The Whistle Stop

The Whistle Stop
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 23, 2013

Here is what I’ve learnt since taking up jogging: I do not run like a gazelle. Or a cheetah. Or any of those animals used as metaphors for people who can run fast and free. I run like Cliff Young. No-one will ever mistake me for an athlete.

Last week, as I pounded up the hill to the traffic lights, a young girl in hot pink lycra ducked out of an apartment building and bounded onto the footpath ahead of me.

She looked as natural running as I do gossiping. I was mesmerised by her bottom. It was round and pert and muscular, and with each smooth stride her cheeks rose and fell like pistons. Her lean crankshaft-legs propelled her effortlessly forward. She was a machine. Nothing jiggled or rippled – this girl was poetry in motion, before it became a cliche.

As I jogged behind her, I saw part of the pavement had been blocked off by workmen restoring the council building on the corner. Two middle-aged blokes in fluoro vests were roping off one lane of the highway for pedestrians while half a dozen workmen screwed wooden scaffolding over the footpath.

I watched the damsel up ahead glide from the footpath to the cordoned off lane and cruise past those workmen. Half a dozen hard hats on sunburnt necks swivelled in her direction. One fella elbowed a mate who was facing the wrong way. For several seconds, those construction workers were transfixed by the sight of my friend’s air-cushioned bottom. As I got closer, I saw the foreman shaking his head in wonder. I chuckled as I thudded past him: “Stop perving!”

“You’re just jealous!” he shot back.

“You bet! But I’m ready for a wolf whistle!”

He snorted. “You might be waiting a long time!”

A few seconds down the road, I glanced back at the building site to see who was ogling my 46-year-old rump. The foreman had turned his back to me and was telling a truck driver where to park. His workmates were clustered around a crane chaining beams to the hook. Up ahead the propeller-like ponytail of the girl-athlete was a blur. I could still make out the curves of her neon spandex that had caused such commotion among the blokes in blue singlets.

Sapped, I turned for home and slunk into the shower.

I wore hot-pink lycra once. I also wore white shorty-shorts with lace hems and a g-string leotard. This was my 6am beach-walking outfit, because I was all class in the 90’s. I’d power-walk from Scarborough to Floreat with a girlfriend in her purple leotard and micro-shorts. We were too busy gas-bagging to notice anyone lusting after us. Or smirking. 

But I do remember as a 14 year old, there were two uni students who rented a cottage in the next street, a dozen houses up from my best friend. On summer Sunday afternoons, walking to her place to watch Countdown, I’d see those Uni boys drinking beers, propped on their brick veranda. They’d call out: “Come ‘n have a beer with us! We won’t bite!” Or they’d wolf whistle. Or wave.   

They flummoxed me. Boys were scary. Were their bellows dangerous, like the mating calls of wildebeest? Were they just being neighbourly? Should I ignore them? Should I smile out of politeness, then walk faster? Or should I yell: “Get nicked, losers!”

I smiled, then ignored them. It kept me virginal and in control. Our afternoon three-play became a contest. What would they yell out this time? “Hey, babe, what’s the rush? Where are you going? Can we come too?”

Years later, I bumped into one of them at a pub. Being less self-conscious, we laughed about those teasings. “You were never rude to us” he said, “We were just boofheads trying to get you to notice us. Hope you took it as a compliment.”

I told a girlfriend and she was furious: “Men who wolf-whistle are judging women on their sexual attractiveness. You’re not an object to be paraded for men’s approval or disapproval!”

I’ve never heard workers on building sites voicing their disapproval of women. But yes, when I was young, I was intimidated. Sometimes I’d be frightened, and later, angry, if men’s banter turned crude.

But then I confessed that I was crushed when those tattooed fellas at the building site showed no interest in my middle-aged bottom. My friend stared at me, horrified. And then I felt stupid and ashamed – like I’d sold out the sisterhood.

“I liked that foreman, the cheeky sod” I said. Those builders might have been smitten with that damsel’s perfect derriere, but at least they showed their appreciation with silence.

I’m 46 now. I run like my knees are tied together. I have to stop after 22 minutes and my legs seize up in the car if I forget to stretch. So please Mr Foreman – give me some encouragement! Whistle at me! And make it loud. This would-be cougar needs something to brag about!

Make it or fake it

Make it or fake it
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 16, 2013

I’d never seen a spotted dick up close before. Once as a teenager, I’d seen a picture of one while I was rifling through the miscellany of Mum’s third drawer. It was an unappetising sight even in black and white. Mum had written on the top of the cutting in capitals: “MUST TRY THIS.”

Twenty years later and here was my first spotted dick in the flesh: a cup-sized mound of tea-coloured sponge dotted with currants and swimming in a pool of custard. The waiter slid the plate in front of me with a flourish. That pudding was trying to look exotic, but to me, it was just freckly and dull.

