Drive Me Crazy

Drive Me Crazy
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday August 1, 2015

I am yet to meet a man who can resist the call of the open road. We are gunning towards Kalgoorlie on a week-long road trip. My husband is enthroned in the driver’s seat of our hired motor home. The kids are strapped in the back, squabbling over a box of Jatz crackers. I’ve eaten an entire packet of Twisties in the sixteen minutes between Meckering and Cunderdin.

The man in the van couldn’t be happier. He croons the backing vocals to Slip Slidin’ Away, then launches into a falsetto for the chorus:

You know the nearer your destination,

The more you’re slip slidin’ away.

A road train roars past, buffeting us sideways. I catch a glimpse of the Hulk Hogan behind the wheel and his sign on the dash: ‘Highway Warrior.’

“Wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of him,” I say.

“Yep, we’re a special breed,” replies my smooth-cheeked driver, caressing the plastic wheel of his white Jayco Conquest.

I stifle a snort.

“Driving into the sunset, rising with the dawn,” he intones.

He pauses theatrically, leaning forward to scan the sky before resuming his soliloquy:

“Man and machine at one with the wilderness.”

He eases smugly back into his seat as I shift uncomfortably in mine. I silently beg for an interruption to the treeless view. An unbroken ribbon of grey highway vanishes over the horizon. I study the mallee scrub for signs of life but it refuses to offer up even a crow. I’m momentarily absorbed by a dark lump on the roadside up ahead. Could it be a goanna? As we bear down on it, I realise it’s only a jagged strip of tyre.

“Road alligators,” mutters my wannabe truckie, hanging his arm out the driver’s side window.

I note the succession of coffee drips now staining the front of his favourite mauve polo. His left leg, rendered useless by cruise control, flops in the footwell. A camel-brown ugg boot ensures against holiday frostbite. He wears a roomy pair of elasticated trousers to keep himself nice.

A speck appears on the horizon: bigger than a car, smaller than a road train. It grows a high roof cab, a boxy body and becomes a shimmering mirage of white. It’s another Jayco Conquest! As we close the gap, my husband slides one hand to the top of the steering wheel and casually extends his index finger in a passing salute. The other driver reciprocates the gesture as he zooms past.

“The brotherhood of the road is alive and well,” my husband says with a satisfied sigh.

The next four hours of driving stretch eastwards with barely a bend in the road. The kids have settled down and are watching a movie with shared headphones. After Burracoppin, the salmon gums return, shading the highway with their green parachute canopies. By Bodallin, a flotilla of flat-bottomed clouds has gathered on the horizon.

Periodically, my wheatbelt tour-guide waves vaguely towards some feature of the landscape requiring my attention. “Sheep?” I offer, having no clue what he’s pointing at.

“Wheat silo,” he says flatly, now that I’ve missed it.

Minutes later, he signals towards the window again.

“Shed?” I attempt, as we whizz past a humpy of rusted tin.

“Windmill,” he corrects.

I give up and examine the gnat flapping frantically against the windscreen. I marvel at its staying power, four tiny wings a blur of desperation. And then I twig. It’s our slipstream that’s powering those wings. The gnat’s splattered innards have glued his body to the glass. He’s probably been dead since Walgoolin. I hope my flying friend never knew what hit him.

I while away the next ten kilometres classifying the streaks and smears dotting the windshield, but the impact of bug versus van has obliterated most victims. After identifying one wasp and a cicada, I lose interest. I practice my powers of perception instead, using each insect splodge as a Rorschach test. In the dark stain of a flattened mosquito, I see the delicate wings of a miniaturised butterfly. Who knew bug juice could give such artistic pleasure?

We pass through Southern Cross as the sun dips behind us. The last shafts of daylight drench the cab in golden light, giving my husband the tan he always wanted. The hairs in his left nostril are aglow. So are the bristles in his ear. The setting sun turns the thicket of hair on his forearm the colour of beer.

The monotony of the darkening highway is broken by another motor home barrelling towards us.

My husband delivers his customary one-finger salute but the van’s grey-haired occupants stare stonily ahead. They pass us without acknowledgment.

“They didn’t wave at you, honey,” I say, feeling miffed on my man’s behalf. “How dare they ignore the brotherhood of the road?”

“Foreigners,” he says matter-of-factly. “Any Twisties left?”

Mind your Busyness

Mind your Busyness
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday July 25, 2015

I stood at the toy shop counter and waited.

If the stripling in charge sensed my presence, he didn’t acknowledge it. He was engrossed in his phone, thumbs strumming the screen. A pair of tiny headphones gummed his ears.

My outside wore an expression of polite resignation. On the inside, I was chafing with annoyance.

Finally, he glanced up. “Sorry,” he said. “Was updating our Facebook page.”

“Just the Lego please,” I replied. He bagged the box, swivelled the credit card machine towards me and calmly returned to swiping his phone.

“Thanks,” I said, trying to catch his downcast eye. But he was too busy multitasking to cope with another distraction.

I remember the days when multitasking meant eating breakfast while thinking about lunch. Or frying bacon and testing the smoke alarms at the same time. I grew up being told to tackle one job at a time. Those who scurried inefficiently from task to task were labelled as scatty or dappy, or a pain. Being able to give your steady and unwavering attention to one mission was a mark of superior intellect.

