Country Comfort

Country Comfort
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday August 29, 2015

Through the Wyalkatchem shop window, Capt. Jack’s Antiques Emporium looked murky and deserted. The sign on the door read: Open most days about 9 or 10. Occasionally as early as 7. Sometimes as late as 12 or 1.

I didn’t blame Capt. Jack for keeping gentleman’s hours. The town was having a slow morning. At 10.30am, mine was the only car on the main street. I’d been driving east since 7am, aiming for Beacon, on the far edge of the Wheatbelt, where I was to give a talk at a luncheon. My caffeine-deprived brain had demanded a pit-stop.

As I stretched my legs, a pair of crows pranced about in the middle of the road. They flitted up and swooped onto the footpath to inspect the city slicker and her station wagon. Unimpressed with my country credentials, they resumed skipping across the wide avenue of Railway Terrace. “You should try your luck in the big smoke,” I thought as I jiggled the door handle at Capt. Jacks.

To my surprise, the door swung open, jangling a bell that startled me and sent my corvine friends wheeling noisily into a fluted gum.

“Hello?” I called, noticing a yellowing newspaper propped against the glass ribs of an old wash-board. “LINDY GUILTY” shouted the headline. I picked up the paper and checked the banner: October 30, 1982. The front page picture showed a heavily pregnant Lindy Chamberlain being driven to jail.

“A travesty,” came a voice from the gloomy rear of the shop. A tall gent wearing a checked flannel shirt loomed into view. “The dingo did it,” he said through a thick silvery moustache. “And got away with it.” His eyes were a bright shade of blue in a weathered face. He must’ve been pushing seventy.

“Is there somewhere I can get a coffee?” I asked, carefully returning the newspaper to the window display. “And is there a loo around here?”

He laughed. “Been holding on since Dowerin have you?”

“Perth actually. This is my first stop.”

“Why would you live in that festering cesspit when you could live in this small corner of paradise?” he said with a grin. He jerked his thumb to the left to signal I was at the wrong end of town: “Fred the newsagent will make you a nice coffee,” he said. “But you can use my dunny if you like.” He stopped himself with a grunt: “Hang on. I better check it’s fit for female company. Being a bachelor n ‘all, you might not like my toilet humour.” He brayed at his joke.

As my new acquaintance wheeled around, I followed his slippered feet past a pine meat safe, a shellacked dressing table and a smiling Clarke Gable, propped against a bedhead. I breathed in the fusty smell of old books and bibelots, wishing I had an hour to kill, fossicking amongst these treasures.

He ushered me into an airy kitchen at the back of the shop, where a small woman in a scarlet turtleneck and a matching red hat sat at a table nursing a mug of tea.

“This is my friend Bessie. You’d never pick her for 78, would you?” he said. The three of us began polite introductions. “I’m Mick,” he said, “and this,” he added, motioning toward a ginger tabby-cat sidling over to join us, “is No Nuts.”

I spluttered.

“I refuse to call him that,” said the small woman. “I call him Doughnuts.”

“I rescued that cat from Kings Park,” said Mick. “He’s countrified now. Eats three bunnies a week, don’t you boy?” And he tickled the moggy under his chin.

“How long have you had the shop?” I ask.

“Four years. Had in mind to call it Dr Jack’s, but they wouldn’t let me, case people thought I was the town GP. It’s not my first antiques shop. I had one in Beaufort Street, in Inglewood twenty years ago.”

“I remember that shop!” I exclaim. “I bought a mirror there once.”

“There you go,” he said. “Small world.”

It’s time to go if I’m to reach Beacon by midday. As I emerge from the loo, a thought strikes me: “Aren’t you lonely on your own in a small town like this?”

“Nope,” says Mick. “Suits me fine. I needed a change of scenery. Three divorces’ll do that to you. I’ve been single now for thirty years and I can tell you, loneliness is a state of mind.”

Bessie nods her agreement.

I say my thank you’s and return to the street. Wyalkatchem is maintaining its deserted facade. But Fred the newsagent’s a jolly fellow who makes me a long black and draws me a short cut to Beacon on the back of a serviette.

As I head north, Wyalkatchem dwindles to a speck in my rear view mirror. I’d have liked to stay longer.

