Leap of Faith

Leap of Faith
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday April 25, 2015

Fear pricked the soles of my feet. The Griffin road bridge over the Collie River was so high I could feel the adrenalin flooding my gut. My legs felt wobbly. I tried to ignore the pounding in my ears. My brain scrambled to process three converging phobias: my fear of heights, fear of falling and fear of drowning.

Five metres beneath me, the dark water swirled in murky green currents. I perched on the rusty water pipe slung beneath the bridge, my left hand a row of white-knuckles gripping the guard rail behind me. Could I jump?

“C’mon Mum” shouted a voice from the pebbly beach.

Minutes before, I’d been comfortably grounded on the river bank. I waded out to waist-height, shrieking and flapping my arms as the bracing water lapped at my ribs. Adjusting to the chill, I floated on my back, admiring the stands of towering jarrah. Young flooded gums competed for water views amongst the melaleucas and banksias.

I rolled over and studied the sun-bleached timber legs of the bridge, trying to guess their age. Thick metal skirts reinforced the ankles of the poorer specimens, but couldn’t hide the dark veins and unsightly splits further up.

Some larrikin had gouged his nickname into a strut. ‘Mongrel 2015’ it read. Got that right!

I turned to see eldest son scrambling up the embankment on the heels of his uncle. At highway’s edge, they scanned for cars before scuttling out along the bridge, hugging the dirt strip beside the guard rail.

I watched as my 14-year-old man-child folded his giraffe legs and squeezed through the gap in the steel barrier. Then he dropped confidently onto the giant pipe suspended from the girders.

Counting to three, the pair of them leapt from the bridge. I checked my son’s face for terror but found only exhilaration. Legs flailing, they plunged into the deep water. I held my breath waiting for them to surface. Their heads emerged in a raft of bubbles and they lay on their backs, hooting and punching the air.

In that moment, I decided I too, needed to jump off the Griffin bridge. I wanted to test my mettle, impress my offspring, liberate my inner daredevil. Mother-of-three would be hailed as fearless.

I peeled off the T-shirt and skirt covering my bathers and left them, neatly folded, in a pile by the roadside. I tweaked my bather top for maximum coverage, then ducked under the railing and gingerly placed one foot on a girder, the other on the water pipe.

And then I looked down and felt faint. The river below was as black as a crocodile’s gullet. To my addled brain, I could have been peering over a four-storey balcony, without the balcony. Up river, my seven-year-old paddling his plastic canoe looked like a gumnut baby on a leaf.

Imagined catastrophes played out in slow motion. I stood rooted to the pipe and contemplated death by idiocy. A belly flop would be an embarrassing exit but would amuse the congregation at my funeral. Strangulation by river weed? Being eaten alive by marron? My remains would never be found. (The West would callously bestow my page on another hack writer. I mentally wrote the headline: Columnist’s demise is water under bridge.)

My ego regained control. No way would I be branded a chicken! I steeled myself to jump but a flicker of movement caught my eye. I swivelled head on rigid body. A beefy bloke with a Rasputin beard was swinging one hairy thigh over the guard rail. He settled with a thump beside me.

“Got the willies eh” he said. I noted he had a piece of BluTack wedged into his ear.

And then he was gone. Half-way down he hugged one knee and performed a layback bombie that sounded like a depth charge. He surfaced, loosened some pond scum from his beard and sliced through the water with six freestyle arms. He beached, waded ashore and lumbered back into his tent.

Rasputin was just the model I needed. I sucked in a lungful of air, stifled the voices in my head and released my grip on the guard rail. For several moments I teetered on the pipe. The safety barrier was now beyond my reach. The only way out now was down. I stepped off the pipe. As I hurtled toward the blackness, there was no time to contemplate a graceful entry. I smacked the water and disappeared as most of the Collie River went up my nose. Spluttering and snorting, I bobbed to the surface to a welcome of cheering and clapping. I checked myself: nothing broken, septum intact, ego at capacity.

“Nice one Mum,” shouted teenage son. “Bet you can’t do it twice!”

