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!”

Under the skin

Under the skin
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 8, 2014

We’ve become an unlikely pair of confidantes, the icecream shop lady and I. But regularity breeds familiarity. And small children are good conduits for conversations with strangers.

Her name is Paula. In a hot-pink polo shirt, she’s a splash of colour against the stainless steel coffee machine. Her ice-cream parlour is tucked into a Fremantle laneway. Opposite her shop, a terracotta Neptune mounted to a wall dribbles water from his lips into a tiered pond. My kids beg for coins to drop in the wishing well.

Paula is always chirpy and energetic. We swap stories as my two connoisseurs paw her glass cabinet, arguing the merits of Chocolate over Bubblegum. I tell Paula about my first job as an ice-cream scooper and how my arms would ache. She tells me about growing up in Mount Magnet in the 60s; how her dad became shift boss for the Hill 50 gold mine. How her ex-husband, father of their daughter, had been a proof-reader for The West Australian.

“Cup or cone, my darling?” Paula says to my son. She slyly glances at me over the counter. “Cup,” I mouth. She gives me a little nod – two mothers colluding against ice-cream drippage.

“Cone!” my boy protests, sensing defeat.

“But I can get more in a cup!” promises Paula, and she scoops a thick ribbon of chocolate ice-cream into a fat ball.

My 4-year-old hugs the counter and blurts: “Paula? What happened to your face?”

I cringe but Paula flashes me a wink and props her elbows on the counter. “Well,” she replies gently. “I got burnt when I was a little girl. See?” She turns her right cheek, stretching the patchwork of skin grafts that criss-cross her face and neck.

“When I was five, my dad was pouring petrol into his truck and a spark from the engine ignited the can. He flung the burning can over his shoulder just as I walked around the side of the truck. The petrol fire went all over me – burnt off my hair, melted my ear, went down my face, neck, shoulder, arm.”

She lifts a lock of her hair to reveal the stub of her right ear. My daughter, for once, is silent.

“Mum said she’d never seen Dad move so fast. He scooped me up and threw me in the water trough. I spent the next two years in the Mount Magnet hospital. Had free run of the place. Had breakfast every morning with the doctor and his wife. Mum and Dad came afternoons. But seeing my Dad gave me flashbacks. I’d start screaming and I couldn’t stop. I wouldn’t let him anywhere near me. But every day after work, he’d sit outside my room. He’d sit there, on a chair in the corridor, for hours. And then he’d go home.”

My four-year-old has all the information she needs. She hands me her empty cup and darts off to join her brother, now splashing in the fountain.

Paula mops the counter: “From the age of seven until I was sixteen, every school holidays, Mum drove me to Perth for skin grafts. And every three months, I outgrew one of them. All the skin on my right arm, they grafted onto my left. The doctors took bits from all over me. But I such a scrawny kid, they ran out of skin.”

She strokes the luminously pale side of her neck: “They used a piece of my stomach lining to patch here.” She laughs at my shocked face, saying, “Mum always told me, ‘You’re no different to anyone else.’ I believed her. Hospital was an adventure. The pain never scared me.”

A dad with an excited toddler tugging at his arm, steps up to order a waffle.

“I stopped having grafts when I was 22,” Paula resumes quietly when they depart. “By then, I was a barmaid in Kambalda. And you know what? No-one gave me a hard time. But after that last lot of plastic surgery, when I needed six weeks off work, Mum thought I better talk to Centrelink. When I got to the front of the queue, this government fella says ‘Sorry. Wrong queue. The handicapped counter’s over there.’”

“I said, ‘How dare you! I’m not handicapped!’ I stormed out in tears. That was the only day anyone ever got to me.”

It’s time to head home. I collect damp socks and four wet shoes and we wave goodbye. But all week, Paula’s story crowds my thoughts.

‘The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it.’

That quote by Hemingway suits her.