by Donna Mazza
I am still tentative so he carries her up the bush-lined path past various parents and children, laden with schoolbags. Nobody looks at her. No stares. At Jake’s classroom, Isak leans through the door with the baby, ready to show her off. Kids push past him, eager to get home. Jake drags his teacher by her hand over to see the baby.
‘Oh, sweet,’ she coos. ‘Did you look like that when you were a baby, Jake? I bet you were that cute too.’ She touches Asta’s cheek and I retract inside. Jake laughs, grabs his bag.
‘Come on, Isak, we have to go and get Emmy.’ And I take his elbow, pull him from the doorway. ‘I’m exhausted. This is a bit much for me yet.’ I overstate things, want to get away. No questions. Please, no questions.
Emmy is the last child left in her class, up on her knees on the mat, bag on her back. When she sees both of us with the baby her face reverses from steaming impatience to glowing joy. I feel mine do the same. I remember that desire for a sister of my own. She is lucky her wish was fulfilled. Emmy dashes from the door, her teacher several steps behind.
‘She’s been so excited, talked of nothing else all week. I’ve heard all about her beautiful red hair.’ Miss Healey smiles down at the baby and I shrink inside, frightened of revelations.
Emmy pulls off the cap, ‘See, Miss Healey. Like sunshine and rust.’
‘Watch the baby’s head.’ Isak pulls the cap over her long head. I want to explain, lots of babies are born with distorted heads. The fontanelles grow and it will be round like everyone else’s. It’s just for a few months. But I am silent and the conversation moves on. She seems to not notice.
‘She was a bit early,’ Isak is explaining. ‘But she’s fine, just smaller than usual for a newborn.’
Then she opens her eyes and the teacher baulks, takes in a sudden breath I dread.
‘Wow, she’s got big eyes.’ Polite. She looks deeper, I surrender. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone with eyes like hers before.’ She pauses, staring. ‘They’re so beautiful, and very unusual.’
I step in, very close to Isak, and she retreats back to find personal space. I look at her seriously in the eyes. ‘We need to be a bit discreet, Maddie.’ A knowing look. Just enough.
‘Oh, things are not—oh, I see.’ She swallows hard. ‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that, Stacey.’
‘We don’t know how much of an issue it is just yet,’ says Isak. ‘Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves.’
‘It’s okay, I understand. My sister has a boy and you just have to keep things as normal as possible.’ She reels back her enthusiasm like untouched bait. Emmy detects the shift in mood and goes quiet. On the way to the car she looks up at me, and reaches for my hand.
‘Is Asta okay, Mumma?’
Among the blooming grevillea, small birds dart about. I don’t want to quell her.
‘Yes. She’s fine. But you know she’s been born a bit early so we need to be extra careful with her.’
Isak straps Asta into the car and Emmy slides across into the middle, staring down into the baby. ‘She’s a bit delicate. Don’t worry, sweetie.’
‘It’s okay, Asta. I’ll help look after you.’
Isak passes a pump bottle of hand sanitiser between the seats and the kids dutifully kill their bacteria. Its sharp scent fills the car and we rejoin the streaming traffic of the freeway, curving off onto an arterial road that funnels into various housing estates. Ours has a tired entry statement of bas relief pelicans in flight, eroding from rammed earth. A nod to the remnant wetland at the heart of the estate, now devoid of mosquitos. Frogs silent. The streets meander like small intestines, diverting into terminated streets. I call ours the gall bladder but it could just as easily be an appendix. Not a dream house but at least it is ours.
There’s a caterer’s disposable tray of lasagne in the fridge and cleaners have been through and sanitised everything. Not a speck of glitter is left in the carpet and dirty fingerprints have been wiped from around each light switch. Daddy-long-legs are gone. My ease has not returned. The spare room has been transformed. Painted and filled with the new baby furniture. A bucket for dirty nappies and a pile of clean ones.
Isak looks over my shoulder into the room. ‘They ordered a nappy service for us.’ I want to cry. Not sure why.
‘She doesn’t have any clothes.’
