Life Cycle

Life Cycle
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday August 8, 2015

A communal laundry in a caravan park is an odd place to befriend a stranger. He was parked at one end of a plastic pew, patiently waiting for his washing to finish. I was feeding dollar coins into the wall-mounted soap dispenser, impatiently waiting to be rewarded. I snuck a glance at my laundry companion, wondering if I should ask him why the soap was on strike.

He was reading the sports pages, his newspaper propped on the barrel of his belly. A thick neck sat on a stocky body. I guessed he was pushing 70. Tattoos rode up and down his forearms. The lower half of his face was obscured by a Grizzly Adams beard, the top half with an army-green beanie. He would’ve looked fearsome if not for his ugg-boots, one of which was graffitied with a red love heart and the word ‘Pa’ by a child’s Texta.

“Any idea how this thing works?” I said, throwing him a helpless smile.
“Tried giving it a thump?”
“No,” I said, taken aback by his gruff voice. I tried to read his expression but there wasn’t much on offer between beanie and beard. He folded his newspaper and stood up. I prayed his uggs weren’t stolen.

He sized up the soap dispenser and gave it a swift thwack with the palm of his hand. A small packet of washing powder thudded into the tray.
“Hope it’s worth it,” he said with a smirk, handing me the box. I looked down and read the label: “Det-N-Ate.”
“I’d like to Det-N-Ate this,” I replied, holding up my husband’s favourite lime-green polo shirt.
He nodded.

“Where’ve you come from then?” he asked, as I upended muddy clothes into one of the washers.
“Kalgoorlie. Via Perth. We got to Esperance last night. You?”
“Driven the rig from Queensland with the missus. We’re on our way home now. Gotta be back in time for our wedding anniversary. Forty years. Feels like eighty after six months in a caravan. But here’s what I know now: Anyone who has to turn a map upside down to say ‘turn left’ should never be allowed to navigate. She’s got us lost so many times I’ve had to invent a hearing impediment in my left ear. Taken me the whole trip to perfect that.”
I snicker. “So you’re one of those grey nomads I keep reading about!”
“She is. I’m a silver fox.”
He enjoys his own joke. My washer falls into a steady rhythm with his machine, swishing and whirring in tandem.

“How’ve you gone living in such a tight space?” I ask. “We’ve only had our van for three days and we’re tripping all over each other.”
“I try to stay outside. Got all the fruit I need – a telly rigged up, my radio, Foxtel box, solar panels.”
He gestures through the laundry’s open door. A red-dusted caravan is squatting on the concrete pad in Bay 8. Under its awning a mash of cables and equipment crowd a trestle table. A satellite dish capable of signalling Mars extends from the roof.
“You could block out the sun with that thing,” I say.
“Blocks out the missus. Haven’t missed a single footy game all season.”

He stands, flips the lid of his washer and deposits a mound of wet clothes on an ironing board. I spot the leg of some Collingwood pyjamas. Crowning the pile is a large pair of floral knickers, indecently exposed.
I read aloud the sign above the dryer as he dumps his washing into the barrel. Anyone climbing into this clothes dryer will be asked to leave the campsite immediately.
My laundro-mate chuckles. He plugs two dollars into the dryer and it roars to life. With his hands on his hips, he arches his back and groans: “Crook back’s giving me hell.”
“How’d you do it?”
“Had an argument with a chopper in Vietnam.”
I’m not sure how to respond.
“Landed heavy,” he says filling my silence.
Before I can ask, he continues: “I was a medic. Got called up at 20. I was doing Ag Science. The army shunted me into pathology. One minute I’m castrating lambs, the next I’m doing post mortems on soldiers. It was a big step up.”

My washing machine wheezes to a halt. “Time’s up for you,” he says regretfully as I gather an armful of smalls. “And I was just getting started.”
“Happy anniversary,” I say, holding up a damp ball of lime-green polo. “Hope I can say the same in thirty years.”
“Only so many heartbeats in a life,” he replies. “No point wasting ‘em on the wrong fella.”
“It’s okay,” I say. “I’ve already found Mr Right.”
He flaps open his newspaper, flumps himself back on the bench and gives me a parting wink.

