Bo, their full-sized poodle, bounded to Susie and pinioned her to the door. Normally she would have returned the welcome. Today was not normally. Phil had gone straight into the kitchen.
“I didn’t steal it, Mum.”
“Bath,” her mother said. “You didn’t have one after football.”
“You have to believe me,” Susie protested.
Her mother stopped in her tracks. “I believed you the last time,” she said.
“But this time, it’s true,” Susie insisted. “Really.”
“‘Bath,’ I think I said,” her mother replied.
Phil came out of the kitchen, bearing a glass of water, his right fist clenched.
“Phil?” Susie appealed to him.
“Later, munchkin,” Phil replied. He passed her mother the glass of water.
“I don’t want a bloody pill,” her mother stomped.
“It’ll calm you down,” Phil advised her.
“You can’t just pop a pill, you know …”
“Please take it, Jane.”
“… not for every little upset in life.”
“Please, my dear.”
“It brings on my hot flushes.”
“For me,” Phil insisted.
“See?” her mother shot at Susie as she took the orange lozenge from Phil’s now unclenched fist, and swallowed it.
Phil was busy being kind and conciliatory. He was the kind of man who liked being kind and conciliatory – one of the reasons he was, damn his eyes (and though Susie hated to admit it), such a good teacher.
Susie had tried – tried her hardest, in fact – to find his lessons boring. Everything about them said they should be: the Arctic, presently, the fauna of the tundra, the narwhals and Inuits. But try as she might, she had found herself absorbed.
He went to retrieve the mail from the little wire basket he’d screwed in skewiffly behind the letter-box to stop Bo from mutilating the post. He was also patting Bo’s bouncing head, almost as if he were yo-yoing with him. “I know the whole thing is worrying … exceeding worrying indeed. We’ll talk through it all later,” he said – kindly, conciliatorily. “Here,” he said passing her a squidgy, jiffy-bag type envelope. “This one’s for you.”
The stamp on it was from Papua New Guinea.
“Grandma!” Susie snorted.
“I think that would be a reasonable guess. Come on, Bo,” he said and took down the dog’s lead.
Susie trudged upstairs to her bedroom. Normally ‘Grandma’, the mother of her dead father, was someone … well, at any rate, whose eccentricities made her laugh. Made them all, the whole family, laugh. Today, though – as has already been said –, was not normally. And the not-normalness of today made of Grandma’s not-normalness something that was – just for the moment – neither funny ha-ha, nor even funny peculiar, but something profoundly irritating.
Normal grandmothers, Susie had been told, rocked on chairs and crocheted. Susie’s grandma rocked around the clock and Karaoke’d. Normal grandmothers went on holiday twice a year and sent postcards. Susie’s grandmother whizzed around the globe like a satellite with ants in its antennae and sent … frogs.
Over the years, consequently, Susie had acquired less a collection of frogs than, piled as they were into her bookshelves, a library of them. She had wooden frogs from China, and china frogs from Hollywood; she had polyester frogs from Polynesia and velvet frogs from Venezuela. She had frogs with Stetsons, with matador caps and with berets; she had fat frogs and thin frogs and sort-of-neither-fat-nor-thin frogs; she had frogs so real you half expected them to croak, and others whose only concessions to their amphibian originals were a set of bulgy eyes and ‘w’-ed legs. She even had one frog which was blue. Sent from Perth. Perth, Australia.
Normally Susie got some kind of perverse pleasure from shredding the inevitably badly wrapped parcels. But today – as has already been noted – was not a normal day. Whilst she tore she wondered angrily to herself whether in Papua New Guinea there wasn’t, by the smallest quirk of fate, something else to buy other than a frog. A T-shirt, for instance. Even a ‘My Grandma Went To Papua New Guinea And All I Got Was A Lousy T-shirt’ sort of a T-shirt.
True to tradition, though, it was a frog.
A beanbag frog, this, of a paisley design and with rather weird, very green eyes which even for a frog were very sticky-outy. It exuded an indefinable eeriness, this frog. A certain almost mystic quality. It had a wise face. Yes. A wise face and a kind face.