Back then, if the phone rang, I sat down to answer it. Everyone did. In the 80s, our home telephone ruled from its own settee. A friendship could free range only the length of its green twisty cord. While gossiping, I’d multitask by winding the phone cable around my fingertip until it throbbed and turned purple.

Now I feel sorry for my home phone, trapped by its own limitations. It was just a primitive tool for talking.

I’d old enough to recall when mobile phones came with long rubber antennaes and squishy buttons. I was a cadet reporter in a radio newsroom the day our first Motorola captivated the office. It may as well have been the Roswell alien. The entire staff crowded around it. We young ones jostled to get our first glimpse of this strange creature. It had a pale fleshy keypad, a tightly coiled, muscular cord and a metallic black body. The handset clung to a battery the size of a brick, only heavier. We cubs viewed that mobile phone with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. After ten hours of charging it gave us twenty minutes of talk time. I got a sore shoulder from lugging it around.

Worse, it made us contactable in the field.

“Where the blazes have you got to?” my news director, Murray, would shout down the Motorola. He’d pause long enough to drag deeply on his cigarette.

“It doesn’t take thirty-five minutes to get from the Supreme Court to Wellington Street, young lady!”

It did when we court reporters had nicked off for coffee. In 1989, the closest I came to multitasking was juggling the Motorola and Murray’s temper.

Now, no device can compete with the thrilling gadgetry of my shiny new iPhone. My brain scrambles to attend to its constant demands. Like Pavlov’s dog, I leap to answer the Ding! of every incoming email, the distracting trill announcing another text message. My typing stalls repeatedly as I remind myself to renew my driver’s licence, pay the overdue gas bill and put on a second load of washing. I am at my least efficient when multitasking.

After an hour of interruptions, I resolve to become single-minded. I ignore the unmade beds and the damp washing. I chain my phone to its charger and gag it with the mute function.

“Can’t do two things at once, hey Mum?” says eldest son, smirking. This from a boy who can’t concentrate on homework unless he’s funnelling tasteless music into his ears. I watch him at his laptop, headphones attached. He’s skipping from his essay on Genghis Khan to a music video while vetting every beep and flash of his phone. Never has any brain been asked to perform so many tasks for so little mental output.

My Mum can’t understand why we’re allowing our gadgets to shorten our attention spans.

I went with her to the phone shop to replace her ailing ten-year-old mobile.

“I just want something basic,” she told the shop assistant.

He steered us towards a wall of electronics.

“This one is popular with our older customers,” he said, pointing at the latest iPhone. “It has bigger buttons, larger fonts, assisted GPS, a great camera. You can even edit your videos.

“I just want a phone that phones,” she reiterated.

“Like this one?” I said helpfully, pointing at the most basic model I could see.

“That one does nothing except dial and text,” said the salesman with a shrug. “It’s a pet rock.”

“I had a pet rock once. I miss it,” I said defensively.

Overwhelmed by choice, we left the shop empty-handed and went to have coffee and cake instead. Call me callow, but that’s the kind of multitasking I’m good at.

Making a Stand

Making a Stand
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday July 18, 2015

You rarely see a shopkeeper in a top hat these days. Or a roadside lemonade stand on a glacial Sunday afternoon.

Had the top hat been made of felted beaver fur, it might have lent its owner an entrepreneurial air. But this topper was made of pink plastic and glitter and made its owner look like a circus performer. It was rammed onto the head of my five-year-old, who had set up shop under a naked plane tree. Her cardboard sign read: Leminhade $10.

“Shall we move the dot and make it $1.0?” I suggested. “The mining boom’s over, you know.”

“No,” she said firmly, customising her paper cup tower. “But you can do the pouring.”

I remembered the last time I ran a lemonade stand. I was ten and a dead rat sent me broke.

It had been a broiling summer and we’d moved to a new suburb. The neighbourhood kids were mostly boys who roamed in a pack. I crossed the street to avoid them but then eyed them jealously as they huddled outside Mrs Fong’s milk bar dividing a lolly bag between them.

Mrs Fong had a knack for siphoning my pocket money into her Atari video game machine. She’d sandwiched her console between her bread rack and her drinks fridge. An upturned milk crate masqueraded as a stool. Its plexus of hard plastic bit into the backs of my thighs. Sitting on that crate for ten minutes left my bottom scored like pork crackling.

Mrs Fong wasn’t the friendliest of deli owners but she knew that kids who had pocket money needed to spend it. Her Atari offered only the enticing frustrations of Space Invaders. If my stash of 20-cent pieces lasted longer than she liked, she’d clap her hands as if to say “Enough!” and yank out the power cable.

One slow weekend, Mum suggested a lemonade stand might make me some friends. She mixed a jug of Cottee’s lemon cordial and I scooted round to Mrs Fong’s. I steered myself away from her Atari and spent my week’s pocket money on her lollies instead.

Lugging Mum’s rickety card table down our driveway, I set up my stall by the kerb and re-branded Mrs Fong’s shop as my own. Business was slow until several specks appeared on the crest of our hill and a bunch of kids came charging down the footpath.