He leads me to a white cupboard, hanging with soft coloured onesies. A few tiny dresses. Little jackets. No labels, all handmade. ‘Custom-made. Must have cost a packet.’
‘It’s kind of weird.’ He laughs, places Asta into the bassinet and wheels it out into the dining room.
‘And you expected something not weird?’ He flicks on the kettle. Kids retreat to television.
Night and day bleed together. Salty and fresh clouding one to the other, become brackish. Bubbles emerge from the earth. Slow rising to the surface. Breaking in the air. Languid movements beneath the skin.
Slithering creatures live within me. Leak out, spurt and spray. They dry and become wet again, leave a firm crust all around.
I am submarine, subterranean.
Sublime.
I am consumed, in the belly of the beast.
Utterly gone.
I breathe enough only to stay alive. Enough to feed her. Rising to the surface, breaking through only to fill my lungs. Just enough. I am necessary. Not the purpose.
Milk and blood, blood and milk. Whorl together. My blood is her blood, her milk is my blood. She burrows into my flesh, sucking me in with a force beyond refusal. A force I can’t deny. I ache for her, nipples sparking and tingling for the pain of her mouth. The sweet agony of it. My foot taps against the coffee table, neck stretched up, mouth open. I roar silently at the ceiling as she latches on. Breasts weighty and red, she needs and needs and needs and I leach out, leak endlessly. Marinated in my own juice.
Her wide mouth is a gateway to ease, a portal into agony. I rock back and forth amid damp cushions. A bottle of water at my side only to replenish what she takes. Nothing left for me but I want nothing more. We are locked together in eternal love. Her tiny nails clawing at my armpit, drawing down more milk. My body obeys and refills. Endlessly abundant.
A fly buzzes at the window. Television burns quietly in the corner. And the world goes on.
She grows. And each day her appetite increases, so I yield. Make more, give her more. She stretches back with satisfaction. Her arms and fists reaching.
Sometimes we roll together in a tangle of sheets and fitful sleep. I turn on my side, the swollen breasts stifling my movements. She fixes herself to them as they pass her mouth. Latching on without thought or need. Pure instinct. The drive to have me.
The nights and the days. I have forgotten my name and the chapters that have gone. I have no knowledge of what will come or how I have moved from place to place. How they have all lived around me. Their coming and going in a world above the surface, where the wind blows and the sun shines. Down here, inside this thing we slip into the gullet. So slick with saliva that little force is required to swallow it down. So many things here that I cannot name. Through the miasma all I see is her eyes, her cheeks drawing in, the rim of milk at her lips.
Isak’s eyes, lids low and concerned. He bends to me, touches my hair. The phone rings and he speaks for us. The doorbell rings and he speaks for us. Brings me water. In the wood on the cupboard I see patterns swirling, ancient symbols. Twisted faces caught in a yell.
The dark-haired doctor comes. Her accent a merge of British and European. She smiles and takes the baby. Weighs and measures. Twists her legs and feels her stomach. Turns her over on the floor. I don’t remember what she says. Isak is there and she speaks to him. Then she sits beside me on the couch, looking down at my bare breasts. Piles of tissues and bibs all around. Her hands feel like razors, pointed at the ends. Her touch slashes at my nipples, tearing open the red crescents. I rear back. Can’t move away. Silent. Mouth wide open.
She speaks to Isak and they are nodding. Worry.
When she
is gone he comes with a tube of cream. Soft as butter. His touch eases the raw flesh. But before it can seal, they fill and swell. Hot and bursting. Asta’s suckle tears the wound wide. Skewering through my chest, pinning me to the couch. Stitching back and forth, binding us together in relief and suffering.
I have become the mother she needs. Who I am and who I might have been have gone completely.
The bones of a bird are hollow, which is why it can fly. I have been hollowed, my marrow drawn out through my nipples. And so I have risen, arms outstretched. Higher and higher, buffeted now on air pressure and currents. They have driven me south with scarcely a bump in the road. The children have finished school for the year and we are all packed in the enormous car. Baby sleeping, landscape and ecosystems transforming as we tear past on our way to a caravan park on the coast, far from home.
