Free Not a Fairytale by Shaida Kazie Ali Page A

the bag of the unfortunate soul next to me, and finally I have used up all the bags in my row and the flight attendants have stopped smiling at me. I sleep for a while, until I’m woken up by the smell of airline food and I promptly throw up into the closest thing, my skirt.
    Then I’m in Cape Town, so jet-lagged and stinky that I barely recognise myself, let alone Salena, who has come with Ma to fetch me. I’m going to stay with her in her new home in Pinelands, near the hospital. It’s a good distance from Ma’s new Claremont townhouse. I’m not completely hormonally deranged. Me and Ma under one roof? Not a chance. We can chat on the phone.
    I sleep for two nights and days, waking up intermittently to pee and drink water and then, five minutes later, to throw it up. Salena’s guest toilet is really clean. Even under the brim. Her toilet could star in one of those advertisements for toilet cleaners – the “After” version.
    Salena looks different, and I’m picking up vibes between her and Zain. I start to wonder if I should rather have stayed in a hotel.
    Two weeks after my arrival in Cape Town, I begin to get excruciating back pains. I don’t want to bother Salena, so I haul myself off to the obstetrician she’s arranged for me. The OB-GYN looks about eleven years old and speaks with a heavy Afrikaans accent. She tells me that my back pain, excruciating as it is, is normal, and once she establishes it’s my first pregnancy, I am dismissed as being a hysterical first-time mommy. She tells me to go for physiotherapy.
    So, with my tail between my legs, I slink back to Salena’s. The pain terrorises me all night long. The next morning, after a handful of Panados, I make the appointment with the physiotherapist. Salena arranges for a neighbour to take me there, and the physiotherapist woman tells me I’d know if I was in labour. She proceeds to attach wires to my body, and while I think she plans on electrocuting me, it seems she’s only going to give me electrical jolts. They don’t work. I try to survive that night by rubbing my lower back against the wall and taking more Panado’s. Neither helps. In the middle of the night, Salena and an elderly Peanut Butter keep me company. Salena makes me toast and tea, and we play Snakes & Ladders. I lose, even though I cheat.
    The pain is intolerable, and this time Salena calls an ambulance. I feel like a fraud. I keep telling her the doctor said I was a melodramatic first-time mother, and that I should just grin and bear it. But Salena will hear none of it.
    I am pushed into an examination room by the ambulance attendant and Salena goes into the waiting room. A nurse begins to examine me, and I am hooked up to a machine. This one spews out paper and beeps contentedly. The nurse is wearing a pale green uniform, and she smiles all the time. I like her. She says, “Mommy, you’re definitely in labour.”
    My heart stops. I know, because I can’t hear the machine beeping.
    “Okay,” I agree, albeit reluctantly. “Bring on the drugs.”
    “You’re nine centimetres dilated,” she tells me. “Just one more centimetre and baby will be ready. It’s too late for drugs.” Now there’s something Jimmy’s pregnancy magazines never mentioned – I thought it was never too late for drugs.
    The nurse is serene and explains the procedure to me with gentle words. She stands on my left, cradles my head with her right hand, and cups my left leg under my knee with her left arm. But the baby, who has been letting me know for two weeks that she wants to be born, is pissed off. The monitors start beeping angrily. Baby’s cord is around her neck. A doctor I have never seen before arrives. He chats to me but I can’t hear a word. I see a silvery needle in his hand and notice his manicured nails. Then, casually, like he’s using kitchen scissors to cut the skin off a breast of chicken, he slices my vagina open. My brain reminds me that Jimmy’s magazines called this an