The Long Goodbye

The Long Goodbye
Ros Thomas
Published: January 26, 2018

In her dotage, my mother always planned to throw herself under a bus. She was adamant a snappy exit was far preferable to the long goodbye.

“If I start losing my marbles,” she told me on the night of her 60th birthday, “then I’ll take myself out.”

I was 30 and horrified, then amused at her ingenuity.

The number 28 bus was Mum’s contingency plan in case her golden years were to be robbed by senility. Her family had dibs on dementia. Nobody died of anything else.

Hers was a meticulous fantasy we fleshed out with new storylines to keep ourselves entertained. It would begin on the day Mum’s doctor began talking, sotto voce, about irreversible mental infirmity.

My mother, a vision of composure, would thank him for his expert diagnosis and explain that she was completely prepared for this eventuality. We imagined we’d drive home together in silence, the air between us thick and dolorous.

The next morning, my mother would begin her last day like any other. She’d eat a

small bowl of muesli and drink milky tea from her Noritake cup. She’d sweep the floor listening to her cheer-up cassette of Harry Secombe and his rich bel canto.

The breakfast dishes would be dried and put away. She’d give the passionfruit a deep watering, top up the fishpond and hang her gardening clogs on the hook by the sliding door. Twisting a lemon off the tree overhanging the side fence, my mother would take aim at one more crow.

She’d ease into her favourite pair of suede loafers with the shoehorn her dad whittled from deer bone when she was a child. (After the war, her family had run a thriving shoe shop in Oxford Street, Leederville.)

Unfurling the garage roller-door, Mum would conduct a last lap of her front garden – inspecting the leaves of her roses for thrip – then stroll down the hill and turn left onto Montgomery Drive.

At the mid-point of a sweeping bend, she’d park herself on the verge and wait calmly, the sun warming her back. When the bus loomed into view, she’d count to five, step off the curb and let the number 28 take her for one final ride – under the front axle.

The bus driver (thoughtfully edited out of our fantasy), would feel nothing, see nothing. He’d be fixated on the traffic lights up ahead flicking to green. With a gentle nudge on his accelerator, he’d flatten the last rise (and my mother), swinging his machine around the corner into Alfred Road just as the lights switched to amber. My mother’s death would be blameless. And painless.

There were few problems we couldn’t solve, she and I. Her dementia was one of them. Naturally it found her, just as we feared it would. But she refuses to become an accommodating host.

“I have a neurological condition,” she says matter-of-factly if someone asks after her health.

Dementia is a dirty word. She will not acknowledge its presence.

“Don’t worry honey,” she says to me with unnerving repetition.

“You know my end game. I want the short cut, not the scenic route.”

We snort, the two of us. She still remembers our little bus joke.

…

Mum turned 80 last year. She refused my offers of a birthday party, a family dinner, even an afternoon tea.

“No surprises,” she said, frowning at me.

“You know I hate fuss. It makes me anxious.”

In almost fifty years of daughterhood, I’ve rarely seen my mother anxious. But now she frets constantly about trifles: the whereabouts of the TV remote, the insistent flashing light on the answering machine, her grandchildrens’ names. Lately, Gabriella and Daniel have become interchangeable with Daniella and Gabriel.

I now watch her decline with a gnawing disquiet. Will this be my fate too? I turn 50 this year. An only child. Can my father’s dementia-free genes outwit my mother’s increasingly addled ones?

Every time I misplace my glasses, I wonder if this is how it starts. Tiny forgettings.

This morning, I pause, mid-stride, en route to the laundry – my mind suddenly blank and purposeless.

With a jolt, I remember I’m looking for fresh batteries and sigh with relief. My sense of foreboding loosens its grip. I vow to pack more living into each day, just in case. I know Mum is valiantly trying to do the same.

On the outside, she remains a perfect likeness of my mother. The shock of snow-white hair – two cowlicks competing with a centre-part. The winning smile, the playful demeanor, the erect carriage, her body petite now but still muscular from a lifetime of exercise.

“Tighten those cheeks,” is still her favourite dig at me as she pokes my rear with her thumb.

“No man likes a flabby bottom.”

On the inside, however, my mother is becoming a jumble of fear and confusion. A crank caller sends her into a panic.

“He said he was from the Tax Office and I’m going to be investigated.”

I hear her voice quaver.

“No, Ma,” I say. “It’s a scam. I stuck a note to the phone to remind you. It’s not really the Tax Office. It’s someone trying to scare you into giving them money. They rang us too.”

She calms down but remains shaken for hours. The next morning, she recycles the trauma with the newness of yesterday. The following day brings yet another fresh volley of alarm. I continually remind her the Tax Office threat is not real.

But the plaques and tangles of her dementia are good at short-circuiting her memory. For a week, she’s in a rat-run of despair.

Month by month, I watch from the sidelines as small pieces of her drift away. Some she lets go without a struggle.

Her mobile phone sits idly on the kitchen table. She cannot remember how to dial out or accept a call. Its keypad is now a Sudoku of confusion. I accept she is no longer contactable once she leaves the house. Secretly I think she derives a sneaky pleasure being free of me on her suburban roams.

…

It’s October. Unseasonably warm. We are lunching together at a café. She is wearing a jumper. And a pair of her late husband’s gardening shorts, ballooning around her small frame. She has them belted at the waist like a paper bag but the outfit screams of madness. I debate whether to make a joke of it. In the end, I say nothing. But as she pushes back her chair to stand, I note the critical gaze of other patrons as they absorb her fashion farce.

In conversation, I watch her grabbing blindly for a recalcitrant word, trying to direct it from woolly brain to tongue. I see the moment – the slackening of expression – as she surrenders and allows the word to spin away, out of reach. Her daisy-chains of neurons no longer transmit at will.

…

On a plane home to Perth, row 27, I’m seated next to a middle-aged Swiss tourist who’s nuzzling his girlfriend in her window seat.