Isak relives his love of Ed Sheeran and plays the songs over and over until the kids are singing along to ‘Galway Girl’. He has dressed in his shamrock T-shirt because it always brings him good luck. I know he must have a need for sanity, clarity. Some words from me that will bring us back into the same orbit. Ireland is our touchstone. He is trying to be joyful and make contact. I lift my arms and rise to him. Willing myself back. Emmy is in the middle, wearing a wide sunhat, bright birds on her shirt and bare legs. There is a giant bottle of sunscreen in the console, insect repellent and a bag of lollies I never would have bought. While I was feeding they have changed positions, abandoning me by the roadside while they set a course of their own. I am trying to catch up. We are attempting unity and hoping the glue will dry.
Jake sings along, tapping on his tablet at some strange game. Immersed in two diversions, eyes darting. Isak smiles at me, turns the volume down.
‘Enjoying the ride?’ Handsome today in his new car.
I nod. ‘I love holidays with you.’
He grins wide. ‘I thought we’d lost you for a while there.’ Squeezes my hand.
I thought I was lost. A group of black cockatoos flash white tails at the car, dipping dangerously low. Their slow wings taking them just out of reach. ‘Where are we staying?’
‘Hamelin Bay. There’s a nice caravan park there and it’s on the beach. Shady and close to Augusta but out of town. Nice and quiet.’
I’ve been there as a child but I don’t want to talk about that. I take a lolly and settle into the journey. The further we travel, the more it is like a return to a faint childhood imprint. The coast, small towns and shifting character of bush with unique trees—tuart, marri, jarrah, karri—words like lullaby.
We left here when I was very young, my mother fleeing my father and taking us to Byron Bay so she could live more alternative. It never lived up to her hopes so on we went—Warrnambool, Launceston, Port Fairy, Leura, Armidale, Katoomba and back and forth so I couldn’t keep track. Eventually I was old enough to leave. The rubble of that still stands between us, as surely as the kilometres of coastline from here to there. She rang, sent a card and some hand-felted boots for Asta, no doubt made by one of her many old friends.
‘Did you speak to Mum?’ I know he did. He would have thought it only fair after he’d called his own mother.
He nods. ‘She was in Katoomba, back with Marco. Poor bugger is sick and can’t run away from her.’ His weatherboard house in the mountains was always cold. My last stand with her happened there just as I finished school. ‘She thought Asta was beautiful but Mary is an awful name, no surprises there.’
‘She probably thought I did it to annoy her.’ I take another sherbet. She will have thought of Bible Mary.
‘She did speak to me for a while though.’ He looks furtive, a little wary of my reaction. ‘I sent her a few photos of the kids holding the baby.’ He hands me his phone. He’s taken over the BubBot app for me, uploading images of Asta asleep and in the arms of Emmy. I see how she has grown, quickly, and I hadn’t noticed. Fully soaked in breastmilk. It breaks my synapses and undermines my memory. ‘She is helping treat his cancer with diet. She said it seems to be working.’ Isak rolls his eyes, no patience with non-medical treatment.
I am not quite so critical. She has had a lot of experience, but I just don’t forgive her for my messed-up childhood. The other side of the country is only just far enough away. My brother has never come back from London, like I have, so I think I’ve done well to get this close and stay in touch with her. I scroll through his reports, dutifully recording my feeding and her sleep.
‘Alex sent you some flowers from London.’ Last time I saw him, we walked across Blackheath to the station on my way to South Africa to meet Isak’s mother. I was already pregnant with Emmy and I knew the holiday years were over. He told me I’d make a great mother because I knew what it was to have one that was shit.
‘Did you speak to him?’
Isak shakes his head.
‘The flowers were lovely but I had to put them on the back verandah. Too perfumed for her.’ He looks in the rear-view mirror. ‘How’s she going back there, Em?’
‘Still asleep. I wiped a bit of spew off her chin. I think she’s dreaming.’
‘You’re a good big sister.’
