At the time, I fantasised that ‘gardening’ was going to happen to me, like maturity, or wisdom, or wrinkles, suddenly, like a lightning bolt striking at an age-appropriate moment. Ha.
3. A glass-stoppered jar decorated with a hand-drawn skull and crossbones, bearing the label: ‘Very Deadly’.
This, I inherited. In a time of lenience, before the legislation on domestic pesticides changed, my father, who liked nothing better than to burn, poison, chop, electrocute*, or otherwise ‘kibosh’ nuisances, spent half a lifetime gathering an impressive array of lethal substances. When he sensed his mortality approaching, I imagine he pictured me going about his empty house, like a dazed Alice In Wonderland, holding bottles up to the light, dipping my pinky in strange powders, sniffing liquids, naive and curious. He got busy labelling. Very. It’s quite a trick to make someone laugh when you’re long gone.
4. In the back of a cupboard, in a flattened plastic bag, under a sediment of flesh coloured dust, I found what looked like a crumbled plaster cast, or clues in an episode of Stargate. What the…? Oh yes. That bra.
Christ. I made that thing a quarter of a century ago. It was one of my attempts at feminist Pop-Art. I took one of my old bras, filled the cups with newspaper, suspended it on a coathanger and dipped the whole shebang in plaster-of-paris, and, when it was dry, painted it shiny baby pink, covered the edges in red loops and the rest in polka dots. It was a good idea, a talking point, but… really, the world was waiting for Sarah Lucas.
Out with the lot of it!
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* Electrocute: When I was eight we had a resident rat. Being an engineer, my father made an elaborate electrical trap out of a piece of three foot by five foot hardboard covered with a tinfoil circuit. It took him weeks to perfect. This Deadly! electrical maze glinted across the whole top of the kitchen table downstairs and was switched on with direful warnings for my benefit and excessive ritual every night. The rat, of course, just jumped over it.
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