In Loving Memory

In Loving Memory
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday March 1, 2014

I pull into the driveway of his brick bungalow and there he is, waiting for me. He’s propped in a folding chair in the sun, shielding his eyes with a soldier’s salute.

Three months ago we’d been strangers. “I want you to write what it’s like to grow old,” he’d emailed me, “always looking at life over your shoulder. My wife of 55 years has been taken from me by illness. Maybe one day you could visit her in the nursing home. She is in room 19. Her name is Ada. Warm regards, Carl, 87.

The following Sunday, I’d sat with Carl in Ada’s room, acutely aware that a bedrail was all that divided this sick woman from my well self. Carl held his wife’s limp hand and whispered fighting words in her ear, trying to replenish her health with his. “She’s not coming back to me, is she?” he asked. Three days later, Ada died.

Carl and I have kept in touch. Now he ushers me inside the three-bedroom home he bought for Ada in 1972.  Her shower caps are still strung along a makeshift clothes line in the laundry. A tray of her earrings is lying open on the kitchen table. The treasures of half a century of marriage compete for space on every surface. “She’s keeping her eye on me, so I haven’t changed a thing,” he says.  

I notice a framed photograph of Carl and Ada leaning against a navy-blue Mercedes saloon. “Aaah, my two darlings,” he says, “except one of them never got her licence. She loved being chauffeured around. I sold that baby two years ago – ‘Hearse or limousine’ I put in the ad. The postie bought it for his wedding.”

Carl leads me into his study. It’s crammed with towers of browning newspapers, old VHS tapes and a spaghetti junction of electrical oddments and gubbins. “Ada wouldn’t come in here!” he beams. A sign on the door reads Litter Den.

I ease a dusty book from a row on a shelf: How To Help Your Husband Get Ahead, 1954. On a dog-eared page Ada has underlined the chapter heading: Make Mountains of his Virtues, Molehills of his Faults. Carl snorts gleefully. 

I see she has folded a square of toilet paper to bookmark Chapter 9: How To Get Along With His Secretary.

We take our tea in the sitting room. “Ada had 57 falls before they told me I couldn’t look after her anymore,” he tells me.

“57? You counted?”

“I’m an accountant.”

We trade smirks. He turns to pour the milk, and I realise he is hiding watery eyes.

 “She left me behind, my Ada. What happens to us – the ones left behind? I’m 87, what’s my future? To die of a broken heart? How can I start again?”

Below a window looking over the backyard, there’s a 1960s credenza with sliding glass doors. It’s filled with cut crystal. Carl has printed on one of the glass panels with a black marker: Remember the good times you had with Ada.

Her favourite armchair squats alongside. The upholstered cushion is scalloped where she once sat. Draped over the headrest, a blue checked tea-towel is embroidered with a row of dainty tulips. I can still make out the indent of her head in the fabric.  

Carl has recovered himself and is rummaging around in a filing cabinet. With a  flourish he pulls out a plastic sleeve and lays a handwritten letter on the table. “Please read it to me” he says. “I want to hear her voice again.”

The letter is dated April 2, 1974. “My darling,” I read to him. “Once again, I have to resort to pen and paper to get my point over.” I scan ahead nervously, realising Ada has written in fury. I look sideways at Carl but he knows what’s coming and begins to chuckle: “Keep going, you swine!” he says to me and puffs out his chest proudly. “This one made me sit up!”

“I have never been sorry having married you. You have been a wonderful provider and a good husband, but lately you are becoming one of the biggest bast–ds I can think of.”

He slaps his thigh and cackles.  I’m shocked but giggling too at the secret mechanics of this marriage. And then Carl’s mirth is again overtaken by sobs. He leans into me and says: “Always kiss your man before you fall asleep – even if you have to force yourself through gritted teeth.”

It’s time to pick up the kids from school. He hands me a carton of eggs and stands waving in the driveway as I reverse onto the street. I wait until he turns and walks safely inside before heading for the highway.

The Call of the Mild

The Call of the Mild
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday February 22, 2014

It was the first time I’d been up close to a Miss Universe contestant. I felt intimidated – how a pigeon must feel standing next to a flamingo.

I turned to cross the shopping centre forecourt and noticed a small crowd creating a hubbub on the plaza. Curious, I stopped beside a white marquee and read the placard: Miss Universe 2014 WA Parade, Today 1pm and 3pm.

From behind a partition, one of the contestants stepped out beside me. Gazing up at her, her pre-Raphaelite mane ringed by a halo of mid-afternoon sun, I craned my neck to make out the top of her head.

She turned to talk to an official and I admired the waterfall of butterscotch-blonde hair cascading down her back. I cast my eyes to ground level to count the storeys on her platform sandals. And that’s when I noticed her left buttock had escaped her purple bikini. I couldn’t help but stare. Was she meant to have this much rear exposure? That golden crescent of buttock was perched on the top of her leg like a chicken tenderloin. (It reminded me to call past the butcher and get something for dinner).

