Fish out of Water

Fish out of Water
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday May 30, 2015

Hope is two goldfish pootling in a plastic bag of water.

Small daughter and I stood transfixed in the pet shop. A wall of fish tanks glowed in iridescent greens and blues. A dozen filters hummed a soporific tune. Everywhere we looked, fish were darting hither and yon, their coruscating skins a riot of colours.

In the nearest tank, an orange pipsqueak swayed his translucent tail and lazily glided towards his watery window. Squishing his little fishy lips against the glass, he ogled us with globular eyes.

“That’s the one!” shouted five-year-old daughter, jabbing her finger against the tank. The goldfish didn’t flinch. I took that as a sign of emotional resilience.

“I’m gonna call him ‘Finger’” she said. “Fish Finger for short.”

“Shouldn’t your brother name him?” I said. “After all, it’s his birthday.”

She ignored me, and resumed skipping sideways along the tanks, pressing one eye against the glass when a fish caught her fancy. A teenaged sales assistant in khaki uniform shadowed her like a prison guard.

Daughter let out a shriek. She jabbed at a corner where an odd-looking goldfish was poking around in a weed. “Look! He’s got an orange raspberry on his head!”

“It’s a lionhead,” said the fish curator flatly, barely disguising his contempt.

He turned to me, twirling a net the size of a fly swat.

“She’s not going to bang on the tank at home?”

“Oh, no” I reassured him. “They’ll be in a bowl.”

I pointed at Finger, still staring at us from his window seat. “Can we have that one?” I said. Then I singled out the Lionhead with orange beanie from his myriad strange-hatted siblings. “And that one.”

Back in the car, my youngster cradled her brother’s birthday fish, each plastic bag knotted, but now dangerously close to horizontal.

I drove home timorously, weaving around corners and crawling over speed humps trying not to verify Newton’s first law of motion.

“Finger’s making my hand look bigger,” called my daughter from the back seat, inspecting her palm through the prism of the bag. I tried to explain to her the theory of refraction and how water can magnify images by deflecting light rays but she had the attention span of a goldfish.

“Mum! Finger just touched my finger with his tail. Hey! That’s two times I said Finger!”

Her newly 8-year-old brother was ecstatic with his new pets. He christened Finger’s playmate Flip.

For the next hour, boy glued himself to fishbowl. Finger and Flip played tag for his amusement, ducking between the plastic fronds of their underwater palm tree. At bedtime, he reluctantly wished them good night. Ten hours later he was scurrying down the stairs to bid them top o’ the morning.

After two days, I wondered if our aquatic guests were enjoying their celebrity? Did they mind the constant gawping; the succession of school-children pressing curious faces against their bowl, who banged and tapped knuckles against their glass and dipped grubby fingers in their pond?

For all I knew, our fish felt liberated. Perhaps they thought they were swimming in the sparkling waters of Lake Victoria? After all, food was abundant. Every day, delicate wafers appeared as if by magic on the surface. Life in the goldfish bowl was good.

On day three, we awoke to find Flip swimming backstroke. His tummy looked distended as he took his reverse constitutional around the palm tree. Teenage son caught my eye, smirked and swiped his index finger across his throat. I shot him a warning glare. “He’s fine,” I announced for 8-year-old’s benefit. “Flip’s just swimming upside down for fun.”

Popping home at lunchtime, I noticed Flip had mastered sidestroke, but didn’t appear to be enjoying it. I pleaded with him to buck up for the sake of the birthday boy, but he just looked at me, fins trembling. (No-one feels as helpless as the owner of a sick goldfish.)

It was dark when the kids and I stormed in the door after sport. Flip was lying on the rainbow-coloured gravel, motionless.

“He’s dead! He’s dead!” wailed eight-year-old.

“He can’t be dead,” said his sister, screwing up her face with surprise. “His eyes are open.”

Her brother was inconsolable. “Don’t worry,” she said, throwing a comforting arm around his waist. “He must have banged his head on the glass.”

I shepherded my birthday boy into the kitchen for grief counselling while his father spooned Flip out of his bowl and wrapped him in paper towel. I could make out the impression of Flip’s damp orange body inside his papery bier, like the Shroud of Turin. My husband sidled to the toilet to give him a burial at sea.

