Lending an Ear

Lending an Ear
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday May 31, 2014

Someone once said train stations are the gates to the glorious and the unknown. As our train slid into Fremantle station, the kids and I spilled out into the chequerboard foyer. I stopped to do up small son’s shoelaces. That’s when I heard a quavery voice over my left shoulder:

“Can you plug me in?”

We were the last passengers left. All I could see were four small grey wheels behind a mobile advertising stand. I took two more steps and realised the wheels belonged to a motorised wheelchair. It was tucked into the corner, backed up to the wall. Its occupant, an old man with rheumy eyes and a grubby green shirt. His woollen vest was peppered with moth holes. He waved a power cable at me.

“Plug me in?” he asked again.

My first shameful instinct was to look away and hurry past.

But he caught my eye and pointed down to a power point: “Can’t reach it. Flat battery.”

He wasn’t irrational. He was stranded – trapped in a comatose machine.

My youngsters scampered over to inspect the mystery man behind the billboard.

I took the cord from his hand, crouched behind his wheelchair and inserted the plug. His chair emitted a shy peep as the battery awoke.

“Where’s your ear?” I heard my four-year-old daughter say. I scrambled to my feet: “Don’t be rude!” I whispered. And then I saw he was indeed missing his left ear. I squirmed at her impertinence, but the old bloke didn’t miss a beat. “That’s what happens when you don’t wear a hat!” he said. He winked at me as small child studied his bald, pink head.

“The sun got to my ear” he told her. “First they cut off this little bit,” and he grabbed the top of his remaining ear. “Then this bit went.” He waggled the lobe. “And before I knew it, I just had a hole.”

This gruesome tale only emboldened my daughter. “Same as a snake,” she said.

I cringed. But the old fellow chuckled, then motioned towards my 6-year-old son who’d been struck dumb by fear or curiosity.

“Got any questions about my ear, son?”

My boy shook his head and inched closer to my side.

“Will you grow another one?” his sister piped up.

“Could’ve, but I’m too old now.”

Satisfied, she took off to play hopscotch on the tiles. Her brother began hopping too.

Why had I been so reluctant to stop and talk to this witty fellow? He was scruffy, but then, so was my four-year-old. He’d unnerved me by calling out, but how else could he attract my attention? Confined to a wheelchair, he was hardly likely to leap out and snatch my handbag.

“Name’s Ned,” he said, and raised his arthritic hand in salute.

“Was it skin cancer that took your ear?” I asked him as we watched the kids, his wheelchair tethered to the power point.

“Twenty years on Koolan Island’ll do that to you” he said. “Worked for BHP. Just a singlet I wore – a singlet and footy shorts. I’m covered in these blasted splotches.” And he rubbed the dark mottles on his arm.  

We fell into an easy patter about harsh summers. And when my youngsters began bickering, I said: “Nice talking to you,” and the kids and I trooped off.

A week later, I’m still thinking about that stranded pensioner. My children are still skiting about Ned’s missing ear. I repeated the story to the German student we’re billeting.

“I would have kept walking,” she said. “In Berlin, we avoid eye contact in the street. We call it ‘wie Luft behandeln.’ It means to look through someone like they’re air.”

Many a time I’ve given a passing stranger a friendly nod and been snubbed. How that irks me!

A sociologist in Chicago reports that commuters who acknowledge each other enjoy their trip far more than those who ignore their fellow travellers. Even a small smile, or a throwaway line about the weather, makes people happier.

Ned’s story about life on Koolan Island made me curious. My laptop told me that in the 60s, Koolan was the largest and most remote iron ore mine in the country. Not much bigger than Rottnest, the island was then home to 900 workers. (Koolan also claimed to have the world’s longest golf hole, an 860 yard, par seven, which doubled as the air strip.)

I don’t want my children being fearful of strangers. Out with me, I want them to be comfortable saying hello to the kaleidoscope of passers-by. I want them to empathise with people who are different.

Keen to keep her ears, my daughter now wears a hat without argument.

All credit to you Ned!