Despite her anger, despite her fear and misery and frustration, Susie found herself smiling at the frog.
To this day she swears she doesn’t know why. There was a compulsion, that was all: She had to do it. She had no choice.
She kissed the frog.
And he came to life.
Chapter 3
Susie dropped the frog. Like a hot potato she dropped him.
Susie’s world was not one in which kissed frogs came to life. She didn’t believe in fairy-godmothers. Pumpkins, in Susie’s world, were not coaches-in-waiting and glass slippers were really stupid shoes to go dancing in.
He’d splatted on the floor as only a beanbag frog could splat, legs and arms splayed enough for them to be described as ‘alimbo akimbo’. The green, sticky-out eyes were lifeless. Susie was transfixed.
She knew she had to touch it again. She knew she would find the courage to do it, knew it was just a question of time. Curiosity may have killed the cat; humankind, though, was created by it.
She also knew that the longer she took to do it the harder the doing of it would be. The sooner she found the courage the easier it would be. Yes, the sooner – there was no question about it – the bet- …
She squidged her eyes closed as tight as they could go. She extended a rigid arm, closed her eyes still shutter, thought of England, and clutched the frog.
“DON’T DROP ME,” shouted the beanbag frog, almost causing Susie to do precisely that. “If you let go of me we all become lifeless again.”
“All?” Susie asked.
“Look, don’t you know, and you will see,” said the frog.
She looked around her.
Her entire library had come to life.
Even the little brown dog bought in Paris and who was thus, for politically very incorrect reasons, considered by Grandma to be an ‘honorary frog’.
And not just to life. But to a life which had been imprisoned, djinni-like, in a bottle. This bottle one of lemonade; and which had been jiggled up and down just before being opened. When its top had come off, therefore … DJOOM! They were spuming, the frogs (and honorary frog), all over the place. Susie’s gob was so smacked as to be stuck – stuck fast. Her eyes protruded even more than the beanbag frog’s.
Who, beneath the froggy cavorting, continued, “Touch one of us, don’t you know, any one of us and we all remain alive. Break that contact and we all return to being lifeless. Well, until you make contact again.”
“Right,” said Susie. But it was just a noise. She was still finding it quite hard to adjust to the new reality which was before her.
“I don’t hear bathwater running.” Her mother. Shouting from downstairs.
Susie made a blind grab for her petulance and found it remarkably easily. “Give me a chance,” she petulanted back. To the beanbag frog she said, “Sorry.”
She sat him comfortably in the middle of her bed, picked up her fresh clothes and left him. She couldn’t see her mother, in her present mood, having too much truck with suddenly-coming-alive frogs.
She started for the bathroom. And then she stopped. Had what had just happened to her really happened to her? Or had she just dreamt it?
She looked back at the beanbag frog. And at all the other frogs, and the little brown dog, now frozen mid-cavort. It was a mystery, all right. A conundrum, even.
She went back to the bed, touched the beanbag frog. They all came back to life.
“Just checking,” she said, and, leaving him again, she went into the bat
hroom. She started to run the bath. Alice-like she “curiouser and curiouser”-ed in her head, trying to make some kind of sense of this new situation, wondering what (if anything) to do about it all.
Before her cogitations had progressed beyond a jot, however, a smell arose from downstairs which made them all … well, not really relevant. Because the reality of that smell superseded all others.
Fish pie.
Fish pie meant peas. And peas meant trouble.
Peas meant trouble with a capital ‘T’. Peas, in Susie’s humble opinion, were the vilest, horriblest, most nauseous foodstuff in the whole history of the universe. Eating peas, so Susie reckoned, was as good for Susie as eating genetically modified razor blades. And yet Susie’s mother was Attillaly insistent both that eating them was good for her and that eat them she would.
The bath became a pond of despond. She plonked herself in the water, rather than wallowing in it.
She reached desultorily for the soap. This managed to brush against the sponge which knocked her frogman frog into the water. Her frogwoman frog as, Susie supposed, she should more accurately be called. Souvenir of Los Angeles. Susie couldn’t be bothered to fish it out.