Three of them, I noted, were boys from the neighbourhood gang, but customers were customers. Besides, one boy was begrudgingly towing a sister about my age. I tried to sound cool as the boys procrastinated, fingering the coins in their pockets.

“The lollies are half the price of Mrs Fong’s,” I lied.

“As if” said the tallest boy.

Two loud cracks split the air. I spun around to see my step-father at the top of the driveway. He had the stock of his air rifle jammed into his shoulder, the muzzle aimed at the ivy to our left, festooning our side fence.

“Crack!”

He fired off a third shot. We kids were paralysed by fear and indecision.

My step-father leant his gun against a drainpipe, strode over to the fence and bent to retrieve something from the garden bed. He straightened, shouted something I couldn’t hear and triumphantly held up a small package he appeared to be holding by its string.

Grinning like a Mississippi Republican, he was heading our way when I realised he was dangling a dead rat by its scaly tail.

It took a moment for this gruesome sight to register. When it did, the sister screamed. Her brother panicked and all five of my customers bolted.

“I thought the boys might like to see it,” called my step-father, perplexed by all the hysterics.

“Don’t be ridicuIous,” said Mum. “You scared the daylights out of them.”

On cue, I burst into tears.

When the rat corpse had been disposed of, and I’d recovered from the murderous interruption to trading, I resumed my post with my cardboard sign.

The street remained deserted. After an hour, Mum gently suggested I come inside. I spent the last weeks of the holidays riding solo to the local pool and trying to impress on Mrs Fong the need for crate cushions.

That was then.

I was snapped out of my 1980s reverie by the arrival of Jack and Finny, my five-year-old’s favourite playmates, both desperate to play shop with her.

Finny made a grab for her tissue-box till and Jack began unstacking her cup tower. “No-one’s allowed on my side of the table,” my youngster wailed, flinging her top hat to the ground and stomping up the street.

Finny and Jack poured themselves some lemonade, clearly delighted with their takeover.

“You two are in charge while I sort her out,” I called, breaking into a jog. “But make sure you leave me your ABNs!”

Show Business

Show Business
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday July 11, 2015

It was raining cats and dogs. My windscreen wipers whined a irksome tune. As I passed the Showgrounds, I spotted a sandwich board. Feline Fanciers Show, it read. Today. 9-4pm

“Come on,” I said to my 5-year-old as we drove through the gates. “We’ve got an hour to kill.”

The cat pavilion was a vast tin shed that smelled strongly of toast and vaguely of tuna. The entrance was fortified with sacks of cat litter, stacked like sandbags along one wall, in case of dog invasion. A small table offered an array of cat show essentials: three knitted berets, four pairs of fingerless gloves and a half a dozen jars of pickled onions.

Inside the hall, a hundred cats were corralled in cages.

“Look mum!” said my daughter excitedly. “They’ve got shiny curtains!” She pointed to the rows of metal crates bespangled with silky drapes and plush padding.

In the first cage, a poufy Persian sprawled across a pink satin pillow. Her tail twitched against a backdrop of matching curtains, the hems studded with rhinestones. A dainty bowl of salmon-shaped biscuits sat alongside her silver tray of kitty litter. She narrowed her eyes at me and yawned. I felt inferior.

“Cage curtains are important for privacy,” said a woman at my elbow. I noticed her windcheater featured a tiger’s head embroidered with gold sequins. She was holding a leopard-print bag filled with knitting. I picked her as a cat lover.

“Cats don’t like to see their competition,” she said knowingly. “And they hate being shown in winter.”

It was as cold as concrete in the cavernous shed.

“If you’re smart,” she w hispered so no-one else could hear, “you match your curtains to the colour of your cat’s eyes. Really sets ‘em off.”

I looked around and saw several cages padded in vivid shades of turquoise and emerald. I admired a Burmese with golden eyes who was trying to tear down his harlequin-striped curtains.

“Are you showing a cat today?” I asked my new friend.

“No,” she laughed. “My show days are over. My Mr Fluff was crowned Grand Premier in 1989. In those days, all I was allowed to put in his cage was a white towel, litter and water. Now they get a boudoir!”

A cat the size of a small lion stared stonily at us from a cage plumped with red velvet.

“I only have four cats now,” she continued. “Marika has diabetes. I have to inject her with insulin twice a day. Lord Louie is a Burmese cross. I named him after Mountbatten. Kismet Hardy is 19 now – he sleeps on top of the microwave.”

She was interrupted by a vile stench. My daughter screwed up her face. “Ewwww” she wailed. “What’s that?”

“Someone needs their bottom changed,” my companion broadcast in a loud voice. The pedigree lion in the red velvet cage stared smugly at me. The stink from his litter tray was making my eyes water.

We moved smartly to the next aisle where a judge was examining a giant puffball on legs.

“Good chin, gorgeous wedge,” announced the judge, but all I could see was snub of muzzle buried in a mound of fur.

“Lovely coat, nice expression,” the judge declared before adding: “This handsome fellow deserves first prize – he showed himself off the minute his toes hit the table.”

A steward in a white coat bundled the winning cat under one arm. Depositing him into the upholstered crate beside me, the steward reached into the neighbouring cage for a new contestant. A hefty grey cat with sky-blue eyes was in no mood to please. He peeled back his rosy lips to reveal a shark-toothed grin and attacked the steward’s arm, snarling and hissing. The steward leapt backwards, slamming the lid. “Bloody Russians,” he muttered. “Ruthless, aren’t they,” I whispered back – just so he knew he had an ally.