Come Rain or Shine

Come Rain or Shine
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday May 24, 2014

Every morning, even before I roll out of bed, I wonder how the sky is behaving. I lie still for those few moments between sleep and wakefulness and take a guess at the weather.

I prise open my right eye (the one nearest the window) and make a mental measurement of the light streaming in through the gap in the curtains. Sometimes, the brightness bounces painfully off my retina. I clamp my eye shut and my brain registers with a jolt that it’s sunny outside. Other mornings, there’s only a soft splash of daylight that dapples the carpet and I sense it’s overcast, clouds on the move.

As I throw back the doona and my feet kiss the floor, I can tell you whether the air this morning is crisp, chilly, bracing or brisk. Crisp is any May morning before 7am. Chilly is unpleasantly cold. Bracing is cold, but pleasantly invigorating. Brisk is for the conversation I have with the man next door after nipping out to get The West in my nightie.

How’s the weather at your place then? It’s how the world speaks to us. The weather tells me what to wear. It alters my mood, colours my day. It can even change my plans.

Weather is the universal language of strangers, a conversation-starter that guarantees an ally: “Geez, how cold was it this morning?” No-one argues over the weather. I can predict rain and never be held to account. I can complain incessantly about the weather and escape being branded a whinger. A bore, maybe, but not a whinger.

My nan was the family meteorologist. During the long summers of my childhood, she would have daily discussions about the weather with Mrs Anderson next door. They’d talk across the side fence, standing in their respective backyards. Being seven or eight, I could only make out the top of Mrs Anderson’s head, but Nan got to see her bloomers on the line.

“Chance of rain?” Mrs Anderson would ask. I could just make out her mouth moving in the gap between the pickets. She and my Nan would crane their necks and take in the sky, all hopes pinned on one lonely little cloud adrift in iridescent blue. “We should be so lucky!” my Nan would say matter-of-factly, and then they’d change the subject and talk about the humidity.

Some mornings, my Nan would swap fences to the eastern side to confer with Mrs Fry. Mrs Fry had tight white curls and a lovely husband called Mr Fry, who slipped me a jelly bean every time I pulled a weed from his front lawn. His wife hated the heat even more than my Nan did. “Chafe! she’d complain loudly. “All you get from this weather is chafe!” And my Nan would nod sagely.

My Nan had two sayings which she alternated depending on the season. During a stinking hot summer Nan would chant, “This heat will be the end of me!” and in the winter, she’d declare “This cold is going to give me chilblains.”

I never understood what chilblains were but Nan was always warning me: “Don’t sit so close to the radiator. You’ll get chilblains.” I didn’t sit on her cold lino either, because she said that would give me something called piles.

These days, the weather isn’t just geographical, it’s extraterrestrial. It’s photographed from outer space, probed, plotted, and predicted. We can read the weather of the entire planet on our laptops and smart phones.

My husband is obsessed with the Bureau of Meteorology’s radar plots. He is not normally excitable. But if I glance out the window and casually inquire: “What’s the weather doing?” he’ll hurry over to his computer. Madly tapping his keyboard, he’ll pull up the satellite images of the West Australian coastline. He’ll zoom in on a low pressure system a hundred nautical miles out to sea and declare: “Rain tonight! Maybe three millimetres. About midnight!” Teenage son and I trade smirks.

The weather shapes our identity. We pride ourselves on how well we recover when the floodwaters recede, the fires are doused, the cyclone dissolves to a squall. In our family, elders recount survival stories from Cyclone Tracy. The devastation and trauma are passed over in favour of a ripping yarn: “It was Christmas Day you know, and your Auntie Jill had a turkey in the oven, and you know where your Uncle Ray found it? The cyclone had blown it clean out of the oven and it was floating in the neighbour’s pool!”

Remembering that story, I tell it to my youngsters. “What’s a cyclone?” asks my six year old. I point to their father who is tracking his satellite radars. “Let’s ask the weather-master shall we? And while he’s at it, he can tell us what it’s gonna be like tonight!”

“Dark” he says. And with a smug look on his face, he slams shut the lid of his laptop.

