Under the skin

Under the skin
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 8, 2014

We’ve become an unlikely pair of confidantes, the icecream shop lady and I. But regularity breeds familiarity. And small children are good conduits for conversations with strangers.

Her name is Paula. In a hot-pink polo shirt, she’s a splash of colour against the stainless steel coffee machine. Her ice-cream parlour is tucked into a Fremantle laneway. Opposite her shop, a terracotta Neptune mounted to a wall dribbles water from his lips into a tiered pond. My kids beg for coins to drop in the wishing well.

Paula is always chirpy and energetic. We swap stories as my two connoisseurs paw her glass cabinet, arguing the merits of Chocolate over Bubblegum. I tell Paula about my first job as an ice-cream scooper and how my arms would ache. She tells me about growing up in Mount Magnet in the 60s; how her dad became shift boss for the Hill 50 gold mine. How her ex-husband, father of their daughter, had been a proof-reader for The West Australian.

“Cup or cone, my darling?” Paula says to my son. She slyly glances at me over the counter. “Cup,” I mouth. She gives me a little nod – two mothers colluding against ice-cream drippage.

“Cone!” my boy protests, sensing defeat.

“But I can get more in a cup!” promises Paula, and she scoops a thick ribbon of chocolate ice-cream into a fat ball.

My 4-year-old hugs the counter and blurts: “Paula? What happened to your face?”

I cringe but Paula flashes me a wink and props her elbows on the counter. “Well,” she replies gently. “I got burnt when I was a little girl. See?” She turns her right cheek, stretching the patchwork of skin grafts that criss-cross her face and neck.

“When I was five, my dad was pouring petrol into his truck and a spark from the engine ignited the can. He flung the burning can over his shoulder just as I walked around the side of the truck. The petrol fire went all over me – burnt off my hair, melted my ear, went down my face, neck, shoulder, arm.”

She lifts a lock of her hair to reveal the stub of her right ear. My daughter, for once, is silent.

“Mum said she’d never seen Dad move so fast. He scooped me up and threw me in the water trough. I spent the next two years in the Mount Magnet hospital. Had free run of the place. Had breakfast every morning with the doctor and his wife. Mum and Dad came afternoons. But seeing my Dad gave me flashbacks. I’d start screaming and I couldn’t stop. I wouldn’t let him anywhere near me. But every day after work, he’d sit outside my room. He’d sit there, on a chair in the corridor, for hours. And then he’d go home.”

My four-year-old has all the information she needs. She hands me her empty cup and darts off to join her brother, now splashing in the fountain.

Paula mops the counter: “From the age of seven until I was sixteen, every school holidays, Mum drove me to Perth for skin grafts. And every three months, I outgrew one of them. All the skin on my right arm, they grafted onto my left. The doctors took bits from all over me. But I such a scrawny kid, they ran out of skin.”

She strokes the luminously pale side of her neck: “They used a piece of my stomach lining to patch here.” She laughs at my shocked face, saying, “Mum always told me, ‘You’re no different to anyone else.’ I believed her. Hospital was an adventure. The pain never scared me.”

A dad with an excited toddler tugging at his arm, steps up to order a waffle.

“I stopped having grafts when I was 22,” Paula resumes quietly when they depart. “By then, I was a barmaid in Kambalda. And you know what? No-one gave me a hard time. But after that last lot of plastic surgery, when I needed six weeks off work, Mum thought I better talk to Centrelink. When I got to the front of the queue, this government fella says ‘Sorry. Wrong queue. The handicapped counter’s over there.’”

“I said, ‘How dare you! I’m not handicapped!’ I stormed out in tears. That was the only day anyone ever got to me.”

It’s time to head home. I collect damp socks and four wet shoes and we wave goodbye. But all week, Paula’s story crowds my thoughts.

‘The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it.’

That quote by Hemingway suits her.