Fortunately, a much, much larger part of me told that tiny part to shut the hell up and make this all finish, and also that maybe crying a bit would be a good idea. That might have just been because I was tired and hungry, to be honest, or maybe because I’d noticed that my wife hadn’t been as fussed about my no longer coming as I might have reasonably assumed from my phone call. That could have been a foreshadowing of how the next eighteen months would shake out, had I bothered to question it.
But, hey, I wasn’t about to search the deepest corners of my marriage at that point. Evidently I wasn’t even in the emotional place to search the deepest corners of my carry-on luggage.
At last, after an hour of circular arguments and threats about just how bad they could make things for me, the fight abruptly went out of my interrogators and they plonked a document in front of me to sign. The gist of said document was that they would be keeping my ninja star – thereby robbing me of what would have been a hilarious prop in retellings of this story – and that I would have an active record with the Federal Police in case there was a sudden spate of ninja terrorism. The file would eventually be closed when I was deemed no longer a threat.
That period turned out to be a matter of weeks, at which point I went into the Federal Police headquarters in Adelaide’s CBD and signed another bit of paper. In my memory it was a year or more later but, given that I was living in Sydney by May, that can’t possibly have been the case. Also, I remember it just saying that I was not a ninja, with a helpful little cartoon of a masked figure in a circle with a line through it. But I’m pretty sure that can’t be right either.
All that was to come, though. After my interrogation it was well and truly late, but I went back to the terminal to have a chat with the airline staff about how many flights remained that evening (none), how much of a refund I’d receive given the circumstances (sharp intake of breath), and how I’d feel about being rescheduled to a 6.30 flight the following morning (cautiously positive, although given the amount of wine I correctly anticipated I would be drinking over the course of the evening to come, that flight would be a turbulent journey of hungover regret worthy of its own story).
As a white middle-class man there were obviously no repercussions. I’ve travelled internationally with not so much as a question at Customs about my shady Shinobi past, and have tweeted inflammatory rhetoric about Peter Dutton without worrying that it would land me on Christmas Island.
I did remain vigilant about checking my bag for damn near everything for years afterwards, until the rules at different airports became so individual and arbitrary that I couldn’t be bothered trying to remember if this specific airport had declared war on fold-up umbrellas or whether security guards would respond to my pulling out a Ventolin inhaler by staring at me as though I was mad. So I figured that I’d just push my bag through and let Fate decide.
But I do know what I’ll do next time I see them scan and rescan my bag: throw down a smoke grenade and disappear like a ghost. ‘You want to know about my bag? I wasn’t even there, copper. I wasn’t even there.’
Mind My Baby
Cathy Wilcox
THIS IS A story set in Paris, about a catastrophe that’s arguably not huge on a world scale. It’s a story of travel and how sometimes you forget to take proper account of how having a baby can affect your plans.
I was invited one year to go and stay with my long-time friend Celina, who lived in a nice suburb on the outskirts of Paris, about an hour from the centre by train. I’d known her since we were both beginners in that big city – me, a graduate Arts student and avowed Francophile looking to define myself outside the parameters of suburb, school and snobberies of Sydney; and Celina, who had fled to Paris from Poland as a political refugee, with no French, no passport and no recognition in France of her qualifications and experience as a psychologist.
We’d met through a colleague of mine at the English language magazine where I’d found work. It was a time of freedom, before either of us had responsibility for others.
We bonded later during my time there when I suffered the loss of a lover, and discovered, through her sympathetic gesture of a half-full bottle of vodka, that Celina had experienced a similar loss. She’s one of my great friends in life.
Some years down the track, when I had married and had my second child, she called to say that her husband and son were off to visit the grandparents for summer, so why didn’t I come to stay with her outside Paris for a few weeks with my small baby Felix? We could hang out like old times. My husband could look after our older child back home – that’d be fun for them. ‘Hey, why not?’