He flaps his hands and lets loose a babbling stream of sound. I strain to collect a crumb of language I recognize.

He grabs her face and squeezes her cheeks and makes a smacking sound with pursed lips. Perhaps he is mimicking kissing. Or eating. I can’t tell but it’s disconcerting to feel excluded. I feel strangely alone. Is this how my mother feels when conversations she can’t understand swirl around her? I vow to spend more slow, quiet time with her.

…

It’s March. Still hot. Sitting on the grass at the local pool, I map my mother’s physique against the panorama of bodies on display. To my left, an old woman in a swimming cap negotiates the stairs to the shallow end, her back bent painfully into a question mark. A portly man, motionless on the edge of the diving board, springs with a shudder of white belly into a clumsy dive.

As far back as I can remember, my Mum was trim and fit. Her legs were beautiful: shapely calves, a muscular groove along the side of her thigh, quads taut and smooth. On Saturdays at the tennis club, blokes in their white shorts and Slazenger shirts would follow my mother with their eyes. I wanted her legs. I wanted the attention they created.

At 80, my mother’s body is still a resilient and efficient machine. She’s had no broken bones, no stents or sutures, no surgical repairs. There have been malfunctions of course: thyroid, pancreas, stomach. But nothing life-threatening.

And yet it’s the 2-percent of her body mass residing in her skull that will ultimately undo her. The neuron forest of her brain is shrinking – becoming scarred and stunted. Soon she will be imprisoned by her own incapacity to think. The vast freedoms of an independent life will be curtailed. Dementia will wither her personality and turn my mum into someone else. But not yet.

…

I decide to visit my aunt at her nursing home, an attempt to shock myself into accepting the inevitable. My Aunty Marg is the same age as my mother, her Dementia a year advanced.

It’s a Sunday afternoon in May and I see no-one as I navigate the carpeted hallways looking for room 9. I’m loath to breathe deeply – to be reminded of the staleness of life at its lowest ebb. But the corridors smell benign. Instead, I’m struck by the soupy air. It’s uncomfortably warm – a hopeful precaution against chills.

I find my aunt in the dining hall, a tiny slip of her former robust self. Gone is her trademark copper rinse, her hair now wispy and white. She can walk and feed herself but remembers nothing from hour to hour. She searches my face while I make small talk and butter her bread. Her crocheted cardigan has a silverfish hole she frets at with her thumb.

Opposite us a bird-like woman is cradling a life-like doll in the crook of her arm. She raises her fork from her plate, offering the trembling contents to her doll-baby first. I have to look away.

I sit with my aunt for an hour, repeating the names and ages of my children, my suburb and street name. I kiss her papery cheek goodbye, then sob helplessly in the carpark.

….

It’s June. Nearly a year has passed since I started this piece.

The number 28 is now just a bus to Claremont. It is no longer the Elysian Express. Mum’s master plan for a snap exit lingers in my imagination but has been erased from her own memory. She will not have the finale she wanted.

Most days, Mum’s dementia does not inhibit her.

“Isn’t it a gorgeous day,” she greets me whenever the weather is fine. If the sky darkens she’ll say: “Won’t it be lovely if it rains.”

First thing each morning, I ring to check on her. There is something to be said for daily-ness. My mother is aware decline and disaster are coming but her thoughts don’t linger there.

“Have you been for your ride today?” she asks me.

“Yes, Ma. At 6. Round the river.”

“Good girl,” she replies. “Keep doing the things you love.”

Some mornings she’ll ask me over and over: “Are you happy?” until exasperated, I snap: “Yes, Ma. I’m happy. Now – about your pills.”

For all my guilty frustrations, I’m delighted she is carefree. My job is to soothe the worries, remove the obstacles; knit together the loose threads, the pulls and runs of an unraveling life. I hope some essence of my mother survives until the end.

“What’s in the diary for today?” I ask her on this morning’s call.

“Let me see,” she replies. I hear the rustling of pages. “What day is it?” she mutters. “Friday?”

“No Ma. It’s Tuesday.”

“Aah. Table Tennis,” she says.

“I love Fridays.”

Farewell, Friends

Farewell, Friends
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday December 12, 2015

This column started as a happy accident. After twenty years in television, I’d resigned from the ABC to welcome baby number three. And then The West phoned, requesting a column on domestic life from the wilds of suburbia.

An old boss rang: “Are you sure?” he asked. “Every week, you’ll sit down and open up a vein for inspiration.”

He was right. I became attuned to my surroundings. I made small talk with interesting strangers. I stored away the snippets of a spat overheard at the checkout. I pushed my life outwards to absorb more. I once drove to York because the town was having a Medieval Fair and I was desperate for ideas. That became a column on manliness. Never had I seen so many grunting he-men in one paddock.

I made a rule to only write from personal experience: I hoped it would keep me authentic. I learnt that good writing needs clear thinking. I carried a notebook with me everywhere. My family and friends became used to my cries of frustration and woe. The gist of a column would float around in my head all weekend, then the column itself would arrive about four days and six drafts later.

I fretted about my deadlines. It was like standing under a windmill and being knocked down by one blade, only to scramble up to see another bearing down on me.

So this is my last column. It’s time to leave before I run dry, become stale or worse – begin to disappoint.

Over the last three-and-a-half-years, I’ve collected a wealth of stories. My great delight has been that so many of you have taken the trouble to write to me. I’ve marvelled at your insights. Back and forth we‘ve emailed, sharing crumbs of conversation and small truths until we’ve become like old pen pals who are yet to meet.

My first column traced my insecurities as I put my career on hold for toddlers. “When did we tell women who are ‘only mothers’ that their contributions are somehow less worthwhile?” I asked. One reader’s email I committed to memory: “Don’t ever confuse your life and your work,” he wrote. “The second is only part of the first.”