A Woman’s World

A Woman’s World
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday May 17, 2014

We met in the rice cracker aisle. I hadn’t seen him in 25 years. We’d worked in radio together when I was the bumbling cadet and he was the news editor, sure-footed and velvet-tonsilled. I’d been in awe of him – or scared of him – one and the same thing to a 21-year-old feeling hopelessly inadequate. I can remember how he’d grow more and more frenzied as the clock sped towards news hour. He’d pound away on his IBM electric, a gravity-defying stub of ash dangling from the cigarette wedged into the corner of his mouth.

Now he was barefoot shopping in Coles and I was loading up on Saos for school lunches. We made small talk about radio days before he announced matter-of-factly: “You chicks have got it made. The media’s biased towards women. I should know – I got the sack for being male.”

“You don’t mean that!” I said, taken aback.

“Yes, I do. I was a man and they only wanted women. Attractive women, of course. I tried to grow breasts, but all I grew was resentment.” He laughed, but I could hear the indignation in his voice.

I wasn’t sure if he wanted my sympathy or a comrade in arms. Our conversation limped to a farewell at the checkout. Walking home, my arms strung with shopping bags, I tried to picture my career from his point of view.

I remember when alpha males ruled radio newsrooms. In the late 80’s, hardened newsmen with gravelly voices would sub my scripts then give my right cheek an encouraging pat: “Have another go, sunshine!”

Anxious to impress, I worried they’d peg me as the dumb blonde. (More often than not, I was). So I put my hand up to do the graveyard shifts, reading news bulletins til midnight, and fumbling out of bed at 4am, just as friends were staggering home. I thought hard work would make up for lack of talent.

One summer, desperate to be taken seriously, I took to wearing pretend glasses to work. They were Lois Lane style with square black rims. I thought they made me look intelligent. My girlfriends said they made me look hilarious.

By the time I’d crossed the divide into television, female reporters with big hair and pastel suits were as much in demand as their chain-smoking male counterparts. To me, gender was irrelevant: a scoop was a scoop. We never questioned that our news directors were all male: the corridors in management were awash with testosterone too. Women reported the news, they weren’t in charge of it.

For the next eighteen years, I had only one female boss. She grilled me once: “Are you wanting to get married? Are you thinking about children?”

“No interest in either!” I replied proudly, aged 27. Three months later she was gone, emptying her desk after a dip in the TV ratings and complaints about her abrasive ‘management style.’

Feminism didn’t do young female reporters any favours either. It told us we needed to be ball-breakers, to be strident and brash. But the one thing despised in a newsroom more than a bimbo, was a woman as aggressive as a bloke.

Sure, there were perks for women in telly. I got $2000 to spend on clothes. Staying blonde became a tax deduction. But the night a male rival got sloshed, I discovered his salary beat mine by $30,000.

I returned to one job after baby number two, feeling crushed by the conflict of motherhood. On Monday mornings, I’d race out my front door in tears, my small son howling in the arms of his babysitter.

The newsroom had moved on in my 18-month absence. Young, fresh-faced reporters eyed me suspiciously. I was intimidated by the new computer software and embarrassed to ask for help. What if I was outed by my childless colleagues as less competent? Or less committed? In the afternoons, I’d make a flurry of whispered phone calls to make sure 6-year-old son was safely home from school, that he was dressed for Tae Kwon Do, that a girlfriend was still good to take him, that my toddler had woken up happily from his nap.

Three months into that job, I fell pregnant again. It took me a week to work up the courage to ring my boss in Sydney: “Ben, I have some news you’re not expecting…” I couldn’t decide whether to sound euphoric or apologetic, as though I’d connived to deceive him.

He took my announcement in his stride. But I was floored by the glamorous young reporter who griped: “But didn’t you get pregnant last year?”

So, in answer to my former male colleague at the supermarket, the one feeling downtrodden by the effortless rise of women in media? Don’t complain to me buddy! I’m tired of talking about sexism. Ageism’s my thing now!

Losing Control

Losing Control
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday May 10, 2014

I am at war with my machines. This week, I am at choke point with the toaster. It cannot contain the crumbs from even a single slice of bread. Its crumb tray is like men’s nipples, a useless feature that should have been engineered out of the final design.