When the words ‘Hey, why not?’ come out of your mouth or even pop up in your brain, you should hear alarm bells.
But anyway, it seemed like a great idea. Felix was around eight months old, a very happy, easy baby; I’d been back and forth to France many times – once with my husband and our firstborn – and I’d be staying with my great friend, who’d mothered her own child. She’d be able to mind the baby while I travelled into the city and enjoyed some ‘me time’ in the boutiques.
Felix was, as I say, an amenable baby, but although he was adapting to solid food he had a particularly sensitive gag reflex and couldn’t tolerate lumps of any kind. Also, an avid breast-feeder – he absolutely refused to take a bottle – he tended to gorge himself until over-full. I had never had a chance to enjoy the mother–baby idyll of co-sleeping with him or his older sibling, as they’d both been prodigious chuckers and a feed in bed would always result in everyone being soaked. Still, no problems, I should be able to cook and blend simple food for him at Celina’s.
The month was July. It was a cold winter in Sydney and we travelled to a warm and humid summer in Paris. You’d think that would be a good thing. The other thing about summer in Paris is that it becomes daylight very early and stays light until very late. I had a baby angel who was a great sleeper, so long as he was sleeping in a darkened room. He sucked neither thumb nor dummy – my breast was his preferred soother.
At Celina’s place, the shutters on our windows were broken and there were no blinds. So when it was light, it was light. That was the first thing.
It turns out, in case you didn’t know, that eight-month old babies aren’t very responsive to the hands on a clock. They can’t simply be told that they’re in a different time zone so could they please sleep now. If we adults take a couple of days to switch zones, the best you can hope with a little kid is that they’ll gradually adjust by a couple of hours a day. This meant that I was trying to be wakeful during the day, to adjust, but being on call all night for an infant who would want to play, or be attended to, or cry, or feed. Crying would wake my friend and the neighbours. So besides cuddling and comforting, feeding seemed the only thing to soothe him.
Can I mention here that the other thing about travelling from winter to summer with a baby is that the baby gets extra thirsty in the heat? I will also mention that for who-knows-what reason, dear little baby Felix didn’t like the taste of Paris water, from tap or bottle. Also, he completely lost his appetite for the baby mush that was offered to him. Some of the finest quality fruit, veg and poultry were rejected. He only wanted my breast for food; he only wanted my breast for drink; and he only wanted my breast for comfort.
It’s so great to be needed.
One week into my girlfriends holiday in Paris and I was getting a little run-down from sleep deprivation and my very bones were being sucked hollow by an adorable baby with a winning smile and a jaunty quiff. Oh yes, did I mention? Felix was such a great traveller that people on the Paris Metro would lose their stony grimaces and point out this little cherub to one another, so winsome was his public engagement.
These people were not spending the night with my crying baby leech monster.
As I said, Felix’s tendency was to overfeed. The consequence of this, as we tried to keep quiet in the night in my friend’s son’s carpeted bedroom, was that, while I tried and tried to take him o
ff the breast asleep, he would wake and demand more. Eventually he’d stop, look at me, then with a slight puff of the cheeks, spew forth the contents of his bloated stomach, covering me in a veil of warm milk. You see, I had to aim him at me, so he wouldn’t vomit on the carpet.
And then we’d have a bath in our clothes.
Well, after a week or so of this, Felix was gradually adjusting to the time zone, if hardly at all to the food. I was letting go of all my usual ‘healthy baby’ eating rules and hoping that the mere presence of sugar or ‘biscuit flavour’ would persuade him to eat something that wasn’t a byproduct of me. It was impossible to consider leaving him in Celina’s care while I popped into town for a spot of shopping. So I figured, how hard could it be to get around Paris with Felix in his stroller?
Oh! Another thing about travelling to the northern summer from the southern winter is the food. By July I’m usually tired of apples and oranges at home, but with Celina there’s always a feast. Since moving to Paris, she has taken pride and pleasure in the quality and variety of produce, and she’s learned to make the very best of French cuisine.