I wondered if it was the official’s job to point out her rebellious rear end? Would she be mortified? Or was this a bit of cheek to outshine her competitors?

Swimwear has always been my nemesis. Beach-lover I am, but I still recoil at the evil hours I spend each summer trying to find flattering bathers. Even in my teens, when I should have been flaunting what I had, I was too self-conscious to parade it about. I wanted to be admired, not ogled. Mum drummed into me that too much flesh was tawdry – so I kidded myself boys liked the feminine mystique. Mystique was a glamorous word to an 18 year old – it put a seductive spin on my girlish confusion about men’s desires.

My girlfriends and I would pore over our Dolly magazines. Beauty in the 80’s was in your face as well as plastered on it – drippy lip gloss, eyeliner in iridescent aqua or electric blue, permed fringes stiffened with gel to defy gravity. Obsessing over my appearance in Mum’s bathroom mirror, I’d recite her mantra to my reflection: ‘Be Yourself!’

Then I’d troop off with my clone-friends to the Sunday session – all of us sporting the same wildly teased hair and giant earrings, and wearing our matching jackets with shoulder pads like foam mattresses.

In the 80’s, the dating game played in our favour. At the pub, we girls would huddle in an impenetrable circle around our handbags. Few boys had the fox-cunning or charisma to lure one of us away from our flock. Male mating calls were still primitive – a glance held a second too long, a smile spotted across the bar, or the venturesome “Got a light?” We knew we had the power of veto. Those girls who forgot to button their blouses or made-out in public were tramps. Nudity was cheap.

Bare flesh is no longer risqué. I’ve had enough of the micro-shorts that are everywhere this season. Please someone tell me – what statement is this fad trying to make? My 13-year-old goddaughter tells me they’re good for attracting guys. Call me old-fashioned, but I think your shorts should be longer than your bottom.  

Back on the forecourt, I wondered if it was envy making me so uncomfortable? Me: middle-aged housewife, mother-of-three, flat-footed in my orange thongs. I decided I needed coffee and joined the queue at the open-air cafe. The Miss Universe cavalcade had started and patrons were being offered a bird’s eye view.

I sat down next to an elegant woman tapping away on an iPad. She acknowledged me with a smile and pointed at the parade, straining to make herself heard over the loudspeakers: “Picked the wrong day to come here for some peace and quiet!”

I nodded and laughed and we surveyed the girls stalking down the runway, hips thrust forward, cupfuls of bottom jiggling suggestively: “They’re 90-percent naked!” she sighed. “I feel like a voyeur.”

She was right. It was like passing a car crash – shoppers had slowed to a crawl, some were leaning on their trolleys, mesmerised. And then I spotted my Miss Universe wannabe waiting off-stage. She looked nervous, shifting her lissom frame from one flamingo-leg to the other.

Then an odd movement caught my eye. She reached a slender arm behind her back. With thumb and forefinger, she stretched the elastic of her bikini bottom and tucked her wayward buttock back into place. Voila! A fraction of modesty restored. She put on a dazzling smile and stepped daintily onto the catwalk.

And I stepped daintily away to the butcher shop to buy a kilo of beef skirt.

Double the Fun

Double the Fun
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday February 15, 2014

The Two Ronnies were a Saturday night institution when I was eight. At 7.25pm, my Nan would untie her apron and announce: “Off you go then. Do the honours!”

That was my signal. I’d race down the hall to the good room and switch Nan’s hulking Thorn television to ‘ON.’ We didn’t call it TV in those days because Nan was a stickler for formalities: “Abbreviations are uncouth. We have a television set and a refrigerator and a lavatory and a lounge suite. These are their proper names!” Nan referred to the on/off button on her television set as the knob.

The station dial was always set to Channel 2 – we were loyal to Aunty no matter what she gave us. I would kneel on the carpet and wait, the television staring blankly at me on its splayed wooden legs. Studying the inky screen I’d begin counting: One thousand, two thousand, three thousand… And there it was! A pinprick of light, right in the middle of the screen. It grew larger and brighter, flickered sideways, and then Peter Holland and his moustache filled the screen: “That’s all from the newsroom. Good night.”

“That Peter Holland speaks the Queen’s English,” said my Nan, clearly smitten. Twenty years later, I got a tongue-lashing from that handsome baritone as I bolted into the edit suite with a late-breaking story about Alan Bond. Minutes earlier, I’d screeched my car to a halt outside the newsroom’s back door. I  commandeered the first available car space: Holland’s. His Queen’s English became laden with expletives.

