My project in Creative Writing for Beginners: Bringing Your Story to Life course

The Pink Dress

When the dress arrived its colour did that magic where chance encounters with some sensory thing, out of the blue, delve deep inside your head and rummage through the darkest, most ancient of crevices to draw out long, long, forgotten memories. For this evocative dress was unexpectedly the exact shade of pink as the tutus my lost little sister and I wore as seven and nine year olds to very seriously dance the dance of the apple blossom on stage.

The dress was bought second hand online, it was cheap, only nine pounds. It arrived in the post one morning soon after purchase, awarding the seller five stars for despatch time. It was beautifully folded into a neat pink square, wrapped in pink tissue, tied with a pink ribbon. It couldn’t have been any more of a pink package, it was almost a work of art and almost a shame to lift it up to see if it lived up to its online image. Immediately I had shaken it free of the confines of its folding, the foul smell of the artificially freshened home of the previous owner wafted out and up my nose, wrinkling it in a disgusted attempt not to inhale. I took it straight to an unused room, hung it on a hanger and left it there until the smell of that other wearer dissipated. Only then would it fully become mine. I was aware that something about it was tugging at my heart strings, but the smell of it would not allow me to engage in any further consideration.

Then the pandemic struck, dances were cancelled, we remained in our homes and the purposeless dress continued to hang, partially forgotten, in a closed down world.

It must have been three or four months before I had a need to go into the room. As I entered I was absent mindedly thinking of much and nothing at all, pottering over the mundanity of everyday chores and was suddenly stopped in my track by the haunting pinkness of that dress in the bright white of the room. It hit me like a divine vision. In my memory the dress was positively glowing, as pink as the day it was cut and sewn on a long closed English factory floor. And the memory of the dance and the stage and my sister hit me like Saint Teresa’s golden spear. We two, dressed in the exact same pink, blossom crowns on our heads, arms raised above our heads in fifth position, raised up, taking dainty steps on the very tips of our toes across the boards of the stage.

My little sister. I do not remember her being born. I was barely past one when the bump of her began to swell in my mother’s belly and only three days past two when she left the comfort of our mother’s body to join the discomfort of our dysfunctional family, poor thing. Nor I do not remember a life without her. We were always together, shared a bedroom for the whole of our childhoods until we left home for adulthood. We played, we danced, we sang, and we fought. This closeness and the pass-times that filled our lives bound us together for life, securing a knowingness, a familiarity between us like I have found with no other.

Almost as soon as she could stand, we began to dance together as much as we played. Music programmes on television, records on our parent’s turntable, songs on the radio would set us off. Top of the Pops drew us like pilgrims to a shrine every Thursday evening even when we were tiny, my sister no more than two years old. There were songs that we both danced to, especially those performed by the programme’s dance troupe whose ridiculously literal acting out of a song’s lyrics we tried to emulate, learning our first lessons in choreography. Then there were the songs where I would attempt to convince my sister to remain still so that I could dance solo but this usually ended in bickering as she could never resist the rhythm and the compulsion to move to it.

Our dedication to dance at home convinced our mother to enrol us at the Jackson School of Dance, a grandiose name for our small town’s weekly ballet lessons run by the nasty and embittered Miss Jackson, a woman who had failed to realise her own dance dreams and took that failure out on her pupils. She taught us, and other local girls, with a stern face and a nasty perm and thought nothing of slapping the thighs of those who did not meet her standards.

On my first day I was already heartbroken by the school dictates that demanded regulation black ballet pumps fastened with black elastic. I cried my heart out as I watched my mother cut away the delicate pink satin ribbons of my inherited shoes and dye them black. Clear as day I can see that dye brush dip into a pot of darkness, cover over the pink and turn my shoe to ugliness, destroying my ideal of what ballet might be.

But soon I recovered and embraced the school and its uniform, and it was there that my sister and I perfected our skills. She was always better than me and although, even now, I can perfectly follow and recreate a move, I lack whatever it was that she had that made her so watchable when she danced in a group. Every Thursday and Saturday we went to class in the attic of the working men’s social club. To get there we had to brave the shadowy, cigarette smoke filled bar crowded with raucous drinkers, our eyes cast down, hardly daring to look at this alien world until we reached the stairs to climb to class. Upstairs, above all this, we would learn the moves in our horrid black shoes, forcing our feet into unnatural positions, first, second, third, fourth, fifth. Instructed in a language we did not understand crackling out from the vinyl disc on a carry case record player, whilst Miss Jackson gracefully demonstrated the plié, the jetté, the arabesque and was beautifully transformed.

Our efforts and our teacher’s angry slaps all seemed worthwhile when we showcased our budding talents in public. For these exhibitions came with pink beribboned ballet shoes, a wardrobe of costumes, and a choreography of dances, all learnt by heart. Our faces were made up dramatically. Our painted mouths beamed with true smiles. Our hearts beat with joy and excitement. And a multitude of little girls danced on stage before an audience of bored or proud parents according to their tendencies, and my sleeping father.

These memories came back to me as I staggered in the aura of the dress’s pinkness. A pink it shared with the pink of our tutus on that stage. A pink that was neither shocking nor pale, garish nor subtle, almost but not quite verging on peach, but still very much an apple blossom pink. How my sister would have loved it. How she would have loved this dress, not only for the colour but for its style and its promise of a good time, it was a party dress, a dress to go out dancing in. Its 1950’s design nodded to a Grecian toga through the dogged heat-treated pleats ran vertically from neck and nape to knee. They never fell from their creases, they were never in need of an iron, thank goodness, for if heat were applied the thing would simply melt away. It was sleeveless with an elasticated waist and a square neck, neither too low nor too high. At the front corners of the neck hung two sad double bows, both flopping forward and in need of a stitch to hold them proudly open and in place. These were not the only signs of the dress’s true age; it was slightly moth eaten, several small holes in the facing of the neck that were barely visible in amongst so much pink and the elastic had the feel of the overstretched, no longer snappy, emitting a straining crinkling sound whenever put to its barely functioning use. Still it was wearable and would cut a sight on the dance floor. I knew that if and when I finally got to wear it, it would draw admiration. All that I needed was for the world to start up again, for dances to begin again, then the dress could be worn once more, would be danced in once more, and would be worn and danced in for the first time by me. But my anticipation was understandably tinged with great sadness for my little sister was no longer here. She could never again dance by my side and now the solo dance I always craved is mine I find I no longer want it.