Walking home solo from the restaurant, I wondered if some dishes are social climbers. As a nine year old, I thought mum deliberately matched her canapés to the calibre of her guests. Why else did she serve devils on horseback to the family accountant and angels on horseback to the tennis ladies?

Our long-suffering accountant got half a dozen rashers of bacon each one rolled up, stuffed with a prune and then grilled until the toothpick caught fire. The tennis ladies had their streaky bacon draped around a creamy clammy oyster. 

At gin and tonic hour after Wednesday pennants, the tennis ladies (in their fancy pom-pom socks) would arrange themselves in our loungeroom. The angels on horseback rode into the good room on a fine china platter. Keeping steed and saddle in place was a posh toothpick with a frilly top made of coloured cellophane.  

Toothpicks were central to 1980’s entertaining. Mum made nibbles I liked to call ‘traffic lights’: a red cocktail onion sitting on a cube of Coon cheese, sitting on a round of Holbrooks gherkin, all three skewered in place by a toothpick. A wooden bowl full of Counter biscuits and an ashtray kept them company.

At dinner parties, she’d serve a tableau of three peeled prawns balanced on the rim of a martini glass. A wedge of avocado lay artfully in the bottom of the glass. In the concave pit where the stone had been, Mum would dollop a dessertspoonful of mayonnaise she’d mixed with a teaspoon of tomato sauce: the required blush-pink lubricant for a Women’s Weekly prawn cocktail.

Back then, dishes were named after farmyards. Toad in the hole was a collection of sausages buried in Yorkshire pudding batter and slathered in onion gravy. At summer barbies, Mum would roll chipolatas in squares of dough and bake them until the pastry puffed up like a doona. Then she’d sashay onto the patio wearing her orange oven mitts and carrying a hot tray. She’d announce: ‘Pigs in blankets!’ We kids would throw down our table tennis bats and come running. Uncle John, who was loud and Scottish, would nudge me and point to the table: “Sausages in kilts eh! Best you try one of those!” then roar with laughter. I ate a devil on horseback instead.

I had aunties who specialised in mock chicken, mock fish and mock duck. These were dishes that offered themselves up as an animal in disguise. Sometimes I had no clue I’d been deceived. Other times, on the drive home from Aunty Pat’s in Roleystone, it only became obvious when Mum remarked: “Weren’t those chicken sandwiches delicious! Who needs a chook!”

Mock duck, however, was for pros like my great Aunt Binx. I’d watch her  stacking layers of wheat gluten, along with ginger, spices and the liberal use of some powder she called MSG. She’d then marinate her pet project in soy sauce before frying slices in hot oil. I had no idea what the inside of a duck looked like – she didn’t need to imitate taste or appearance for my benefit. But I remember being in Thailand and thinking Aunt Binx’s mock duck was as good as any quacker I ate in Bangkok.

Mock cream, however, was a travesty. I’d bite into a bakery doughnut expecting the cool richness of cream. Instead, I’d hit a blob of something thick and pasty that glued my tongue to the roof of my mouth. Mock cream couldn’t be saved even by jam.

In my teens I discovered certain dinners had mysterious origins no-one wanted to explain. After a week’s neglect in the back of the fridge, lamb chops could re-invent themselves as Wakefield chops, a casserole always prepared in secret. I was an adult before I unravelled the secret of the Wakefield chop.

 A girlfriend revealed her mum would save a dozen whiffy chops from their rightful destiny in the dustbin. She’d soak them overnight in a conglomerate of sauces (HP, Brown, Worcestershire, soy). After a few hours baking them in the oven, she’d pronounce them: “Good as new!”

Which brings me to the problem of the dozen snags I bought and forgot last Tuesday. Could I, would I inflict the Wakefield sausage on my family? No. That would be cruel. I’ll give them lamb’s fry instead.

Better than nothing

Better than nothing
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 9, 2013

I am currently experiencing the unrest of family life. My husband is working overseas. The unrest begins at 5am. I hear three-year-old daughter padding down the hallway. No matter the hour, she wants to celebrate her dry nappy with a trampoline party in our bed. Eventually, she drifts back to sleep but by then, I’ve grudgingly accepted that my day has begun.

I plod into the kitchen and squint around for a teabag, then seize the chance to write in the stillness. Six-year-old son wakes at first light because I forgot to close his blinds: “Can we play Snap?” I silently curse the ABC for not showing Sesame Street at 5.30am. I then feel ashamed for wishing this child had stayed asleep so I could work. Does ‘having it all’ mean always feeling guilty about something?

I start being a columnist when I stop being a mother – at 8pm when I’ve scraped the last plate. That’s when my six-year-old finishes his homework and I give up nagging my 13-year-old son to start. It’s when small daughter nods off just as Beatrix Potter’s bunnies flee Mr McGregor’s garden with their pockets full of radishes.