My Nan and I had Saturday nights to ourselves. It was Mum’s date night. She’d be off to dinner at the tennis club with my soon-to-be step-father. Mum had sashayed out the door in her most flattering frock – sapphire-blue polyester blooming with giant yellow hibiscus.

Nan and I would settle into the paisley armchairs that belonged to her Merry Widow lounge suite: great hulking chairs with sweeping arms and plush upholstery. Mine engulfed me. I would sit cross-legged on my velvet throne and wedge my knees into the padding to balance my tray table on my lap. There we’d eat our savoury mince on toast, watching The Two Ronnies, my Nan tittering away –  she was quite the merry widow herself.   

I was confused by the sight gags: Ronnie Corbett, the publican, standing on two boxes to see over the bar –  one marked ‘Agnes,’ the other ‘Champ’. It took me a year of French lessons to work out it was a Champagne crate cut in half.

The sketch that had Sid and George drinking pints and discussing women went way over my head:

“You’ve heard of erosive zones, ‘aven’t you?”

“Well, yeah, I seen pictures of ‘em in holiday brochures.”

“Nuh, erosive zone – it’s the medical term for a place a woman’s got, you see, where if you touch it she goes mad! I bet your Edie’s got one of them.

“Yeah. Her wallet.”

Every Saturday night I’d watch an hour of television I didn’t understand. But it didn’t matter – I loved it because Nan loved it. Ronnie C was my favourite because he looked like a glove puppet, Ronnie B was her’s because his elocution was flawless, even when he was deliberately ‘pispronouncing.’

Their double act would never have survived today’s political correctness – all that groping of buxom maids and lewd patter about knockers and the clap.

Admirably, my husband has a touch of the Ronnie Barkers – a ribald wit (and a shapely figure in a dress).  He also wears square glasses with thick black rims which he uses to score cheap laughs at parties. He’ll wave them in the air and announce: “Whenever I go to buy a new pair of specs, I ask them for the cheapest, plainest, least breakable glasses they have. You know – like Ronnie Barker’s. And every time I walk out looking like Ronnie Corbett!”

I was in London, aged 37, when Ronnie Barker died. I overheard someone relaying the news on the tube from Notting Hill. My eyes pricked with tears and I was transported back to my childhood, enthroned in my velvet armchair watching television with my giggly Nan.

I chastised myself for being a sentimental fool, then saw that the businessman and the matronly woman sitting either side of me were both reading the tributes in the paper. We three strangers were from different worlds but I bet we’d shared many a Saturday night with The Two Ronnies.

As I breached the pale daylight outside Oxford Circus station, I caught The Sun’s headline on a placard propped against a lamp post. Ronnie had the front page all to himself: it featured a giant picture of his glasses and just four words – “It’s Goodnight From Him.” God must have needed cheering up.

Running on Empty

Running on Empty
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday February 8, 2014

I had always presumed early morning exercisers were chipper creatures, all bounce and bonhomie. I pictured them in their neon lycra peppering their 6am conversations with jaunty clichés such as ‘Life is short!’ or ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead!’

For years I’ve envied early-risers their kinetic superiority, their alertness, their chirpy sociability. Waking up should be a laborious, cantankerous process – and if I’m attempting it, I should be avoided until after breakfast.

Now, I am an early-morning exerciser – by default. At dawn, I disentangle myself from the small sweaty octopus who has crept into our bed and commandeered my pillow. Three-year-old daughter has been unusually generous in allowing me a handkerchief of bare sheet. She and her father are rolled up in the doona like pigs in a blanket.

I stagger out to the kitchen and flick the kettle on, staring mindlessly at the puffs of steam beading the wall with sweat. Tea bag brewing, I lurch out to collect the paper. The box tree nuts are lying in wait for me. Several of them launch their spikes into my left foot, and my sluggish brain jolts awake to record the pain. Bloody box trees!

I drink my tea and command my eyes to focus on the front page. It shifts blurrily before me because my reading glasses are not where I left them on the kitchen bench. I give up on the paper and scoop up some shorts and a T-shirt from the bedroom floor. I strap my two remaining assets into a sports bra, knot the broken laces on my sneakers and blunder out the back door. This may be the only half hour I have to myself all day.

At the corner, I cock my head to listen to a kookaburra in a date palm. A veneer of geniality begins to glaze my brain.

I am awake at last. By the time I’ve jogged up to the playing fields, I have flowered into my agreeable self. A middle-aged woman and her elderly black Labrador cross the path. ‘Morning,’ I chirrup. ‘Morning,’ she barks back, as if taking offence.

Around the oval I go, saluting my fellow early-risers: ‘Hi there!’   