Your letters have made the writer’s block worthwhile. A one-liner that said: “Please get out of my head!” kept me going through a rough patch. My favourite came from 60-year-old Roger: “I read your column to understand my wife.” Underneath, his wife had written: “Are you sure you’re not living with my husband?”

Over time, I’ve discovered that the extraordinary often lies in the everyday. I’ve written about the oddities I see in suburbia and the absurdities I contend with at home. I’ve tried to make sense of the social order of things. I’ve written about old people and young people; why ageing is a privilege; why the story of loss is universal. I hope I’ve reflected the confusion we feel about being good parents, good workers, and good people. I’ve plumbed the ups and downs of relationships, using my own as a touchstone.

My husband has never once read the column before it goes to print. So I’m always nervous on Saturday mornings. I’ll study his face for amusement, boredom, or rising indignation. And then he’ll slap the magazine closed and say ‘Nice one, Blossom.’ Or shrug: ‘Not your best.’ (He likes to tell people I write fiction).

Last summer, at Bunnings, a woman berated me: “I don’t know how your husband puts up with you using your lives as constant fodder for your column.” That hurt. At 2am I was still churning. (“Hang on!” I should’ve said. “He’s the one who provides the constant fodder!”)

At times, I’ve been called a muppet, a ninny, and, since losing my licence, a public disgrace. I grew a thicker hide.

My most enjoyable subjects have been the people I’ve befriended in unusual places: the one-eared man at a train station, the leopard-printed lady at the Cat Show, the truck driver near Geraldton who freed his cargo of homing pigeons just so I could see how they clouded the sky.

But I’ve also dredged up my own traumas: the childhood emptiness of not knowing my dad, for one, and was overwhelmed by readers who wrote intimately of their own absent fathers.

I’m always trying to snatch time at my computer, sometimes at my family’s expense. Little did I imagine, back in 2012, that I would write nearly 200 columns. As a girlfriend recently pointed out: “Your writing used to be about your life, but now your life is about your writing.”

So thank you for all the stories we’ve shared. Without your loyalty, I would not have thrived on this weekly page.

To Matthew, my children Oscar, Dan and Gabriella, and to my nearly 80-year-old Mum, Joan: this summer, I’m all yours.

Giving Up

Giving Up
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday December 5, 2015

The tree is up. Faux-pine and nuclear-green, it is a six-foot monument to the wonders of PVC and all things ersatz at Christmas. Ours is pretending to be a Norway Spruce. It stands unsteadily on our lounge carpet, tripod legs seeking terra firma beneath two inches of 1990’s plush pile carpet.

I bought our tree second-hand from a school fete. Fifteen Christmases have taken their toll. The tips of its branches have sloughed off their plastic skins to expose wire claws which rake your arm and sting like a cat scratch. Brush against the cellophane foliage and our tree sheds clouds of glitter.

This year I’ve abandoned my tree-trimming fantasies to allow my 8-year-old and his small sister decorating carte blanche. Clearly, they’ve inherited their father’s gene for dressing. They give no thought to proportion or colour coordination. They choke the lower branches with thick black cables knotted with our lumpish hand-me-down lights. Some strands they wind tightly around the trunk, some hang floppy and loose. Symmetry is ignored in favour of attaching a decade of kindergarten craft to the same five branches. An argument breaks out over whose lopsided paper stars are whose, and whether the toilet-roll Santa should hang next to his toilet-roll wife. A red globe blows and takes out its neighbours on either side. Our tree is both festive and fire hazard.

Already, a pyramid of presents leans against the trunk. These are the ones Santa allows me to buy for cousins and nannas. I am the Christmas shopper in our house. Somehow, the job always falls to me. The Grinch I live with abhors what he calls the ‘sad spectacle of materialism gone mad.’ He makes a sterling effort for birthdays and anniversaries, but I can’t enthuse him with a soupcon of Christmas spirit.

“What would you like the kids to get you this year?” I ask as he props at the kitchen bench with his morning paper.

“Socks and jocks,” he intones, without looking up.

“C’mon,” I plead. “You say that every year.” (What he really wants is someone to make a fuss over his December birthday.)

“Well,” I say to his centre part. “I know what I’d like. An extension ladder.”

His head jerks up.

“Only kidding. I’d like some lingerie.”

He rolls his eyes. This is the signal that this year, like last year (and the eight before that), I should buy my own Christmas present. I may even need to wrap it, on Christmas Eve, at midnight, with a pavlova still in the oven. Six hours later, I’ll feign surprise when I open it.

“You shouldn’t have!” I’ll say, throwing my arms around his neck.

Following the script, he’ll reply: “I know, darling. I hope you like it.”

This is the problem with gifting between couples: our expectations get in the way. I see Christmas as an opportunity to find my beloved a gift that symbolises our marital nirvana. He sees Christmas as an interruption to the sports pages.

In relationships, presents come loaded with assumptions, judgments and occasionally, disappointment. Givers guess – and hope to find – the perfect gift; receivers have to figure out the agenda behind the gift and then respond accordingly. It’s exhausting trying to be a mind-reader. Instead, I like to apply my first law of Christmas shopping: be gracious if your receiver is not delighted with your choice of present.

This time last year, I remembered my wannabe weather-man had admired an old ship’s barometer we’d seen in an antique shop window. And so I set about finding him one.

I scoured op-shops and auction lists until finally, a dealer handed me the card of a maritime collector up the coast. He gave me a fascinating hour on the history of ships’ instruments. He’d restored two barometers, one of which was a handsome piece with a circular timber mount and the beryllium and copper mechanism on display.

Back home, I smuggled my expensive treasure inside and wrapped it, folding hospital corners into the shipwreck-themed paper I’d found.