I lug her to bed. I call into the laundry, that showcase of my domestic shortcomings. I shield my eyes from the grotesquerie of baskets overflowing with sheets to be folded and shove a load of towels into the machine. I’m desperate to flop on the couch. Instead, I fire up my laptop and coax my brain into paid employment.

Maybe ‘having it all’ means striving for perfection and arriving at mediocrity. Maybe it’s just some platitude designed to make me feel incompetent. (It’s working). Men aren’t trying to ‘have it all’ are they? They’re being told to find their ‘work-life balance’, which is the same thing – the pursuit of an impossibly perfect life.  

I thought I ‘had it all’ for a few manic years in my early 30’s. I’d had my first baby and scored my dream job in television. When Kerry Packer wanted a story, I didn’t dare disappoint. One Saturday afternoon, my boss shouted down the phone from Sydney: “You’ve got half an hour to get to the airport! Some clown’s missing in the desert!“

My husband was jogging. I couldn’t get hold of mum. No time to ring anyone else. I packed a bag for my toddler and we hared off to the airport.

A charter plane sat on the tarmac with my impatient camera crew. Two-year-old boy squealed his approval. Half way to Wiluna, I turned to see black smoke pluming from one engine. Feigning calm, I sang ditties to my son as the pilot dipped towards a makeshift runway amid an olive sea of scrub. He flared the Piper and we thumped onto a tractor-levelled strip in a deserted paddock.

We waited three hours for the rescue plane. I entertained my toddler making gravel piles by torchlight. We ate the shortbread from the ration kit and traced the arc of a passing satellite with our fingers.

After that aborted trip, I began having panic attacks. I thought I was thriving on adrenalin but I was unravelling from exhaustion and stress. How could I excel at my job and still be an A-class mother? What if I was exposed as less competent than my childless colleagues? ‘Having it all’ turned out to be no fun at all.

I’d like to meet the woman who’s actually having it all. (I’d like to meet her husband, her nanny, and her housekeeper). ‘Having it all’ now sounds like some decadent fantasy. The mothers I know who work full-time are too tired to care.    

I still yearn for the profile of a journalistic career. But anytime I now bemoan my lot, my husband cries: “Hands up if you have a martyr complex!”  

I care much less about perfection. I cut corners. I’ve set my body clock to Play School. At 9.30 and 4.30, I jam in an hour’s work while my small ones watch Big Ted goggle-eyed from the sofa. We eat boiled eggs and soldiers for tea while I picture their father ordering Peking Duck at the Manila Hilton. What if I’m now content to ‘have it all’ just sometimes? Sort of. Here and there.

I like to reflect on those rare occasions when I’ve generated a flash of mothering brilliance. That morning when I ignored my deadline, the gritty floor and my tax chaos and made gingerbread with my children.

Six-year-old was fighting his sister for the snowflake cookie cutter, but I calmly headed off two tantrums by finding the six-pointed Star of David one. “Look!” I whispered to my daughter. “It’s two triangles made into a hexagram – that’s better than a snowflake!” She chose the monkey stamp instead.   

That night, I sat pecking at my keyboard until 1am making up for the lost morning of literary excellence. The most satisfying morning I’d had in weeks. To hell with having it all. I’m aiming for half way.

The Bite of Spring

The Bite of Spring
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 2, 2013

I can smell spring in the air. The plane trees have burst into a canopy of lacy green shoots. After ten minutes in the sun I can feel it biting the back of my neck. I dig out the sunscreen from the bathroom cupboard. With my two urchins, we take our prized Manchester United soccer ball and head down to the park. (The ball was a Royal Show special – my six-year-old now fancies himself as the next Ronaldo).

We slip off our shoes and gallop around on the grass. A wayward kick sends the ball rolling over a lush circle of green and we three take off after it, small daughter shouting over her shoulder: “That was a rubbish shot, Mummy!” (She has all the class of a soccer hooligan).

Our doughy winter feet thud over a patch of prickles, camouflaged by the soft clover: “Yowwww!” Three year old freezes, then bursts into tears, unsure what has attacked her. Her left foot is a dartboard peppered with tiny spines. One by one I pull them out while she shrieks in my ear.

Six year old son hobbles towards me, also yelping. His pain threshold hovers around zero so I put him in a loving headlock and begin removing each prickle. (Competing against a squirming child, the maternal pincer grip is woefully inadequate). At last, his foot is prickle-free. We limp for home, my own feet still stubbled with quills. Surely it’s too early for blasted Bindy-eye prickles? I can’t believe there’s been enough sun to harden the little blighters.

Bindii weed has earned the collective hatred of generations of Australians: spiky land mines lying in wait for bare feet. As kids, we called it ‘Jo-Jo.’ We’d get our own back by crawling around the lawn on our hands and knees pulling up every juvenile weed we saw. We’d pinch out the still green prickles and unravel their tightly coiled burrs, stringing them out in lines on the footpath. Then we’d stand back and admire the body count, satisfied that at least one patch of lawn would give us safe passage to the back door.

