Tangled Web

Tangled Web
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday May 23, 2015

His chair scraped mine. He acknowledged the intrusion with a polite smile and settled at a table for two. We sat at adjacent tables and observed the Saturday pageantry of the Fremantle cappuccino strip.

My neighbour ordered a beer. He shuffled his chair counter-clockwise to capture the last shaft of afternoon sun. His closely-clipped beard shone auburn but was greying around his sideburns.

He seemed fidgety, drumming the footpath with one scuffed boot. He undid the buttons on his polo shirt. Then he quickly fastened them again. A moment later, his hand flew up to his neck to check his collar was sitting obediently flat.

A woman materialised behind us, hovering by his table.

“M—-?” she said hesitantly.

“Yep! You must be S—–?” He lurched to his feet and pecked her awkwardly on the cheek. She was younger, perhaps not yet 40. Her mouth was a bright slash of red lipstick competing for attention with her short dress.

“You look different to your photo,” said the woman, tittering self-consciously. She parked her red handbag and flicked her shoulder-length hair.

“You look better than yours,” he replied, grinning at his own joke.

She faltered.

By the wounded look on her face, I knew he’d grazed her ego. I twigged that this was a first date: a real-life rendezvous after an online flirtation.

“Uh, I mean, you look even better than your photo,” he said, trying to recover.

A pair of Harley-Davidson Softails rumbled past. Our heads swivelled towards the noise.

“Like bikes?” asked the man, edging towards safer territory.

“Yeah, they’re okay,” she replied. “I had a boyfriend once who had a Harley. He was crazy about it. He used to say ‘only a biker knows why a dog sticks his head out a car window.’” They both laughed at her ice-breaker.

I feel uncomfortable overhearing their conversation but I’m jammed between occupied tables. My neighbour begins cataloguing his work history as I study a squabble of seagulls on the road. A bus nearly collects a mess of bird on bumper. The gulls dive between oncoming cars, en route to stray chips. Several more, perched on the awning, screech applause for the daredevils.

The man’s companion is bored. She casts around as he elaborates about the rigours of construction work. Perhaps his job leaves him no time for dalliances? I wonder how many of these dates has he been on. Will she give him a second chance? Does he like her?

I speculate about their chances.

My divorced girlfriends say internet dating makes them feel disposable. Cruising for internet love dispenses with the magic. You become an algorithm of desirables: looks, height, weight, education, income. The mechanics of online dating sabotages romance. The internet subverts kismet.

One jaded girlfriend, after a dozen disastrous blind dates, offers her online suitors a forewarning. ‘By the way,’ she writes by way of a post script. “If we meet offline and you look nothing like your online picture, you’re buying me drinks until you do!”

On the upside, she says spurning an unsuitable candidate is surprisingly painless. On her laptop, she can be as kind or as brutal as she likes, knowing he can’t interrupt, argue or grovel. But she says being discarded online is just as torturous as being dumped in person.

“At least he can’t see me crying. I get to preserve my dignity.”

Another girlfriend, newly-divorced, says internet dating is demoralising.

“I’m sure men use it as target practice,” she tells me.

“As soon as they find out I’m a nurse, the innuendo starts. Having two degrees doesn’t save me from the lewd jokes. One bloke wanted to meet up at McDonalds. He thought a nurse wouldn’t mind. If that wasn’t bad enough, he insisted I come in uniform.”

And yet I know several happy couples who found each other online. Maybe finding a mate is more efficient this way? Standing conspicuously alone at the bar of the Sail and Anchor is old hat; best you go online with your preference for a tall, vegan, climate sceptic and filter out the unsuitable riff-raff from the start. Perhaps we should think of online dating as a sophisticated way to address the ancient and fundamental problem of sorting humans into pairs.

I check the blind daters beside me. His pasta has arrived. He eats with gusto. Slurping noisily, he spatters the table with sauce. Clearly unimpressed, she grabs a serviette, dabs at her sleeve and mops the table.

“Excuse me for a minute,” she says, exhaling a thinly-disguised sigh.

“The toilets are over there, aren’t they?”

His phone chirps a little song as she strides away.

He answers, craning around to check she’s out of earshot.