RIP Flip.

We’re heading back to the pet store today. Flip’s under warranty (I think).

The Ant’s Chance

The Ant’s Chance
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday December 13, 2014

My kitchen has become disputed territory. My enemy has drawn its battle lines around the sink. Each morning we meet at dawn, those ants and I. As I pad bleary-eyed towards the kettle, there they are: a black trail advancing upon my benchtop. A swarm of the blighters besieges a lone shortbread crumb.

Two lines of foot soldiers weave unsteadily between the crumb and the window sill, one coming, one going. I note there are twice as many ants as yesterday and feel a surge of annoyance. I watch three scouts march under the coffee machine and emerge next to the toaster, visibly excited by their discovery of a burnt sultana.

I lean over the six-legged troops, flick the kettle on and reach for a teabag. Sensing impending doom, the ants break ranks, abandon their trophies and scatter. I’m barely awake but already I’m plunged into the day’s existential crisis: will I launch a Mortein blitzkrieg or spare my antagonists?

By the time I’ve fetched the milk from the fridge, the ants are in retreat. They take turns slipping into a dark crack in the wall where the splashback meets the benchtop. Within minutes, all but a few stragglers have disappeared. My benchtop will be no Waterloo today.

Don’t get me wrong. I quite like ants. I like stepping over them on the footpath as they make hillocks in the sandy gaps between the slabs. I like the big ones behind glass in museums, pinned to a mounting board. But when I find ants scavenging in my kitchen I dispense death on impulse. Afterwards, I feel a little throb of remorse. Shakespeare said: Sweet mercy is nobility’s true badge. Do my ants deserve to die?

I know that in my 47 years on the planet, I have killed scads of harmless insects with my big, dumb, blundering existence. I pay no mind to the countless bugs who’ve slammed against my car windscreen, leaving a smear no bigger than a raindrop as their epitaph.

I’ll happily smash a blowfly or flatten a mosquito and enjoy the victory. I’m grateful for every cockroach corpse.

And yet I play favourites. I’m a fan of spiders. Spiders eat flies. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. The man of the house has talent – he can shuffle a live Huntsman onto a sheet of newspaper and slide him out the back door. Daddy-long-legs, no matter how long-legged, are welcome to hang their webs from our cornices. I could never kill a cute lawn beetle or an orange ladybird in stylish polka dots. My children know to rush a leaf raft to any bee flailing in our pool. But ants? Does an invasion of ants warrant a massacre?

On the morning of the ants’ first insurgency, I found several dozen of them mobbing a spilled sardine-shaped biscuit from the cat’s bowl. I swept them to their deaths with a wet paper towel. The next morning, the tribe had trebled its presence. I sucked every last one up the vacuum cleaner and felt smug. On the third day, I awoke to a plague of them.

I bought Borax, mixed it with sugar and lured the ants to my honey trap. I don’t know whose nest they took that Borax to, but it wasn’t theirs. So I called a truce to our war of attrition and tried diversionary tactics instead.

Mum suggested I sprinkle spent coffee grounds along their trail around the sink. But they forged a new track around the hotplate. I wiped down my kitchen bench with vinegar. They congregated on a wooden spoon. I blocked up all the cracks in the tiles with squirts of talcum powder and for two days, we were ant-free. “They’re back!” shouted my daughter the next morning, and pointed to a black conga line snaking out from under the fridge. By now, even the cat was getting antsy.

Perhaps I should convert to Buddhism and practice non-violence towards all living creatures. I’ll carry a broom with me for sweeping aside even the smallest insects from my path. But do the Buddhists know about Ross River Virus? Have they ever felt the sting of a March fly or been attacked by a wasp?

Last summer, the big Cape Lilac tree in our laneway spawned a poolside infestation of hairy black caterpillars. At first, we let them be. But they reproduced in such plague proportions that the kids and I felt nauseous from the constant squishing underfoot. The council sent in their exterminator and poisoned them. I didn’t feel one pang of guilt.

But I’m feeling sorry for my ants – they work long hours for little reward. I count myself lucky no-one’s looking down on me as insignificant and disposable. I should tolerate these harmless creatures a while longer. It’s Christmas, after all.

