Going Up

Going Up
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday May 9, 2015

The traffic lights at Labouchere Road flipped to orange and I slammed on the anchors. The car in front sped across the intersection. In the distance I could see cars choking the freeway on-ramp.

“This could take a while,” I said to my three noise-makers in the back, but they were busy singing out of tune to the radio.

Up ahead, I spotted the block of flats I lived in as a four-year-old. I flipped up my sunvisor and counted up four floors to single out the two bedroom apartment Mum rented us after her divorce.

Time had forgotten the five-storey brick box at No. 89 Mill Point Road. All around it, towers of penthouse apartments were drinking in river views. Our 1960s apartment block squatted on the corner, a dumpy brown eyesore.

I studied our fourth floor balcony – a square envelope of concrete jutting out from an expanse of peanut-coloured wall. I could still make out the mulberry-coloured arches painted on the walls at ground level, a clumsy trompe l’oeil stained by the sprinklers with bore water. The umbrella tree in the carpark had grown ten-fold, its flower spikes still catalogued in my mind as giant pink starfish.

Staring at that old building, I was swept away by a flush of early memories. My brain delivered up a snapshot of our flat’s doorbell. It sat just shy of a four-year-old’s straining fingertips, a tantalising square of shiny silver mounted to a green door. I could replay the strangled ‘ding-dong’ of its tuneless chime. I mentally re-traced the swirls in the green carpet on our landing. My mind summonsed the enormous fire hydrant bracketed to the wall beside the lift.

The lift!

I suddenly remembered the lift; could feel again my excitement at being allowed to press the button to summons a ride. The lift announced its arrival with a ‘ping!’ The metal door jolted sideways, vanishing into the wall to reveal a tiny Aladdin’s cave.

Our elevator liked to land where it pleased, forcing me to hop up or jump down to board. I could still recall the tummy butterflies as I contemplated stepping over the two-inch gap between lift and landing. One stumble and I thought I’d fall through the crack and plummet to the lobby. Small girl would be squashed flat by a 2000-pound box. (My brain, enjoying this game, served up a grotesque tableau vivant of the rat Mum once steamrolled with our car.)

Our lift was designed to carry eight people but could only comfortably transport one. It became cramped and awkward with two passengers; incommodious with three. Adult options were limited: stand side by side, shoulders rubbing, or one behind the other, heel to toe. I jammed myself next to the control panel, securing the coveted job of button-pusher.

I tried to identify the smells of the various residents spoiling my ride. Perfumes were stiflingly pungent or sickeningly sweet. Other peoples’ clothing smelt fusty or dank, or reeked of sweat or B.O. Sometimes, Mum got out one floor early and took the stairs.

Later, having conquered my lift-paranoia, I appointed myself elevator-astronaut. Over and over I drove that lift-rocket, cruising down to the lobby then blasting off for Flat 12 on the fourth floor. It mattered not that it was quicker to walk up the stairwell, because I was the pilot in charge of five buttons. (Truthfully, it was only four, because the fifth button was still out of reach.)

Back on Labouchere Road, the traffic lights turned green and my consciousness rejoined the present. As we inched towards the freeway, I wondered if other peoples’ first memories are as equally pedestrian as mine?

The following day, I prodded a girlfriend to tell me her first memory. In vivid detail, she described for me a vignette from her childhood growing up in the Wheatbelt. She remembered being clad in a nappy playing with a toy washing machine on the lid of their septic tank. Her overwhelming feeling, she said, was of the warm sun radiating off the tank, and being absorbed in her domestic idyll, washing her doll’s clothes.

The pair of us were certain our first memories were real, not imagined or distorted by time.

So the next morning, I drove back to my old block of flats in South Perth. A friendly painter allowed me into the building. Climbing the stairs to the fourth floor, I discovered Apartment 12 still had its square doorbell. Bolted to the wall was the very same fire hydrant, (though smaller than I remembered) and the still swirling green carpet.

But unlike me, my beloved lift-rocket had not grown up or moved out. It still had its metal door and faux-timber panelling. Aged 47, I rode that lift up and down – twice – just for kicks, and revisited the favourite scenes from my life, aged four. My job now is not to forget them.

