by Sophie Alal
“You pulled too hard last time,” Anek says.
“No I didn’t,” Namuli protests, unwrapping a bright knobbly fruit from a white face towel. They are naked and the little wild aubergine sits on Namuli’s terrycloth sponge like a speckled jewel. Jade with black lines, ripening to yellow.
There is a preciousness about the way Namuli cradles the fruit. And she winks at Anek, her eyes are feisty and warm, as if she knows how scared her friend is.
“If this culture is so great, then why did I walk like a duck for a whole week?” says Anek, looking dubious.
“Don’t be silly. You think being a woman is easy, eh? Shut up and let’s begin.”
Namuli tilts her face towards the fruit and bites it between her canines. Her lips are distended, as if she does not want to harm her mouth. She winces when the bitter fruit pops, splashing little grey seeds onto her teeth and tongue. She spits out a yellow waxy tab followed by globs of foaming spittle. “Eeu eeu, horrible!”
The hole in the little poisonous fruit is jagged, impressed with the sharp ends of Namuli’s teeth. She dips her fingers into the belly of the caustic fruit and holds it to her nose, sniffing deeply for freshness before reaching for the downy triangle between her legs. “Hmm. This is it. We are on the way.”
“Is anything changing?” Anek says, craning her neck to see whether there were two little lips of flesh protruding from the Namuli’s vulva, which is now resting against her fingers, lightly parted.
“Sort of.”
“In my culture we don’t pull.” Anek’s curious eyes are shining a light terracotta. She is a little apprehensive after the burning that hurt for four days. They had fiddled with the wrong folds, bruising the delicate pink folds of flesh that swelled, then turned pink like the conch shell in their Science Room shelf.
“Shhh, Matron said we should all do it. Pleasure pleasure pleasure,” insists Namuli in a song like voice. Her too soft fingers are chubby, like those of a rich child who has no chores. She senses the fear in her best friend. “If you are scared now, imagine those other things going up there. Do you want Matron herself to do you or what?”
Anek cups a hand over her mouth, directing her whisper to Namuli’s ears. Namuli is wincing. Her face is pinched in concentration. Anek’s eyes are wide with conspiracy thinking about graphic phallic images; tampons, penises, other things that could not be mentioned.
“Did Matron say the real reason for doing it? Or it is a secret, like s-e-x,” she stammers.
“Me, I think it’s obvious. No need to deep think.”
“Best friends last FOR EYVAR and EYVAR and EYVAR,” they sing in unison, remixing a TV commercial for Nice pens, mimicking the posh sounding Irish accents of the elderly nuns in the convent.
The wisps of hair under their arms are fine, a dull browny white. It appears dusted with baby powder and dunked in sweat. It also smells, sour sweet, like rancid pineapple. They are both eleven. And had it not been for the vagary of a few seconds, just thirty seconds till midnight, they might have celebrated their birthdays on the same day.
“I have a secret to tell you. You know what they call IT in the Red Pepper?” Namuli asks with eyes glinting in mischief.
Anek shakes her head, feigning ignorance about the most raucous tabloid. Namuli stands up and looks around the cubicle walls. She sees no one passing by, but there are people in the vicinity. She squats again and the cold breeze bites goose flesh on her wet skin.
“Twin Towers,” Namuli whispers triumphantly, satisfied that she is more knowledgeable, and by that measure more mature.
“Stale news. These days it’s Kandahar,” says Anek, rebuffing her friend in a stroke of one up man ship. “Twin Towers is so last year.”
Namuli rolls her eyes, the atmosphere in the chilly bathroom is sour, and she sulks.
In three minutes. Namuli is done with pinching and firmly stretching her labia minora. She places the aubergine in her four legged soap dish which sits on a ledge. The two friends squat in front of plastic buckets, rubbing pink Geisha soap onto limp damp loofahs, scrubbing out dust and Vaseline cleaved to their pores. Only their eyes are free of foam as they rinse their glistening bodies with cupped hands filled with water. The terrazzo floor carries away the day’s dirt into a drainage ditch. Bathing is much nicer in the evening, when the sun has heated up the overhead tanks, unlike at dawn, when the cold and the crowding of girls in the bathroom oblige it to be a quick affair. Their buzz cuts and warm chocolate skins make them look identical, but time is changing their frames. The delicateness of their child-limbs are ushering in puberty, gonads are awakening tiny buddings which begin to get rounded more each new school term.
As daylight dies into a pink glow, tall windbreakers of pines and eucalyptus trees catch their last rays. They are the only girls in the communal bathroom. Namuli removes the fruit from the soap dish and replaces the fruit in her terrycloth wash towel.