He gave me a quizzical look and marched away. Behind me, a Siamese kitten began yowling in a voice as gravelly as a pack-a-day smoker’s.

It was time to leave. My youngster had chosen her favourite cat: a petite Lilac Ragdoll called Bruno. “Took me four hours to dry him,” said his owner as she fluffed his lacy curtains. “He kept attacking the dryer. I got to bed at 2am. By then, there were nine other cats sleeping on my bed!” She giggled self-consciously, before addressing Bruno with a frown: “And who decided to cough during judging, hey? Good time to get a furball, Mister.”

We said goodbye to Bruno and his strange neighbour, a hairless Sphynx called Neil. The rain had stopped and a weak shaft of sun shone through the shed door.

“Can we get a toy?” begged my daughter, pointing to a collection of crocheted cat rattles for 50-cents each.

“Not today, honey,” I said. “But I could be talked into buying some pickled onions.”

Suit Yourself

Suit Yourself
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday July 4, 2015

Most of us are occasionally troubled by the prospect of looking passé. Except my husband. Not quite fifty, his latest fashion fancy is dressing like a squire en route to a clay pigeon shoot.

Last week he sauntered in the door after work, tummy first, proudly sporting a new woollen puffer vest.

From the high ground beside my kitchen bench, I watched him bimble down the hallway, shuffling through the day’s mail. His puffer vest was constructed from some variety of battledress serge, gunmetal grey, with the delicate weave of an army blanket. A 360-degree matrix of padded panels hugged his torso like a mattress. He wore his new vest zipped to his throat, emphasising a dewlap of chin. Here, I thought, is a man who likes to be protected from the elements while still remaining camouflaged in the field.

“Cold outside?” I smirked.

He leaned in to kiss me hello but didn’t take the bait.

Up close, I saw his new vest had a reinforced shoulder patch, presumably to absorb gun recoil. And superfluous pockets for spent cartridges.

“Been shooting grouse, darling?”

He ignored me and settled himself on a stool, noisily spreading his newspaper on the bench. I couldn’t help myself. I took a step towards him and gave him a hug, then fondled the nap of his new vest. I hooked one thumb inside the armhole and made a pretence of checking the density of the padding, kneading the wadding between my fingertips like a Savile Row sempstress.

“Goose filling?” I enquired.

He looked up and addressed me with an expression of wearisome disdain.

“Only one goose here,” he deadpanned, and went back to his paper.

Out-foxed, I resolved to reclaim the crown of marital oneupmanship.

“Honey,” I said sweetly, reaching for his shoulders to gently rotate him towards me. “What I’m about to say is an observation, not a criticism. But a middle-aged man affectionately described as ‘portly,’ should probably steer clear of any item of clothing referred to as ‘puffer.’”

He shrugged: “Like I give a toss.”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the end of our conversation. I was lost for the last word. I decided to leave the low-end of men’s fashion well alone and resumed skinning potatoes for a shepherd’s pie. Contemplating my peelings, however, I wondered if my husband had lost interest in his appearance.

In recent months, I’ve noticed his laissez-faire attitude towards costume. Last weekend, he returned, grinning, from a shopping expedition. With a flourish, he pulled from a Best ‘n Less bag, a black t-shirt shouting in white capitals: “IF YOU NEED ANYTHING FROM ME, RECONSIDER.”

I’ve never understood the point of talking t-shirts. Wearing a joke on your chest is like telling the same gag over and over until people recoil at the sight of you.

What’s more, there comes a time in a man’s life when his t-shirts no longer fit as they should. They glide over the shoulders nicely enough, but then cling to a pair of chest hillocks and a mound of midriff. ‘Thickening’ is the polite term, but I like to refer to it as ‘tittiness.’ I’d like more vanity from my husband, not less.

But what confounds me most is the enjoyment he derives from other peoples’ reactions to his lurid ensembles. This is a man who has never been afraid of colour. For a friend’s birthday lunch at a swish winery, he partnered his favourite neon-green polo shirt, (a small rip under the arm; fraying at the collar) with a pair of navy chinos, a black – possibly bulletproof – neoprene vest and his new fawn desert boots.

“Well howdy Walker, Texas Ranger!” I drawled as he emerged from the bathroom in a waft of Rexona. He rolled his eyes and pointed to his suede boots: “Soft as a slipper, light as a feather, tough as the desert,” he intoned, gathering his wallet and keys.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for self-expression. I can enjoy the irony of a nearly 48-year-old man wearing an 88-year-old man’s cardigan. I can tolerate a lilac polo shirt, brown corduroys and orange sneakers. I’m even amused when they’re worn concurrently. But I draw the line at a gaping armhole and a shirt missing twenty-percent of its collar.

We pulled into the winery car park. As I followed my middle-aged fashion plate into the restaurant, I thought I saw several heads swivel. An elderly woman tracked him as he passed, then whispered to her husband. A man seated to my left let out a soft sarcastic whinny.