On Christmas morning, el capitan looked nonplussed as he peeled away the paper to reveal his prize. I watched a frown crease his forehead as he inspected his new antique. “It’s from 1907,” I said proudly. “Hand-carved oak and the original glass. See? Restored by a specialist. I drove to Yanchep to find it.”

He looked from the barometer to me and laughed. “You know, darling, there’s this marvellous invention they call the internet? Day or night, you can press a button and it’ll tell you everything about the weather!”

It was at that point I stood up, smoothed my apron and flounced away to check on the turkey.

Perhaps this year, I’ll get him his damned socks and jocks after all.

Too Close To Call

Too Close To Call
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 28, 2015

As I passed the second-hand shop, a tableau of office bygones caught my eye. There beside a hulking green typewriter was an old teledex – a slim Bakelite box filled with cards stored in alphabetical order – exactly like the one Mum used as an address book when I was a child.

Hers was shiny and black and a font of all important phone numbers. At the press of a button, the lid would spring open to reveal the names and addresses of everyone I knew (and lots of mysterious people I didn’t). Mum was particular about printing surnames in easy-to-read capitals. As friends’ lives shifted, she crossed out old addresses and inserted new ones until some pages became a hash of geographical confusion.

I don’t know why I can still conjure Mum’s address book with such photographic precision. Perhaps it’s because our social lives depended on it. Or perhaps because Mum was always asking me to fetch it. For a long phone call, she’d carry her cup of tea to the armchair beside the phone table. That was my cue to make myself scarce.

Eavesdropping was a cinch when the home phone was tethered to the wall. I always knew who Mum was talking to because a verbal handshake began every call (“Hello, Pam? It’s Joan!”) Conversations played out while I half-listened, doodling on butcher’s paper at the dining room table, or doing my homework, waiting impatiently for her to finish. I didn’t dare interrupt, or try to distract her. Mum was either available, or off limits.

Today, my younger children are always pawing at me when I’m on the phone. The pair of them compete for my attention. They know I work from home, but I’m still expected to arbitrate every squabble and supervise every craft project. On deadline last week, trying to concentrate amid their myriad interruptions, I heard myself shout: “Just give me a minute!” Where did my children get the idea that their needs are more important than mine?

In the 80s, when I was a kid, parenting theory encouraged benign neglect. When sundowners at Mum’s tennis club turned into late night parties, I curled up under a picnic blanket on the back seat of the Corolla. By midnight, the carpark was full of kids asleep in their parents’ cars. Try that these days and you’d be arrested.

I marvel at my childhood freedoms. Graylands wasn’t the most genteel of suburbs, but I roamed the neighbourhood on foot, or looped my suburb by bike. On any slow Sunday, had you asked Mum where I was, she’d have paused, steam hissing from her iron, and shrugged: “Oh, she’s around here somewhere!”

As the summer holidays dragged on, I spent boiling January afternoons at the local pool, unsupervised. I’d time how long I could hold my breath underwater or bungle a swan dive with a belly flop off the top diving board. Friends were optional extras. Today’s parenting mantra – “safety in numbers” – hadn’t been invented.

“Keep your wits about you,” was all Mum ever said. Aged 11, flying solo on the swings at the park, I was approached by a strange man asking even stranger questions about where I lived. Heart pounding, I blurted “I have to go now,” and bolted for home. Mum suggested I steer clear of the park for a few days. Had that happened to one of my children now, I’d have put our street in lockdown and called the cops.

In one generation, the definition of parental success has undergone a telling transformation. ‘Good’ mums used to be those who encouraged their kids to be independent. Now, we measure our mothering by how well we keep them monitored, managed and tethered to us. We justify our ever-present involvement in their lives as essential to their survival.

A few weeks back, I listened to a teacher give a talk at my teenager’s school. He described a parent who’d rung in to complain about her son’s disappointing marks on an important project. “I don’t understand,” the Mum argued. “We worked so hard on that assignment.”

I, for one, am struggling to find the middle ground between being suffocatingly present or dismissively absent. I lurch from one parenting quandary to the next, filtering the parental do’s and don’ts proffered by others. Should I allow my 8-year-old son to walk the 200 metres to school alone? (Not yet, I’ve decided, despite his wails of protest.) Can he and his little sister play cricket out on our street? (Yes, but only if I’m there to monitor traffic.)

Half the time, I’m sure my worries and anxieties about what might happen are just scary thoughts – the continuous chatter and judgment of a too-busy mind. Best I stop thinking about whether I’m a good or bad mother, and start recognising that I’m both. And neither.

Passing Time

Passing Time
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 21, 2015

I arrived at the bus stop, breathless, having jogged across the park and up the grassy embankment to the highway. An elderly gent on the bench seat acknowledged me with a nod. His Labrador, sprawled at his feet, raised one eyebrow in greeting and thumped its tail lazily on the concrete.

“Excuse me,” I asked the owner. “Have I missed the 99?”

“Nothing green’s gone past since we’ve been here.”

Relieved, I sat down and remarked on his dog: “How old is he?”

“Bess? She’s nine.” He reached down to stroke a floppy ear. My bus-stop companion bore a remarkable likeness to Ernest Hemingway: a still handsome face framed by an impressive white beard, trimmed to follow a strong jawline. A navy fisherman’s cap, complete with rope braid, angled across his brow. I noticed the sharp crease in his cotton trousers and his polished brown lace-ups, one of which was wedged under Bess’ barrel chest. Only his walking stick hinted at infirmity. It was topped with a brass duck’s head, the bill worn smooth from constant handling. As we waited, he absentmindedly tapped the footpath with his stick.

“Where’re you off to then?” he said, suddenly. I wondered if he was hungry for conversation.

“I have a dentist’s check-up,” grimacing for his benefit. “Hope it’s a quick one.”

“I’ve given up on teeth,” he said with a chuckle, which turned into a wheeze, exploding into a coughing fit.