Not one of them greets me first. I turn it into a game: will they or won’t they? Coming past the tennis courts, a barrel-chested man is striding towards me. Ten metres out, I make eye contact, smile and wait for his mouth to move. Nothing. He swivels his head to look at the bougainvillea on the fence. I throw self-consciousness aside and, at the last moment, I hail him with a sprightly: ‘Morning!’ In return, he gives me a sigh tacked on to a grunt: ‘Mornin’ (no exclamation mark).

For a while there, on my pre-Cornflake jaunts, I thought it was me. I mentally exchanged places with these pre-occupied dog-walkers and stony-faced joggers and put myself in their rainbow-coloured sneakers: ‘Oh no! Here she comes again! Jeez, who shuffles like that?! I’m not saying hello to someone wearing a headband!’

This was too awful a scenario to contemplate. Dawn-risers must want to be alone with their thoughts. They don’t want womanly greetings before 7am. They are enjoying the last breath of cool air. They are quietly calculating their superannuation. They’re wondering who Geoffrey Edelsten will marry next.

And then came an epiphany! Maybe my fellow early-risers just can’t be bothered being polite? Maybe they tolerate my ‘Good Mornings’ but are too selfish to reciprocate? After all, why be generous to strangers? Perhaps they think neighbours sharing an oval should be treated with disdain or indifference? 

After lunch, undeterred, I took my annoying pleasantries to the shops. Outside Coles, I struggled to separate two trolleys locked in canine-style congress. I finally wrenched them apart and offered a trolley to a well-heeled older woman. I admired her crisp shirt and smart hair-cut: “You look lovely today.” 

“You mean, for my age?”  

“No, no, I meant, you look very stylish.“

“I’m 81. I should know how to dress by now.”

I was shamed into silence. She weaved away to the delicatessen.

I replayed our conversation in my head. Could she have mistaken my friendliness for impertinence? I decided she probably wasn’t accustomed to fellow shoppers making conversation. I felt disheartened. 

On the next morning’s jog , a stranger charged over the hill towards me. His toothpick legs stuck out of his baggy white shorts and his arms were flapping at odd angles. Mesmerised by his gawkiness, I was caught off guard when he called: “Good morning young lady!” His exuberance was infectious (and not just because he called me ‘young’ and ‘lady’). “How many laps to go?” he shouted. “All three,” I shot back. “Aaah,” he called over his shoulder as he jerked past, “no more pudding for you!”

Fall on Deaf Ears

Fall on Deaf Ears
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday February 1, 2014

Between man and wife, listening is an art form. It is an elusive skill, requiring mental endurance and an air traffic controller’s concentration. (In our house, most conversations are near misses between my mouth and his ears). Moreover, listening requires self control – the word listen contains the same letters as the word silent. My family has no restraint. Usually, we’re too busy interrupting one another to hear what’s being said.  

The man of the house, however, has turned marital listening into an exercise in subterfuge. He has enough rat-cunning to convince me he’s paying attention to my every word, while really, he’s keeping track of the cricket score over my shoulder.

At stumps, I poked my head into his office and said: “By the way honey, what did you decide about tomorrow night?” He flashed me a meretricious smile: “Whatever you like, Blossom. I’m easy. You’re the social secretary, remember.”

And then our conversation degenerated into this tiresome patter:

“(Sigh) You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”

“Depends…”

“Depends on what? Geez! Do you ever listen to a word I say?!”

“I was listening, I just didn’t think it was important enough to remember.”

Listening is now a prickly aspect of our relationship. I admit I do most of the talking, but he does most of the ignoring. To help himself annoy me more, my husband has mastered a second language: a vocabulary of eye rolls, gruntlets, exasperated head shaking and a raised right eyebrow (of doom). He uses these to stymie all conversation so he can continue reading about Nigella Lawson’s cocaine habit in peace.

I get bored unless I’m talking. I like to fill the gaps between conversations with  commentary. During the Sunday night movie I get in trouble for asking perfectly legitimate questions: 

“Hey! Is that Terence Stamp? Man! He’s aged hasn’t he? No, no, it’s Alan Rickman, isn’t it? Yup, it’s Alan Rickman. He was so good as the bad guy in Die Hard, remember honey? He had that amazing German accent.”

And then my bloke rocks his head on his neck and his right eyebrow strains to push up a forehead wrinkle:

“No, it’s not Terence Stamp and it’s not Alan Rickman, it’s Charles Dance. Now will you please be quiet. I’ve proven to you I’m listening, all right?

And then I squeeze his hand and snuggle into his hairy left thigh because I know Alan Rickman when I see him.

Of course, we now have another listening problem creeping into our  relationship. Apparently I don’t just have a talking problem, I have a hearing problem. No matter that my bloke has a mumbling problem.

He likes to mumble with his back to me. He talks to me sotto voce from his office down the hall. He thinks his conversation is so riveting I should be craning my neck to hear what he has to say. I’ve now been forced into a speech pattern that begins with “Pardon?” And he’s cheesed off with having to repeat himself.  