When Darkness Falls

When Darkness Falls
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday August 23, 2014

It was the wind that startled me awake. A gust outside the window buffeted the hibiscus against the gutter. The screeching of wood on metal unsettled my ears. A branch thumped loudly and my heart joined in. I closed my eyes, chastised myself for being lily-livered, and tried to summon sleep. It was no use. I was spooked.

I swung warm feet onto cold floor and padded out to the kitchen, catching sight of the oven clock: 05.22. What now?

I put on my running gear and tiptoed out the door. The dark was thick and soupy. I couldn’t see where the slabs of footpath beetled over one another, eager to trip me. My street felt foreign and menacing. Was I stupid to run at this hour?

Only the house on the corner was aglow. At a desk behind a sash window, I could see a man in a dressing gown, outlined in cheery yellow lamplight. I felt briefly comforted, then turned into the next street and the gloom enveloped me anew. I strained my ears, hoping to hear the first kookaburras calling to each other from the salmon gums, but the wind had dropped. The air was still and silent.

My imagination goes into overdrive at night, especially when my husband is away. Eldest son keeps me company until 9pm, but at 11.30, I’m squirming in bed, sleepless and watchful. A floorboard creaks. Is someone in the house? That’ll be Freddy Krueger coming to fillet me with his razor gloves! (I’m sixteen again, living out my Nightmares on Elm Street).

In my first year at University, (back row, Pysch 101), Sigmund Freud taught me that my fear of the dark was maternal separation anxiety. (Or more likely, having the wimp gene). But lately, I’ve conducted a straw poll of girlfriends and all but one is still scared of the dark. We’re not frightened of the dark itself, but of the bogeymen who still inhabit our nocturnal minds.

My childish terror of lights-out began when mum and I moved in with my Nan when I was seven. It was my nightly torment to dash from back door to outdoor dunny. The brick thunderbox, roofed with an arch of corrugated iron, sat on a cold slab of concrete. The pedestal was white porcelain, with a chain flusher and a fat wooden seat.

On wintry evenings, I’d stand on the back veranda in my pj’s, hopping from one leg to the other to steel my nerves (and distract my bladder). The umbrella trees that loomed over the fishpond threw witchy fingers of shadow. When the wind gusted, those old crones grabbed at my ankles as I leapt off the veranda and tore across the damp grass. From porch to dunny was fifteen steps – fourteen after a run-up. I slammed the dunny door on the umbrella tree witches, only to have relief turn to shock as warm bum met chilly seat.

It was only ever a one-way terror. The return journey was a doddle as I aimed myself at the lit kitchen.

As a teenager, I was both electrified and petrified by horror movies. The bathtub scene in The Shining rattled me for days. One Friday night when we were 18, my girlfriends egged me into watching the late session of Aliens at Cinema City. I thought two bourbons and cokes would give me the requisite dutch courage. But even Sigourney Weaver couldn’t soothe my jitters. Half way through the movie, unable to bear the suspense, I fled the cinema. Sitting on the foyer steps, I waited for my friends, polishing off my popcorn and admiring the plush blood-red carpet under the reassuring neon brightness.

Thirty years later, I’m still a sissy. I can only watch re-runs of the X Files with all the lights on. Even then, I grip my husband’s hairy left thigh, screw shut my eyes and repeat “Is it over yet?” “Yup,” he says, and I open my eyes to confront the gory climax. “You rotten sod!” I poke him playfully where his tummy spills over his trousers.

My fear of fear is irrational but ingrained. Yesterday, I went out running again before dawn. Stretching my hamstrings on the corner, I looked up the street and saw a big bloke shambling towards me. I stuck close to the picket fences as he came closer. True to form, I ascribed Hannibal Lecter to his motives, Quasimodo to his gait.

‘Morning!’ the man said brightly as he passed. Feeling idiotic for my panic, I told myself to grow up. I watched him as he merged with the dark. And then he stopped. For an instant, I thought I saw him glance at me over his shoulder. I brimmed with fear. What’s he picking up? A big stick? Nah. It’s only his newspaper.