The sponge was also a frog. From Limerick in the emerald isle of Ireland. It had a huge smile plastered across its face. Susie wanted to punch the stupid smile off the stupid thing.
Still the smell of fish-pie was staining her nostrils. Still the ghosts of the peas-yet-to-come were stealing any solace the bath might otherwise have given her.
“No, Susie. No good, girl. Got to get real. Got to get through this. Get this mess sorted. Get your innocence proved. Get it acknowledged, get it broadcast. Got to do that, girl. Got to do it.”
If it wasn’t for the peas. If it just wasn’t for the stupid peas.
She grabbed at the sponge, prepared to smother it in soap. The sponge spoke to her.
“And how the devil are you?” it asked her.
“Excuse me,” Susie asked, not as a question but as a statement aghast, appalled, horrified.
At which moment the frogwoman frog arrived on the surface.
“You know,” she asked, “like, how dirty this water is?”
“If the two of you don’t mind,” Susie hoity-toitied, “I am having a bath.”
“In this water?!” increduloused the frogwoman. She was a skyscraper of a frog, extremely long and very thin.
Susie detected the whiff of an American accent. “I’m … naked,” she hisspered coyly.
“Sure, we’re not big ones, us, for ceremony,” said the sponge. “Seriously. We’d not want you to go to any fuss on our account. How’re you doing? O’Nestly is the name. Mister O’Nestly.”
“Mimimi,” said the frogwoman. “Miami minus ‘a’.”
“Plus ‘mi’,” said O’Nestly.
“Plus ‘mi’,” grinned Mimimi. She dived again beneath the surface.
“If you don’t mind,” Susie said. She retrieved Mimimi and deposited her back on the side of the bath. “Having a bath is something …” She squeezed the water out of O’Nestly. This was accompanied on his part by a few “oof”s and “gently does it”s. “…I prefer to do alone,” she said. And Susie dumped the now wrung out O’Nestly next to Mimimi.
“Frogs,” she hrrrmphed to herself.
The smell of fish-pie still wafted from below her. Her gruntlement’s dis-still leeching to her, the cleansed Susie returned to her bedroom. She grabbed the beanbag frog from the bed.
“I’ve just had two of your lot in the bath with me,” she protested.
“Have you?” asked the frog without any concern at all. “I was in the bath, don’t you know, with Archimedes. He always used to say that I was the ‘ek’ inside his ‘eureka’. Are we leaving now?”
“Leaving?”
“For Grammarcloud?”
“Grammarcloud?”
“The place I’ve come to whoosh you to. Why else would I be here? Is everyone in this place stupid? Or is it just you?”
“You’re unbelievably rude.”
“Beats being stupid.”
“The only place I’m going, Mr Unbelievably Rude, is downstairs. To fish pie and blooming peas.”
As if on cue, her mother shouted coldly up the stairs: “Supper.”
“Coming,” Susie shouted back. Colosseumed Christians told the lions were ready had shouted “Coming” more enthusiastically.
“Mr E,” the frog said.
“What?” Susie ‘what-are-you-on-about-now?’-ed back at him.
“Mr E. My name,” said the frog.
“Right,” Susie said. “I’ve got to go down- …”
“I was rude, you’re right, I’m sorry,” said Mr E. “I thought, don’t you know, you’d have been told. About me. About us. Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Susie said, anxious to be away. “It’s just …”
“Be careful.”
“Careful?”
“You’re tired, Susie, angry. These things block our ears. We start hearing words not said, reacting to cues not spoken. Try to eat the peas. Please be careful, don’t you know. That’s all I’m saying. Very careful.”
“In other words,” said the blue frog, the one from Perth, Australia, “you just be blooming sure, Suse, you mind your peas and cues.”
Susie glowered at the blue frog, let go of the beanbag frog and left.
Chapter 4
It was really that Susie tried to eat the peas. Really and truly. But, even as the plate was being handed to her, before it was even before her, those peas were goading her, taunting her, ‘na-naner-nahing’ at her.