Running on Empty

Running on Empty
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday February 8, 2014

I had always presumed early morning exercisers were chipper creatures, all bounce and bonhomie. I pictured them in their neon lycra peppering their 6am conversations with jaunty clichés such as ‘Life is short!’ or ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead!’

For years I’ve envied early-risers their kinetic superiority, their alertness, their chirpy sociability. Waking up should be a laborious, cantankerous process – and if I’m attempting it, I should be avoided until after breakfast.

Now, I am an early-morning exerciser – by default. At dawn, I disentangle myself from the small sweaty octopus who has crept into our bed and commandeered my pillow. Three-year-old daughter has been unusually generous in allowing me a handkerchief of bare sheet. She and her father are rolled up in the doona like pigs in a blanket.

I stagger out to the kitchen and flick the kettle on, staring mindlessly at the puffs of steam beading the wall with sweat. Tea bag brewing, I lurch out to collect the paper. The box tree nuts are lying in wait for me. Several of them launch their spikes into my left foot, and my sluggish brain jolts awake to record the pain. Bloody box trees!

I drink my tea and command my eyes to focus on the front page. It shifts blurrily before me because my reading glasses are not where I left them on the kitchen bench. I give up on the paper and scoop up some shorts and a T-shirt from the bedroom floor. I strap my two remaining assets into a sports bra, knot the broken laces on my sneakers and blunder out the back door. This may be the only half hour I have to myself all day.

At the corner, I cock my head to listen to a kookaburra in a date palm. A veneer of geniality begins to glaze my brain.

I am awake at last. By the time I’ve jogged up to the playing fields, I have flowered into my agreeable self. A middle-aged woman and her elderly black Labrador cross the path. ‘Morning,’ I chirrup. ‘Morning,’ she barks back, as if taking offence.

Around the oval I go, saluting my fellow early-risers: ‘Hi there!’   

Not one of them greets me first. I turn it into a game: will they or won’t they? Coming past the tennis courts, a barrel-chested man is striding towards me. Ten metres out, I make eye contact, smile and wait for his mouth to move. Nothing. He swivels his head to look at the bougainvillea on the fence. I throw self-consciousness aside and, at the last moment, I hail him with a sprightly: ‘Morning!’ In return, he gives me a sigh tacked on to a grunt: ‘Mornin’ (no exclamation mark).

For a while there, on my pre-Cornflake jaunts, I thought it was me. I mentally exchanged places with these pre-occupied dog-walkers and stony-faced joggers and put myself in their rainbow-coloured sneakers: ‘Oh no! Here she comes again! Jeez, who shuffles like that?! I’m not saying hello to someone wearing a headband!’

This was too awful a scenario to contemplate. Dawn-risers must want to be alone with their thoughts. They don’t want womanly greetings before 7am. They are enjoying the last breath of cool air. They are quietly calculating their superannuation. They’re wondering who Geoffrey Edelsten will marry next.

And then came an epiphany! Maybe my fellow early-risers just can’t be bothered being polite? Maybe they tolerate my ‘Good Mornings’ but are too selfish to reciprocate? After all, why be generous to strangers? Perhaps they think neighbours sharing an oval should be treated with disdain or indifference? 

After lunch, undeterred, I took my annoying pleasantries to the shops. Outside Coles, I struggled to separate two trolleys locked in canine-style congress. I finally wrenched them apart and offered a trolley to a well-heeled older woman. I admired her crisp shirt and smart hair-cut: “You look lovely today.” 

“You mean, for my age?”  

“No, no, I meant, you look very stylish.“

“I’m 81. I should know how to dress by now.”

I was shamed into silence. She weaved away to the delicatessen.

I replayed our conversation in my head. Could she have mistaken my friendliness for impertinence? I decided she probably wasn’t accustomed to fellow shoppers making conversation. I felt disheartened. 

On the next morning’s jog , a stranger charged over the hill towards me. His toothpick legs stuck out of his baggy white shorts and his arms were flapping at odd angles. Mesmerised by his gawkiness, I was caught off guard when he called: “Good morning young lady!” His exuberance was infectious (and not just because he called me ‘young’ and ‘lady’). “How many laps to go?” he shouted. “All three,” I shot back. “Aaah,” he called over his shoulder as he jerked past, “no more pudding for you!”