Author: Elisabeth

Auto-fiction: A dingo took my baby

For her daughter’s second birthday, Laura visited her local toyshop. It was 1984 and the city was pockmarked with similar stores loaded to the rafters with every child’s dream.

A barn of a place, toys were arranged in rows and ranked according to age. Babies’ gear to the right, with each additional age grouping lumped together and gendered along the various rows.

Toys that moved for boys and all things pink and stationary for girls. 

Even in 1984 the pressure placed on children to identify with the bodies into which they were born annoyed Laura, but the pull of her own childhood memories was too great.

Had her daughter been born a son, Laura was determined she would never buy combat toys or superheroes like those displayed loudly in rows for boys aged five and upwards.

But the lure of the nearby doll section was impossible to ignore.

There she sat. The biggest baby doll Laura had ever seen. A doll, the size of an actual baby, only this doll-baby must have been a healthy six-month-old with oversized head, fake brown hair clamped over its scalp, rubber arms and legs attached to a flexible torso made of cloth.

The doll came dressed in a green outfit, shorts and press stud top that could be removed for washing.

Laura would have preferred a more lifelike representation of the human form, but in 1984 manufacturers had not yet learned to make plastic pliable enough so it felt like the real thing. Even as they curved the baby’s fingers just so and the toes likewise tilted inwards as if moulded from the image of a real baby caught in sleep. 

Laura knew it was a mistake to buy this baby for her daughter. The doll was almost as tall as her two-year-old but memories from her own childhood filtered through. The joy she felt – admittedly as an older child – when she and her sister opened their Christmas presents one year to discover they shared identical Rothmans dolls. One in a pink nappy, the other in blue. These dolls all made of plastic, although not quite the size of the doll baby now in her arms, were large enough to give Laura the illusion as a seven-year-old she was nursing her own baby. She loved poking the mock bottle with its pointed teat into her baby’s mouth. Loved pulling off the layers of clothing she arranged on its unforgiving body. Loved to lie it down to sleep and then pull the doll into a possessive embrace whenever Laura decided her baby had slept long enough. 

The price was almost as big as the baby doll, but Laura knew this chance would not come again. Her chance to give her daughter something she’d have loved herself. Something as magnificent as the biggest baby in the doll kingdom and she looked forward to the birthday morning when Pippa would open the doll to screams of delight.

This did not happen. On the day, Pippa ripped off the colourful paper and looked at the monster baby with an expression of utter bemusement. What do I do with this? 

‘We’ll call it Azaria,’ Pippa’s dad said looking askance at the doll. He had told Laura, soon after she brought the creature home and pulled it from its paper bag, it was over the top. 

Pippa flung Azaria to one side as she pulled at the wrapping of her other presents, more interested in the small tokens her mother had bought to add to the sense of celebration.

Not that Laura thought anything else was necessary, but she believed small children should not have to settle for only one present on their birthday. And although there would be many more gifts later that day, as Laura and Tom had invited twenty of their adult friends, most of whom had small children like Pippa to her first ever proper birthday party, she needed more than one gift from her parents to underscore the celebration.

At least Laura needed to buy more than one for her. 

In 1984 people still argued over Lindy Chamberlain’s innocence or guilt. She had claimed a dingo stole her baby from a camp tent in Alice Springs, and sometime later, a jump suit was found in bushes nearby. There were also hints of what was thought to be blood stains in the boot of the Chamberlain family car. 

Azaria, the actual baby, was only nine weeks old when she disappeared, and after much scrutiny and prejudice against a mother who was foolhardy enough to take her new baby camping in the desert, the courts looked severely upon her demeanour as a woman who showed no proper grief. 

Laura knew about the mixed feelings mothers might have towards their babies. She had felt them too, especially when Pippa first came into the world. How her cries unsettled Laura to the point she went to the chemist to buy Merbentyl, a red syrup that was intended to help baby’s deal with their colic. And sleep better.

Merbentyl is no longer recommended for babies under six months, but Laura didn’t know this then. She was convinced Pippa’s tears erupted because of pain inside her small body from frothy mother’s milk that went down too fast. She had no sense of the workings of a small person’s digestive system. Only that it was immature and must hurt. 

Laura had looked forward to the birth and right up until it happened it did not register that a real flesh and blood baby would be different from the Rothmans dolls of her childhood.

A real baby would not cooperate and go to sleep on demand, feed on Laura’s request and stop feeding when it suited her mother. 