A trip to the local produce market was something we could certainly manage, and I could savour the pleasure that comes from a bounty of cheeses, fruit and veg, charcuterie, bread and pastry. And believe me, while my cute little bloodsucker was sucking the marrow out of me, I at least had somewhere to put all that lovely food.
There was a bag full of apricots that was particularly memorable – so sweet and full of fragrance and flavour – and just on the point of overripe, so we had to eat them without delay. Yum!
So there I was, wondering how hard could it be to go into Paris for the day with Felix in the stroller.
‘How hard could it be?’ is a question like, ‘Hey, why not?’
I had lived in Paris for nearly three years; I knew my way around pretty well and wasn’t hampered by language. I also knew it wasn’t always a kind city, so you have to be pretty sure of yourself.
If it has an exemplary public transport system by comparison to our own, then being young, fit and able are necessary conditions to that example, because there are obstacles all the way for the elderly, infirm or people with children. Just pushing through those magnetised doorways or the full-height turnstiles, or getting up and down the stairs is enough to challenge the hardiest sleep-deprived mother. Sometimes you’d have to talk into intercoms to get a special door opened. But occasionally, kind people would see you with your baby and stroller at the foot of a busy staircase and offer to help you. So I mustered my courage, considered my destinations and set out with Felix for a day in Paris.
My favourite place always ends up being around the Marais, north of the Hôtel de Ville, with smaller scale buildings and a mix of funky boutiques, hipster, gay and ethnic Jewish culture. Unlike Sydney, in Paris some places don’t change, and you can sometimes go back and find the same waiter in the same cafe, year after year. Also, each traditional cafe is much like another, so you know what you’ll find there in terms of food and conveniences. And blessedly, they’ve upgraded the conveniences, so you rarely have to negotiate a piddle-puddled stinking hole in the floor.
I needed a cafe for my convenience. So I ordered coffee, made chitchat with the waiter and – after little Felix had worked his usual magical charm – I entrusted him to watch my baby in the stroller while I went to the loo. Even if it’s hard to get around, Paris is pretty baby friendly.
There was another area I wanted to get to, up around the Canal St Martin. It wasn’t one of my regular old haunts but it was always beautiful, and I’d heard it had undergone a wave of renewal and was cool and interesting. We made our way there by Metro and went exploring the surrounds of the Canal, walking along streets I hadn’t checked out before. I was yet to find the very hip and happening parts … maybe they were over the other side of the canal.
And then I felt the gripe.
A gurgling, a groaning, a clenching …
All. Those. Apricots.
I really needed a toilet.
I walked and walked and hoped to find a cafe, a shop, a something.
Did I mention that July in Paris can be very quiet? Most of the locals go on holiday, and away from the touristy areas, lots of businesses close for the summer.
Walking with Felix in his stroller, with no obvious way across the canal except maybe a bridge further along with lots of stairs (I would have burst if I’d carried the stroller up any stairs), and on this side, nothing but residential buildings with their secure entrances, or closed shops …
With my stomach growling relentlessly, I actually began to wonder if there were places – plants, walls or doorways – I could squat behind to relieve myself of this painful griping, or if my bowels were just going to make the decision for me …
Then I saw a business. A gym, with a big glass door. Please be open!
The door opened. There was a big, buff man looking bored and beautiful behind the counter. He was not like the baby-charming waiters in the cafes, and would have happily ignored us until I asked him as succinctly as possible if there was a toilet I could use, as it was an emergency. He gestured behind me – a staircase that went down about three floors. The toilet was down there, at the bottom. I looked at the stairs, then at Felix in the stroller, then at the bored man behind the counter, and my bowels groaned.
‘Please mind my baby!’ I said, and I ran down those stairs and truly, just made it.
It had been a tough choice, but luckily my baby was still there at the top of the stairs when I returned, cooing adorably while the muscled man studied his own perfection. I thanked him profusely and gave up on finding the groovy part of the Canal St Martin.