I’ve taken to upending my toaster over the sink and shaking it violently until I hear its innards rattle. When it cannot cough up another single speck of bread dust, I give it one last slap to remind it who’s boss and plonk it back into its corner of the kitchen bench.

Next morning, as I pull my machine out to toast my slice of kibble rye, I see it has dumped yet another load of sooty crumbs and flame-grilled raisins from some dark orifice.

I’m already cheesed off with the dishwasher  – a computerised princess who recently gagged on a pea. Or so the repair-man told me when he asked me for $180 to remove it. For three days, a fetid pool of bilge water had refused to drain from the bowels of the machine. To stem the smelly tide, I transferred cupfuls of grey swamp-water to the sink, then got down on my hands and knees and groped around in her murky fundament, hoping to release the blockage. The repair-man thanked me for doing the dirty work and sieved out a lone pea, swollen and grey, but capable of gumming up a sophisticated machine several hundred times its size. 

I’m afraid the house is ganging up on me. The doorbell has begun checking if we’re home by ringing itself at two in the morning. The first time it happened, I was startled awake by the loud peals echoing down the hallway. Suspecting a brazen burglar, my bloke leapt out of bed and began fumbling about in the dark for a weapon. He stumbled over teenage son’s tennis bag dumped by the front door. Fuelled by adrenalin and primed to inflict some racquet abuse, my bloke wrenched open the door brandishing a Junior Prince Warrior, rrp $59.  A cool breeze invited itself in and gusted down the passageway, slamming the hallway door and waking all three children.

Two nights later, our midnight caller struck again. There were phantom chimes during the day as well until my husband ripped the doorbell from its casing. (Visitors now spook us by magically appearing on the back veranda when their volleys of doorknocking go unheard.)

I keep reading scary stories about how our machines will soon do our thinking for us. Human evolution will stall as our gadgetry becomes superior. Bollocks! All my appliances are still hopelessly dependent. Their shortcomings might push my buttons but they won’t do a thing if I don’t push theirs.

We’re yet to get a robotic vacuum cleaner though friends say they’re marvellous. I’m all for handing over my gritty floors to a robo-maid who works tirelessly through the night. My husband says they’re a stupid gimmick and a Hoover needs a human to do a decent job. (This from a man who has never used one.)

I can remember when chess champion Gary Kasparov lost to IBM’s Deep Blue in that pivotal victory of machine over man. But that was twenty years ago and I’m not yet being chauffeured by a driverless car. My self-cleaning oven still won’t clean itself.

Boffins predict by 2030, computers will have all but disappeared from sight. They’ll be everywhere yet nowhere, ubiquitous yet hidden, just like electricity and running water, and my children at bedtime. Apple’s iCloud will follow us silently and seamlessly, absorbing our thoughts as we think them. (My dirty ones will stream live to iPorn).

Right now, my computer is attached to an overcrowded power board via a spaghetti junction of cables. The wi-fi regularly goes awol. It’s hopeless upstairs. Last week, I discovered my 13-year-old squeezed into the corner between his bedroom door and his wardrobe, crouched over his laptop. “I’m doing my maths homework. Really Mum! This is the only spot where the wi-fi works.” For once, I believed him.

The next morning at 6am, still half asleep, I nearly garrotted myself on the ethernet cable which teenage son had strung overnight across the stairwell. “What the heck?” I demanded, pointing to the blue cable looped to the walls with globs of Blu-Tack. “Oh, that!” he said. “I ran the internet cable upstairs to get Google.” (All the technology in the world means nothing if you have a teenage boy at the controls.)

For now, I’d like to think I’m still the boss of my machines. At least until my smartphone outsmarts me and incites a mutiny amongst my appliances. That’s when the phantom doorbell will give the signal, the freezer will have a meltdown and my coffee machine will serve nothing but decaf.  