And suddenly, I felt defensive of my Lone Wolf McQuade. He of the beige desert boot, the XL puffer vest, the electrified lime polo.

Vanity’s a nuisance. The conceited are by turns annoying or absurd. How refreshing to find a man devoid of narcissism. And bulletproof to boot.

Walking Tall

Walking Tall
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday June 27, 2015

“The last time I saw you, you were about four,” says a voice over my shoulder.

I twist in my cafe seat.

“Your mum and I were best friends at school. Your grandad had a marvellous shoe shop,” the speaker continues, pointing to a trousered left leg attached to a callipered foot.

“He once split a pair of shoes for me so I could wear something prettier than a big black lace-up. This foot’s three sizes smaller.”

The owner of the Eartha Kitt voice is boxed in behind a walking frame. She’s a handsome woman with a shock of blonde hair, a vivid scarf and an apple-green jumper. I remember Mum talking about a childhood friend with polio.

“Margie,” she says by way of introduction, squeezing my hand in her vice-like grip. We begin to chat in earnest. I order her a coffee and push a chair aside so she can park her walker. She braces her sturdy arms on the table-top and adroitly pilots herself into the chair opposite mine.

“I was five when it happened,” she says, anticipating my next question. “In the middle of the night, I crawled into mum and dad’s bed with shooting pains down my back. By morning, I couldn’t move the leg. Paralysed from hip to toe.”

“So fast?” I ask, incredulous.

“In one night. The hospital had no infectious diseases ward – it was 1942 – the middle of the war. The doctors asked Mum to take me home.”

“Do you know how you got it?”

She shakes her head: “No-one in the street had it, no-one at school. That’s the weird thing: you had to ingest the polio virus. Who’d I get it from? I’ll never know. But Mum said there were people who wouldn’t come to our house after I got it.”

We exchange frowns.

“My little sister got whooping cough the same year,” she continues. “Lightning struck twice.”

Her gaze wanders to the window.

“Not once did I feel ashamed of being crippled. It was all I knew. I dragged my gammy leg around until I got a splint. Dad taught me to swim. He even made me a bike. With hand brakes. I was so desperate to know how it felt to go fast. My good leg had to do all the work, of course. My bad leg just went along for the ride.”

She guffaws at the memory.

“I went to work at sixteen. Trained as a shorthand typist at Underwood Business College in Murray Street. I met my husband at a dance at the Claremont Showgrounds. I’d gone on a blind date with someone else. He’d just played a rugby game and done his knee. It was meant to be: we had matching limps!”

I ask how many children she had.

“Four. In six years.”

I’m bowled over but she just grins.

“At night, when my babies cried, I’d hop straight out of bed, tuck them under my arm and hop back to bed. I never once thought what’d happen if I fell.

When they were bigger, I’d walk the pram to the shops, trailing three little kids. My oldest daughter dragged one foot, because that’s how Mummy walked. In the end, with all the neighbours’ commenting, I had to de-limp her.”

I giggle at the thought.

“I feel so lucky.” she says firmly. “I could’ve been one of those kids in an iron lung. But all I lost was the use of a leg.”

She slaps her robust right thigh. “This leg has kept me upright for 74 years. And you know what?” she whispers, craning forward. “I might’ve got polio, but I’ve never had a sick day since. Except ten weeks ago, I had my gall bladder out. The doctor asked me, ‘How do you go with antibiotics?’ I said: ‘Dunno. Never had any.’”

“Don’t you worry now about falling?” I ask, pointing to her walker.

“I never wanted to be seen with a frame,” she replies. “But I thought: Well, you’re nearly 80. Stuff your vanity. It’s a safety thing now.”

It’s time for me to collect the kids.

She lurches up from the table and repositions herself behind her walker before steering it between the crowded tables.

Out on the grassy verge, I promise to remember her to my mum.

“See if she can still do this,” she says.

Sidestepping her walker, she bends smoothly from her waist, folds herself in half and places her hands palm-down on the lawn by her feet.

“You’re a gymnast!” I say, amazed.

“Kind of,” she says, with a hint of pride.

“When you’re missing a knee you get very good at bending your back to pick things up. Though I’d give my right leg to run up a flight of stairs.”

Stuff and Nonsense

Stuff and Nonsense
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday June 20, 2015

I rang the shiny doorbell and waited. The doormat said ‘hello.’ I studied the flowery cursive etched into the coir matting. Cute idea, I mused.

Despite the blustery day, the porch was pristine. I cast around for a mound of discarded school shoes. Where were my young son’s feculent socks, peeled from sweaty feet and flung to the ground in the rush to play?

The door swung open and a glamorous school-mum ushered me inside.

“The boys are having a ball,” she said. Half a dozen small, excited voices echoed from somewhere upstairs.

The house was a gleaming study in polished stone. Credenzas and tables were clutter-free. The kitchen bench was a naked slab of white marble. A bank of glass doors were pellucid and fingerprint-less. I spotted the missing shoes on a metal rack, each paired neatly with a slug of matching sock.

“How can you be this tidy with three children?” I sighed. I hoped she’d mollify me by flinging open a cupboard to reveal a welter of lidless Tupperware.

“I hate clutter,” she replied instead. “It makes me feel tense.”

I nodded sympathetically, praying she never arrives at my place unannounced.

