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.

Enough about me

Enough about me
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday May 11, 2013

A conversation is not just a rudimentary exchange of information or a conduit for drinking with friends. It has winners and losers. It can be life changing. I know this because a conversation in a pub landed me my husband.

Back then, I didn’t know fate had arranged for me to be leaning against the back bar of the Subi hotel with a man wearing Ronnie Barker glasses. He was comfortably stout, like a prized footballer gone to pot, and I noticed his manly hands (I have a thing about extremities). He was charming, disarming and attentive but it was the way he spoke to me that made me skittish, like Bambi. Here was a man who was warming up for a conversational joust. I set out to beguile him with my verbal prowess.

I failed to allow for the first glass of champagne on my empty stomach. It sent my mouth galloping ahead of my brain. Halfway through the second glass, I was babbling and gushing. Sentences I should have filtered for tedium and stupidity dropped straight onto my tongue and became clumsy word spillage. I was all single-entendre, my brilliant wit sabotaged by a bad case of love jitters.

On this night, I thought it best to attempt being a coquette, rather than try to outfox this razor-sharp raconteur when I’d gone all goosy. And anyway, he was asking too many Mensa questions: “So, being an only child, what have you learnt about other people?”

How to respond? I squirmed. He leaned back and propped his elbows on the bar while a lively silence throbbed between us. My brain darted about in search of a penetrating reply but all I could come up with was: “the big question for me is why none of my yoga pants have ever been to yoga?”

He grinned – I took it as a compliment. And then he leaned in close, brushed an eye-lash off my cheek and whispered “Make a wish.” I giggled in falsetto.

I secretly asked the champagne fairy for three wishes – I wished this man would take me home and hang his bad tie in my closet, I wished to grow old and grey with him and I wished for thinner arms. The good fairy granted two wishes, and I’m resigned to wearing sleeves.

That is the G-rated version of the night I met my man on a late summer’s night. Our eighth anniversary has just passed (un-remarked), but he remains a challenging conversationalist.

Conversation is an art form. We all admire those who have mastered the serve and volley of lingual ping-pong.   

But some acquaintances suck the oxygen out of the air by talking incessantly. Self-obsession asphyxiates friendships. If I’m button-holed by a bloke who doesn’t draw breath for two minutes, I hightail it to the dessert buffet.

Interrupters also infuriate: my children have perfected the technique. But it’s adult interjectors who should be gagged – those people who leap in and ruin my punchlines, or smother me with their preoccupations. I murmur to myself: “Sorry I was talking while you were interrupting.”

Why can’t bores recognise themselves? Some even refer to themselves in the third person, just so we can appreciate them from yet another angle: “And then the nice girl in Country Road said to me – Barbara Blackwood – you look amazing in that colour. Barbara, that dress goes so well with your tattoo. Barbara, we should name that dress after you – we’ll call it…. The Barbara!”

I, too, used to think my stories were riveting. At 20, I landed my first job in commercial radio: a chick among peacocks. I answered the phones with try-hard sophistication: “96FM , we will rock you!” Teetering in my white stilettos I would carry cups of International Roast to celebrity disc jockeys with velvet tonsils. On Friday nights I would regale my friends: “And then he asked me to be the barrel-girl! Me! He told me to giggle and rustle the entry forms so they made crunchy paper noises, it was sooo cool…”

Before long I caught two girlfriends rolling their eyes at each other across the table. My ego collapsed. These days I tell my stories while keeping my third eye roving for audience boredom.  

Some people like to take over a conversation – they interject about their famous second cousin the soapie extra, or launch into the intricacies of their colonoscopy (scraping the bowels of social convention). Some people feel compelled to convince me that daddy long legs are poisonous but their mouths aren’t big enough to bite people, and if I disagree, they become strident.

At my home in Utopia, my conversational skills are sagging. My 12-year-old cancels me out with his noise-cancelling headphones. Husband is riveted by The Footy Show and can’t be distracted so my three-year-old and I compete for each other’s attention.

Sometimes, when I want to ask my beloved about the state of our relationship, I’ll sidle up to him and say: “Honey, do you remember that night we met in that pub?” And he’ll smile and say: “Yes, blossom, that’s the night you thought talking about yourself constituted a conversation.”