Purple Prose (2 page)

For instance, my grandmother made us matching party dresses every year. I have a photograph of my sister and me wearing purple corduroy dresses, pink tights and maroon Mary-Jane shoes. We were both given a jewellery box for our birthdays that year, with a twirling ballerina on a circular stand. Mine played ‘Für Elise'. My sister's played the theme from
Love Story
. How she must have hated the little-girlishness of it, the ballerina's tulle skirt, the romantic cliché of the music and the lavender velvet lining of the jewellery box, designed to hide and protect everything from secrets to sequins. They were all the things I loved.

My brother lives a couple of hours out of the city. I rarely see him. For us to meet, I would have to drive to his house, taking my three children with me. I would have to leave them in the car while I knocked at my brother's door for as long as it took him to cover his skin with trousers, socks, a long-sleeved shirt, mittens and a hat. It wouldn't matter if it were forty degrees outside. He would still cover up.

I would not be allowed into his house. We would have a conversation in the doorway, with me trying to find out how he was in between shouting at my three-year-old not to pull his sisters' hair. That is the best I could hope for. So I rarely invest the four-hour drive there and back for so little reward. He won't answer the phone. He used to write letters, so we could correspond, but not any more. Occasionally, he will answer an email.

He is on antidepressants and antipsychotics, has been in and out of the psychiatric ward of the hospital three or four times
during the last year for anorexia and other problems, has not had a job for more than twelve years, has no friends, speaks to no one. He occupies his time planning and executing detailed combat manoeuvres against his bitter foes, Dirt and Germs, or cosseting his best friends, Imaginary Mortal Illnesses.

As I write this, it is as if I am inventing a character in a novel. My brother sounds like an oddity, a curiosity after whom people occasionally enquire with the same degree of interest that might be invoked by the discovery of a new breed of housefly. He is my children's uncle but they hardly know him. How do you explain, to a three, a five and a seven-year-old, that he thinks kids are a red-alert on the germ scale, second only to dogs?

But he isn't a curiosity, and despite the long drive, the indifferent reception I would receive, the complications my three children present, I know I should do more. Because my brother was, once upon a time, my sister. My best friend. The person I would have done anything for.

I watch my daughters play with their dolls. The handsome prince is being baked in the oven again because of some unspecified naughtiness. One of the girls is in charge of the roasting time, the other is preparing the dungeon, which is the poor prince's final resting place. They are taking turns to create the game, they giggle together at one another's ideas, they shriek at the fun of pretending to saw the prince's legs off with a plastic knife. My eldest daughter sneaks glances at me to see if I am about to step in and defend the prince and stop the game.

At one point, she hugs her sister and says, ‘I love you, Audrey.'

As I watch, I wish for them a shared future of laughter, shrieking and camaraderie in sisterly adventures that involve such things as chopping up the limbs of feckless boyfriends. They will burn each
other's manuscripts but quench their hatred when one of them disappears beneath cracked ice. They will tramp through miles of mud when one is sick and far from home. They will push each other off a ledge, not just to see what happens, but to make the other see too, just as sisters do in stories, and sometimes, perhaps, in real life.

But I don't really know what sisters do in real life. Because I no longer have a sister. In her place, I have a brother. My sister became my brother about fifteen years ago, a transition that was both a surprise and not a surprise all at the same time. Because something was clearly wrong. She was withdrawn, antisocial, rarely worked, silent. She was locked in a body she hated, jailed by a gender she had not chosen.

How astonishing then, for someone who so rarely spoke, to make such a bold declaration to the world. Bold because, at the time, and still now, it was such a uncommon thing to do, to change gender. It was a thing not talked about, a thing thought by many to be deviant or taboo. I know this because I've seen the way people avoid speaking about my sister and my brother, as if the person she was and the person he has become have both ceased to exist.

I have left several selves behind me, selves I can hardly remember being. They are like the events connected to photographs in my childhood album – I know they existed because I have the evidence of them but I cannot imagine that I was ever that person.

These selves seem unconnected physically from me, although they linger in my memory: the fifteen-year-old girl so enamoured with what her friends thought that she had no opinions of her own; the twenty-five-year-old woman singing her heart out at a Robbie Williams concert at Wembley Stadium; the twenty-eight-year-old bride who had not yet encountered her own children and could therefore not imagine loving anyone else the way she loved her husband.

But my shearing off is metaphorical. I have not had to surgically remove those selves. They have slipped away with the passage of time, without causing me bodily injury. My brother has had to hollow himself out, to cut off the physical manifestations of the person he can no longer bear to be. He has had to be counselled, operated on, had to fill out dozens of pieces of paperwork and explain to countless organisations that he can no longer tick the ‘female' box when it comes to expressing himself to the world. Because the world lets us know, in countless tiny ways, that we must always have a declared gender and that gender, once granted, is part of our personhood.

A sister, for instance, is a female person, a ‘daughter of the same parents', according to my
Macquarie Dictionary
in a typically unimaginative description. But what else is a sister? My intellectual self wants to run to the literature, to hide behind someone else's words and emotionless theories of sisterhood. Because then I would never have to say that when I found out my sister was going to live life as a man, my wedding was about a month away. My first thought was that people would encounter him in his men's clothes and with a dusky wash of stubble at my wedding for the first time and I would have to explain it. Why should I have to explain anything on a day that was supposed to be all about me?

As soon as I thought it, I pretended I hadn't and was horrified at my own selfishness. Because obviously my wedding was going to be the first of many occasions when my brother would find himself in a room full of people who would whisper about him but who would not ask him their questions directly. He was trapped in a new awkwardness, an awkwardness again not of his choosing. This time, the awkwardness was manifested by other people who wanted to study him but didn't know where to look, who wanted to brand him as confused or just plain weird, who wondered how anyone could do something so unimaginable, and who thanked God that their own siblings were ‘normal'.

The awkwardness I felt was of a different kind. I wondered if I
could acknowledge what had happened, talk about it with him, ask him questions. But I was a reminder of what he used to be. I was attached to the person he wanted to leave behind. Talking about it with him reminded him of the girl he wanted to forget, the girl he hated. The girl he wished had never existed.

How can I be so selfish as to want to remember a sister my brother loathed?

I feel guilty for mourning my sister. Guilty because mourning implies sadness. I worry that being sad suggests I do not support my brother's decision. I should focus on what I've gained, not what I've lost. I should see the rainbow and not the rain. So I never grieved for her, in case that grief was misconstrued as grief over my brother's decision, rather than over loss. A person still exists who is made of the same atoms as my sister. So what is there to lament? Then I read Rebecca Goldstein's attempts to unpick the complexities of personal identity and it was a revelation. She articulates exactly what I could not: ‘A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether?'

Indeed, how can they? But they do. I know my sister has vanished, has ceased. She will never come again.

In
Little Women
, Beth's death is a ‘benignant angel – not a phantom full of dread'. Birds sing over her soul. In dying, ‘Beth was well at last.' I hoped that becoming a man would heal my sister, that her metaphorical death would be that same benignant angel. That my new brother would be able to have conversations with people, would be able to work, would even find love. I hoped it would tweezer out the pain of the previous twenty-five years of being thought of as one thing, the wrong thing. That it might bandage up the deep wounds caused by thousands of thoughtless actions – the
gifts of dresses and dolls and jewellery boxes from well-meaning relatives – and my own actions as a child in casting her as the ideal sister from a storybook, which was the exact opposite of who he wanted to be.