I Rest My Case

I Rest My Case
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday January 25, 20124

Last Sunday afternoon, my husband plonked a small battered case at my feet: “I found this in the tractor shed at the farm. I thought you might not have seen it in a while.”

Something about this case had slipped below the surface of my mind. It was the colour that pricked my memory first: a once-luminous shade of teal blue. I slid my hand around the smooth plastic handle and felt a familiar groove against my fingertips: My school case! My primary school case!

I felt a rush of nostalgia. I flicked open the metal catches with my thumbs. They sprang up with the same ‘thwack’ from forty years ago, still eager to perform despite rusted hinges and arthritic joints.

Inside the cardboard lid was a sticky strip of red Dymo tape. My name and phone number were punched out in white letters: Roslyn Genevieve Thomas, 84 2556.

Mum, being the model of secretarial sophistication, had brought home the office Dymo amid much fanfare. I was so proud to be labelled. (Now my school case seemed so much smaller than I remembered.)

I turned it over and noticed the sturdy moulded fibreboard, once held together by smooth silver rivets, had sloughed off its shiny painted skin to reveal an underbelly of grimy brown cardboard. The rivets were now rough and rusted. The plastic corner protectors had given up trying and were cracked in intricate eggshell patterns. One had split and torn away from the rivet, leaving a jagged edge which caught my wrist. It stung like a cat scratch. Inside my school case, a white cocoon was hanging precariously from a single silken thread, its occupant long since departed. How did it get there?

My case had that peculiar smell common to all forgotten treasures: the mustiness of neglect, a staleness I found almost comforting. I wanted to breathe in the scent of my childhood but I could detect no trace of oily crayons or pencil shavings. My case was worn out with usefulness.

I snapped open the catches again, just to relish the sound. As an 8-year-old, those latches had popped open to reveal a wilting salad sandwich, wrapped in greaseproof paper, the loose ends folded and tucked under. Nothing glad about that sandwich – my school case could not defend its contents against a 38-degree day. (In 1975, freezer blocks were science fiction).

My lunch was always enclosed in a brown paper bag. I could guess at what it contained by the bloom of the greasy stain underneath. Cheddar cheese sweated the most, followed by salami and liverwurst.

Mum was the Thomas Edison of sandwich inventiveness: peanut paste with raisins. Swiss cheese and gherkin (sliced longways for maximum bread wetness). Mortadella dotted with clammy circles of fat.

Leftover roast lamb was the caviar of cold cuts – once a month I could use a lamb sandwich as playground currency. Mine was made from two doorsteps of hideously virtuous wholemeal bread, but I could barter it for a neat round of pillowy-soft white bread and vegemite.

And then in Year 5 Mum started adding condiments: roast lamb and Rosella fruit chutney. Roast lamb and mint jelly. Cornwell’s mint jelly was playground purgatory. The first time I unwrapped that sandwich, speckled green slime oozed out. Sarah Biddles (the willowy blonde I wanted to be) shouted: “Yech! frogs’ eggs! You’ve got frogs’ eggs!”

She wouldn’t sit next to me after that. From then on, I guiltily binned every lamb sandwich in the vain hope of restoring the friendship.  

During summer, the gravelly forecourt in front of our classrooms became blisteringly hot. I could feel the heat pulsing up through the thinning soles of my school sandals. Sweat would trickle down my back and soak the waistband of my regulation navy-blue knickers. Even so, we girls would hop from one foot to the other on the baking bitumen pleading with the boys to be allowed to play King Ball. The boys never relented. I cursed them, vowing never, ever to kiss one.

The girls with Great Dane legs would shuffle off to play Hopscotch. Instead, my Corgi-legs would carry me to the oval. There a friend and I would unearth cute beetles to replace those who’d inexplicably died on holiday inside our school cases. (Beetle embalmings were planned with glee, but burials were respectfully solemn).

Reunited with my beloved blue case, I’m tempted to pay my old school a visit. Perhaps I should test my memory, to see if the oval still looks like a vast paddock. But what if it doesn’t? What if it has shrunk and the beetles have all gone? What if the monkey bars are no longer two stories high?

Best I stay away. So what if the King Ball squares are no longer etched into the bitumen? Do I need to recalibrate the length of the school verandah with my giant adult steps? Why mess with memory? I think I’ll stick with glorifying the past instead. 

