Colouring In

Everything has to be purple. I’ve got the streaks in my hair, the right shade of eye-shadow, the most perfect lipstick. Clothes are easy – if I can’t find the colour I want, I dye them. I’ve ended up with some of the coolest tie-dye stuff; okay, the tie-dying was an accident, but it looks fantastic.
+++At school, they look at me like I’m weird.  Someone asked if I was going to a fancy dress party. Who are they to talk, with their brown shirts and blue trousers, with their green blouses, faded jeans and stupid, sparkly high heels? They think I look weird? They should take a look in a mirror sometime. The things they think ‘go together’ just don’t. They look like they fell into a pile of clothes and came up wearing anything that stuck.
+++‘Purple Patty’:  that’s what they call me now.  It’s better than ‘Cow Pat’, my old nickname, the one the teachers insisted was ‘affectionate’.  
+++I’ve bought purple-tinted shades so I can look at my classmates without wanting to throw up.
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My stomach aches. I saw these plums in the shop and they were so beautiful, so purple, I bought two punnets. I wasn’t going to eat them; I just wanted to look at them, to have them in my room. But then I thought about how awful it would be when they rotted away, went brown and got fuzzy mould-beards.
+++I ate one, planning to eat one a day until they were gone. My teeth sank into the flesh and a teardrop of juice dripped onto the duvet cover.  It fanned out, kind of like a kaleidoscope, but just the one colour – just purple and perfect.  I let a few more drops fall and make a pattern.
+++The other plums looked sad without the plum I had stolen, so I had to eat them all, to send them all to the same place. I thought they’d be happier together, but they’ve made my stomach hurt, so I must have got that wrong.
+++I do get it wrong sometimes, especially with purple. It’s not an easy colour. It can be quite demanding, cruel, petulant. Like now. Hurting my stomach. I like the word ‘petulant’, it makes me think of petals – purple petals.
+++I took some of Dad’s indigestion medicine. It’s pink, but with a little food colouring added to each dose, it turns out quite a nice shade of purple. Soothing, like it should be. I keep the medicine bottle in my box of Dad’s things – things I knew Mum wouldn’t miss. I’m painting and dyeing everything in my box of purple memories.
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My art teacher got angry with me today. Said I have to use more colours. I did use different shades, but that wasn’t good enough. I tried to use some pink and some blue, but my hand shook so violently, they merged with the purple and blended in. It’s what the colours wanted; they wanted to be purple. Miss Ruddy didn’t understand. I was sent to the headmaster’s office for being ‘insolent.’
+++Insolent sounds like a purple thing to be, so I agreed I had been insolent but that I hadn’t meant to be and promised not to be insolent in Miss Ruddy’s class in the future.
+++I don’t like her name – it’s reddy-brown. I hate red. It’s my least favourite colour. Maybe that’s why I’m insolently purple in her class. Our colours clash. I won’t go to her class anymore, now that I’ve promised not to be insolent.
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I was lying on my bed, listening to music, when Mum came in and started shouting at me. Why was I making life so difficult for her? Didn’t I realise what she had been through, how hard it was to get on with things after Dad died? She was getting calls from school about my work and my behaviour.
+++She slumped down on the bed and started crying and hugging me. Saying sorry over and over again. She was being insensitive, it was harder for me, she knew that. I was the one who’d found him, how could he have done that to me? Poor Patty, my poor, poor Patty.  Over and over, rocking me back and forth. Poor, poor Patty.
+++She got a tissue and wiped my eyes (I hadn’t been crying). Would I like to go back to the man I talked to after it happened? She never says psychiatrist; don’t know why, I think it’s a good word. I said I didn’t need to talk, everything was fine, just needed to be left on my own for a while, work things through (I’d heard that on ‘Tricia’, it sounded like the right thing to say to Mum).
+++It worked. She nodded, patted my arm, said she’d talk to the school and try to get me some leeway. I asked if I could skip art classes, said they reminded me of Dad because he used to love my paintings. She looked surprised. Well, it wasn’t true; she and I both knew Dad never took any interest in my school work, but she wasn’t going to argue with me.
+++She nodded, promised to phone the headmaster and then left. I was so relieved. Those green trousers had hurt my chest; I couldn’t breathe with them sitting on my bed. Those red arms wrapped round me felt like they were burning my back and my shoulders. Red really hurts. Red is lethal.
+++I slid under my duvet and closed my eyes. I saw his face, on the back of my eyelids. Bloated, eyes bulging, tongue lolling. And his skin, so purple.
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I’ve been expelled from school. Mum was really upset. She phoned the psychiatrist. I have to go and stay at the hospital where he works. Just for a while, she said. The police will talk to me again when I’m settled. Mum packed a case for me, but I wanted my purple bag, so I emptied everything out onto the floor.
+++I know she wanted to shout at me, but she was frightened I’d go nuts again. That’s what they told her–I’d lost the plot and attacked another pupil. I didn’t lose anything. I knew exactly what I was doing. I didn’t have my tinted glasses on when I saw her sitting in the cafeteria, the one who’d started calling me ‘Putrid Patty’, my latest ‘affectionate nickname’, and I saw red. I felt she’d look better if her face was covered in purple bruises. Sometimes you just know these things. The colours tell you. So I punched her. I kept punching until they pulled me off.
+++I take after my Dad, you see. He knew all about the effects and powers of colours. He used to have black moods, grey days, felt blue. All the letters with the red writing, those were what made his mood black, his days grey, his mood blue. It was red that made him do it.
+++That day I found him in the kitchen he looked so surprised, like the purple had surprised him. It’ll never surprise me. I’ve got it under control. I’ve got almost all the colours under control. Except red.
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Karen Jones has been writing for several years.  Her work has appeared in The New Writer, Writers’ Forum, Candis Magazine, the Guildhall Press anthology The Wonderful World of Worders, the Leaf Books anthology Discovering a Comet and more micro-fiction, the Edit Red anthology City Smells and online at Alors, et Toi?, Our Atticus, and Up the Staircase.  She was short-listed for the 2007 Asham Award and took third prize in the 2010 Mslexia short story competition.  A poem (she’s not sure how that happened) will appear on EDP and two stories will be published in the forthcoming In the Company of Women anthology.