I wonder if my years in radio damaged my ears? I always wore the cans lopsided, covering my right ear, exposing my left, so I didn’t have to hear myself booming in stereo – mono was disconcerting enough. Maybe my right ear got sick of listening to my voice? Maybe my left ear went out in sympathy?

My teenage son likes to mock my hearing by playing me high frequency tones on his iPod. While everyone in the house is screwing up their faces and sticking their fingers in their ears, I blithely continue stacking the dishwasher. (Raising three children gives me enormous tolerance for high-pitched shrieks and wails).

And then 13-year-old son guffaws: “Hey Mum! Can’t you hear that? Are you deaf? It’s hurting my ears!”

So now I’m being dared to have a hearing test because my husband mumbles and my son plays stupid test-tones only dogs and flappy-eared children can hear.

I have no trouble hearing the 60 decibel repartee of my two best girlfriends. We oracles know each other so intimately we don’t even call it listening: we call it waiting our turn to talk. But I was nonplussed the other day, at our favourite cafe, when one of my besties leaned into me and said: “Luvvy, I think you may be shouting.”

“I’m not shouting, I’m just excited about getting a hearing aid.” Should the espresso machine compete with some really important news, I make sure my smiling and nodding more than compensate for any lack of listening.

So in the interests of marital harmony, I have bowed to familial pressure and agreed to get a hearing test. I’m not too worried – I had one five years ago and got a near-perfect score. Selective deafness, the audiologist whispered to his assistant. He thought I didn’t hear him, but I’m brilliant at lip-reading.

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. 

Bean there, done that

Bean there, done that
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday January 18, 2014

For six years I have existed in a wasteland of sodden tea leaves and limp, spent teabags. Coffee and I parted ways over heart palpitations and the jitters. Even so, it was a bitter breakup: doctor’s orders.

At cafes, I now endure the taunts of coffee-drinking friends: “Tea? Really? (Smirk) Ok – water in a cup for her. I’ll have a skinny double-shot, extra-hot, flat white, in a takeaway cup.”

Coffee snobbery is rife amongst Perth poseurs. At my local coffee house, my delicate teacup and saucer signposts me as persona non grata.  Apparently, I take up too much space at the pocket-sized tables with my collection of dinky pots (one for hot water) and my jug of frigid milk.

I have but one ally who shares my disdain for coffee snobs: a lawyer no less (and a tea-totaller to boot). Emboldened by the promise of anonymity, he sounded off at a recent poolside barbeque: “Coffee addicts are an unholy alliance between heroin junkies and wine snobs. Of course, they mask their sad dependence by acting self-righteous and superior. But we non coffee-drinkers are very tolerant people.” (His wife took me behind a palm tree to say: “He thinks he’s a small L liberal, but really he’s a big F fascist).”

Cafe society has its own pecking order and tea-drinkers are its eccentrics.  Coffee purists would rather we Mad Hatters fraternised amongst ourselves out of sight. They would prefer we took tea at home in our Wonderlands resplendent with knitted tea cosies, Wedgwood china and silver spoons. That’s where time stands still and it’s never too late for a cuppa tea.

My husband, too, is a smug caffeine addict. At work, he’ll schlep up and down St George Terrace in pursuit of his preferred barista. Town baristas have cult followings. My husband’s current favourite has a nose ring and a front mullet (ristretto drinkers call that a frollet). Last I heard, that hairy barista and his coffee machine were operating to wide acclaim from a hole in a wall in London Court (brick dust makes the coffee taste authentically Colombian).

I tell you this because I like to practice hypocrisy. Last week, as my tea-rista filled my pot with steaming water, he leaned conspiratorially across the counter: “Don’t you miss coffee?”

I went blank. Then I weaved my way back to my table juggling my saucer and rattling cup in one hand – teapot and milk jug in the other. Boiling water dripped onto my big toe. I jumped, and my spoon clattered to the floor: a flotilla of heads jerked up from their macchiatos and skinny lattes and their riveting coffee-enhanced conversations.

Under the scrutiny of that cafe crowd, I had an epiphany: I did miss coffee! I missed being dark and dangerous and brooding. I missed sneering at tea-drinking fools. I re-traced my steps to the counter and announced: “Okay, Alberto, I surrender! Gimme me a weak flat white.”

He winked at me and belted his last puck of spent coffee grounds into the knockbox: “One lukewarm milkshake for the born-again coffee virgin coming right up!” The businessman at my elbow snickered.

Within an hour of that coffee, my single entendres had doubled. My brain was Stephen Hawkingly-alert. I began reciting TS Eliot in my head. I decided I too, could measure out my life in coffee spoons. And then I drifted home in a daze of caffeine euphoria.

My renewed infatuation with coffee has caused some consternation at home. My husband now has to share his prized coffee machine. Some mornings, I catastrophise that he loves that coffee machine more than me.