“Out of the bathrooms, now!” a primary seven pupil shouts, in a high voice that sounds exasperated.
Surprise knocks the broken aubergine from Namuli’s hands. It is flying. For a fraction of a second, Anek catches it in her still soapy palms but it slips away to the scum coated ditch. She is relieved that she has escaped. How could she betray their friendship, by not partaking in this rite of passage?
<>
“School rules are a leveller,” Anek remembers her dad saying, as they dry themselves and pull their after school frocks on. “And sameness is a comfort.” The frocks are a post WWII cut, plain front bodice, short sleeves and hems below the knee. They have existed since the first congregation of Sisters of St. Francis opened their school in 1950, and until now, only underclothes were arbiters of inner personality. Even the school culture has remained unchanged, frugal, like the lives of the old nuns in the convent: tea with a bun and jam for breakfast, repeated at four o’clock, weekly music classes, physical education three times a week and sports over the weekend. Lunches and suppers taken with strict regularity.
In little doses the elderly Baganda Matrons release their colourful subversion in the dull school routine. Secrets with neither force nor sharpness flow gently like water, wearing smooth set-in stone school rules. During Home Room classes the pupils become ladylike Baganda by osmosis. Anek feels conflicted, remembering that her mother has already warned her not to partake in any strange culture at school. Especially not that of the Luloki, the lake shore people. Their ways are different from ours, Anek hears her stern voice in her head. Her father simply supported his wife.
In little doses the elderly Baganda Matrons release their colourful subversion in the dull school routine. Secrets with neither force nor sharpness flow gently like water, wearing smooth set-in stone school rules. During Home Room classes the pupils become ladylike Baganda by osmosis. Anek feels conflicted, remembering that her mother has already warned her not to partake in any strange culture at school. Especially not that of the Luloki, the lake shore people. Their ways are different from ours, Anek hears her stern voice in her head. Her father simply supported his wife.
<>
During art and craft the next day, all is normal in the imaginative composition class. Mr Kizito, the art teacher, walks along the rows in curious attention, talking himself hoarse and correcting shaky lines on unbleached parchment, mixing paints and demonstrating how to lift off errors with a damp brush. Like magic, the smudges painted by unsure hands turn into creatures with actual faces, and imagined blobs begin to look like real plants. Anek feels strange. She colours the forests purple, and the river runs red between two mountains. The yellow moon in the sky is blotted out and turns orange.
The first cramp grips her groin, then her back. Unaware of what is going on, sweat breaks on her brows and fear petrifies her. She wonders whether it is malaria or food poisoning, but this is a strange new pain. Her jaws slacken and she is sailing off her stool, hitting the floor like a lump of potter’s clay. Although it is a warm rainy afternoon in March, Anek feels stifled as the air stops circulating about her.
The pupils crane their necks at her, on hearing the cacophony of pencils and brushes falling. A jam jar rolls and shatters into a million little crystals. A biscuit tin half filled with water drenches the water colour pallets on the long hard wood table. She measures the curl of every smile and the weight of each whisper for meaning, and knows that something is very wrong with her. Anek looks at the eyes staring at her and starts crying. Her tears are hot with shame. She eases off her seat and feels a sticky stream run down her leg. She tugs at her skirt, drawing the back side of her frock to the front, and sees a patch as wide as an avocado and red as the tomato soup served with the main courses on Feast Days.
<>
High heels, cinched waits, make up, and perfectly painted nails. It is so cool. “But why is this so painful?” Anek mumbles to no one in particular, thrashing, then curling on the green leather of the cot. Painful pangs tear through her belly. It is more severe than anything she has ever experienced. Not the delirium of malaria, not measles, and not food poisoning. Her mental plane flips. In that moment, when the second cramp breaks the lining of her nubile womb, she feels like dying.
#
Anek’s helpers run, in the light drizzle, to fetch the nurse who lives next door to the infirmary. When they knock on the door of her blue and white cottage, they have to wait for a minute before she opens. The supplicants look like little lambs frightened by thunder. The class monitor curtsies, in a half kneel, the kind the Matrons approve of.
“Excuse me nurse,” the class monitor says. “There has been a terrible accident.”
“What happened?” the nurse says, cool, pushing back the mosquito screen door. She is used to these pupil’s terrible accidents being no more than a scrape or a minor allergic reaction.
“We don’t know,” the class assistant says. Having not greeted the nurse she adds, “Good afternoon. Yes, yes she’s bleeding.”