A Line to the Past

A Line to the Past
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday April 4, 2015

Kulin seems deserted this Sunday morning. The town’s womenfolk are sleeping-in after last night’s dinner dance. The kids on bikes yesterday must be watching TV. Two brown honeyeaters pirouette noisily overhead. They bank sharply before alighting unsteadily on a power line. Theirs is the only movement on Stewart Street.

My newly five-year-old daughter, keen to explore, kicks up a shower of red pebbles from the gravel footpath. We wander past a derelict shop. In the window is a faded sepia photograph of a swarthy bloke wearing a mug-shot smirk. His white shirt-sleeves are rolled up above his elbows, business-like. My pint-sized companion is captivated by his eyebrows, which sit on his jutting forehead like two hairy caterpillars. I read the caption:

Norm Tyley – the Red-Faced Crooked Butcher.

We turn the corner but the Woolshed Cafe is still shut – no caffeine heart-starter for me. We double-back along Day Street. That’s when I spot a long-forgotten friend. Its concrete roots are planted at the centre of a barren backyard. A galvanised trunk is poker-straight. From its branches, half a dozen frayed and flapping towels strain against their pegs.

This is the Hills Hoist of my childhood. There’s the winder with the black plastic knob. The four canopy arms are the same dull grey as the clouds scudding across the Wheatbelt sky. I can see, across the fences, that almost every backyard has a Hills Hoist. Some are bare skeletons; some are pinned with full loads, newly damp with autumn dew.

“What’s that?” asks my youngster, pointing to the steel tree I’d stopped to admire.

“That, honey, is a Hills Hoist!”

“What’s it for?”

“It’s a clothes line.”

Showing no interest in either clothes or line, she resumes scuffing pebbles with the now dusty red toe of her sneaker.

But I’m transported back to my childhood, growing up at Nan’s house, the only child of a working mother. Nan’s Hills Hoist had been planted into a carpet of matted buffalo. It stood sentinel between her outside washhouse and the magnolia tree that overlooked Mrs Anderson’s yard at No. 47.

Mrs Anderson’s Hills Hoist was a newer model and came with a trolley on wheels – Nan called it a jinka – that cradled her washing basket. On the east side at No. 43, the Fry family’s Hills Hoist had been planted so close to their sleepout that every time Mrs Fry swung it round to reach a new piece of line, its metal elbow scraped her guttering.

On slow Sunday afternoons, Mr Fry sat in his easy chair on his concrete patio, using the shade from his wife’s wet sheets to read his paper. Every half hour, the sun would find a gap to blind him, or the wind would conspire to rotate the Hills Hoist five degrees. Mr Fry would haul himself out of his chair, shuffle a few inches to the left, then settle himself down again in the shade of a flapping Bonds singlet, or his wife’s underpants. Mesmerised by the size of Lil Fry’s bloomers, I stickybeaked over the picket fence, watching each cotton leg billowing and deflating like an airport windsock.

Aged seven, my job was to lug Saturday morning’s wet washing to the Hills Hoist and hang it out. Mum would crank the handle until the lines dropped within reach, then I’d wipe them with a damp cloth. She’d unhook the wicker basket of wooden pegs and hang the holder at waist-height from the winder instead.

By the time I was ten, plastic pegs had arrived in a riot of colours. I amused myself by matching peg colour to sock colour. On bumper wash days, I created complementary colour arrangements for Mum’s secretarial wardrobe. A modern-day Van Gogh, I paired yellow pegs to Mum’s violet shirt, blue ones to her tangerine trousers. But I came unstuck if her pale-green tennis top was in the wash, seeing pegs never came in magenta.

Nan said to peg whites with whites, and to hang sheets and towels on the outside rungs, so visitors wouldn’t see our unmentionables. If she dashed to the shops, I used the Hills Hoist like a merry-go-round. Every kid did. Ours creaked and groaned and shuddered violently even under my flyweight. A garden tap staked in the lawn obstructed my flight path. I had to remember to jerk my legs up and over the tap, or it would smash into my knees. More than once the tap won, and Nan would arrive home to find me limping across the lawn. She never said anything. The deep blue bruises were enough punishment.

Back on Kulin’s Day Street, small daughter interrupts my reverie shouting: “Mum! There’s a kookaburra o n the Hills Hoist!” For several moments, I drink in the sight of bird on wire. I wonder how many more totems of my childhood are almost obsolete.