My husband is fastidious about his morning brew. He’s obsessed with the surgical cleaning of his beloved contraption. Most mornings this week, he has beckoned me from my lukewarm milkshake to lecture me on why I should be grateful to have a three-some with his machine.

He gruffly points out the trail of coffee grounds across the kitchen bench. He gets down on his hands and knees to demonstrate how they have spilled onto the floor and made it gritty. He accuses me of not wiping the dark orifice where the groupo attaches to the machine. (Only coffee nerds could come up with a name like groupo for a metal filter with a handle). He says I haven’t scraped the last deflated bubble of dried milk from the frothing proboscis. (I too, can up with stupid names for ordinary things).

To avert a serious domestic, I promise him I’ll be more respectful of the coffee ritual. I slink back to my sweet warm pudding of a drink and force myself to think sweet warm thoughts about my man.

And then I have another epiphany: Hang on! We’re on the same side! I am once again a coffee addict. That makes me one of the in-crowd. Coffee makes me invincible. It’s time we high-borns showed those ridiculous tea-types who’s boss.

Consuming Passion

Consuming Passion
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday December 14, 2013

“What if I look like mutton dressed as sheep?” I ask the lissom sales girl. It’s a  legitimate question: I’m trying on a frock in attention-seeking scarlet. Actually, it’s more a shade of watermelon. I’m worried I’ll look like one in it.

She looks at me blankly and continues preening herself in the mirror next to mine. She’s been stalking round the shop on her leg-stilts like some exotic wading bird, a riot of colour in flowing jungle-print. I crane my neck because she is wearing this summer’s four-inch platforms and I’m straight from the beach in my purple thongs, circa 2010.

“Go on,” she coaxes. “Spoil yourself – it’s Christmas!”

And there it is: an invitation to conspicuous consumption. Her words stick to my brain like cheap tinsel puttied to shop windows. I agree with her anyway: “I’ll take it!”

“It fits you like a glove,” she calls over her shoulder as she heads briskly over to the till. I give myself a last once-over in the mirror, unsure whether to believe her. The dress does fit rather snugly (perhaps not so much glove as fireman’s gauntlet). I hand her my Mastercard and she plucks it daintily from me with a well-practiced flourish.

Clutching my gilt-edged carry-bag, $249 poorer, I exit the shop giddy with my impulse buy. I am high on shopper’s euphoria.

By the time I’ve rounded up a BBQ chicken and a 12-pack of toilet rolls at Coles, I have dress-buyer’s remorse. I already own frocks I love more than this clingy one. I always feel garish in red. Why blow $250 on something I’m too timid to wear?

Trudging home, I observe my fellow shoppers too, are weighed down by their new purchases. Up ahead, I notice a handsome woman with a platinum helmet of hair bearing down on me. Her arms are strung with dress-shop bags, their (glamorously) sharp corners bouncing against her legs as she sashays through the arcade.

Can we pass without colliding? Her gaze is somewhere above my head, so making eye contact with this superior being is out of the question. Sensing an imminent sideswipe, I step to my left. She marches past me unimpeded (and ungrateful). It is a vulgar display.

I wonder if my haughty friend is annoyed I didn’t step out of her way sooner. Perhaps she was wanted my envy for her shopping spree. All I sensed was an aggressive attempt at oneupmanship.

By the time I get home, I have concocted a rationale for my own splurge. My red dress reclines artfully on the bed while I rummage through my wardrobe  for shoes to match. 

For a few moments, I am again drunk with pleasure, but then my satisfaction turns to something ugly: a slavish craving for more. I want the tan-coloured wedges I spotted last week. Should I splash out and buy the filigree necklace I’ve been lusting after all year? I’ve waited long enough, haven’t I?

Part of me hankers for reckless extravagance. Or perhaps it’s schadenfreude – that same perverse satisfaction I get from reading New Weekly in the hairdresser and seeing Miley Cyrus being shunned for trying too hard to be controversial.

Had I had access to money as a teenager, I too would have succumbed to shopping gluttony and bought myself a pair of Reebok hi-top sneakers and a perm. Instead, I spent my $12 pocket money on McCalls’ dress-making patterns. I spread those brown paper cut-outs all over the loungeroom floor. Then I tacked together my version of the flouncy denim skirt Brooke Shields wore while shipwrecked in The Blue Lagoon.  Sewing those crooked seams on mum’s old Husqvarna took the best part of a Saturday. But I can still recall the kick I got out of looking bespoke the entire summer of 1980.

Strangely, I cannot remember a single Christmas present I received as a kid. And yet I envied my well-off friends their new Starfire white rollerskates and Nintendo Gameboys. My temptation now is to spoil my offspring. Last week I asked my teenager his favourite thing about Christmas. I expected ‘presents’ to top his list. “The Santa Claus footprints you used to dust around the fireplace with icing sugar” came the reply. (He’d got wise one year and licked the floor).  