Phil had been kind to her. With a wink to signify secrecy, he served her only the teeniest teaspoon of the green excrescences. Susie had immersed these within a snowball of mashed potatoes; she had scooped half that snowball onto her fork; and had, spoonful-of-sugarlessly, sought to medicine-swallow it.
But they had started to grow, the peas. To swell. What had been pebbles gianted into boulders. And the boulders started to press, hard, against the back of her throat. She would choke. She was being choked. She might die.
Phil noticed that Susie was struggling. His eyes implored her: “Try, Susie. Really try.”
She was trying. But – please help her, someone – she was choking. She was dying. Couldn’t anyone see? Didn’t anybody care? If she didn’t get rid of them, the peas, she would. Die. Horribly.
The still swelling peas, simmering as they were in an acid of strangled sobs and silenced protest, were – if such a thing was possible – tasting worse and yuckily worse. Going cold – how could they be? – in a throat microwaving around them.
Which was the point at which her mother noticed.
She stopped her own eating and watched Susie.
Eventually, like tar lolloping reluctantly and lumpily from the shovel, the congealed scoop disappeared. The peas were gone; they had been eaten.
But their taste had not gone. The bump their swallowing had indented in the back of her throat, that had not gone. She gulped water. And allowed a really tiny, the teensiest-weensiest “yuck” to escape from her lips.
A “yuck” her mother heard. And her mother’s opinion of the “yuck” was not that it was teensy-weensy. Her opinion was that it was yet another indication of Susie’s “mind-blowing” selfishness. Those welcome at her mother’s table, so her mother told her, were those who welcomed being there. Clearly Susie didn’t welcome being there. Therefore she should perhaps adjourn to somewhere away from the table where, equally clearly, she would be happier. Let’s say her room, for instance. Perhaps a few more hours of her own company might persuade her how welcome it is, the company of others, the company of family – the company of company.
Courtesy of the peas, her tears had already taken off their tracksuits and were limbering up around the starting blocks. Now they threatened to false-start from those blocks. And sprint. Sprint anywhere. The destination unimportant.
Susie, though, was not about to let a few still subm
erged tears beat her. She dabbed at her crumbless chin with defined, almost ponderous deliberation. She slowly refolded her hardly unfolded napkin, and returned it, with undue pomp, to its place.
Hoping that her legs’ quivering was less apparent to her mother than it jellily felt, she stood, the Queen before the House of Lords. She meticuloused her chair beneath the table, turned and, with measured and with silent tread, walked to the door, which – ultra-slowly, ultra-quietly – she closed behind her.
Susie wouldn’t allow herself to sob. Sobs could be heard. Tears, however, are silent. And her tears, anyway, were no longer stoppable. Perhaps startled by starting, in the event, those tears opted not to sprint but to spit. Or rather to be spat. Like the too-hot fat spat from a too-hot frying pan – Gulliver attacked by Lilliput’s archers, a thousand prickles from a thousand pins.
There are tears – certainly there are – which soothe, which purify, the tears of sadness and of mourning. These tears, though, weren’t those healthy tears. These tears, sizzling trenches into Susie’s cheeks, these tears were ugly tears, tears that only scalded, only putrefied.
Silently, Susie closed the door to her room. She threw herself on her bed, buried her head under the pillow and … SCREAMED!!! It was all, all of it, every single shred of it so totally, one zillion per cent UN-BLOOMING-FAIR!!!
The scream did her good.
She saw again the beanbag frog on her bed. Talking frogs, though, were not on her agenda. Not just for the moment. She was raging within herself. Raging.
It was unfair.
It was all so unfair.
Yes, and all so unfair as well.
And it wasn’t fair that it was so unfair. And surely if it was so unfair something had to be done about the unfairness of it all. Something had to be done about fairing it a bit. If all of us, we all went round, Phil-like, all “life-isn’t fair”-ing all over the place, then the Christians, wouldn’t they, would still be being fed to the lions?
She stomped over to the beanbag frog. Mr E, as she remembered he was called. She plonked him on her knee and asked him, “Why is life so unfair?”
Susie and the Snow-it-alls Page 2