Keeping Time

Keeping Time
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday October 12, 2013

Memory is a fickle companion. I never know which moments of my life it will choose to preserve. That’s why I like to hang onto things – keepsakes – as an antidote to forgetting.

I still have the doll who followed me everywhere as a child. (She was my favourite because she liked to put me first). I named her Colleen – a good Irish name for a doll made in China. She had turquoise eyes with thick black lashes and strange plastic eyelids that fluttered briefly before closing in forgiveness when I tipped her out of her pram. She also had a blonde cowlick that gave her an unattractive bald spot at the back of her head. But I loved her anyway.

Last week, foraging in the back of a cupboard, I discovered her languishing in a cardboard coffin like Snow White. She was lying on a bed of tissues, wedged into a shoebox – one eye open, one stuck closed – but as lovely as ever. In the bottom of the box was a plastic sleeve containing all the miniature Qantas condiments from my plane trip to Melbourne as a 12 year old (salt, pepper, sugar, mustard and my first ever moist towelette). There was also a collection of faded postcards from an uncle with wanderlust  and the stub of a concert ticket to Duran Duran in 1983. 

Thirty years later, my doll-memory is yet to fail me. I can still remember the embroidered cream flowers on the hem of Colleen’s crimson dress and how her knickers had no elastic. I can recall my 12-year-old urge to pocket the kangaroo-embossed cutlery on that plane. And I can still picture the euphoric teenage me after the Duran Duran foursome emerged from the stage door of the Entertainment Centre and scrawled their initials in my autograph book.

Why cling to such schmaltz? I have kept crates of my relics, rarely opened but dragged from old house to new house, garage to garage. Why do I curate these treasures?

Last month, the pragmatist I live with was cleaning out the carport to make way for eldest son’s new ping-pong table. He pushed half a dozen packing boxes towards me: “It’s time” he said, and we both knew what he meant. Inwardly seething (but outwardly compliant), I sat down on an old milk crate and opened my cartons. I pawed through folders stuffed with school exercise books, runner-up tennis trophies and an assortment of papier mache animals made in Mr Antoine’s Year 5 class using strips of newspaper and Clag glue. (Mr Antoine was expert at craft projects but I lived in fear of his sweaty man-hands brushing against mine.)

For the first time since 1993, I ripped the dusty duct-tape off a box labelled ‘me’. It was stacked with cement-grey Betacam cassettes, an embarrassing archive of my early years of television reportage, when Jana Wendt was my idol. I wore my hair tizzy like hers, with shoulder pads like body armour in my pastel-coloured suits.

Tucked inside a large envelope was a sheath of love letters (mostly mine, unsent). They transported me back to the summer I turned 17, adoring the two lifeguards at my local swimming pool. My girlfriend and I would lie artfully reclined on our towels, basting ourselves with Reef Oil. Those lifeguards never came near us. Perhaps because we weren’t drowning – or because we looked like two rotisserie chickens crisping in the sun.

And so I tipped out the dregs from the last carton and stuffed our recycling bin with wads of Archie comics and school Year-books and diaries doodled with love hearts next to names like Scottie and Gav and Craig.

My detritus gone, I felt a pang of despair. Could I mark the passage of time without these mementos? And if these precious souvenirs meant so much to me, why had I spent so little time poring over them?

The next morning, the rubbish truck pulled up and I watched as its robotic arm snatched our bin and dumped my memories amongst its smelly innards. Now the proof of my past was churned up with everyone else’s.

I drifted back into the house and surveyed my modernist existence – mass-produced beds and televisions, computers and plates and cups. If a chair breaks, I’ll get another one from Ikea. But against the loungeroom wall, I saw with fresh eyes my grandmother’s sideboard.

That rosewood buffet is the one piece of furniture that wasn’t sold off after she died. Instead, it sits in awkward conversation with my sleek new sofa and funky swivelling armchairs. It’s a relic of Nan’s world, clashing with mine. All the same, I couldn’t bear to part with that shellacked showpiece – it’s one of the family, like a faithful old dog, following me across suburbs on its unsteady cabriole legs.

Why am I so sentimental about heirlooms I don’t much like? Perhaps collecting memories is less about the memories and more about the collecting.

