Farewell, my friend

Farewell, my friend
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 1, 2014

I’m not one for living in the past. But the death of a long-ago friend has marked me in strange ways. Our friendship blossomed during a summer of waitressing in 1985, the year I turned 18. We shared the breakfast shift at the North Cott cafe, overlooking the beach. Her name was Jan. Her name-tag said so.

She was twelve years older, fit and tanned, a single mum to two girls. I’d pull up to the cafe at 6am and see her dilapidated Volvo 240 parked skew-whiff out front, windows open and a pack of Sterling Ultra Milds on the front seat.

By 6.30, the easterly dropped and left the cafe blinds in peace. The first swimmers shuffled up the concrete steps, salted by the ocean, hungry for breakfast. I’d never seen such a smorgasbord of near-naked bodies up close. Jan would elbow me as she folded a mound of serviettes. My eyes followed hers to some swarthy athlete who’d hitched up his red sluggos to display two meaty buttocks. A collection of old boys who swam daily, all-weathers, stood chatting in saggy bathers, drying off their wrinkly brown hides. Girls in bikinis paraded perkiness.

Behind the coffee machine, I admired Jan working the outdoor tables, a model of waitressing efficiency. She could stack three greasy plates along one forearm yet still wriggle free from the bloke who liked to pat her bottom as she took his order. Swatting his arm with her free hand, she weaved back to me. She’d dumped her plates and cutlery so they clattered on the bench and every head turned towards her. “One cappuccino for The Octopus!” she’d announce, grinning.

A virgin at waitressing, I was intimidated by the hulking coffee machine. The frothing proboscis dribbled boiling water on my hand or spat steam at my face if I lost concentration. Customers flustered me by huffing when their lattes took too long. I boiled the milk into a frenzy and served up flat whites with slimy skins that stuck grotesquely to upper lips. My new friend Jan was always encouraging: “You’re getting the hang of it. See? Do table four’s next – they’ve only been waiting for ten minutes.”

Now accustomed to dawn risings, Jan and I started meeting at the beach to exercise on days off. I wore a tie-dyed singlet and my favourite white shorts with elasticated lacy hems. Sometimes I wore a g-string leotard over the white shorts because I was all class in the 80’s. Jan had a bright purple leotard and black micro-shorts. We power-walked along the footpath that hugged Marine Parade from Swanbourne to Leighton beach. Engrossed in conversation, we ignored the smirks from middle-aged couples in sensible tracksuits.

We dissected our relationships – her new squeeze, my over-familiar one. We itemised their shortcomings, justified our own. We raked over our childhoods, volunteered deep secrets. Nothing was too personal or too painful for a verbal autopsy. I marvelled at her insights. She could solve any of my problems.

On the weekends her girls went to their father, we warred at the tennis net. Line calls were disputed with McEnroe histrionics. The sore loser copped the bill for lunch. We counted calories, invented new diet regimes, wondered if this would be the year we’d be thin enough (and brave enough) to wear a bikini.

And then I got sacked from the cafe. The boss caught me hiding in the coolroom, scoffing a slab of his prized hummingbird cake. Jan constructed an elaborate defence, but my coffee failures had caught up with me, and now I was also a cake thief.

I went off to Psych 101 at Uni, she had a baby with the new boyfriend. We still walked along the ocean once a week, then once a month, then not at all. We caught up on the phone, as delighted with each other as ever, but the gaps in our friendship grew longer until I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her.

And then one morning last year, I spotted her at the shops. She looked gaunt, her collar bones sharp against her oddly pale skin. I was shocked, but made a pretence.

“All right,” I said as we hugged. “You win. You’re thinner!”

“No. You win,” she said. “I’ve got cancer.”

I burst into tears.

I hardly knew anyone at her crowded funeral. A few faces were vaguely familiar, old friends of hers I’d met once or twice. Jan’s girls had slyly grown into women. I spotted three small grandsons. I was now a middle-aged relic from her past. I stood against the chapel wall and my mind drifted to the year we met, when the beach beckoned to sun-tans and summer romances. I longed for her company, for our shared confidences, for my younger self. But she is gone now, my friend Jan. Part of me went with her.