“Good afternoon,” the nurse replies, giving the girls a crooked smile. Her fingers are damp from washing and unadorned. She retreats and returns, pinning on her lacy white nurse’s cap, then tying an apron about her slim waist. When they arrive at the infirmary, she tells the two helpers to return to class. When they are out of earshot, she faces Anek and says, “You are a woman now. This is normal. Don’t cry. First, go to the bathroom and wash yourself then come back.” She hands Anek a plug of cotton wool wrapped in linen gauze.
“But I’m dying.” Anek groans.
“Hmm, you are not dying,” Nurse Betty reassures her and laughs a little. She sighs deeply, and hands her a small red pill and a cup of water.
In three minutes, the indomethacin kills the pain and Anek sits up. She cleans up in the bathroom and returns to the consultation room. She plugs in the heavy Morphy Richards flat iron and presses her frock in silence. As steam hisses up, she steals glances at the nurse. Now calm, Anek notices her kind round face. She is ageless, like the portrait of the president in the Headmistress’s office, next to the Bishop, and the Founder Mother Superior in her severe black wimple. She has always existed. In grace. Her dark hot combed hair always resting in a bun on her nape.
Nurse Betty balances a kidney shaped steel bowl in one hand, opens boxes and rummages through drawers, looking for something that should have been there.
“I can’t find any sanitary pads so let me show you how to make one,” she says, pulling apart the green privacy screen on wheels. She hands Anek a white ball of cotton wool and loosens two meters of gauze. She cuts them roughly, into three pieces, with a shiny surgical blade. She rolls the cotton into a tight wad and wraps it in one piece of gauze. The makeshift sanitary pad looks like a cocoon with straps. “Make sure you tie these straps firmly around your waist. Like this, like this, OK?” she explains, motioning at Anek’s hips.
Anek goes behind the screen. It is the first time she has ever experienced any privacy at school, the first time she is told to hide from the public. She feels shy and embarrassed at seeing the knotted gauze ends sinking into her flesh. It reminds her of the sumo wrestlers in Samurai Jack bleeding in cartoon colour. This awareness of her own body fluids make her feel strange, and different in a grown up way.
“You must keep clean. Yes? And nobody must know about it. It is your little secret. This is very normal and all women go through this. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“Some tea?” Nurse Betty asks, when Anek steps out from behind the screen. She is pouring herself a hot infusion fragrant with lemon grass, fresh cinnamon, ginger and mujaja basil. Beside her cup is a plate with golden brown balls of mandaazi and a banana. She offers Anek some but Anek shakes her head in refusal.
“Are you sure?” the nurse says.
“OK, just a little.”
Anek’s hunger triumphs over modesty. Visiting Day is still three weeks away, and her grub is almost finished. All she has left is half a tub of Blue Band margarine and a cup of deep fried crunchy corn and groundnut mix.
“Well then, get a cup from there.”
Nurse Betty points at a metal trolley standing next to a cupboard stacked with medical supplies. It has a glass jar of sugar, a box of tea bags and small spice bottle of tea masala. The tea things are draped over with a knitted white doily. In the lower shelf are half a dozen melamine cups and a hand of ripe yellow bogoya.
Anek convinces herself, that the arrival of this force, like electricity in a far away village, is greeted with excitement. But the reality is neither smooth nor simple. She remembers the showers, and the torment of the previous week. It appears like a crude game of awakening compared to this bleeding for five days. She lays in the infirmary all afternoon, and when the last spasms of trembling and shame have subsided, she raises and looks outside. Everything is as it always has been. The pine trees and eucalyptus are still jostling for airspace, and the girls are in teams playing dodge ball, cliques telling stories. Even the solitary bookworms are invisible.
Namuli brings evening tea to the infirmary. She sets the mug and bun on a table and sits across Anek on an empty bed.
“Sorry,” says Namuli with a rueful look.
Anek shrugs and blows steam off the cup’s rim. “Nurse gave me painkillers.”
“People were excited that you’ve hit chiba. So, are you going to pull at last?”
Anek cannot believe that even the popular girls are interested in her. Fake care, she thinks. So, those mean girls who call her mulugwala are curious about her? Here was their unwitting ambassador acting like they were all friends. Anek raises herself and sips more tea. She knows that Namuli is her only real friend.
Loyal.
“They don’ wanna know,” says Anek, watching Namuli’s jaws slack in disbelief. Her voice is singing again, like it might laugh.
All those girls had pulled. They were so cool and stylish compared to Namuli and her, whose parents were strict about modesty. They knew how to apply make up, wear perfume and high heels, and they go to Cineplex with boys during holidays. Namuli with her buttery skin, was pretty and confident like them though. It made Anek think that maybe she too could be special, if she pulled.
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Sophie Alalis a writer, poet and journalist. She lives and works in Kampala and publishes at Deyu African, a platform for sharing African and Diasporic arts and culture.
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