Seeing Pink
The story behind my short story A Darker Shade of Pink
What do you think of when you think of the colour pink? Flamingos? Pigs? Pastelly coloured babygrows? Cherry Blossom?
Or, do you see pink as nothing more than a washed-out shade of red? A symbol of sibling rivalry, and a fairytale gone wrong?
When I was asked to write a short story for an anthology exploring the symbolisation of colour, it was not cherry blossoms that came to mind. Don’t get me wrong — I’ve written very successfully about cherry blossom before, but not in the context of colour (or in the context of cheery blossom, come to think of it).
I have a deep-rooted love of fairytales, which reverberates through many of my stories, but I’m honestly not sure how the request to ‘write about colour’ led me to a first choosing pink, and then writing a retelling of a favourite red-based fairy story. I don’t think I intended or planned it to take that route. I certainly didn’t know it was going to end badly. I mean, pink isn’t supposed to be about ending badly, is it? That’s more of a blood-red kind of thing, a storm-cloud grey. And there’s the problem.
Once I had my opening line (‘Rose had never liked pink […]’, if you were asking), I realised that this wasn’t really a story about pink, but more about Not Being Red. That was all it took to get side-tracked into Not Pink. I blame Rose, personally. Yes, I am the kind of author who takes no ownership for the way my stories unfold. I have no control over my characters half the time. Zero. Nada. Zilch. They do what they like. I’m not going to lie — that’s kind of useful. Means I don’t have to think too hard; I just have to listen.
So when I was asked how I wrote this story, my honest answer is “Rose wrote it herself. I just listened to what she was saying and wrote it down.”
It’s the first time in ages (ever? I’m not sure) that I’ve written from a child’s point of view. I was worried it might be hard, but then I remembered my own childhood. I had an awesome childhood. (disclaimer: Not all of it was awesome, but lots of it was.) I also had siblings. Three of them. So many of my childhood memories are tangled with memories of doing things with my older brother. We did so many things together — climbed trees; went fishing in the river; built go-karts, out-created each other with Lego; swum in the local lake; had endless bike rides, endless cheese and pickle sandwiches. We even got slightly panicked in a rubber dinghy in the middle of Galway Bay once, as teenagers. But we survived it all. Annoyingly, whatever I remember about the things we did together, he usually remembers better. I’ll start a trip down Nostalgia Road with “Do you remember [insert childhood event here]” and he’ll say “Yes, of course! We did [insert related event that I do not remember here]”. And then we’ll argue about it.
Because that’s the other thing about siblings. They fight. And jostle for attention.
I remember (and don’t bother to ask him, because he’ll undoubtedly remember it differently) that I also spent an awful lot of my childhood wanting to do what he did. He was older (not by enough to count, in my humble opinion — only 13 months) and, perhaps more importantly at the time — the 1970s — he was a boy and I was a girl. So he was allowed to do some stuff I wasn’t allowed to do. And that, dear readers, was Not Fair. I mentioned this frequently throughout my childhood. I was just as tough/able/clever/determined/whatever it was I needed to be to think I could/should/would do whatever he could do. My mum often thought otherwise.
So, the story I wrote about Rose, the pink child, is not about wanting to be pink, or about liking pink. It’s a story about wanting to be as fully-coloured and well-noticed as her older sibling. Does she get her wish? That would be a spoiler.
Now, I mentioned I had three siblings. I am not only a younger sibling; I’m also an older one. That comes with its own nuances and a whole new set of It’s not fairs. You might see a hint of that sneaking in to A Darker Shade of Pink too.
For the record, now we are grown up, my siblings and I still revert to our age-old patterns of sibling rivalry (“You were ALWAYS the favourite, younger sister.” “I never said that, honest.”) but ultimately we deeply love each other and each one of us knows that, despite living in three different countries on two different continents, when we need each other, we’ll be there for each other. We’re siblings, after all.
You can read the full story, A Darker Shade of Pink, in the Kaleidoscope anthology, co-authored by Jinny Alexander (me!), Aline Greyson, Lo Potter, Mike VandeVenter, and others, and published by Creative James Media.
You can buy the anthology here (most e-book readers), here (Amazon.com) or here (Amazon.uk).