By January, any undiscovered Jo-Jo prickles had hardened their ability to inflict maximum pain. The baking sun turned the lawn dry and crispy by 10am. A Jo-Jo spike could spear an 8-year-old’s heel so flush to the skin that not even Mum’s eyebrow tweezers could get a grip on the butt end. “Go and rub your foot on the bricks” Mum’d say. I’d gingerly scrape my heel against the paving, hoping friction would dislodge the thorn. If it worked, the relief was instant. (Though like a Pavlovian dog, I’d already conditioned myself to walking on tiptoe).

Other times, that spike in my heel would refuse to budge. Later that morning, I’d gently test my foot for the umpteenth time, applying my full weight to gauge the pain. There’d be a twinge, but I couldn’t be sure if it was now an imaginary hurt and the prickle had left me hours ago.

Last week, I happened to be talking prickles with the bloke who owns our much-loved icecream bar. He remembers growing up in Geraldton when thongs came in black and brown and cost $2 at Woolies.

“We’d bolt into the house from the backyard and the only thing you’d hear was the ‘crack, crack, crack’ as the doublegees crunched into the lino as we walked. We’d take off our thongs and they’d be caked with the suckers. Big, nasty ones they were, like police road spikes – no matter which way they lay, one of those damn thorns pointed upwards. When a three-cornered jack got your foot, you’d show off the hole.”

Country doublegees were to town weeds what a King Brown was to a gecko. When we were on summer holidays in Kalbarri, the locals would warn us: “Watch out for that Tanner’s curse – s’like a plague this year. It’ll leave fork-holes in your soft city feet!” (I could only presume Mr Tanner was the bright spark who sailed into Fremantle from Capetown in 1830, thinking his doublegee plant might make a nice salad vegetable).

Instead, doublegees took over. They stabbed bike tyres and clung on so you’d have to replace the tube. They jammed the blades of Uncle Andy’s lawnmower and gave me new words to take to school: ‘bloody bastards!’ Doublegees lamed dogs, matted sheep’s wool and contaminated grain harvests.

Standing chatting on the verge with our next-door neighbours at the weekend, I saw the wife was holding a bucket and a three-pronged gardening fork: “Weeds wrecking the lawn already?” I asked.

“Jo-Jo.” she replied, shaking her head.

“I know, our littlest one got her first foot-full down the park yesterday!”

“How’d she take it?” the husband asked.

“Oh, it was awful – she was howling and dancing around not knowing what was happening and getting more and more prickles.”

“The Rite of Spring ballet!” he laughed.

I hadn’t thought of it that way.  

Family Territory

Family Territory
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday October 26, 2013

Sometimes, a two hour drive is all it takes to turn humdrum to holiday.

“How about a romantic weekend away?” my Lothario whispers across his pillow, our love life handicapped by the three-year-old octopus suckered between us.

“Just a couple of days hey?” he murmurs. “Somewhere exotic. By the beach.  Away from all this.”

I could have kissed him. Instead, my arm is paralysed by the dead weight of a sleeping child’s leg-tentacle flopped across my chest.

“Promise?” I whisper back.

“No” comes the reply, “but the weekend after next I have to go to my high school reunion in Bunbury. I’ve booked us all into the Lord Forrest hotel.”

Those who remember Alan Bond will recall his gift to Bunbury: a five storey shiny white high-rise with a single porthole window skewered through its pointy apex.  Driving into town last weekend, Bondy’s tower loomed over the back beach like the snout of a white pointer. Its dark porthole eye followed me all the way to the hotel carpark.

“It doesn’t look like a shark, dopey!”  says my husband. “It’s supposed to look like the prow of a ship!”

“Well I say it’s a shark!” (much like its owner in 1983).   

So here I am at the Lord Forrest, sitting on a plastic patio chair by the side of the once-famous atrium pool, staring up at the hanging gardens of Bunbury (devil’s ivy).

“Mum!” cries my 6 year old. “There’s a bridge! And pretend rocks! And a waterfall! And look! You can see through the roof!”

Outside the rain is sheeting down, but my children are intoxicated by their first taste of three-and-a-half star luxury. Small son plays hopscotch on the crazy paving, mindful not to step on the cracks. Then he discovers a blue button in the wall and leaps in fright when the spa gurgles to life. His sister flaps her inflatable orange arms and paddles over to the pretend-rock steps for a closer look.

The pool gate swings open and in walks a portly bloke in baggy shorts, flanked by two primary-school-aged granddaughters.

The girls leap into the water and the granddad settles himself at the only poolside table – mine.

“Nice day for swimming!” he says and we laugh politely.

I can see through the lobby windows a row of date palms flailing in the squall outside.  

“Frank!” he says, by way of introduction, and pumps my hand. “Travelled far?”

