Not a Fairytale Read Free Page A

colourful dresses, and I love the women’s gold and black beaded necklaces. I’m glad I nagged Ma into letting me wear her old dangly earrings and bracelet.
    I greet everyone in the lounge and an old woman tells me to go to the back yard where the other children are going to watch the qurbani. I have no idea what she’s talking about but I smile politely and do as she has ordered. The back yard is huge, filled with loquat trees and grapevines and six woolly sheep making baaing sounds. I have never seen sheep in real life. No one else seems surprised by them, and some children are even petting them. They smell funny. I’m not going to touch them.
    Near the sheep there’s a hole in the ground that someone has dug. Like a grave. Not that I’ve seen a grave, except in films, because girls aren’t allowed to go to graveyards, or so Papa says. Then there’s a man in white robes with a large knife in his hand. I think of the three blind mice. This must be a carving knife. And then there are more men and they are reciting from the Quran and I move forward and the man with the knife has his arm wound tightly around the sheep’s head and, as I watch, something warm splashes on my satin dress. The smell slaps my face along with the baas of the other sheep. I run. Through the house, down the road, till I find the car and crawl into the back seat. In my mind I can still see the sheep moving even after its throat is slit, and I feel blood entering the top of my nose and the drops fall slow and heavy onto my lap, hiding the sheep’s blood.
    That night we drive home, and in the boot there is a bloody newspaper parcel filled with our portion of the sheep’s body. The next day my mother will cook it into a curry and my food battle with her will begin. Until I learn to cook, I refuse to eat anything but Rice Krispies and cheese sandwiches. My mother tells everyone that I’m just going through a phase. She says it’s because I’m spending too much time with Hindus like Rukshana – even though Ruks is Muslim like us (and some Hindus do eat meat, just not cows!). But Ma doesn’t trust her because she’s dark-skinned.
    After that day I notice things I hadn’t seen before. Cows in trucks turning into a long driveway in Maitland, near Polla-the-Prune’s ugly house. When I ask my mother, she says they’re going to the abattoir. I look up “abattoir” in the dictionary – it’s a slaughterhouse where animals go to be killed.
    I phone to ask Salena how the animals are killed in the abattoir, and she tells me. A sheep (or a goat) is trained to lead the others to their deaths. Usually this is a young ram, and when he has lived in the abattoir long enough and is used to the smell of blood, he leads the other sheep up the ramp into the slaughterhouse. The sheep follow, he escapes through a side gate, and they die. Later, when he gets older, they get a new Judas goat and the old one follows him to his death.
    Salena says our mother and other women like her are Judas goats. They let girls follow them into the marriage-abattoir. I don’t understand what she means, but she is sad when she says it. I wish I could make her happy.

    Yummiest Cheese Sandwich
    Take 3 pieces of your favourite cheese (mine’s Gouda), 3 or 4 tomato slices, a few pieces of cucumber and some lettuce. Put them on buttered wholewheat bread and add lots of salt and pepper. Mmmmm!

Poor Skollie
    F OR THREE F RIDAY NIGHTS IN A ROW , Ma’s yellow Mazda has been broken into. It has to stand outside in the driveway because my father parks his gold Mercedes in the garage.
    The first Friday they broke her passenger window and stole her radio. The second Friday they broke her driver’s window and stole the replacement radio. The third week she left her car doors unlocked, but they still broke the window. Ma says they just like the sound of glass breaking.
    I say “they”, but Ma thinks it’s just one skollie – she found only one set of footprints in the sand next to