Back home, with my kids in the bath, I began folding a pyramid of washing and surveyed the accumulated clutter of five lives. If cleanliness is next to godliness, my living room is a portal to perdition.

There’s my husband’s thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, hogging one end of our dining table, untouched for a month. I’m tempted to get out the vacuum cleaner and finish the job for him.

At the other end of the table, teenaged son reigns over his electronic kingdom. He’s suckered to his laptop via headphones, the contents of his schoolbag scattered under his chair. A spaghetti junction of life-sustaining computer cables and chargers renders the rest of the table useless.

I swivel to take in the TV room and contemplate our bookcase packed with spines: all that reading, waiting for me. My recipe books are crammed into every space. One shelf hosts a still life of encrusted chemist’s bottles, exhumed by the bobcat when we dug the pool. I won’t part with my amber jewels: they know the secrets of our century-old house.

A nook beside the kitchen holds three delicate bowls made by an old potter in Provence. On the smallest bowl he’d painted a little girl on a swing. We agreed it was a fine likeness of my daughter. I’d carried those bowls, as precious as Faberge Eggs, through three airports.

So why all this talk about minimalism? Will de-cluttering my home make me calm and controlled? I doubt it. I tried spring cleaning once. It only proved I’m a hoarder the rest of the year.

I already feel besieged by my 21st century life; the pressure to be constantly available. Some days I feel swamped by the constant emails demanding replies, the texts and phone messages needing acknowledgement, the wads of bills and paperwork calling my name.

Perhaps our clutter has gained a life of its own. Somewhere between the 60s and the 90s, desire became need. Shopping became a competitive sport. I blame China. Who else could mass-produce the gorgeous coffee cups I just bought from Freedom for $2.95 each.

“Did we need more coffee cups?” asked my husband, whose idea of need is different to my own.

I didn’t have all this stuff when I was young. In my twenties, I had one black vinyl sofa, a motley assortment of crockery bought from a garage sale and a futon that hurt my back. When my girlfriend and I moved house, we called in a mate with a taxi truck. Piled up in the van, our stuff occupied so little space, we could have set up house right there on the tray.

For the 25 years since, I have collected, displayed, stockpiled. I’d like to offload the Romertopf clay roaster I was given for my 21st but it seems ungrateful. Instead, it idles in a dark cupboard with my grandmother’s pressure cooker, a blackened jaffle iron and a Moroccan tagine.

I have no idea what’s in my wardrobe, but it’s bursting. I own clothing from size 8 to 14. It doesn’t matter whether I’m in a skinny stage, a heavily pregnant stage or a Toblerone stage, I’m know I’m covered.

The man of the house, however, doesn’t need stuff. He could be happy with nothing more than a ten-year-old ute, a comfortable sofa, a squishy pillow, a newspaper, a remote control, his ugg boots and a barbecue.

Me? I like to arrange my clutter in expensive baskets so it looks more attractive. I know that every time I have a clean-out, I end up re-creating what I already had. I suspect the joy of ditching all that stuff is just as illusory as the joy of acquiring it in the first place.

Minimalist? I’m a maximalist.

Mother Love

Mother Love
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday June 13, 2015

I joined the tail of the takeaway coffee queue as two women settled themselves at an empty table beside me. The older woman signalled the waitress by gesticulating above her head. The younger one looked away, abashed.

The older woman ordered a latte.

“Can we keep that door open?” she asked the waitress politely, pointing at the cafe’s front door.

“It’s a bit stuffy.”

Her companion appeared mortified. “Mum!” she whispered urgently. “It’s fine.”

The waitress obligingly edged the door ajar. The mother smiled her thanks and leaned across the table, eager to chat. She looked sweet, sensible, middle-aged.

I guessed the daughter was about 15, fully grown but still gauche. She was clearly miffed at having a mother make preposterous demands of a waitress.

My mum and I once inhabited the same parallel universe. Aged 16, I feared a shopping expedition was doomed if Mum suggested she join me. What if she wore her enormous paisley scarf? What if someone overheard her making a fuss in the change rooms? Would she reflect badly on me? I was such a teenaged twerp.

But if I rewind my memory further to when I was small, I can remember my desperation to be near her. The smell of her was a heady melange of Oil of Olay, Velvet soap and talcum powder. I can recall the shape of her beautiful hands, the slender fingers, their perfect oval nails. I loved her smooth muscled calves; can still hear the buzz of her Remington Princess electric shaver as she sanded her legs before tennis. I’m still able to summons the scent of her Coty lipstick; how she’d kiss my forehead as I sat in her lap, my head tucked under her chin, breathing in the warmth of her neck. Nothing ever went wrong in my life when she was around.

Until I was eight. I’d started a new school. Mum had a new job and a new habit of arriving late to collect me.

“Mr Elsner needed me to type a letter,” she’d say.

Or: “I had to take dictation.”

I didn’t care about the demands on a working single mother, because I was the last child left clinging to the monkey bars in the deserted playground. All my friends were home drinking Ovaltine and snarfing Gingernuts. My mother was likely dead. She’d been hit by a truck. Or shot by a bank robber. By the time her battleship-grey Sigma rounded the corner, I was already in an orphanage and inconsolable. The world was a fearful place without her.