“Just from Perth. It’s my husband’s 30-year school reunion tonight. He’s up in the room deciding which side to part his hair.”

“Ha!” he snorts. “We’re holidaying close to home this time. My wife has a sore hip. We’re doing the wineries, sixteen of us.”

“Sixteen?” I say, thinking he must be on a tour.

“Yeah, the whole family. We do all our holidays together – two daughters, their husbands, my son, his wife, the grandkids – 11 of them.”

I must look incredulous because he adds: “Yep, we’re the Griswald clan. We travel in convoy. We need five cars – the eldest grandkid is 19 and they tail down to three.”

“Wow!” is all I can manage.

“Yeah, we’ve seen the world all right. Last year we went on a cruise through the Caribbean, we did Greece and Turkey before that. We’ve gone from one side of America to the other. Sometimes we take up four rows on the plane.”

“Why?” (I feel a hermit by comparison). “Doesn’t everyone want to do their own thing?”

“Sometimes. But this way, the kids learn how to be part of a tribe. We learn about them. I can tell you, that one there…” – he points to the elder girl in the pool – “she’s only nine but she’ll do anything for anyone. Her cousin, she’s six -smart as a whip. Best speller in her class.”

I see the pride on his face. He shrugs at me and grins, as if all families are like his.

I try to picture my family, en masse, checking in at Air Bulgaria. All those niggling, squawking personalities trying to control proceedings: dominators, peace-makers, martyrs. Didacts, autocrats, me –  dreaming of an upgrade.

“Is it relaxing?” I ask.

“Most of the time. Neutral territory helps. We use these holidays to catch up on everyone. I want to know what the young ones are thinking, how they see the world. In return, we tell the grandkids all the old family stories – remind them how they got here.”

I wonder if I tell my children enough about their past. Do they understand the world had its own momentum before they arrived? That they belong to something bigger than themselves?

Frank’s grand-daughters have climbed out of the pool and are shivering. He stands up and hands them each a towel.

“What’ll we do now, Granddad?”

“Let’s go and see what the others are up to!” He winks at me, then raises his hand in a gentlemanly salute: “You can never separate who you are from where you’re from.”

And with that, the pool gate clangs shut behind them.

Smokes and Mirrors

Smokes and Mirrors
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday October 19, 2013

Smoking was my religion once. I worshipped at the altar of Benson and Hedges. I was convinced that slim gold box had a certain prestige that would rub off on me. It didn’t but I kept smoking anyway. That was until I discovered Sobranie cocktail cigarettes and was smitten with the idea of matching my lavender dress to my lavender cigarette.

In the 80’s, Sobranies had gold filters and came in rainbow colours like a (flammable) box of crayons. At 19, a girlfriend and I, going to a ball, split our waitressing money to buy a pack so she could match the turquoise Sobranies to her eyes. I thought those coloured cigarettes gave me what the French call panache: a combination of charisma and reckless courage. But all they really gave me were head spins and a throat made of sandpaper.

I was sure it was the tobacco haze that gave smokers their air of worldly sophistication. I desperately wanted membership to their club. At parties, the non-smokers stayed warm (and dull) inside, while the smokers gathered in conspiratorial huddles on the veranda, laughing at their in-jokes and admiring each other’s magnetic personalities.

Inhaling burnt leaves was fundamentally unpleasant but I persevered, fearful of being labelled a wowser. Before long, I discovered a lit cigarette became a smoke signal luring interesting people my way. “Got a light?” was the password to smoking solidarity between strangers. No matter where we came from, we had our addiction in common.

I thought boys liked girls who smoked. One night at the pub, I watched a girl sidle up to a group of blokes. She leaned in provocatively, dangling an unlit cigarette between her ballerina fingers. The conversation evaporated. Those four lads couldn’t extract their lighters fast enough. Four Zippos burst into life as their owners jostled to anoint the young lady. When I passed in front of her ten minutes later I realised her male entourage was more enthralled by her high beams and low singlet than by her smoking prowess.

Radio bred serious smokers. Aged 21, my first newsroom was a glassed cage where plumes of smoke spiralled from ashtrays like genies from lanterns. Old hands smoked while they read the news – cigarette in one hand, script in the other.  The new girl-cadet decided smoking might give her some journalistic cachet. I joined the A-grade smokers and lit up at 6am. By the end of a breakfast shift, our overflowing ashtrays were ranked in order of effort. My boss, Murray Dickson, always beat me by a packet.

Back then, choosing a brand was like choosing a footy team: would it be Dunhills, Alpines or Kents? No woman ever smoked Camels. No man smoked menthols. A man’s man smoked Marlboro Reds, Peter Stuyvesants or rolled his own, one-handed, while driving a semi-trailer. Brickies dragged on their Winnie Blues and wolf-whistled from scaffolding. (I felt indignant and self-conscious, but if it happened tomorrow, I’d be thrilled).