When he’d composed himself, I pointed to the duck’s head. “I’m quite taken with your walking stick. I’m supposed to convince my mum to use one – she’s getting a bit unsteady – but she won’t budge. Although I haven’t seen a fancy one like yours.”

“Bought it in London,” he said, giving the handle a twirl. “Been a beauty. Only problem is, the ferrule wears out every six months.”

“The what?”

“The rubber cap bunged on the end here. See?” He raised his stick. “Ferrule. There’s all kinds, but I like this one with the raised bumps underneath. When you’re resting your whole weight on it, it’s the difference between standing up and falling on your face!”

“Who knew walking sticks could be so technical!” I said. He chuckled again, no wheeze this time.

“Do you live near here?” I said, happy to make small talk now it was obvious we’d both missed the bus.

He pointed his stick over his shoulder. “I live three streets that way. Same house for 42 years. My wife died six months ago.”

“Oh. I’m sorry,” I said quickly, surprised he was sharing such intimacies with a stranger. “It was a long illness,” he continued matter-of-factly. “I was relieved for her at first – she was 81 – but as the months go by, I’m realizing she was the last person I could talk to about the past. My friends are too busy with their own troubles.”

“Do you have family here?”

“One son in Sydney. The other in Albany. They’re good to me, but they got their own families. And I’m getting on for 83. Some days, I can’t imagine getting to 85, but then again, when I was 75 and first diagnosed with cancer, 80 seemed unlikely too.”

“My mum’s turning 80 next year,” I said. “She reckons she’s reached the age of invisibility.”

“Hmmf.” A thoughtful silence stretched between us. “This is the problem for old people,” he said finally. “We’re no longer involved in the main business of life: production and reproduction. I’m not sure how we’re supposed to make ourselves relevant again. But at least we can give you young ones the encouragement to keep at it.”

“Quite frankly, I worry more about losing my marbles,” I said, voicing a private fear. “Dementia runs in the family and I’m terrified it’s sneaking up on me.”

“Luck of the draw, ain’t it,” he replied. “I have problems with my lungs and a weak heart. I’m more deaf than not, but I can hear what I need to with this little gadget in my ear. I can’t see properly and my hip gives me hell, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned – it’s that you’ve gotta keep going. Nothing else for it.”

I heard the crescendo of an approaching diesel. I swivelled to see the 99 bearing down on us and leapt up to wave at the driver.

“C’mon old girl,” I said to Bess the Labrador, still flaccid on the footpath. Her owner, bracing on his stick, heaved himself up.

“She’s allowed on the bus, is she?” I asked, scrabbling for change in my pocket.

“Oh, I’m not waiting for the bus,” said my new acquaintance. “Bess and I just stopped here for a rest. We’ll head off home now. Nice talking.”

The Wheel Deal

The Wheel Deal
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 14, 2015

In my twenties, last century, I became captivated by a book called The Third Policeman. It was a darkly comic novel penned in the 1930s by an Irishman, who wrote – sodden with whisky – under the pseudonym of Flann O’Brien.

Several of his characters had spent their lives on bikes, traversing the rutted roads of their country parish. So attuned were they to their metal steeds that a transmutation occurred: the rider’s body began to merge with the molecules of his bike.

The postman, for instance, became 71 percent bicycle. He developed strange behaviours: regularly leaning one elbow against walls, or standing in the street with one foot propped on the kerb.

I wonder if I, too, am becoming half-woman, half-bike. My metamorphosis began after the calamity of losing my driver’s licence. In the wake of a disastrous double-demerit-point weekend, I found myself forced into two-wheeled servitude by the local constabulary’s speed cameras. The curtailment of my freedom was shocking: so accustomed was I to holding a steering wheel. How I would manage three children and my life without a car?

The first week, I rode across four suburbs to reach the nearest Officeworks. There, I discovered I had no hope of fitting two cartons of printer inks, a telephone book of photocopier paper and an impulse buy of several lever-arch files into my bike panniers. Ignoring Newton’s first law of shopping bags, I hung a pendulous sack from each end of my handlebars. My bike seemed stable enough while stationary. But as I panted up the first hill towards home, the brick of paper dangling from my right handlebar began swinging wildly, banging painfully into my shin. The lever arch files champed at my knee cap with their metal-teethed corners. After ten minutes, my saddle had stiffened to concrete. I cursed the westerly headwind as my legs screamed for mercy. My bike, as transport vehicle, was a bruising ride. And worse, it depended on me for its engine.

The friction between us only escalated the second week. Grocery shopping became a saga of misfit: milk and bread jammed under the metal carrier behind my seat, fruit stuffed into the panniers, tinned tomatoes and baked beans strung from one handlebar, cheese and yoghurt from the other. I gently wedged a carton of eggs into my backpack. As I cranked through my gears to tackle a long rise, the chain jolted on its cog, dislodging my foot from the pedal. Clipping the kerb, I toppled onto the verge, a tangle of spokes and bags. Hauling myself up, I saw the milk had split open and was chugging its contents into a drain. My avocados were mush. Only the eggs had been granted a soft landing. I checked myself for missing skin, collected the foodstuffs strewn across the grass and trundled for home, nursing grazed ankle and bruised ego. My cycling enslavement, I decided, would be hell on wheels.

But three weeks into my driving proscription, the bike and I found our rhythm. Our personalities slid into one. Together, we looked for smooth detours around storm drains, tree root speed-humps and the glitter of broken glass lying in wait by the kerb. Potholes became our common enemy. We travelled to the soundtrack of the wind, breathing in the sweet smells of the slow lane.

My life constricted. Or loosened – I’m not sure which. Without a car, my world had shrunk, but I discovered new freedoms. Each day, I calmly calculated where I needed to go. Bike and I rode as fast or as slow as our mood. We scooted through traffic jams and took short cuts across park paths. I learnt the contours of my suburbs by heart. In my car, I’d flattened big hills with a gentle nudge on my accelerator. On my bike, every dip and rise was committed to muscle memory.