In Loving Memory

In Loving Memory
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday March 1, 2014

I pull into the driveway of his brick bungalow and there he is, waiting for me. He’s propped in a folding chair in the sun, shielding his eyes with a soldier’s salute.

Three months ago we’d been strangers. “I want you to write what it’s like to grow old,” he’d emailed me, “always looking at life over your shoulder. My wife of 55 years has been taken from me by illness. Maybe one day you could visit her in the nursing home. She is in room 19. Her name is Ada. Warm regards, Carl, 87.

The following Sunday, I’d sat with Carl in Ada’s room, acutely aware that a bedrail was all that divided this sick woman from my well self. Carl held his wife’s limp hand and whispered fighting words in her ear, trying to replenish her health with his. “She’s not coming back to me, is she?” he asked. Three days later, Ada died.

Carl and I have kept in touch. Now he ushers me inside the three-bedroom home he bought for Ada in 1972.  Her shower caps are still strung along a makeshift clothes line in the laundry. A tray of her earrings is lying open on the kitchen table. The treasures of half a century of marriage compete for space on every surface. “She’s keeping her eye on me, so I haven’t changed a thing,” he says.  

I notice a framed photograph of Carl and Ada leaning against a navy-blue Mercedes saloon. “Aaah, my two darlings,” he says, “except one of them never got her licence. She loved being chauffeured around. I sold that baby two years ago – ‘Hearse or limousine’ I put in the ad. The postie bought it for his wedding.”

Carl leads me into his study. It’s crammed with towers of browning newspapers, old VHS tapes and a spaghetti junction of electrical oddments and gubbins. “Ada wouldn’t come in here!” he beams. A sign on the door reads Litter Den.

I ease a dusty book from a row on a shelf: How To Help Your Husband Get Ahead, 1954. On a dog-eared page Ada has underlined the chapter heading: Make Mountains of his Virtues, Molehills of his Faults. Carl snorts gleefully. 

I see she has folded a square of toilet paper to bookmark Chapter 9: How To Get Along With His Secretary.

We take our tea in the sitting room. “Ada had 57 falls before they told me I couldn’t look after her anymore,” he tells me.

“57? You counted?”

“I’m an accountant.”

We trade smirks. He turns to pour the milk, and I realise he is hiding watery eyes.

 “She left me behind, my Ada. What happens to us – the ones left behind? I’m 87, what’s my future? To die of a broken heart? How can I start again?”

Below a window looking over the backyard, there’s a 1960s credenza with sliding glass doors. It’s filled with cut crystal. Carl has printed on one of the glass panels with a black marker: Remember the good times you had with Ada.

Her favourite armchair squats alongside. The upholstered cushion is scalloped where she once sat. Draped over the headrest, a blue checked tea-towel is embroidered with a row of dainty tulips. I can still make out the indent of her head in the fabric.  

Carl has recovered himself and is rummaging around in a filing cabinet. With a  flourish he pulls out a plastic sleeve and lays a handwritten letter on the table. “Please read it to me” he says. “I want to hear her voice again.”

The letter is dated April 2, 1974. “My darling,” I read to him. “Once again, I have to resort to pen and paper to get my point over.” I scan ahead nervously, realising Ada has written in fury. I look sideways at Carl but he knows what’s coming and begins to chuckle: “Keep going, you swine!” he says to me and puffs out his chest proudly. “This one made me sit up!”

“I have never been sorry having married you. You have been a wonderful provider and a good husband, but lately you are becoming one of the biggest bast–ds I can think of.”

He slaps his thigh and cackles.  I’m shocked but giggling too at the secret mechanics of this marriage. And then Carl’s mirth is again overtaken by sobs. He leans into me and says: “Always kiss your man before you fall asleep – even if you have to force yourself through gritted teeth.”

It’s time to pick up the kids from school. He hands me a carton of eggs and stands waving in the driveway as I reverse onto the street. I wait until he turns and walks safely inside before heading for the highway.