No-one told me I could betray my brand without being charged with treason. I worked out that I could smoke John Player Specials one week and Sterling Extra Milds the next. In London, I joined the pallid crowd and bought Marlboro Lights. In the early 90’s I settled on Benson & Hedges and dedicated myself to a decade of nicotine addiction.

At family dinners, I thought I could slip outside for a dozen quick puffs and no-one would notice. I’d bury the stub in the potted palm by Mum’s front door. Then I’d sneak into the bathroom and perform a surgical hand scrub before brushing my teeth and rejoining the table. I thought a smear of toothpaste could mask the stench of tobacco embedded in my clothes and hair. Who did I fool? Just me. How on earth did non-smokers put up with us?

I can remember when pop-out ashtrays were built into seats on buses, in cinemas and on planes. What an outcry there was when gutsy politicians banned smoking in pubs and restaurants! But for me, smoking had become robotic. I despised my foul habit but it owned me. One by one, friends were giving up but I was the straggler who deluded herself by declaring she still enjoyed it.

Once, on an Air France flight in 1997, I wandered through the ash-coloured curtains into the smoking section. I found myself sandwiched between four Japanese chain-smokers while I waited for the loo. Our toes almost touching, they exhaled their smoke over each others’ shoulders. No-one spoke. Stale fumes thickened the air, but those men stood puffing away for most of the flight. I realised I didn’t even need to light up. I could just inhale.

Many times I tried and failed to quit. Common sense and willpower eventually triumphed over my 10-a-day stupidity. (On weekends, I didn’t count). Giving up was just as well, really because ou recall that potted palm outside Mum’s front door? The one I liked to use as an ashtray?

It died.

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 end of the line

The end of the line
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday October 5, 2013

My home telephone is almost obsolete. It hardly rings any more. Sometimes I forget it’s even there. It languishes by the window on my desk, a wallflower obscured by the showy blooms of a potted cyclamen.

I know my home phone is lonely because as I walk past, it emits a weedy ‘peep.’ I see its will to live ebbing away, unable to compete with the thrilling gadgetry of my shiny iphone. I feel sorry for my home phone – trapped by its own limitations – good for talking, and not much else.

When I was a child, the telephone ruled from its own settee. Ours was Bakelite and sat like a black brick on a small lacquered table by the front door, attached to a bench seat upholstered in flocked green velvet. This is where we sat to answer the phone. The handset was a dumbbell, only heavier. Holding it to my ear for more than three minutes made my neck ache. Next to the phone lay a glossy white teledex that sprang open to reveal the numbers of everyone we knew.

Everything stopped when the phone rang. It had to: the cable to the mouthpiece was only two-feet long. My nanna would settle herself on the bench seat, wait politely for another three rings to pass, then pick up the handset: “Good afternoon,” she’d say, lips pursed to round her vowels, “Mrs Thornton speaking.” She knew rushing down the hallway made one breathless. (And being too eager was crass).

Calling someone on the Bakelite phone, however, took a 7-year-old’s concentration.  Dialling the number 1 was a short stop, so my finger only had to rotate the wheel an inch. But dialling the number 9 took effort, a full 240 degree trip. I can still hear the ticka-ticka-ticka as the wheel, reaching the end of the spring, lurched backwards, eager to discolate my index finger. Mum dialled numbers with the pointy lid of her Bic Cristal pen, the height of secretarial sophistication.

In my teens, the home phone was the centre of my universe. Ours was squat and custard coloured with a panel of ten push-buttons on the front. It had a springy cord which I could stretch from the side table, around the corner and under the pantry door. There I’d sit, out of earshot, between the dog biscuits and the bread bin, phone clamped to my ear, knees hugging my chest. I got leg cramps, but it was worth it. After forty-five minutes on the blower, it was decided – I’d wear my nylon parachute pants on Saturday night.

Sundays were for post-mortems on the electrifying events of the night before:

 “Didja see the way he was lookin’ at you?”

“As if! Was he really lookin’ at me?”

“He was lookin’ at you, all right!”

“Stoked! Was he lookin’ over his shoulder, or right at me?”

“Over his shoulder AND right at you!”

 “Get off that phone!”

“Gotta go, Mum’s doin’ her block!”

I’d emerge from the dim-lit pantry, blinking in the daylight.

Back then, I knew all my friends’ numbers by heart. Even now, twenty years since my besties moved out of home, I can still rattle off their childhood home numbers, along with my teenage phone patter: “Hi Mrs Simpson, how are you? Off to the tennis club today? Great! Is Jane there please?

I cursed holidays that separated me from my home phone.  One summer at Rottnest, with heartthrob Andy stranded on the mainland, I spent all my pocket money at the Bathurst settlement pay-phone. It was always occupied. Some bloke with a Swan Gold would be flicking through a tattered White Pages while he leaned against the glass talking cricket with a mate. I’d wait impatiently as my 3 o’clock telephonic rendezvous with Andy drew near. Finally, Swan Gold man would shamble off and I’d dive in, ramming coins into the slot, hoping Andy would pick up, not his Dad.