“Not bad,” he confides. “But yesterday’s was better.”

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!”

Cuts Both Ways

Cuts Both Ways
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday April 11, 2015

I glide around the shop display, high on the heady scent of perfumed candles.

“Would you like to sample our skin creams?” purrs the willowy shopgirl. She hands me a luxury Popsicle stick. With it, I scoop out a polite portion of Kashmir Petal lotion and knead my hands until I smell like a marshmallow. I admire her little amber pots arranged in careful rows along the counter and marvel at her equally decadent prices.

Into the shop walks a woman my age with a familiar face. I can’t place her but I know we’re acquainted somehow. Perhaps we have friends in common? I acknowledge her with a smile and say ‘Hi!’.

She glances towards me and for a micro-second, our eyes lock. I see a flicker of recognition before she hesitates. My greeting hangs uncomfortably in the air. I search her face for friendliness but she gives me a look of Easter Island disdain. I register her unsmiling mouth and realise she has cut me dead. She turns her head to avert my gaze and lavishes her attention on a glass cabinet full of trinkets.

I am flummoxed, then embarrassed. What to do? The slender sales assistant eyes me, waiting for Act II of this shop-staged melodrama. I busy myself with a pot of Magnolia body crème while my mind ratchets through my options. Perhaps she didn’t hear me? Do I say hello again? Maybe she didn’t recognise me? Maybe she decided not to recognise me? Perhaps she’s shy? Is shyness an excuse for rudeness?

Up surges a flood of teenaged insecurities. Perhaps she just doesn’t like me? Why doesn’t she like me?

I berate myself for caring and become incensed instead. How dare she! Is it so hard to be friendly and say hello? My Freudian brain scrambles to rationalise id from ego. I decide to give my nemesis the benefit of the doubt. I sense she’s as aware of my presence as I am of hers. I throw a final glance in her direction and resolve to greet her again if she meets my gaze. Her eyes dart from mine and she feigns sudden interest in a box of greeting cards on the counter. The irony is not lost on me. I cut my losses, nod my thanks to the shopgirl and slip out of the store.

A fortnight later, even as I write, I’m reliving my indignation. Why is snobbery so infuriating?

I’ve only been labelled a snob once (at least to my face). At a bar in Sydney, a bloke in a suit who’d had tee many martoonis suggested I join his table for one. I pointed out my table of ten noise-makers and told him I belonged there. He crooked his index finger at the barman, who leaned in to hear his order: “You call this happy hour?” said martini-man loudly, then pointed at me. “This one’s a snob.”

A dozen heads swivelled on necks. I was mortified. Martini-man, well-pleased with himself, slid off his stool and zig-zagged back to his table. I slunk back to mine.

At high school, I watched the social climbers with awe and envy. One in particular fascinated me. She was the 16-year-old protégé of an upwardly mobile mother, a woman who parked her Mercedes conspicuously outside the principal’s office. I got the feeling we could be friends until a more suitable friend became available. (Nobodies and Somebodies couldn’t be pals.)

I learnt from her that snobs-in-training can’t be complacent – there is always someone higher up the ladder to impress. And this girl was never satisfied. Social climbing was relentless. There were always more and more people to look down on.

By the time we’d left school, she’d run out of friends. Her ritual sneering reinforced her hypocrisy. I was good enough to talk to if nobody better was around. (Her admiration for those above her was far greater than her contempt for the likes of me below.) Years later, we bumped into each other at a fete. Our talk turned to school and her embarrassment at having a mum who aspired to be Queen Bee of the Mother’s Auxiliary. “I didn’t enjoy school much,” she said. “I never felt like I belonged.” I realised then that despite all her social manoeuvring, her schoolyard snobbery was deep-rooted in insecurity.

As for my priggish acquaintance from the gift shop, I’m sure to bump into her again. But this time, I’ll be ready. I’ll bear down on her with my arms stretched wide. I’ll shout excitedly, “Hellooo darling!” Cupping her face with my palms, I’ll plant noisy European kisses on her cheeks. “Where have you been?” I’ll gush and hold her at arm’s length admiringly. I can’t wait to see the look on her face. Snob value!