Airing Dirty Laundry

Airing Dirty Laundry
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday June 28, 2014

My laundry is a showcase of my domestic shortcomings. A pagoda of clean clothes is stacked on the bench. Eldest son’s sports gear lies reeking on the floor awaiting fumigation. Suspended under the skylight is a dowel rail trimmed with dripping garlands of blue and white school uniforms. My husband’s favourite polo shirt, the lavender one with the chlorine stains, hangs damply off the door knob to the broom cupboard. A load of wet washing I forgot to hang out yesterday is crumpled in the washing basket, beginning to turn whiffy.

I am not a laundry-proud kind of person. My laundry is a sweat-shop that’s either stopped up with five peoples’ dirty clothes, or clogged up with clean ones. No-one but me ever puts anything away.

Of all the domestic duties that co-habitation requires, it’s the laundering that my live-in clothes horse takes for granted. Before bed, he unbuckles his trousers, liberating a roll of tummy. His fawn chinos drop to the floor. He daintily steps over them and untucks his business shirt from his underpants. He inspects his shirt front for soy sauce and coffee drips. Satisfied at finding both, he balls up the shirt and lobs it almost into the laundry hamper. Jocks and socks follow in alphabetical order. He knows it’s only a matter of time before these items of clothing will magically reap ear, spotless, back in his wardrobe.

On weekends, his gaudy, fraying favourites emerge from his chest of drawers. The burnt-orange tracksuit top is a permanent Saturday fixture. He usually teams it with the dung-brown trackie daks with a navy stripe and a saggy seat. These are the items of clothing that pass regularly through the laundry on their way to Bunnings, or to middle son’s soccer game. Another dad snorts in my husband’s direction: ‘Get dressed in the dark, mate?!” Later, after father and son’s obligatory post-match hot dog, I soak the tomato sauce stains out of the pants and dry the orange tracksuit top over a chair so it won’t shrink, because I know what love is.

My laundry is also a dumping ground for miscellaneous household items. I’m supposed to find a home for the secateurs, a container of ceiling putty and half a metre of air conditioning duct in case in case they’re urgently needed. I babysit an assortment of batteries (possibly live, more likely dead) lined side by side beside the washing machine. A lonely shin-pad waits for me to locate its mate.

On the highest shelf next to the dryer, I keep a stash of Allen keys. These keys sit atop an Ikea screwdriver kit, now on permanent standby after last week’s upstairs emergency.

In a huff, 13-year-old had stomped into his bedroom, slamming the c 1978 door. The outer door-knob flew off taking the spindle with it, and imprisoning teenager inside his room for forty minutes. (I congratulated the house for that stroke of genius).

I have friends whose laundries are more show-pony than work-horse. I don’t understand how their laundries operate with such efficiency. Even when I call in unexpectedly, their polar-white Corian benchtops are pristine. They must live in the nude.

When my kids are whining and husband is jet-lagged, I use the laundry as a safe-haven. No-one in my family expects to find me there. I make a start on folding t-shirts and re-uniting socks, but my mind is elsewhere. I fantasise about washing teenage son’s new black jeans with husband’s burnt-orange tracksuit and watching gleefully as the colours run. I peel a pelt of lint from the dryer filter and sweep up the gravel of spilled cat biscuits.

Yesterday morning, my husband was running late for a meeting and rummaging through the laundry clothes pile for his lucky lilac-checked business shirt. “This place is a sty!” he complained loud enough for me to hear from the bathroom. “Where’s that shirt?”

“I think your blue one’s dry!” I called back. He grabbed his blue shirt from the bottom of the stack, upending the pile. As he barrelled past me to get dressed in our bedroom, I braced myself for this month’s lecture. (He calls this talk a ‘minor marital adjustment,’ I called it a ‘blazing row’).

He swung open the bathroom door and poked his head around the corner, hopping on one leg to put a sock on the other. “We’ve been in this house for more than a year now,” he said. “Any chance you could get a system going in that wash-house of yours?”

Of yours? What a cheek! I was incredulous. Then furious. I bent down and retrieved yesterday’s purple socks and his lime-green running shorts. “Here you go!” I said, tossing them in his direction. “The laundry’s all yours. Let’s see how you manage in there!” And I flounced into the shower, grabbed the soap and got to work shaving my legs with his new razor.