In the hospital after a thirty-six-hour labour, at the end of which Laura, drugged to near paralysis on Pethidine, could no longer push. Her doctor in a room filled with students and nurses, hitched Laura into stirrups and stretched her legs wide.

She had no energy left to protest or to feel shame when the doctor raised his fingers-of-steel. Forceps shaped like those a doctor 29 years earlier had used on Laura’s own unborn head as her mother lay on a hospital gurney, which Laura’s mother later described as a butcher’s table.

He, too, dragged out Laura, as the other doctor pulled Pippa, small marks left on both foreheads that stayed visible only a day or two. 

Several hours later – a worry to Laura who came from the school that recommended early bonding of mother and child, though Laura could not stay awake until the evening – she feared for her baby.

Pippa was born at lunchtime. And when Laura woke in her hospital bed with three other women feeding babies in beds nearby, she begged a nurse to produce hers. 

Not long after the baby arrived, swaddled in a seersucker wrap and whimpering, the nurse drew curtains around Laura’s bed, and proceeded to teach mother and baby the art of feeding. Not from the pointed teat of her childhood, but from her adult sized nipples.

Laura had nurtured them as her pregnancy progressed, rubbing them with lanolin to increase their flexibility. She was awed when she squeezed the first of the sticky yellow colostrum from each nipple several weeks before her baby appeared. 

Laura had not even considered this possibility before Pippa was born. She knew she wanted to breast feed. It was a given, but she had no idea how this might happen. It was not without mishap to help Pippa get the hang of latching on but latch on Pippa did and feeding became Laura’s default source of comfort. Whenever Pippa cried, hungry or not, Laura attached her to a breast and Pippa obliged, until she was nine months old. 

Laura took the art of feeding to heart. The hospital nurses advised allowing Pippa to suckle only three minutes on each side before shifting to give her nipples a rest.

Laura mistook the nipple care when one nurse told her how to prevent baby from catching an infection hygiene was essential. Laura bathed her nipples in methylated spirits after each feed.

It stung as tiny cracks erupted on her skin under Pippa’s ferocious sucking. Her nipples screamed in pain. Only when she left the hospital did Laura realise her mistake. 

The rules of hospital faded over time and mother and baby fell into an easier rhythm. Then, months later, Laura and Tom took Pippa on a picnic to Hanging Rock. Around lunch time they spread a check blanket over a flat patch of ground and Laura drew Pippa to her, in readiness for a feed. Pippa protested and screamed. She stopped only when Laura set her upright.

Laura tried several times later that day and the next to feed her daughter, but the more she tried the more Pippa refused. 

In time Laura was convinced Pippa had weaned herself. This was okay, though over the next several days Laura’s breasts grew hard and painful like gigantic Tombowlers.

Pippa was old enough then to drink from a cup and she took her cow’s milk this way and water and juice and any other liquid she needed to help to lubricate her tiny body. The months moved on.

By the time the courts refused to believe a dingo had taken Azaria, and her innocent parents were in prison, Pippa was well on her way to toddlerhood.

Although Laura baulked at the name her husband had chosen for the doll baby, she saw the funny side of it. Especially when Pippa took to introducing the doll to adult friends.

Pippa never took to playing for long with Azaria. Something of the size differential, or her mother’s desire, got in the way. 

Azaria languished in a corner cupboard through another two actual babies born to Laura and Tom. And neither of these two, like Pippa, took to playing with Azaria. They wanted the latest in Cabbage Patch dolls, the real ones not the fakes. 

One day during a quiet cull of no longer used children’s toys, Laura drove Azaria to her local Opportunity shop in the hope some other child might enjoy the company of this doll baby. A child who might give this monster baby a better name, a name not synonymous with death and dingos. 

A lion in my dreams

Fear comes to me in the form of unexpected loud noises, sudden raised voices, a series of inexplicable sirens in the street outside my house, one after the other, as if they’re rushing to a crisis not far away. 

Fear comes at the sight on blood on a small child’s lip after a fall, or the loud wail, again of a small child, who has fallen from a height. Fear comes from the gush of blood that spurted from my daughter’s foot thirty years ago after she had caught it in the spokes of an exercise bike. A severed artery, I imagined, not knowing where significant arteries exist on the body. 

Fear comes in not knowing how to make sense of events happening around me as in the secrecy that surrounded the analytic training. We were not to discuss it. Certainly not with our teachers. 

Fear comes on days when the temperature climbs steadily and beyond forty degrees centigrade under a cruel and relentless sun. Contrariwise, when the wind picks up on bleak days and the branches on the pin oak in our garden are about to shear off and fall onto the roof.