I still get a childish thrill from hauling our dusty box of Christmas decorations up from the garage. I lift lopsided stars and strange glittery creatures from their tissue paper nests and tell my kids how old they were when they made them. They beg me to make shortbread so they can use the reindeer cookie-cutters and sneak glace cherries from the bowl. We go for night drives with all the windows down counting how many houses are strung with fairy lights. It’s the lead-up to Christmas I love – the day itself is always an anti-climax.

Oh, and whatever happened to my new red dress? Actually I bought it last Christmas. I still haven’t plucked up the courage to become a scarlet woman.

The story of life

The story of life
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday December 7, 2013

It was his email that intrigued me:

‘You have no clue what really happens when you get old. My wife of 55 years has been taken from me by illness. Maybe one day you could visit her in the nursing home. She is in room 19. Her name is Ada.’

Warm regards, Carl, 87.

The following day, on a whim, I drive out to the aged care home. It’s a secure facility. A cleaner notices me waiting expectantly on the visitor’s side of the door. She punches in the security code, then pads noiselessly away on her soft soles, leaving me to guess which of the deserted corridors to search first. I inhale that haunting scent – the staleness of life at its lowest ebb. It’s the same miasma I recall from the nursing home where my Nan died – the smell of confinement, unease and antiseptic.

I knock gently on the door of Room 19 and hear a chair scrape as someone gets up to open the door. “I told her you’d come!” Carl beams at me. “Come and meet my beauty.”

He still has his veteran’s pride: khaki trousers with a sharp crease up the thigh, a pressed short-sleeved shirt, shiny chestnut brogues. Only his hearing aid and the Velcro bandage gripping his wrist hint at any outward signs of decline.

His wife, Ada, is slumped awkwardly in the bed, a slip of a woman in a voluminous cream nightie dotted with cornflowers. Her spindly arms and papery skin stand out in relief against the fat, dimpled pillows stacked behind her. She’s breathing noisily, her lids drooped over cloudy eyes. Carl smooths a wayward wisp of her fairy floss hair.

“She’s not coming back to me is she?” We both know the answer. “Two of her brothers had Parkinsons” he continues, “and now she’s started with the tremors. I give her a kiss and she gives me ten in return!” We both smile.

A nurse rattles in with lunch and briskly suggests we wait outside. “Ada’s refusing to eat,” Carl explains, and leads me to two plastic chairs in the corridor.

He is surprisingly buoyant. “This is my world now. Sitting with her hour after hour, then going home to a cold bed. I want you to write what it’s like to grow old: always looking back at life over your shoulder.”

He points to an elderly gent leaning precariously forward in his wheelchair. “That’s Ray,” Carl says. The wheelchair’s foot rests are folded up and out of the way and Ray is using his slippered feet to inch along the carpet. “The week after he moved here to be with his wife, she passed away. He doesn’t realise she’s gone. He spends his whole day shuffling from room to room looking for her.” Ray looks searchingly at me as he edges his wheelchair past us: “Do you know where they’ve taken her?” I am moved to tears.

Carl stares at the burgundy leaf-pattern in the carpet while I collect myself. “I met Ada on the bus, you know,” he says. “I came to Fremantle after the war. I was a frontline interpreter. I’m Dutch, but I speak four languages so the Yanks wanted me.”

He opens his wallet and pulls out a small plastic sleeve. He tips a pebble into my hand. “Grenade” he tells me. “They took this shrapnel out of me leg. I howled like a baby. Ada always told me I was a big sook.”

“She tricked me into marrying her, you know,” he says. “I’m Catholic. My family back home didn’t want no Church of England girl. She says to me one day: Can you take me to Hehir street?”

“I know that street” I says to her. “Little church there.”

“We arrive at the church and the priest says to me: Know what you’re here for?”

“Ada had gone and got herself converted. We got married three weeks later.” He leans into me and says: “You girls got your ways of getting your man!”

We’re allowed back into Ada’s room. “She still won’t eat” the nurse tells Carl, as she pushes the lunch trolley out the door. He lifts Ada’s limp arm and nestles it in his. The veins at her wrist are ropey and tinged with green. The lingering remains of a soft-pink manicure stain her nails.

Carl reaches over to the bedside table and picks up a hand mirror with a long gilt handle. He holds it so Ada can see her reflection: “Look at those rosy cheeks!” he coos, but Ada doesn’t register.

“I just want my wife back,” he says. I see a tear slide down his cheek.