Quite a mouthful

Quite a mouthful
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday April 20, 2013

The scariest teeth I’ve known belonged to a Grade 7 teacher called Mr Campbell. They dominated his face in the same way as Mister Ed’s – horsey and over-sized. In fearsome combination with his gravelly baritone, (which exploded like a sonic boom when angry), choirmaster Campbell and his big choppers are all I remember about singing lessons.

To my four-foot nothing, his six-foot something appeared gargantuan. He strode around the music room on his leg-stilts with his head cocked to one side, straining to indentify which one of us was out of tune. My thin soprano would peter out to a squeak as soon as Mr Campbell leaned over and put his ear to my mouth. Unimpressed, he would restore himself to his full height and grimace before moving on to find the owner of the flat notes.

Memories of his gritted teeth came flooding back last week as the kids and I were shedding our beach sand under the open air shower at North Cott .

There they sat: the top row of a set of dentures, sunning themselves on the retaining wall. My two-year-old daughter pounced on them thinking they were an exotic shell to put in her bucket. Five year old son was more cautious: “Mum, did that thing really come from the sea?” Twelve year old son’s disgust turned to horror when his sister shouted: “Can the teef come home with us?” and jammed those dentures sideways into her mouth, using both her hands to try to make them fit.

“Spit them out!” I yelled.

She did, and they landed upside down in the shower, the plastic palate filling up with a little puddle.  

I gingerly collected those disembodied cuspids, washed them off and set them back in their sunny spot on the retaining wall to await their owner. But after ten minutes, it was clear no-one was missing their front teeth enough to consider them lost.

That encounter with the contents of someone else’s mouth got me thinking about my husband’s grandfather, (unforgettably named Fred Smith). He was the dentist in Collie for forty years. His pet hate was going to parties and having guests whip out their wet dentures to show him where they were chafing. He got his own back pinning patients to the dentist’s chair with his famously giant belly and they got to hear the gurglings of what he’d had for lunch.

Fred Smith flung all the rotten teeth he extracted out the back door of his surgery into his vegie patch. Aunty Lin, Fred’s youngest daughter, delighted in digging them up and playing knucklebones with her gruesome treasures.

It’s rare to see shocking teeth these days. Modern dentistry has given us whiteners and veneers, braces, crowns and caps – all kinds of costumes to disguise the ugliness within our mouths. But historians are fascinated with bad teeth. Josephine Bonaparte’s smile was said to resemble a ‘mouthful of cloves.’ One scholar reported her teeth ‘looked like an oyster lease at low tide.’  

Queen Elizabeth I was renowned for her blackened teeth – being addicted to sweets and fearful of the primitive dentistry of the day. For centuries, portraits of the nobility only showed a tight smile: it was left to the lower classes to display their poor breeding with a cheerfully jagged grin. By the 1800’s, the Georgians had realised a ‘fine set of snappers’ was needed for genteel-sounding speech and to show off the ‘ornaments of the mouth.’ A well-kept toothy smile was obvious proof of prosperity.

In our house, 5 year old son is currently milking the gap in his pegs for all it’s worth. A few weekends back on a blustery day, his boogie board flipped up and smacked him in the mouth, dislodging his prized front tooth in a pool of blood on the sand. The tooth fairy left a comforting, over-generous fiver and a note: “You got off lightly little man, your dad had his front teeth knocked out at Uni when a young Troy Buswell unintentionally slammed a door in his face.”  

My mother was a stickler for my six-monthly dental visits when I was a child. Our dentist, Mr Hodby, had scary implements but gentle hands. I spent hours of my childhood staring at his ceiling, my body rigid with fear, hands clenched in my lap. I can still picture the swirly patterns of the fibrous cement panels overhead. Like a proper lady on honeymoon, that ceiling is all I remember.

Thanks to Mum, my teeth are still my best feature. In my late 20’s, as I was set free from Mr Hodby’s chair one day and was walking back to my car, my old music teacher Mr Campbell came striding towards me. He’d shrunk – his legs were no longer stilts. As we passed each other, I wondered “What about those scarily big teeth?” So I flashed him a confident smile in the hope he’d remember me from choir 1979, front row, squeaky soprano. He smiled back at me, politely, not a hint of recognition, revealing a row of neat white teeth, no bigger than mine. Quite a nice smile, actually. And away he went.