Columns from The Weekend West

Ros Thomas 26/09/2015 Ros Thomas 26/09/2015

Closed Book

My teenage son’s dislike of reading is a pall between us. I am alternately saddened and infuriated by his sudden rejection of books. A pile of them sit idly on his bedside table, attracting dust. Their spines are stacked to face his pillow, the titles shouting to his deaf ears.

Every few weeks, I add another book to the pile, hoping it will ignite some glimmer of interest. I encourage, I cajole, I coerce. I paint him word-pictures of his smaller self, bewitched by the favourite stories of his childhood. I remind him how he had always been a rapacious reader; his books as precious as his Lego. I pull the Roald Dahls from his bookcase. We had bedded down with them night after night, the pair of us in raptures. I leave them lying around to serve as small mnemonics of the delights of reading. He is unmoved.

Ros Thomas 04/04/2015 Ros Thomas 04/04/2015

A Line to the Past

Kulin seems deserted this Sunday morning. The town’s womenfolk are sleeping-in after last night’s dinner dance. The kids on bikes yesterday must be watching TV. Two brown honeyeaters pirouette noisily overhead. They bank sharply before alighting unsteadily on a power line. Theirs is the only movement on Stewart Street.

My newly five-year-old daughter, keen to explore, kicks up a shower of red pebbles from the gravel footpath. We wander past a derelict shop. In the window is a faded sepia photograph of a swarthy bloke wearing a mug-shot smirk. His white shirt-sleeves are rolled up above his elbows, business-like. My pint-sized companion is captivated by his eyebrows, which sit on his jutting forehead like two hairy caterpillars. I read the caption:

Ros Thomas 24/01/2015 Ros Thomas 24/01/2015

Like the clappers

Rough landings test my nerves. Belted tightly into my window seat, I stared at the wing tip flexing violently. The rain sheeted in grey gusts. My bird’s eye view of the city was a blur. As the cabin jolted and jerked, the young woman next to me clutched our armrest. She caught my eye, searching for reassurance. I returned her a half-hearted smile and stiffened for the landing.

One set of wheels slammed onto the runway, then the other. I gasped as we lurched sideways and the overhead lockers groaned. The engines roared into reverse and the air brakes on the wing bit into the thick air.

Above the dying screech of the engines, I heard the sudden but unmistakeable sound of someone clapping a few rows ahead of me. My neighbour glanced sideways at me and began clapping too. I felt compelled to join her. A moment later, the cabin erupted into brief applause: we passengers united in our appreciation for our pilots’ skill.

Ros Thomas 06/12/2014 Ros Thomas 06/12/2014

Bite Your Tongue

It was the first roadhouse I’d seen in forty-five minutes and I needed coffee and petrol. In that order. I swung off the Brand highway and pulled up at the pump, feeling dwarfed by the half a dozen road trains stretched out across the carpark.

At the counter, I stood beside a truckie who made me feel petite.

“A coupla cheese sausages and a pie n’ sauce,” he said.

In the bain-marie, two shrivelled sausages with wrinkly red hides lay sweating behind the glass.

“How’d they get the cheese in?” I said, thinking out loud.

“Beats me,” said the truckie, “but they’re bloody good,” and he slapped a ten dollar note on the counter and gathered up his two paper bags.

Ros Thomas 01/11/2014 Ros Thomas 01/11/2014

Farewell, my friend

I’m not one for living in the past. But the death of a long-ago friend has marked me in strange ways. Our friendship blossomed during a summer of waitressing in 1985, the year I turned 18. We shared the breakfast shift at the North Cott cafe, overlooking the beach. Her name was Jan. Her name-tag said so.

She was twelve years older, fit and tanned, a single mum to two girls. I’d pull up to the cafe at 6am and see her dilapidated Volvo 240 parked skew-whiff out front, windows open and a pack of Sterling Ultra Milds on the front seat.

Ros Thomas 04/10/2014 Ros Thomas 04/10/2014

Old School Ties

She weaved through the crowd towards me. I grinned and waved. I hadn’t seen her since I was 17 and now I was 46. Yet here we were at our thirty year high school reunion and she’d hardly changed. She looked softer than I remembered. Her hair was shorter. It suited her.

She squeezed in beside me at the bar. As I puckered up to greet her, I saw her eyes dart down to my name badge and back up to meet mine. In that instant, I realised she had no idea who I was.

My school-mate tried to recover her composure. “Ros!” she said brightly, but my ego had already collapsed. Our conversation lurched into a catalogue of our offspring and then we floundered. I made a lame excuse about needing the bathroom and fled.

Ros Thomas 27/09/2014 Ros Thomas 27/09/2014

On with the show

When I was 11, Mum and I moved into a duplex in Graylands. In 1978, the posh people of Claremont liked to call Graylands ‘the wrong side of the tracks.’

It was hemmed in between bushland and the railway line at Karrakatta. My nearest park was the cemetery. But it was the maximum security mental hospital that gave Graylands its ignominious reputation.

In those unenlightened days, Mrs Watson, who lived in the front duplex next door, would refer to the hospital in hushed tones as the “lunatic asylum.” Mr Wheeler, the Vietnam War vet from two doors down, liked to spook me by pointing out some bloke swaying up our street towards the corner bottle shop. “Reckon he’s escaped from the loony bin?” he’d whisper.

Ros Thomas 06/09/2014 Ros Thomas 06/09/2014

Reality Bites

“I’m trying to get the kids excited about the power of words,” her email said. “They are selecting subjects (for the rest of their lives).”

It was a letter from a high school English teacher, asking if I’d talk to her Year 10s. I cast my mind back to last century and tried to remember being 15.

That was the year I rolled down my camel-brown school socks until they sat like a pair of bagels around my ankles. I thought those bagel-socks made my legs look longer and shapelier. Really, I just looked like someone who needed to pull her socks up.