Sights that had passed me in a blur from the inside of my Swedish steel box became suddenly intriguing. Why had I never noticed the recluse on a nearby corner? Wild-haired and hump-backed, always in the same tatty shorts and t-shirt, cataloguing his latest collection of oddments. Some afternoons, I’d ride by and catch sight of him, surrounded by rusty tins, painting sheets of scrap metal – for what, I didn’t know.

Stopped at traffic lights yesterday, I paused to look wistfully across a sea of cars and drivers and remembered with a stab of shame, why I’m in the bike lane. But all I saw were stony faces, staring dully ahead. Riding a bike is one of life’s simple pleasures, like skimming stones, or baking a cake, or interrupting my husband.

Justice has smote me with her flaming sword, as deserved. When I’m back behind the wheel, I promise never to take an eye off the speedo. But for the next few months, I’ll respectfully ride out my punishment.

Keeping Mum

Keeping Mum
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 7, 2015

My mother has a wind-up toy that has been in our family as long as I have. It’s a little tin duck in a bright orange waistcoat, perched on a metal tricycle. A silver key cranks the clockwork motor hidden under his seat and he takes off, tiny webbed feet pumping the pedals, a blur of duck a l’orange on the loungeroom floor. Then, as the mainspring slackens, he begins to tire, pedalling slower and slower in diminishing circles. Exhausted, he finally whirs to a halt. That duck has faithfully entertained all three of my toddlers, tolerating their knocks and drops and their chubby little fingers overwinding his key. He was built to last, much like my mother.

“Look,” I said to Mum last week, inspecting the toy’s flaking paint and chipped wheels. “He’s getting a bit worse for wear.”

“Well, I’m not surprised. We all wear out eventually.”

As Mum stood up from the table – too briskly – she grabbed the back of a chair to steady herself.

“Dizzy?” I asked, suddenly worried. “You have had breakfast, haven’t you?”

Ignoring me, she strode purposefully into the kitchen.

“You know I can’t eat first thing in the morning!” she said as she filled the kettle.

She clattered a cup onto a saucer. I could tell she was kicking herself for failing to hide her unsteadiness. Above all else, my mother prides herself on being spry.

Her daily constitutional is to ride her bike on a seven kilometre loop of the golf course – fast, and without a helmet. When she hears the postie’s motorbike puttering into her cul-de-sac, she jogs across the front lawn to the letterbox, just to prove to herself she still can. This from a 79-year-old who’s numb from the knees down; who trips and stumbles now that she can no longer feel her feet.

“Idiopathic peripheral neuropathy,” declared her specialist a month ago, as he pricked her ankles with a pin. “Can you feel that?” he asked, working higher up her shins. “Nope,” she said. “Do it harder.”

He raised one eyebrow at me.

“Idiopathic means we don’t know what’s causing the numbness,” he explained. “In old age, we fail gradually and randomly. The nerve endings in your legs are no longer sending messages to your brain. I suggest we run a battery of tests to try to find out why.”

In and out of hospital she went to be probed and prodded. A CAT scan of her brain one day; an MRI of her spinal cord the next; an EMG to test the electrical activity in her muscles – so many medical acronyms in search of a prognosis, all procedures tending gloomwards.

Between her appointments, Mum began a quiet rebellion by gardening barefoot, contrary to doctor’s orders. A life-long recalcitrant, she continued jogging to the letterbox, risking a fall. She snorted when a young intern suggested a walking stick would aid her balance. She turned to jab playfully at me with an arthritic finger: “Don’t you dare!”

“Okay,” I grinned. “No walking stick for Christmas!”

When her neurologist next suggested a lumbar puncture to test her spinal fluid, she protested: “Good grief! Is this really necessary? Some things can’t be fixed, you know.” For the first time, I detected a note of helplessness in her voice.

I went home distressed. Was I complicit in these medical interventions? And for what? The slim chance of a cure? Was this really just perseverance in the face of pointlessness?

Here was this daughter’s dilemma: Did my relentlessly independent mother want me to take care of her this way: with more doctors, more tests, more management? Would I remain a comforting presence in her life if I continued to interfere with her wishes?

Even now, I naively think I can protect her with vigilance. I feel uneasy when she fails to answer her phone. I worry when she’s too tired to eat dinner. We’re in the process of trading places, she and I, but there are no coming of age celebrations when mother and daughter swap roles.

Yesterday, I stopped by her house to find her in a darkened hallway, halfway up a ladder, trying to change a light globe.

“Mum! What are you doing?” I said, unable to hide my alarm. “I thought we agreed – no climbing ladders.”

For once, her ailing memory provided an alibi. “I never agreed to that,” she said, looking down defiantly. “And I’m perfectly capable of changing a light bulb.” The shaking ladder proved otherwise. For my mother, an indignity of ageing is conceding defeat.

As I hugged her goodbye and swung onto my bike for the short ride home, I repeated two questions I’ve been asking her this past year. “Are you happy, Mum?”

“Yes.”

“Are you lonely?”

“No.”

For now, that’s all I care about.

In the Back Seat

In the Back Seat
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday October 31, 2015

I still marvel at the idea humans can now soar above the clouds in a pressurised metal tube. To me, there is no noise on earth as exciting as the sound of jet engines rising in pitch, preparing for takeoff. Not even a midnight horror can dampen the thrill of flying.

Waiting to board, we passengers queued stoically. An overtired toddler, weaving listlessly through our line, suddenly reversed gear and became hyperactive. He began leapfrogging his mum’s bag until his foot caught the handle and he sprawled across the tiled floor, letting loose a volley of ear-piercing wails. I heard the middle-aged couple behind me exchange sighs. A flight attendant wearing a clipboard and sensible shoes announced:

“All economy passengers seated rows 60-75 please proceed to the gate for boarding.”

