Her mother, a strong personality, would flip over from the Showtime movie channels whenever Noha came into her room and was desperately worried about her daughters. Noha told Fahd that she could remember her mother forbidding her to ride the horses at the funfair, even bicycles. She was not to jump around or play too energetically in case she broke her hymen.
‘A girl’s a matchstick!’ she would tell her.
When she was older and understood the implication of this sentence, she would lie beneath her blanket in the bitter Riyadh winter and ask herself, ‘A matchstick? Who will strike me, and when?’
Noha still recalled those moments as a young girl when she would hide beneath the bedsheet and send her little hand to grope around. She felt no pleasure, just the thrill of discovering this buried treasure. One day her mother walked in on her unexpectedly and Noha snatched her hand away in confusion.
‘What are you doing?’ her mother asked, sensing the child’s confusion and panic.
‘Nothing!’ Noha answered in terror.
Her mother wasn’t sure of what she had been up to, but she started dropping hints that it was a sin to play with oneself: ‘If you put your hand there you’ll never have children!’
It was absurd that a mother should threaten her child with the inability to bear children. So what if she did? What does being a mother mean to a girl of seven?
The next time she fiddled with her hand and moved it around down there, she was doing so for two reasons: first and foremost out of curiosity and secondly because she enjoyed its the way it felt. It was at this moment that her mother surprised her again, coming into the room and fully exposing her by uncovering the blanket. She moved closer and questioned her and Noha was stammering that she had been trying on her new underwear when her mother’s hand, burning and heavy, landed on her face.
Although Noha only left the house very rarely all her friends were men. She absolutely never went out without her mother and an army of brothers and sisters. Her mother would never let her go with children or the driver, nor with any of her relatives. In her mother’s absence the only person who could accompany her was her father.
Being accompanied by her father felt like a moment of wild rebellion to Noha, and it was the same on those rare occasions that she was allowed out with her friend. Her mother took her to her grandmother’s house, her mother took her to university, her mother took her to her doctor’s appointments, and so on, so much so that Noha would sometimes feel sorry for her, wrapped up in her daughter and neglecting her husband.
‘It’s wonderful that she’s done this,’ she would tell herself from time to time, ‘because otherwise I would have slept with lots of the men I’ve met. It’s true that I’ve done the deed with three to date, but that was only on the phone. If Mum had let me be for just a bit of the day I’d have done so much …’
It was imperative that Noha dispose of her sister, Nadia, with whom she shared a bedroom and bathroom. She did her best to upset and annoy her. Exploiting Nadia’s fear of the dark she started switching the light off early, leaving her sister quaking with fear. The two of them bickered until at last Nadia moved her books and bed in with her younger siblings, and the little bedroom became the kingdom of Noha’s secret love affairs.
During her first year at secondary school she was pursued by a boy two years her senior. He made her come, bringing her to a climax with just his voice and groans, as happened in the movies. Noha was amazed that her mother never heard her back then. She eventually took care to close her bedroom door and then, as a further precaution, to shut herself in the bathroom. How embarrassing it had been when one of her friends, hearing the echo bouncing off the ceramic tiles, asked her, ‘Are you in the lavatory?’
‘Yes,’ she had said, explaining that the insulation in the bedroom walls muffled his voice. He never found out the truth: that she was trying to keep her voice from the ears of her mother, who hovered in corners like bats in the dark.
A girl is like a matchstick, her mother would constantly remind her: she could only be used once. She meant that Noha should hold on to her virginity. The thought that Noha’s fingering might lead her to a sticky end terrified the mother, and her fear grew when she saw her playing blind man’s buff in the dark with her cousins. Whenever they caught each other she was convinced they must be canoodling.
Her poor mother.
Noha remembered the time she had been asleep or, to be exact, pretending to sleep, lying on her stomach as her cousin Samer, stretched out beside her playing his Game Boy, threw his hand across her and brushed up against her.
‘What a fool,’ thought Noha.
Noha had a male friend who she found out was gay. More worrying to her was that either he hadn’t realised it himself, or was unsure, or even that he went both ways, with women and with men. He would sometimes say things that would never pass a man’s lips: ‘Ha ha. Someone lift me up.’
She felt that the manliness of any young fellow in the habit of saying such things was open to question. Maybe the trickiest moment came when she sent him a risque image of herself, and pleaded with him to reply in kind, only to receive a photograph of his bottom, taken in the lavatory of a fast food restaurant.
Discussing his relationship with his last girlfriend he told Noha of peculiar moves that could only be of interest to someone with homosexual leanings.
Noha sent Fahd an intimate picture of herself, which she had saved on her laptop. One day she was with her sister Nadia, browsing through the picture folder where she kept images of the latest fashions. The girls were getting ready to attend their cousin’s wedding. The laptop was perched on the revolving chair in her bedroom and her sister was busy talking about the girls at school. She quietly spun the chair round before Nadia could catch sight of the shot, her heartbeat rising and her face colouring as she imagined her sister seeing it, not that she was sure she hadn’t. What would she tell her? Either that it was of her, in which case she had no reason for keeping it unless she had sent it to somebody, or that it was of someone else, which opened up another can of worms, and implied she had lesbian tendencies.
— 21 —
FAHD DIDN’T STAY WITH Noha, the Paper Moon girl, for long. Saeed was right: it was too much trouble waiting to get free of her armed bodyguards and easier to take oneself off to another, riper girl, who was easier to talk to and meet.
One evening Fahd paid a visit to Faisaliya Tower where he had organised a group art exhibition in the mall’s central hall, which allowed women strolling around the shops to stop and take in a picture. He was looking at a beautiful canvas entitled Daughters of the Rain, an abstract depiction of village girls cavorting beneath showers of rain, when he was startled by a woman in her late thirties standing next to him and looking at the same picture. Flustered, he moved to the next picture, only to find her next to him again, examining it through her niqab.
‘The brother’s an artist?’ she asked boldly.
‘Yes,’ he answered.
She talked to him about Daughters of the Rain, why the artist had given such prominence to the colour blue when the rain clearly brought such joy and pleasure. He was on edge and anxious as he spoke to her, looking about in fear lest one of them dropped down from the top of the tower clad in his light cotton mashlah. Little did he know that his time would come later, one melancholy morning as he sat with his lover Tarfah in Starbucks, from where they would lead him away to face charges not merely of illegally consorting with a female, but also of using feigned affection and black magic to exercise his influence over the hapless girl.