 “Hi Andy! It’s me!”

“Hey! Been swimmin’?”

“Yeah. At the Basin.”

“Hot here too. Cricket’s on.”

“Oh.”

“3 o’clock tomorrow then?”

“Okay”

“Okay. See ya.”

Now, phone booths are all but extinct. I don’t miss them. But watching an old episode of Dr Who, my 6-year-old son piped up as Tom Baker and his trailing scarf vanished into the Tardis: “What’s that blue box?”

“That’s a phone booth.”

I decided the next time we take the kids to Rottnest, I’m going to make a pilgrimage to the Bathurst phone box, that monument to 20th century phone technology.  (It’s still there, outside Unit 501.) I’ll tell the kids about the time I worked up the nerve to ring a boy I liked, only to slam the phone down in panic as he answered.

And that’s the thing with mobiles: they’re too delicate. Smart but fragile. I need a phone that can handle my temper when those blasted telemarketers call during dinner. Only the home phone appreciates a good hang up.

To the manner born

To the manner born
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday September 28, 2013

At my neighbourhood cafe, social order is upheld by the good breeding of its customers. Crass, rude, ignorant oafs are not tolerated here. Customers know to walk outside to answer their mobiles. The discourteous cop withering stares for jumping the coffee queue. We’re the bad manners police: we catch and kill our own.

Last Thursday morning, my curiosity got the better of me and I asked my friendly barista: “Where’s the baby?”

He was puzzled too. A newborn’s cry, high-pitched and grating, filled the cafe. It had the familiar staccato rhythm of all distressed babies: that frenzied pattern of hoarse barks that pains a mother’s ears and lodges in her gut. We both began scanning the tables. I couldn’t see any baby capsules tucked beside chair legs. No anxious mums were tending prams on the footpath. That newborn wailing drowned out the cafe music and stopped conversation. “Where’s it coming from?” called a middle-aged woman sitting by the wall.

“Is it coming from the kitchen?” offered two young girls in the corner. The barista left his burbling machine to check. I wandered back to my table with my tea, still casting about for the howler. The only customers who didn’t seem perturbed were a grandma and grandpa, trying to keep a toddler entertained with a biscuit and their mobile phone.

The waitress was the first to zero in on the distress cry. It was coming from the grandma’s phone: she was playing the toddler a video – presumably of the newest baby in the family.

“Excuse me” the waitress said, “but your phone is disturbing our customers. Would you mind turning it down?”

“Oh for goodness sake!” said the grandma, immediately taking offence. “It’s not loud. Don’t be ridiculous!”

“Well, it’s louder than our music and it’s upsetting our customers” the waitress replied. Could you please turn it down.”

The grandma grunted towards her husband, then scooped up her belongings. She grabbed the toddler by the hand, scraped a chair out of the way and barged out the door.

We all exchanged quizzical looks and tut-tutted over the drama. The grandma with the loud phone had been disciplined for the common good. Cafe society resumed with a round table discussion on civil niceties.  

Sometimes, even small discourtesies are infuriating. I shake my head in disbelief when drivers refuse to let me merge. I glower at people who sidle into the middle of my line at the checkout. And I’m always appalled at the rudeness of customers who expect to be served first, having arrived last. When   confronted by the arrogant or self-righteous rule-breaker, I feel compelled to mete out some small measure of punishment: a dirty look, a cutting remark. But I rarely give in to the impulse to mouth off: for some reason I don’t feel old enough.  

On a rare outing to the cinema last week, I sat behind a nerdy bloke who gave me (and everyone within a three row radius) a running commentary on the merits and lineage of Apple computers. It was a pointless exercise given we were watching the biopic about Steve Jobs. For several minutes, we listened to the boorish prattle from computer nerd, Row G, until a businessman sitting next to me clenched his teeth and delivered a loud: “Shhh!”  

Being an obnoxious kind of nerd, Row G loudmouth continued his critique until a gravelly voice from somewhere behind me exploded: “Quiet! Or I’ll have you thrown out!”  

A sea of heads swivelled on rubbernecks and several of us clapped our appreciation. One man had enforced cinema’s first commandment: Do not speak above a whisper. (Better still, do not speak.) The nerd, Row G, fell silent. Social order had been restored. 

I was a public nuisance once. Aged 21, I would drive my flatmate from Scarborough to the city, where we both worked. Running late as always, we’d hit Powis street and groan. In the right hand lane, waiting to turn onto the freeway were cars queued 100m back from the on-ramp. So I would hoon up the inside lane to the front of the queue. There, I’d stop dead, and snap on my indicator. At the slightest gap, I’d nudge my way into the turn lane and in front of whichever poor sod had been inching patiently forwards. Whooping with delight, I’d theatrically wave my thanks in my rear view mirror and speed onto the freeway. Usually, the driver behind would throw up his hands in contempt.  I would feel a moment’s guilt and then a rush of adrenalin for pulling off yet another peak hour coup.

