Fatima Chapter 3 |1968: Child Woman

1968: Child Woman

Fatima felt slightly nauseous.  Mr Govender was not a kind teacher however, and she felt that she could ride out the alternating flushes of hot and cold through her body until the school siren shot out its wail.  There was always a feeling of tired calm when the siren went.  Some children rushed out hurriedly but most could feel the effects of the spent energy on their tired brains and bodies and took long to pack up while chatting and slowly making their way home in groups of twos, threes and fives.  She was looking around for Aisha when she felt it.  It seemed to come at the first and loudest blast of the siren and she moistened between her legs with the ‘decrescendoing’ wail of the remaining sound.

She couldn’t believe she was wetting herself! She was thirteen years old now.  She hadn’t even wet her bed in years.  Her neck flushed a shade of deep red and she could feel the blood being pulled to her cheeks.  Shame! Trying to remain discreet she calmly packed her homework into a satchel and made her way towards the toilet.  The green walls calmed her a little as she entered the girls toilet which was roofless on the inside forming a sunny little courtyard during most of the year.  It was silent.  Everyone had gone home and the toilet gave the impression that it was being intruded upon.  Her shoes rang on the concrete floor, the sounds bouncing from wall to wall creating a plethora of overlaid echoes.  She hoped no one could hear.

She carefully crouched down into one of the cubicles and pulled the front of her dress up.  This is when the panic struck.  Such a feeling of pure basic fear had never before coursed through her little body.  In all her short life she had never experienced the fear of death.  She did now, and it overpowered her naïve senses and drove her into a deep sleep.  In short, she fainted.  Her eyes rolled and she bent over.  Placing her head into her lap, she fainted.

It was the screaming that brought her round.  From far within the deep recesses of her mind she could hear a distant panicked guttural wailing.  In her state of discontinued consciousness she was aware of, but not immediately concerned with, the far-away screams outside her head.  She lay motionless, deeply settled within the impassive recesses of her mind until the sound of a million crickets were gently faded into her head.  The sound was like the sound of dawn which rose steadily until it became intensified hundreds of times over; amplified with a canny treble that grew louder and louder until it filled her head.  The screams began to sound more intimate, more jarring, and with a rush of confused resonance she was jolted awake in mid-scream, her own!

“Stop shouting biddha, open the door.”

Beneath the lower end of the door that was cut to three-quarter length she could see the wrinkled face of the ayah who cleaned up after school.  She had a concerned but calm look on her face.  It was as if maternity was bred into her; she knew she had to be calm to keep the child calm.  When Fatima managed to open the door the old ayah could see immediately what the problem was.  The sight of blood had initially worried her but now she could see what was going on.  She took the back of the girls head in her left hand while she tugged at the toilet paper with the right and cleaned the now smudged trickle of blood off her inner thigh and hands.  It was just a jot.  She spoke all the time with an intrinsic knowledge that this would help calm the girl.

“Don’t worry Biddha, everythings ok, just a little bit of blood, all part of growing up.”

Fatima didn’t quite comprehend what the ayah was saying.  Her eyes gave her confusion away.  They seemed to quiver within their large widened sockets.  They signalled to the ayah that the girl was still searching for pieces of this puzzle.  That expression of guilt, bewilderment and confusion would one day revisit her in the face of her own child but for now she was unaware of its presence upon herself.

Adding to her confusion the ayah spoke again;

“You’re a woman now, every month you’ll have little bit blood coming out from now on.”

The poor ayah was now grasping the full extent of the girls’ confusion and spoke softly to her;

“I think maybe your mummy just felt shame to tell you, but when girls become womans you bleed little bit every month, just for few days.  You can have babies from now on.  You’re getting older now, time to grow up and become a big girl.  You’ll have to be careful around the boys from now on.”

She nodded, those big eyes fixed squarely on the ayah’s shriveled mouth.  She knew that something new was happening to her and that the blood was natural but she was still horrified.  Babies!?  She was barely a child herself.  She had heard talk about high school girls getting pregnant and having babies too soon.  It was always spoken of in hushed tones, and often there was a distinctively menacing derogatory tone to the comments.

‘That one, you can see it in her from small! Always running around with the boys.  Tooo much boys all the time.  Now they all acting sur-prised but it’s the hup-bringing that’s the cause.  I blame the mother; it’s her job to teach praw-perly how to behave.’

Fatima had a new cause for panic now.  No matter what, she mustn’t have a baby before it was time to get married.  And that seemed an impossibly long way off.  She hoped that this blood didn’t mean that she could get pregnant just by touching boys.  She would have to be very careful.

The walk home was a journey of silent worry for Fatima.  Usually she would be interested in everything on the way home; the grocers stalls, the sweet aunties, the boys in the mango trees, or old Puglar-Peter the 'mentally handicapped' child of Nathoo (Bobby) Naicker who sat outside the ice-block aunties house … but not today.  Today the sun seemed to bear down onto the top of her head making her a little faint.  She was glad to get out of the sun and through the back door into the kitchen.

Her mother shifted her stance onto her left foot, turning the roti with her right hand while placing her bunched left fist into her hip,

“Why sooo late baby?”

The sight of her mother brought out the child in her; her face crumpled up into a frown as she started to cry and whine at the same time;

“My head is paining mommy.  I got sick today in school.”

A look of concern came over the older woman’s face.  She started on the child but was cut short by Fatima blurting,

“Blood came out of my cookie mummy!”

Mariam caught herself as she took in the shock.  She hadn’t had time lately to think about the girls’ age.  A sad nostalgia welled up in her chest.  Fathu was no longer a child.  Her little baby would now be trained and chained to the ways of women.  From now on she would have to learn new behaviours and the freedom of childhood would soon be gone from her.  Still, it was every woman’s fate to become like this.  There was little she could do for the child now but guide her along gently, teaching her how to behave appropriately.  She was a good child anyway, always listened and obeyed, eager to please.  That temper though, that would do her no good as a woman.  She would have to try and get the girl to bottle that raw anger, to accept things she couldn’t change.  After all, life is like that for a woman.

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