Crossing the Line

Crossing the Line
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday May 3, 2014

You can tell a lot about a person by the way they behave in a queue. Especially a long one at an airport. Some people do their waiting silently and their fuming internally. Others want everyone around them to know how cheesed off they are. I like to alleviate the boredom by studying the fashion choices of those in my line and making small talk with my neighbours.

“My husband would kill for your jacket!” I said to the moustachioed gentleman in his sixties standing ahead of us in the queue for the economy check-in. (The kids and I were flying to Melbourne for a wedding). His chequered sportscoat ran the gamut of browns, with suede patches on the elbows and leather buttons. “It’s Harris Tweed,” he confided, as he brushed a speck of fluff from one sleeve. “The real thing actually. Got it in Scotland in 1979.”

We went back to waiting. After several static minutes, I noticed Mr Harris Tweed was becoming agitated, checking his phone and sighing loudly. My six-year-old and his little sister counted out loud the twenty-four of us roped into the rectangular maze. Harris Tweed caught my eye and gestured towards the lone attendant at the counter: “How long’s this going to take?”

My small daughter was mesmerised by his handlebar moustache – the way it twirled up at its wispy extremities. Each time he emptied his lungs in a loud huff, the free ends of his moustache fluttered in the updraft, like two tendrils of a vine looking for their next toehold. “Ruddy airports!” he grumbled at me again. “Where’s the staff?”

I recalled why lobbies in skyscrapers are built with mirrors next to the elevators. In the 1950’s hi-rise boom, residents complained about the long wait for the lifts. Putting mirrors in the lobbies gave people something to do –   checking their hair or slyly ogling those around them made the wait feel shorter.

Harris Tweed-man ogled those around him, but not slyly. He turned to me conspiratorially and motioned several bodies ahead. “Will you get a load of that?!” he said in a loud voice. “Reckon he knows how stupid he looks?!” Harris Tweed had me pegged as his ally – I had admired his jacket so he presumed we were like-minded on everything. I was trapped.

I followed his gaze to a young bloke who had what looked like golf tees inserted in the lobe of each ear. A pair of baggy denim jeans clung desperately to his hips as gravity and a scrawny rear plotted his trouser’s downfall. On his head he had a black flat cap with the letters D – O – P – E embroidered across the front.

“Dope!” yelled my six-year-old, eager to show off his spelling prowess. “Mum! That man’s name is Dope!”

“You said it, kid!” said Harris Tweed.

“Don’t be rude!” I warned my boy.

The guy in the Dope-hat turned around to scowl at us as he was called up to the counter. Moments later, clutching his boarding pass, Dope-hat ambled off towards the departure gates, giving Harris Tweed a grin and a sporty wave with his middle finger.

That was all it took. Harris Tweed hissed towards the counter – “How about some service, people?! Ten minutes we’ve been waiting in this line – TEN MINUTES!”

The travellers behind us shifted uncomfortably. “Settle down, mate!” came a gruff voice from behind. I wondered if Harris Tweed’s queue rage would get him hauled off to airport security. But he fell into embarrassed silence. A dominant male had spoken.

Only last week, I inadvertently jumped the line at the bakery. I was scolded by the woman at the other end of the counter . “Excuse me!” she said in tart tones, “I was here first!”

“Yes, of course. Sorry,” I grovelled. She gave me a filthy look and I felt myself shrink in shame.

Most of us don’t mind waiting our turn if we know everyone in a queue will be treated equally and customers are being attended to efficiently. We’ll even invite someone more deserving to be served ahead of us. (The demand for fairness extends beyond mere self-interest).

At the airport queue, Harris Tweed’s patience was about to be sorely tested as he was beckoned to the counter.

“I’m sorry, Sir,” said the lady in a suit, “but this is the Qantas check-in. You’re flying Jetstar. You’ll need to check-in over there.” And she pointed to another restless loop of travellers cordoned off behind another set of ropes.

“Oh goodie,” he sighed sarcastically, and without another word, he grabbed the handle of his bag and strode away to his new queue.

My two urchins and I got to the counter at last. “Sorry about the wait!” said the suit-lady. “Five people have called in sick this morning. Hope you’re not too frazzled!”

“Not as much as some” I said, with a wink.