The story of life

The story of life
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday December 7, 2013

It was his email that intrigued me:

‘You have no clue what really happens when you get old. My wife of 55 years has been taken from me by illness. Maybe one day you could visit her in the nursing home. She is in room 19. Her name is Ada.’

Warm regards, Carl, 87.

The following day, on a whim, I drive out to the aged care home. It’s a secure facility. A cleaner notices me waiting expectantly on the visitor’s side of the door. She punches in the security code, then pads noiselessly away on her soft soles, leaving me to guess which of the deserted corridors to search first. I inhale that haunting scent – the staleness of life at its lowest ebb. It’s the same miasma I recall from the nursing home where my Nan died – the smell of confinement, unease and antiseptic.

I knock gently on the door of Room 19 and hear a chair scrape as someone gets up to open the door. “I told her you’d come!” Carl beams at me. “Come and meet my beauty.”

He still has his veteran’s pride: khaki trousers with a sharp crease up the thigh, a pressed short-sleeved shirt, shiny chestnut brogues. Only his hearing aid and the Velcro bandage gripping his wrist hint at any outward signs of decline.

His wife, Ada, is slumped awkwardly in the bed, a slip of a woman in a voluminous cream nightie dotted with cornflowers. Her spindly arms and papery skin stand out in relief against the fat, dimpled pillows stacked behind her. She’s breathing noisily, her lids drooped over cloudy eyes. Carl smooths a wayward wisp of her fairy floss hair.

“She’s not coming back to me is she?” We both know the answer. “Two of her brothers had Parkinsons” he continues, “and now she’s started with the tremors. I give her a kiss and she gives me ten in return!” We both smile.

A nurse rattles in with lunch and briskly suggests we wait outside. “Ada’s refusing to eat,” Carl explains, and leads me to two plastic chairs in the corridor.

He is surprisingly buoyant. “This is my world now. Sitting with her hour after hour, then going home to a cold bed. I want you to write what it’s like to grow old: always looking back at life over your shoulder.”

He points to an elderly gent leaning precariously forward in his wheelchair. “That’s Ray,” Carl says. The wheelchair’s foot rests are folded up and out of the way and Ray is using his slippered feet to inch along the carpet. “The week after he moved here to be with his wife, she passed away. He doesn’t realise she’s gone. He spends his whole day shuffling from room to room looking for her.” Ray looks searchingly at me as he edges his wheelchair past us: “Do you know where they’ve taken her?” I am moved to tears.

Carl stares at the burgundy leaf-pattern in the carpet while I collect myself. “I met Ada on the bus, you know,” he says. “I came to Fremantle after the war. I was a frontline interpreter. I’m Dutch, but I speak four languages so the Yanks wanted me.”

He opens his wallet and pulls out a small plastic sleeve. He tips a pebble into my hand. “Grenade” he tells me. “They took this shrapnel out of me leg. I howled like a baby. Ada always told me I was a big sook.”

“She tricked me into marrying her, you know,” he says. “I’m Catholic. My family back home didn’t want no Church of England girl. She says to me one day: Can you take me to Hehir street?”

“I know that street” I says to her. “Little church there.”

“We arrive at the church and the priest says to me: Know what you’re here for?”

“Ada had gone and got herself converted. We got married three weeks later.” He leans into me and says: “You girls got your ways of getting your man!”

We’re allowed back into Ada’s room. “She still won’t eat” the nurse tells Carl, as she pushes the lunch trolley out the door. He lifts Ada’s limp arm and nestles it in his. The veins at her wrist are ropey and tinged with green. The lingering remains of a soft-pink manicure stain her nails.

Carl reaches over to the bedside table and picks up a hand mirror with a long gilt handle. He holds it so Ada can see her reflection: “Look at those rosy cheeks!” he coos, but Ada doesn’t register.

“I just want my wife back,” he says. I see a tear slide down his cheek.

He leans in and plants a kiss on Ada’s slackened mouth. We sit in silence by her bedside. Ada shifts in the bed, swallows uncomfortably. Her eyes focus, settling on her husband. Her voice is trembly with the effort of speech but there’s no mistaking what she whispers: “I see a beautiful face.” And then she turns her head away and stares unblinkingly at the door.

Ada Caubo – 24/3/1928 – 13/11/13