I looked down at my boarding pass: 73H. Probably next to the rear-most toilets.

Sidestepping my fellow sleepwalkers, I went to the front of the queue. This is the way airlines divide the privileged from the ordinary, I decided. They know broadcasting my 73H low worth makes the passengers sitting in front of me feel more valuable. Does class warfare extend to 30-thousand feet?

Stepping aboard, I passed the welcoming committee of Chief Stewards in their sharp suits and slicked hair.

“This aisle please,” one said, waving me to the right.

I jerked my battered trolley-bag forward. Passing through Business, I inhaled a lungful of the rarefied air fizzing from the high-born vents and felt light-headed. A balding gent in an unsightly mustard-coloured Polo shirt was settling himself in 8C. I noticed the smiling flight attendant hovering over him. “Welcome aboard, Mr Atkins. Would you like a bowl of warm roasted macadamias?” He nodded contentedly as she unwrapped his cashmere blanket. I hoped the packet peanuts in 73H wouldn’t be stale.

As I passed through the gilded curtains and entered the cramped slum-rows of cattle class, I wondered if airlines make Economy seating purposely awful? Surely there is a way to make the rich feel super-special without making the rest of us feel second class? Does Veuve Clicquot taste better when you know your inferiors are drinking warm Sprite?

I was right about my seat: 73H was three steps from the rear toilets at the arse end of the plane. A huge fellow wearing a lurid orange T-shirt shoved past me to jam his backpack into the last overhead locker.

“Jackpot,” I heard him mutter sarcastically as he compressed his bulk into the seat behind mine, bucking me forward as his knees collided with my seat back.

A girl with long shiny black hair and a Hello Kitty jumper arrived and pointed expectantly at the window seat next to me.

I clambered out of my seat to let her in. No sooner had she sat down than she whipped a packet of antiseptic wipes from her bag and proceeded to disinfect her tray table. When she’d finished, she got to work decontaminating the video screen, her arm rest and the fingerhold of the window blind. Satisfied, she sterilised her hands with a tiny bottle of sanitiser before turning to me.

“Do you have pets?” she asked in a high voice.

“Um. We have a cat.”

“Me too! What’s her name,” she asked excitedly, pulling out her phone.

“Alfie.”

“Does she sleep with you?”

“Aah, no?”

“Why not?”

“He’s not allowed. Fleas,” I added, helpfully.

She paused to swipe her screen. I wondered if we had anything else in common.

“This is Fifi. She’s my baby,” she said, tilting her phone towards me and flicking through dozens of photos of a fat ginger cat in set poses. There was Fifi leaning against her scratching post, Fifi curled up in her basket, Fifi with one paw pressing down on a toy mouse.

For several minutes, I feigned polite interest in her tubby tabby until she reverted to more questions about Alfie. I tried to kill her interest by explaining that Alfie had a Hitler moustache and a temperament to match, but she only clapped her amusement. As we taxied down the runway, I scrabbled around in the seat pocket for my headphones, clasped them to my head and made a pretence of closing my eyes. It seemed to do the trick because I nodded off. When I woke up bleary-eyed with a cricked neck and my right leg throbbing with pins and needles, my neighbour was brushing her teeth.

“Morning,” she said.

Confused, I checked my watch: 2am. (I decided plane travel is only glamorous in retrospect.)

Several hours and no sleep later, we stragglers trundled wearily up the skybridge to the concourse. As we passed a wizened old man dusting a window, I reminded myself that most of the world’s population has never been on a plane. If you’ve flown, you’re already upper class.

Driven to Despair

Driven to Despair
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday October 24, 2015

The man behind the counter at the Motor Vehicle Licencing Centre dwarfed the glass partition that separated us. He was as skinny as he was tall, with a flap of dark, wavy hair plastered across his forehead. His moustache was fringed with grey. As he strained to staple a wodge of documents, I stood meekly on the wrongful side of the counter. He nodded and I slid my offending paperwork towards him and waited. He glanced up at the clock on the wall, sighed and turned to face me with the nettled expression of someone whose job it is to be civil to miscreants.

“Yes?”

I pleaded my case. “I think there’s been a mistake,” I said. “I got this letter last week saying you’re going to suspend my driver’s licence. But you can’t lose your licence for driving at 72 in a 70-zone on a highway can you?

He studied my papers.

“You can when it’s a 60-zone.”

Despair tightened in my gut.

“I see here,” he continued, “that you’re already on a good behaviour bond for driving at 60 in a 50-zone four times on the same road on a double demerit- point long weekend.”

“Well, yes,” I replied guiltily. “But I thought the speed limit on that road was 60. It’s the main thoroughfare through my suburb. You get honked if you drive at 50!”

“Well – I’m afraid the law says it’s a 50-zone,” he said sternly. “You’ve now accrued thirteen demerit points. Your licence is suspended. No driving any motor vehicle from midnight tonight.”

I felt nauseous.

“Can I appeal?” I whispered.

“Not once you’ve paid the fines.”

I cursed my bill-paying efficiency. In shock, I cast about for a worthy plea bargain but drew a blank. Instead, I dumped my dignity. I propped my elbows on the counter, clasped my hands and prayed to the Licence God.

“Please! I’m hardly a public menace. I drive a 10-year-old clunker for goodness sake! You can’t be a hoon in a station wagon: it drives like a brick.”

But he’d heard it all before. He held up his hand to silence me and pushed a document under the glass.

“You sign here to accept the suspension,” he said.

My hand trembled as I scrawled my signature with the Department of Transport’s official 30-cent biro, tied up with string for safekeeping. He stamped my paperwork with too much gusto.

In that instant, I became a bloody Volvo driver unable to drive like one. Disaster! My lead foot had led me astray. On the way home, I began to panic: No licence for six months? With three children?

A girlfriend called by to commiserate.