The Restless Years

The Restless Years
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday August 17, 2013

A homesick Irishman is the last person you expect to find on a storm-wrecked Swanbourne beach on a Sunday morning. It was not yet 8am and the wind was biting. As the kids and I climbed over the craggy rocks jutting out over the point, we spotted a middle-aged dad and his two small boys down in the cove. They were fossicking about in the great mounds of seaweed coughed up by the still surging ocean.

My three kids were keen to see what mysterious flotsam those boys were collecting in their buckets. So the dad and I got talking. His wife was sleeping off a nurse’s nightshift, he told me, and his boys needed to blow off steam. My own husband had just flown in from the Philippines, I told him, and we’d abandoned the house so he could enjoy his jetlag in peace.

“Ryan!” he introduced himself, and crushed my hand in his. We laughed at the lunacy of a trip to the beach on a day like this. He’d come prepared to be weather-beaten: his boys were in woolly turtle necks zipped inside windjackets. They were sloshing about in knee-high welly boots, beanies pulled down low to cover small ears.

My boys had refused to wear anything but board shorts. Three-year-old daughter had agreed to a tracksuit, but was saturated within a few minutes. She stripped down to her knickers and a singlet and began collecting shells, flashing her goosebumps at the weak-willed sun.  

I had to concentrate to decipher Ryan’s south Dublin brogue as the wind snatched his words and flung them past my ears: “Y’knaw, there was nothin’ doin’ at home” he said. “We’d been to Australia on holiday and I loved the place, milk n’ honey, like. We came out eighteen months ago. It was my idea to move – I landed a job in construction.”

“How have you found it here?” I asked.

“Ay, I like it, but not enough. I think we have to go home soon” he said, scuffing the sand with his left boot, “My wife is desperately homesick – she’s not managing well.”

 “What are you missing most?”

“Green fields, family, the neighbours.”

“In that order?” I laughed, and he nodded.

“My wife has 27 nieces and nephews all about, and the neighbours, we’re very close with the neighbours. The village comes alive after knock-off – we head in next door or up the lane for a couple of pints while the kids play. You don’t do that here – I miss it.”

That got me thinking. Is homesickness a weakness? I always thought homebodies who stay rooted to the same familiar place must lack ambition or curiosity. But then I experienced the wrench of dislocation for myself. 

At age 26, I was distraught with homesickness after moving to Sydney for a new job. It was meant to be summer, but the rain bucketed down. My excitement soon wore off and I slid into  despondency.

Home was a rented flat in an unfamiliar suburb. Work colleagues were indifferent to the new girl. On weekends, I became a lonely observer of other peoples’ happiness. I traipsed around my new city on foot. In sidewalk cafes, I was the solitary figure contemplating the  parade of couples and families. It seemed everyone but me took the comforts of belonging for granted. I never quite shook that feeling of restlessness. The dull ache of homesickness stayed with me even as I made a new life in a city I grew fond of. Four years later, I seized the opportunity to move back to Perth.

Now I question whether my homesickness was a deficiency: me, pining for home, because I couldn’t cope with the newness of being alone.

Fifteen years later, I fantasise about escaping the stranglehold of my domestic responsibilities and moving the five of us to some exotic locale. I fool myself into believing I could be at home anywhere in the world. After all, I could instantly re-connect with friends on Skype and Facebook, family would be just a text or a mouse-click away. Such are my daydreams. Technology may have created the global village but it cannot convince me migration is now painless.

I ask my perpetually jetlagged husband if he struggles with homesickness when he’s away. “Always” comes the reply.

“What does it feel like?”

“Melancholy” he says, “Waves of it. And talking on the phone just reminds me of what I’m missing.”

Homesickness must be a close relative of nostalgia. We are not easily separated from the people and places who shape our histories. The Irishman on the beach could not explain his wife’s deep longing for the green fields of Dún Laoghaire. But even I knew a balding Australian paddock was a poor substitute.

“My wife comes from a family of twelve” he tells me. “It’s not easy leaving that behind.”

“Twelve?” I gasp. “My husband’s one of seven and I thought that was a big family! He and his younger brother are born in the same year!”

“Aah” he replies, “back home we call them Irish twins.”