This became a daily infraction – my girlfriend would cover her face with her hands and cringe: “I can’t look! Tell me when it’s over!” Even now I’m amazed at my rudeness. (Back then, I called it ingenuity).

As a reformed rule-breaker who’s now a stickler for manners, I’m ready to atone for my driving sins. So next time I cut you off on the freeway, I won’t be the slightest bit offended when you overtake me and shout through your window: “Moron! Are you blind?!”

Minus glasses, I am blind, but I guess that’s not what you’re driving at.

Only the Lonely

Only the Lonely
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday September 21, 2013

“So, how many brothers and sisters do you have?” asks the school mum I’m standing with.

We’d been chatting, this new friend and I, waiting for our six-year-olds to come barrelling out of class. I feel a thud of embarrassment at her question, but I force a smile and reply: “I’m an only child.”  

I say those four words with a shrug so they’ll appear weightless, but they drop between us like stones. I see on her face that peculiar mix of curiosity and suspicion. She can’t hide the look I know so well.

“Wow!” she says, “I wouldn’t have picked you for one of those,” and our conversation skids in a direction that makes me feel exposed.

“What was it like growing up?” she asks.

“Oh fine!” I reply, “You don’t know what you’re missing if you never had it.”

She looks at me expectantly, waiting for more, but I’m saved by the bell as kids come swarming through doorways.

On the walk home through the park with my son, I feel a familiar pang of alienation, an uneasiness at having been outed. Even as an adult, a single childhood still feels like something to hide.

My mum wanted lots of babies, but she and my dad divorced when I was three. No matter – I had a long-suffering Siamese kitten who filled the role of baby sister. I’d squeeze her into dolls’ dresses and wheel her up the street imprisoned in my toy pram.

As a kid, I’m not sure I even knew what ‘lonely’ felt like. I was just alone, and I was very good at it. Inventing ways to compete against myself turned into elaborate tests of endurance. (I was a fierce opponent). My nanna gave me a plastic kitchen timer which I put to work, furiously pedalling my blue bike around the block, trying to beat yesterday’s record.  

Obstacle courses were my specialty. I mapped them out with an eight-year-old’s precision:  start at the thunderbox, swing once around the Hills Hoist, sprint to the back fence, twice down the slide and leap onto the veranda to finish. 53 seconds – not quick enough. (Losers got eaten by the crocodiles who lived in the cracks in the pavement.)

 We had little spare money for toys, so I grew expert at collecting odd things. I sorted buttons by colour into glass jars and curated coin exhibitions on bedspreads. I invited beetles into plastic containers fitted with five-star cotton-wool day beds and leafy gazebos .

Sleeping over at my cousins’ house, the noise of their big family was overwhelming.  Tormented by her big brother, my girl cousin would unleash her ear-piercing shriek:

“Mum! Christopher yanked my hair!”  

“I did not, you dobber!” he’d bellow in protest.

I’d be scared witless but secretly thrilled as he chased us down the hallway. My role was reluctant witness for when brother whacked sister, or sister pinched brother. My Aunty would storm out of the kitchen with flour on her hands and shout at us over the ruckus: “ENOUGH! All of you – outside and sort it out!

I was worn out from the rioting but even so, I hated being detached from the herd. In the quiet at home, I’d head for my room and dive back into The Famous Five. Books transported me into other teeming families where I could observe the action without feeling compelled to join it.

But my favourite story was about an only child who lived in a third storey apartment in New York, just as Mum and I had lived in a third-floor flat in South Perth. The girl in the book had strung a makeshift sign out of the window, hoping the people walking below would look up. “Hello!” the sign said. “Wave to me if you see this.” When we moved into a duplex, I scolded myself for not playing that game when I’d had the chance. In my teens, it dawned on me the story’s theme was isolation.

In high school, I worried that a kid with no siblings would be branded a misfit. But I wasn’t. Friendships came easily and I cherished girlfriends like sisters. (I still do). But I envied their take-for-granted solidarity with siblings. They always had someone to watch their back or take their side.

I carried into adulthood those traits often ascribed to only children:  over-achieving, over-sensitive, over-indulged, self-centred. I’ve tried to rub out those tics, tried not to conform to stereotype, lest someone point a finger and say: “See!”

Now, when I meet another only child, we make an instant connection. Feeling safe, I’ll plough straight in and ask: Did you feel lonely growing up?” Almost always the answer is “No,” followed by a pause: “But now that I think about it, maybe I was.”

And then I go home to my own brood of three, cavorting and messing up the loungeroom and yelling: “Mum! Come into our cubby!”

I put my childhood aside and concentrate on theirs.