“Just think how this’ll reduce your carbon footprint,” she said, consolingly.

“I don’t have a carbon footprint,” I wailed. “I drive everywhere!”

The man of the house was unimpressed.

“So I guess I’ll be driving the kids to sport all weekend, will I?”

I tried to sound upbeat: “I’ll follow you on my bike!”

“Gee, that’ll help,” he sighed.

I went to bed and pulled the sheet over my head. I spent several lonely hours reflecting on how the rule of law creates a better society.

The next morning, I resolved to remain a glass half-full kind of gal. Then I stood in the driveway wondering how I would fit the contents of my car into two saddlebags on the back of my bike.

My car has always been my handbag. I like to use the passenger footwells to store all of life’s necessities: lip gloss, hair elastics, biros, loose change, a refreshing drink, a picnic blanket. Last week I needed a notepad to write down a phone number and all I had to do was rummage under the seat until one materialised.

I packed what I could into my bike panniers and decided if I was going to become a full-time cyclist, I’d have to swallow my pride and dress like one. I threw on a tatty t-shirt to match my jeans and rode to the bike shop. “I’m going to need some lycra,” I panted to the male assistant, his ropy thighs suctioned in neon spandex. “But nothing with a padded gusset,” I added, wincing at the sight of his lime green, walnutty bottom as he led me to a rack of clothing.

All the leggings were shouting their corporate sponsorship. “Are these slimming,” I asked hopefully, selecting a sky-blue pair with the least amount of brand splodges. I thought I heard him snicker as I parted the curtains and entered the changing room.

Two hundred dollars later, I was outfitted for my two-wheeled servitude: six months in the saddle and a new cycle of life. I’m an enemy of the people but I can be reformed. Wave to me as you drive past.

Modern Fairy Fail

Modern Fairy Fail
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday October 17, 2015

The closet under our stairs is home to a pair of battered suitcases, a retired floor mop topped with a shrivelled toupee of sponge and at least two generations of Daddy Long Leg spiders. I quite like spiders-on-stilts as a rule, but not when they come charging three abreast from the dark recesses of my scariest cupboard. Spring cleaning can be bloodthirsty work.

With my vacuum cleaner, I sucked them into the vortex of Hurricane Hoover and continued nosing deeper and deeper into the cupboard. And that’s when I struck an unfamiliar object. It was a mouldering cardboard box. I sliced open the packing tape with a knife. Inside was an antiquated collection of Brothers Grimm fairy tale books. They’d belonged to my mother as a girl and she, in turn, had entrusted them to my childhood.

I shuffled through the box, surprised and delighted to find these yellowing relics. Here were my favourite fairy tales – Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, Rumplestiltskin and Rapunzel. I teased open the fraying cloth cover of Hansel & Gretel and fell down a wormhole, hurtling back to my grandmother’s house and the bare boards of my bedroom, aged nine.

I remembered the story of Hansel & Gretel being a thrilling, if uncomfortable read: two children deserted by their new step-mother in the woods; captured by a cannibalistic witch who plans to barbecue her small prisoners. When at last, the witch gets her comeuppance, I reveled in the punitive gore of the hag being pushed alive into her own oven.

That witch deserved what she got. But I thought hard about what kind of father could be talked into discarding his children. He was a coward, I decided and I resolved never to get involved with one of those. But I was soon to acquire a step-father of my own. Not convinced of the benefits, I was already wary of being displaced in my mother’s affections. Hansel & Gretel became a touchstone for my own fears of abandonment.

Back beside the staircase, I discovered at the bottom of the box, a copy of The Juniper Tree – surely the most brutal of Grimms’ folk tales. As I turned the brittle pages for the first time in nearly forty years, the grisly illustrations loosened another panoply of childhood memories. In what cerebral crevice had they been hibernating?

Here was yet another hateful stepmother. This one beheads her stepson to allow her daughter to inherit the family fortune. The stepmother cooks the boy’s head in a stew and feeds it to his unwitting father, who remarks: ‘Delicious!’

I’d remembered few of the macabre and gory details – only a 9-year-old’s outrage that the villainous wife might get away with her crime. How relieved I’d been when she was crushed by a millstone.

Was my childish mind traumatized by such violent storytelling? Not me! I was far more terrified of the monster under my bed. Fairy tales were instructive: they cautioned me to trust my instincts. They helped me calibrate my moral compass.

Those old stories gave graphic expression to what every parent knows – that people get angry and even violent; and that these darker sides of human nature can be explored for entertainment rather than being repressed and denied.

My children have only ever seen the saccharine Disney versions of these fairytales – bowdlerized almost beyond recognition. In 21st century Hollywood, villains find themselves transformed or absolved. Good triumphs over evil and all mistakes can be rectified. Nice things happen to nice people.

Should we be sanitising fairy tales for today’s kids? In my mother’s 1940’s edition of Snow White, the evil queen must wear red-hot iron shoes at Snow White’s wedding, and dances herself to death. Cinderella’s horrible step-sisters have their eyes pecked out. Revenge was a fitting punishment. The awfulness those endings rankled in my mind, but I lapped them up, enjoying my darker fantasies.

Last night, I decided to test the delicacy of my five year old’s constitution. At bedtime, I produced my antique, unexpurgated copy of Cinderella and we settled down to read. On page 12, I remembered – nervously – what was coming. Cinderella’s stepsisters failed to fit the golden slipper. “Here’s a knife,” their mother urges. “If the slipper is still too tight for you, then cut off a piece of your foot. It will hurt a bit. But what does that matter?” So they slice off some toes.

I paused to gauge my five-year-old’s reaction, fearing I might have created a new monster for bedtime. But she turned to me and giggled.

“That was a dumb idea!” she said, whipping one foot out from under the covers. “They should’ve scrunched up their toes up like this.”

And with that practical advice, we went to the ball, met our Prince and lived happily ever after.