He leans in and plants a kiss on Ada’s slackened mouth. We sit in silence by her bedside. Ada shifts in the bed, swallows uncomfortably. Her eyes focus, settling on her husband. Her voice is trembly with the effort of speech but there’s no mistaking what she whispers: “I see a beautiful face.” And then she turns her head away and stares unblinkingly at the door.

Ada Caubo – 24/3/1928 – 13/11/13

Man Enough

Man Enough
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 30, 2013

‘The bloke’ is back. I know this because I went to the Medieval Fair in York. Never have I seen so many grunting he-men in one sweltering paddock.

I was at a loose end a few Sundays back. My two smallest urchins needed an adventure while their father was away. As I pulled off the highway into York at 10am, the gauge in my car read 34-degrees. I cruised along Balladong street looking for a shady park. Six-year-old son spotted a hulk of a man crossing the street in chest plate and chain mail. “Look Mum! It’s a dress-up! He’s wearing a metal skirt!”

“Yes, honey. We’ve entered the Dark Ages. That chain mail frock is called a hauberk. It stops a sword from cutting your legs.” His eyes were saucers, so I notched up a gear.

“See his big sword? It’s so sharp he could cut slice you in half with one blow!”

Three-year-old daughter wailed: “I wanna go home!”

Her brother, shocked at the grim and gritty business of trial by combat, grabbed her hand: ‘Don’t worry. We’ll still get an ice-cream.”

We three peasants joined the queue of gentlefolk squashing through the makeshift gate. We shuffled forward and handed the festival wench a tenner.

Inside the fairground, bosomy CWA matrons were peddling Christmas cakes and heraldic tea towels. Big fellas in velvet tunics and hessian trousers were flogging home-made weapons. “What’s this called?” asked my youngster, pointing at a knife with a slender blade.

“That, my young man, is a stiletto.”

I smirked. “Yep, my feet kill in those!”

The weapons merchant leaned in towards my boy: “Your ma’s a smarty-pants i’nt she?!” My 6-year-old agreed, then spotted a chain-mail tunic hanging from the awning: “What’s that?”

“Aah, that one’s got a strange name too – it’s called a cuirass. Can you say that? Cweer-aaas.”

“Plenty of them ‘round here!” (I was on a roll).

He cocked a shaggy eyebrow at me.

“Let’s go get an ice-cream!” I said, wishing medieval shopkeepers didn’t take themselves so seriously. We trooped off to the Penny Farthing Sweets van.

An ear-splitting metallic screech shook the crowd. Small daughter clapped her hands over her ears. Then a baritone boomed over the loudspeaker: “Hear ye! Hear ye! Geoffrey the Blaggard of York will duel to the death with the imposter El Sid from Goomalling. Mark my words, blood will be spilled today.”

At that moment, I heard a chink-chink-chink and turned to see an armoured giant half as wide as he was tall heading towards us. Small daughter darted behind my legs.

He wore a black helmet that jutted over his forehead, leaving two metal slits for his eyes. A wild gingery beard joined up with the shag pile on his chest. His XXXX girth strained against a belt that held a 5-pronged mace in its scabbard. The crowd peeled back to let him pass.

His opponent, El Sid from Goomalling, was a dark knight with curls and  brooding looks. “Today is a fine day to die!” he bellowed, and we reciprocated with cheering, clapping and snickering.

And so the bludgeon fight began. The mob roared its appreciation for two beefcakes sweating it out in full armour on a baking hot day. While my children gaped from behind the rope fence, I cast my gaze at the throng.

There were no vapid metrosexuals on display here. I was a maiden amongst the countryside’s best brawn: men in mud-caked boots and faded Levis and wraparound sunnies. There wasn’t a pastel polo-shirt or a pair of suede loafers in sight. For the first time since my high school ball, I felt petite.

I turned back to the arena to see El Sid using his murderous blows to annihilate the home town hero. Geoffrey the Blaggard, his throat slit, collapsed in mock agony, writhing in the hot sand and grass clippings. The kids were speechless.

We wandered back to the car as Geoffrey revived himself with a stubbie of VB. I reflected that even the out-of-town blokes looked man-ful today with their burly chests and thickets of leg hair.

Making a rare trip to St Georges Terrace last Friday, I was perplexed by the male vanity on parade. By lunchtime, the city was teeming with dandies flaunting their over-pumped torsos, finicky hairstyles and stage-managed stubble. Is this what women want?

The man’s man I live with has no truck with titivation. He’s a retrosexual – the kind who hails the Dunlop Volley as the greatest sandshoe ever made. A guy who carries his six-pack in a brown paper bag. I tolerate his quirks because I don’t want a bloke who primps more than I do.

Later, on the drive back to Perth, I asked my youngster which part of the  Medieval Fair he’d liked the most. Was it the bruising contests in the arena? The gruesome armaments? The Herculean warriors?

“I liked the honey-tasting best,” he said. But the raspberry ice-cream came a close second.