Doctor’s Orders

Doctor’s Orders
Ros Thomas
The West Weekend Magazine
Published January 19, 2013

What is it about growing up in Perth that sticks to me like beach sand whipped up by the Freo doctor? Remembering mums and dads struggling to wrap wet kids in flapping towels. Brothers and sisters duck-diving under waves trying to stall their departure until someone shouts over the howling wind: “Icecreams for kids who help carry!” Everyone searching for their thongs.

Try explaining to someone who’s not a native: “Hey! I think the doctor’s in” – that bastard-saint of bluster and balm so familiar to Perth beach-goers. The sea breeze that’s welcome relief from yet another stinking hot day, but the killjoy that makes the beach so unpleasant everyone packs up and heads back to the baking car. As a kid, the bitumen was always so hot you had to stand on your towel until there was a break in the traffic. Back then, as we drove away from the sinking sun with all the windows open, I would take one last look back at the ocean, sun-dappled but choppy now. One last laugh at the seagulls being buffeted sideways as they swooped down to the fish and chip wrappers on the grass.

Thirty years later, these are the memories that hallmark an Australian childhood. We must tell our children how we tortured the Hills Hoist in the backyard, how it made terrible creaks and groans that brought Mum outside to tell us off. We, too, now have the buffalo lawn, and another generation of kids knows the sting of grass cuts from rolling around on it. Someone still gets sent inside to fetch the calamine lotion. And little ones still go to bed in shortie pyjamas with the fan on full bore, legs covered in pink calamine dots.

I want my children to know by instinct all these ways of being Australian. I want to hear them squealing  as they jump on the trampoline while Papa squirts them with the hose. I want them to know that the best thirst quencher is a slab of cold watermelon; that the hot plate needs a slosh of beer before you cook a dozen snags. I think back to all those backyard barbies where Uncle Hughie would send me inside for the tomato sauce (“Get the dead horse for me will ya Rosi-gal!”) I would sit by his elbow and marvel as he drowned his steak in it.

Killing flies was small-game hunting when Mum handed us the red plastic swatters she kept on top of the fridge. (Fly spray was expensive and only for special occasions.) Anyone who didn’t shut the flyscreen door got a peeved: “Were you born in a tent?!”

I’d spend Sunday afternoons on the swings at the park with a girlfriend from six houses up. Sometimes we’d vanish to the corner deli to play Pinball while we waited for Countdown to start. We’d blow our pocket money in an hour, but a dollar lasted for ages and Smarties were three for a cent.

I try to give my 12 year old son the same long leash –  let him skateboard round the streets and vanish ‘up the shops’ with a mate. I hope he’s sensible enough not to take for granted the freedoms  I give him, because I feel uneasy every time I let him out the door. At the same age, I was horsing around at the local pool for hours, only coming home when I was hungry.

I spent most Saturday afternoons unsupervised at the tennis club, racing my blue bike up and down the driveway, or hitting balls up against the clubhouse wall. The members’ last sets always seemed the longest – waiting around for the grown-ups to finish play because then we were allowed a packet of chips and a bottle of red creaming soda. With a paper straw. We didn’t get in the way of the adults socialising: we were part of a family, not the centre of attention.

All those sunburns, and heat rashes, and chafing from too much sand in our bathers – the small but vivid discomforts of an Australian summer.  How many times did I slather myself in baby oil and lie out in the backyard to summons the New Year’s tan? That night, I’d be soaking in a bath loaded with bicarb soda to take the sting out of red shoulders. My childrens’ peachy skins will be saved by sunscreen and long sleeved rashies. And the comfort of air-conditioning.

I have promised my children we will go to the beach every single day of these holidays. Their father thinks that’s way too much effort. But I have chosen to ignore the sand-pit in the car and the endless wet towels. Rather, the kids and I are now craving our daily dose of sea and salt. With each swim, a new generation of Aussies is laying down a patina of beachside memories. I hope these memories will be easily retrieved when in years to come, someone asks them: “So what was it like growing up in Perth?” Or better still: “Who’s this Freo Doctor?”