Age 11, she whacked me across the ear. I’d been whining and thrashing about while she tried to brush my knotted hair. I deserved that slap. But I pretended to be deaf for two days.

“Pardon?” I strained, cupping my good ear so she’d have to repeat her question. On day three she apologised, but I was tired of being deaf by then. It was a hollow victory.

Aged 26 and living in Sydney, I couldn’t wait for her visits. We’d drink G & T’s on my cramped balcony and plan weekend adventures in the Blue Mountains. She was as much fun as any of my girlfriends. They came to her for advice about terrible bosses and wayward boyfriends. She could empathise with any problem.

She walked me down the aisle the day I was married. She was as excited as I was, until she saw the crowd and had to pause to overcome her nerves. When I was pregnant, she’d feel her way around my belly while explaining to her unborn grandchild the importance of following the Eagles.

As I grappled with the stricken nights and foggy days of multiple motherhood, she’d arrive with a cottage pie and a tray of baked apples. Then she’d gather up baby, toddler and nine-year-old and herd them to the park to play Frisbee.

My children call her Noo-Noo. Always have. None of us can remember why. This year, Noo-Noo’s 79th, she and I are spending a lot of time in doctors’ waiting rooms. I now hold her arthritic hand the way she held my grandmother’s. I see her skin has become crepe-paper thin, the knuckles swollen, the fingers painfully bent.

We laugh at what’s become of her beautiful hands, what the years will do to mine. She tells me she found her missing keys in the fridge. Ten minutes later she tells me again. I smile and nod but I fear for the prospect that mother and daughter are reversing roles.

The doctor writes her another script to add to her collection. We go for coffee before I drop her home. She talks about the opera season in New York, how much she’d love to go. “Maybe I should stay closer to home,” she says. I think I hear a tinge of unease. But she’s already up and gleefully inspecting the cake cabinet.

Hanging on the Line

Hanging on the Line
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday June 6, 2015

A dozen of us are waiting testily in the phone shop. We’re each clutching a malfunctioning device or a disputed phone bill. The atmosphere reeks of discontent.

Grudgingly, we split into three queues and align ourselves in front of the three young Ubermenschen standing behind the counter. I choose the line leading to a tall hipster-dude who looks technologically supreme behind his workstation.

With nothing to do but wait, I study the shop assistants. Hipster-dude’s black bushranger beard sits incongruously below the pale shiny dome of his head. But I admire his Lemtosh specs, which give him an air of a teenaged Woody Allen – before the neuroses embedded.

He abandons his terminal to fetch something from a back room. I notice he’s gripped from groin to ankle by a pair of jeans so tight they must be his sister’s. A long-sleeved gingham shirt with contrasting cuffs is suctioned under his waistband, the same shirt all his colleagues are wearing. I wonder if this phone company sees the irony in dressing its staff as cowboys.

Five minutes tick by and hipster-dude fails to reappear. His lady customer – one ahead of me – swivels to mouth me a “Sorry.” I give her an empathetic shrug. She turns back, rests her elbows dutifully on the counter and marks another few minutes by tapping out a ditty with polished fingernails.

The queue next to mine is becoming agitated. A burly fellow in a leather jacket is at breaking point. He sighs loudly and flaps his phone bill over his head as a female shop assistant deserts her workstation for the second time and vanishes through the rear door. Casting around for an ally, leather-jacket catches my eye:

“Bloody phone companies!” he says. “Happily take all your money but don’t wanna know you when they cock up!”

The gent behind him grunts agreement. The mood in the shop is one of barely-restrained rage.

That’s when I notice we customers are all of a certain age: there isn’t an unlined face amongst us. We’re now the serfs; our masters are the young techno-aristocrats. Since when did we depend on kids half our age to fix our mobiles and backup our lives?

I’m forever begging my teenager to help me meet the demands of my gadgets. This is a boy who at 14, could make me a Pentium chip using two Oreos, a paper clip and a ball bearing but still can’t spell biscuit.

“Just click ‘Yes’,” is his mantra.

“But what am I saying ‘Yes’ to?” I ask nervously.

“It doesn’t matter, Mum. Just say ‘Yes.’”

A movement at the counter catches my eye. The lady with the red fingernails turns to leave.

I feel a surge of optimism and dutifully step forward, proffering my iPhone 5 to hipster-dude.

“It just stopped working,” I say, fingering the cracked screen. “I tried to fix it, but it’s dead.”

My phone lies mutely on the counter. I peel off the hot-pink case and press the home button to demonstrate its uselessness. The screen remains an inky void. Stripped of its plastic finery, my iPhone looks old-fangled.

Hipster-dude begins pressing buttons in combination. In his smooth hands, my phone leaps to life and a dozen small icons reappear. Along the top, I see a little message pulsing. ‘SOS’ it reads.

“You’ve taken out the SIM card, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” I admit sheepishly.

“It won’t like that.”

“Well, I was trying to fix it.”

“You’ve put the SIM card in upside down!”

I wonder if he’s expecting my embarrassment or my indignation. Instead, I launch a pre-emptive strike to disguise my incompetence.

“I’m out of contract, aren’t I? How much to upgrade to an iPhone 6?”

I imagine the power shifting between us.