We turn south on Caves Road, which twists past forest and tourist destinations we have never been to. A stand of tall, pale trees marks another shift in the landscape at Boranup forest. The cathedral of karris, so pale and tall, render us all silent. We turn west to Hamelin Bay, descending into a hollow filled with peppermint trees.
Isak checks us in and drives to a small cabin in the middle of the park. There are sparse tents, hanging with beach towels and bathers. Evidence of barbecues. Worn shoes askew by the zipped tents. Once the door is unlocked the kids push past us, running into the small cabin and claiming bunk beds. Both at the top, of course. Isak transports our luggage and modest food supplies and I carry Asta, who wakes at my scent, turning her open mouth back towards my chest. Calling her low grizzle. Milk leaks through my shirt and drips onto my stomach and we settle into the pastel couch. Almost as soon as they arrive the children want to go to the beach. I don’t make them wait. This feeding might go on for most of the afternoon. They close the door. Voices fading in the distance.
The cabin creaks in the breeze, branches scratching against its metal cladding. Inside is pastel and grey, blinds slightly open. It smells of shed skin and disinfectant. Seabirds outside. Her cheeks draw in and out, her brow furrowed with intensity, desperation. The hours of driving have left her ravenous and she draws deep on my flesh, reopening the wounds that have started to heal. My nipples have turned leathery and dark, protruding like a finger, but she has the power to force them to the limit of endurance. Skin stretching thin as a membrane. As the initial rush ceases she claws at my armpit, coaxing my body to make more. I dehydrate quickly, finishing off the last warm water from the bottle I had in the car.
I poke my finger between my nipple and her lip to break the suction and peel her off, laying her on the couch so I can fill the bottle. Open the blind to let in some fresh air. My heart races as I stand face-to-face with a stranger on the porch of the cabin next door. He doesn’t look away, but stares at me through the window. I screech and close the blind. Asta startles, cries and rolls onto the floor. My heart is racing. I check her over and she latches on again. I am still shaken when Isak returns with the kids. He rushes to make them sandwiches. Once the kids have the network password, they are silent and absorbed in games and we lay on the bed into the late afternoon. I tell him about the stranger.
‘Do you think it’s them, that they are watching us all the time?’
He strokes my cheek. ‘I hope not.’ He smirks and we laugh a little. ‘They know where we are, in case anything happens.’ He reaches for my hand, ‘I think it’d be better if you did the BubBot, Stace. I only notice some things but you’re right up close with her. Have you read what I’ve sent?’ I skimmed, not patient enough to sit and read through his notes on our feeding, her nappies, the responses of Emmy and Jake.
Surely some thi
ngs, my thoughts, have to be private. ‘You’ve done a great job and I don’t think I’d do any different. Anyway, I don’t want them to know it all.’
‘But that’s what you’re doing, Stacey. It’s a medical trial.’
Asta is snuggled in the pram beside our bed, fast asleep.
A medical trial. ‘She looks like a baby to me. Is that really what you think of her?’
He raises his eyebrows, a mix of surprise and horror. ‘Of course not. Look at her. She’s so sweet.’
I know he’s trying to treat her like a normal baby. ‘She’s not like the other kids though.’
‘No, but they are all different.’
‘She’s more different.’ Trying to dig for what he really thinks.
‘The feeding is different, that’s for sure. I don’t remember you being so intense with it before.’ He runs his hands through his hair. ‘I mean, she’s always hungry and your tits are huge.’ He looks at them, leaking again through my clothes.
‘Nice way of putting it, Isak.’ There’s no escape from them and the smell.
‘Sorry, but you know what I mean.’
‘I do feel like it’s all that I am. Right now anyway.’ He takes my hand and tears come gulping.
‘You’re amazing, that’s what you are. To do this, you are so brave. You didn’t know what was going to happen to you. You might’ve ended up with anything. It took courage.’ He kisses my fingers and I can’t help but smile.
‘Stupidity too, I think.’
He pulls me closer, runs his hand over my waist.
‘Don’t start things you can’t finish.’ Kids outside the door.
He laughs, looks over at the door, the baby. ‘But I’d expect nothing less from a girl like you. Remember that time we did the Ring of Beara and you suggested—’