Fear is my father. The sound of his footfall in the hallway at 6.00 pm, end of his workday and we children scurrying from the lounge room away from the lure of the television to respective bedrooms where we might be safe. 

In my dream the other night, a lion took my hand into its mouth and gripped on tight. I could feel the point of its teeth against my flesh, but it did not bite. 

Another lion dream and I have many. Lions and wild cats in my dreams, threatening to break in, to break skin, to terrify and destroy. Mrs Milanova said the lion was a part of me, signifying hunger in some instances, rage in others, and always a desperation that spoke of untold terrors, as much of myself as of others.

Do unto others, as you would have them do to you…Turn the other cheek…Love thy neighbour… Biblical injunctions writ large in my memory as statements without qualification. Even when I first heard them as a small child I resisted their lure. 

Fear comes in the form of getting caught.

My mother bought groceries from Mr Broekhoff’s store on the corner of Wentworth Avenue and Canterbury Road. Two houses down from us. It was a wide-open store from memory, with wooden floors and in every corner, sacks of sugar, grain, rice, and dried beans, which he sold by weight in brown paper bags. This, before biscuits were contained in bright coloured wrappers, though these came later and Mr Brockhoff lined them on shelves behind his head along with fly spray in squirt cans, corned beef and baked beans. Tinned beans and peas.

The corned beef came in round edged tins with a key attached two thirds up. My mother turned the key to one side and the tin came away to reveal a slab of cooked pink meat, without any blood or skin. Bits of orange/yellow jelly flecked its sides, and we ate it sliced on white bread for picnic lunches when my mother could afford. 

Mr Brockhoff sold Arnott’s biscuits, sweet and dry/savoury, from tins the height of upright shoe boxes but wider. This was the cheapest way. Biscuits by the pound. Even cheaper to buy the broken ones, which my mother bought for us kids, but for visitors she insisted on the unbroken biscuits, which she arranged on plates to accompany the endless cups of tea she offered my aunts and uncles on Sundays when they rocked up to our house with their several children. 

My mother’s face glowed with pleasure. My father, sober by then and unable to get any more alcohol when nothing stayed open on Sundays, except for milk bars which stocked only necessities. Lollies, cigarettes, milk, and bread. My father tried to join in but conversation was not his happy place, unlike my mother who might as well have been back in Holland. Her joy transparent. 

After our visitors left and the six o’clock news came onto the television, my father soaked in tea and a hangover, sat silent and surly in the corner. I took my spot behind the single lounge chair that flanked a side wall near the door and hid there out of view to watch television through the gap between chair and wall. 

From time to time during advertisement breaks I snuck into the kitchen and lifted a stash of biscuits from its brown paper bag. On good days there were double deckers: Monte Carlos, custard creams, and orange slice. Two for the joy of one. And I piled them into my pockets unseen, then slid behind my chair as the television droned on into the Sunday evening movie. No one noticed me and my hoard of sweetness, which I nibbled biscuit after biscuit. 

‘They’re for visitors,’ my mother said whenever we pleaded with her to open one of the biscuit packets she had bought from Mr Brockhoff. On a whim because they signified opulence and luxury, something she longed for. The war had made people hungry, she told me. For sweets, for butter and sugar. 

To compensate, my mother taught us to make butter biscuits. A simple affair of flour, and sugar in equal quantifies and half a stick of butter. You mixed the flour and sugar together in a bowl, made a well in the centre, then poured in the butter melted in a pot over the stove. I loved to watch the gold river catch at the sides of flour with its silver glint of sugar grains, and then force the lot together with her hands. Dexterous as the ratio of butter to dry called for vigour. 

When it was well mixed she formed small balls in her hands, the size of golf balls then flattened them on a well-greased tray with a fork indentation in the middle for decoration. Then she baked them in a moderate oven. When cooled the biscuits were crisp and brittle. Strangely delicious given their basic composition. 

This is the stuff of childhood. How easily satisfied with foods that contain little by way of taste and complexity beyond the sweet or salty. To this end, I mixed cocoa powder with white sugar in the bottom of a cup and stirred them together then sat in another secret corner, this time in the kitchen or my bedroom, spooning cocoa sugar into my mouth. This in the days when no one had told me how sugar ate at the enamel on your teeth and caused decay. 

I ate my cocoa sugar with impunity, the way a small child might dip into a pot of honey and eat it with a spoon. Sweet and simple, an antidote to fear.