Nothing much else to report from that trip, except in the second week I got terrible bronchitis and went home sick. I was so run-down. Felix drained me dry on our return to Sydney because he had to adjust to the time zone again. I had to wean him, just to recover some strength. My sleep was so disrupted that I developed insomnia, during which time I had a crisis of faith and lost God, needed years of therapy and medication.
But I’m fine now. I just pause for a little longer when I think, ‘Hey, why not?’, and make sure I go easy on the apricots.
On a Fin and a Prayer
James Jeffrey
DEATH COMES TO us all in the end. I just didn’t expect it to come disguised as a chicken.
Barely able to see, my face apparently stuffed with pins, my chest with knitting needles and my throat with a fist, I listened to the rumble of the 747’s jet quartet over my gasps. Beneath me, the belly of the Korean Air jumbo bulged with suitcases in chilly darkness. Beneath that stretched 11,000 metres of sky and cloud and air pocket. And beneath that lay the sea from which my accidental killer had come. I pictured my death notice: ‘James Jeffrey – born prematurely, Great Britain. Died in the same manner, row 36.’ Then cursing anaphylaxis, I passed out.
My first mistake had probably been in drawing attention to myself. I’d been planning a trip to Europe – backpacking from my father’s country in the west to my mother’s in the east – when my eye was caught by the jaunty blue fuselage of a Korean Air plane roaring out of Sydney. I had a sudden vision: I would spend three days passing through the restaurants of Seoul like a whale through krill, before heading to Scotland, which – how to say this lovingly? – was less of a culinary destination than it is now.
But my ticket wasn’t going to be just any old ticket, it was going to be special. Looking back, it’s not clear why I did what I did. Perhaps I mysteriously reasoned an Asian airline was more likely to serve what I’d come to view as death flesh, my own glittering, scale-armoured Kryptonite. More probably it was because I’d noticed on earlier flights that everyone on special food lists – vegan, kosher and the rest – got fed first.
‘I’d like to add a dietary requirement to my booking,’ I informed the travel agent, for it was the mid-1990s and we were yet to suffer the internet. ‘No fish.’
And with that, my
destiny was written.
That I was powerfully allergic to fish was a discovery Mum and Dad made early in my life, during a series of trial and error. It was a culinary experiment in which they tried to kill me every Friday. This was fish-and-chips night, and each time they watched in almost academic curiosity as my lips expanded, tongue ballooned, and eyelids puffed up so much it looked like my eyes had been replaced with a pair of matching arses, each with buttocks proportioned according to what would now be recognised as the Kardashian school.
In later years, my parents freely admitted they were stumped by this small-scale horror show. But rather than seek medical expertise, they went all Holmes and Watson and decided to investigate for themselves. One week they tried without the salt. Not guilty. Next week, vinegar was acquitted. Perhaps the chips?
‘It was a process of elimination,’ Dad would later explain, deploying the airy tone he reserved for those occasions when he wanted to impress upon me that whatever assumptions I was even thinking of making, they were wrong.
‘Didn’t you worry you might accidentally eliminate me?’
‘No,’ he said, in the same tone.
These days there are handy websites that outline the symptoms of anaphylaxis. Nestled amid its myriad horrors (facial swelling, breathing and swallowing trouble, possible death) is perhaps the greatest: ‘A feeling of impending doom.’
For Mum it was a mystery as unhappy as it was unfathomable. How could food – that reliable friend, microwaveable companion, physician and nutrition all rolled into one – possibly turn foe?
She had a boyfriend who felt the same way. He was convinced (a) it all hinged on how the fish was cooked, and (b) he was the man with the know-how. Like an alchemist who specialised in Neptune’s bounty, he was going to take a base material – a bream he’d hooked that morning – and turn it into the key that would unlock for me the gates to the kingdom of fish-eaters, or at the very least, navigate my gut without incident.
The Full Catastrophe Page 12