He points to a chart on the counter-top. “If you go to this plan, you’ll get one for free.”

“Great,” I say. “I’d like a silver one please.” (Hoping I don’t sound shallow).

Hipster-dude slips away to process my new contract. I glance at the queue beside me. Leather-jacket-man is berating the girl-assistant over his phone bill.

He jabs a finger at her and loudly demands a refund.

“Calm down, sir,” she says quietly. “I’m doing the best I can.”

He throws up his hands, swipes his paperwork from the counter and storms out of the shop, just as hipster-dude returns with my new phone.

“Geez! Does that happen often?” I ask, overtaken by a sudden surge of sympathy.

“All the time,” he replies wearily. “Phones make people crazy.”

He presents me with a contract as thick as the one Gina signed to start up the Roy Hill mine. Unperturbed, I sign away the next two years of my life. Clutching my shiny new plaything, I thank him and skip out of the shop.

Fish out of Water

Fish out of Water
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday May 30, 2015

Hope is two goldfish pootling in a plastic bag of water.

Small daughter and I stood transfixed in the pet shop. A wall of fish tanks glowed in iridescent greens and blues. A dozen filters hummed a soporific tune. Everywhere we looked, fish were darting hither and yon, their coruscating skins a riot of colours.

In the nearest tank, an orange pipsqueak swayed his translucent tail and lazily glided towards his watery window. Squishing his little fishy lips against the glass, he ogled us with globular eyes.

“That’s the one!” shouted five-year-old daughter, jabbing her finger against the tank. The goldfish didn’t flinch. I took that as a sign of emotional resilience.

“I’m gonna call him ‘Finger’” she said. “Fish Finger for short.”

“Shouldn’t your brother name him?” I said. “After all, it’s his birthday.”

She ignored me, and resumed skipping sideways along the tanks, pressing one eye against the glass when a fish caught her fancy. A teenaged sales assistant in khaki uniform shadowed her like a prison guard.

Daughter let out a shriek. She jabbed at a corner where an odd-looking goldfish was poking around in a weed. “Look! He’s got an orange raspberry on his head!”

“It’s a lionhead,” said the fish curator flatly, barely disguising his contempt.

He turned to me, twirling a net the size of a fly swat.

“She’s not going to bang on the tank at home?”

“Oh, no” I reassured him. “They’ll be in a bowl.”

I pointed at Finger, still staring at us from his window seat. “Can we have that one?” I said. Then I singled out the Lionhead with orange beanie from his myriad strange-hatted siblings. “And that one.”

Back in the car, my youngster cradled her brother’s birthday fish, each plastic bag knotted, but now dangerously close to horizontal.

I drove home timorously, weaving around corners and crawling over speed humps trying not to verify Newton’s first law of motion.

“Finger’s making my hand look bigger,” called my daughter from the back seat, inspecting her palm through the prism of the bag. I tried to explain to her the theory of refraction and how water can magnify images by deflecting light rays but she had the attention span of a goldfish.

“Mum! Finger just touched my finger with his tail. Hey! That’s two times I said Finger!”

Her newly 8-year-old brother was ecstatic with his new pets. He christened Finger’s playmate Flip.

For the next hour, boy glued himself to fishbowl. Finger and Flip played tag for his amusement, ducking between the plastic fronds of their underwater palm tree. At bedtime, he reluctantly wished them good night. Ten hours later he was scurrying down the stairs to bid them top o’ the morning.

After two days, I wondered if our aquatic guests were enjoying their celebrity? Did they mind the constant gawping; the succession of school-children pressing curious faces against their bowl, who banged and tapped knuckles against their glass and dipped grubby fingers in their pond?

For all I knew, our fish felt liberated. Perhaps they thought they were swimming in the sparkling waters of Lake Victoria? After all, food was abundant. Every day, delicate wafers appeared as if by magic on the surface. Life in the goldfish bowl was good.

On day three, we awoke to find Flip swimming backstroke. His tummy looked distended as he took his reverse constitutional around the palm tree. Teenage son caught my eye, smirked and swiped his index finger across his throat. I shot him a warning glare. “He’s fine,” I announced for 8-year-old’s benefit. “Flip’s just swimming upside down for fun.”

Popping home at lunchtime, I noticed Flip had mastered sidestroke, but didn’t appear to be enjoying it. I pleaded with him to buck up for the sake of the birthday boy, but he just looked at me, fins trembling. (No-one feels as helpless as the owner of a sick goldfish.)

It was dark when the kids and I stormed in the door after sport. Flip was lying on the rainbow-coloured gravel, motionless.

“He’s dead! He’s dead!” wailed eight-year-old.

“He can’t be dead,” said his sister, screwing up her face with surprise. “His eyes are open.”

Her brother was inconsolable. “Don’t worry,” she said, throwing a comforting arm around his waist. “He must have banged his head on the glass.”

I shepherded my birthday boy into the kitchen for grief counselling while his father spooned Flip out of his bowl and wrapped him in paper towel. I could make out the impression of Flip’s damp orange body inside his papery bier, like the Shroud of Turin. My husband sidled to the toilet to give him a burial at sea.

RIP Flip.

We’re heading back to the pet store today. Flip’s under warranty (I think).