Eating the Underworld

by Doris Brett

  What does a frog know? the Princess thought. Not even that it asks the impossible; a frog can never be companion or playmate. And so she promised all, knowing that it was a promise that could never be claimed on.

  And how could she know, thought Rachel. No-one knew. You thought it was all over, all through. How could you know it was still with you?

  Gravely, the Princess thanked the frog for the returned ball—why not humour the creature, after all? The frog acknowledged her gesture, hopped closer, ready to accompany the Princess home. But then, with a sudden twist and turn, the Princess was off, running for home; her two slippered feet much swifter than the frog’s clumsy leaping. Finally the frog stopped exhausted, and the Princess sped into the distance, leaving the frog croaking helplessly behind her.

  Home free, thought Rachel. She knew that feeling. Making a daring run through obstacles and sliding to safety before anything could catch up with you, like the bat and ball games she had played as a child. Throughout her illness, Rachel had imagined herself to be the batter. She had hit the ball high and wide and ran, scrambled, for the bases. She had passed each base, while the ball was flung from player to player, always evading its deadly touch. It had not been easy; it had required concentration, focus, a kind of wild, determined energy. She had had to weave between opponents, duck shadows, grit her way through the drip of chemicals, falling hair, the shock of her vulnerable body and skid, with the last of her breath, to home-base. It had been hard, but all the time, she had known where she was going and when she had made it, she knew that she was home free.

  The next day at the palace, the Princess had already forgotten the frog. She was seated at the great banqueting table, lunching with the King and his courtiers, when there was a creeping splish-splashy sound. Something soft and wet was coming slowly up the stairs.

  Her heart suddenly rapid with terror, the Princess slammed the door against the intruder. But the King said, ‘My child, what are you so afraid of?’

  And then the story emerged.

  And as she was telling it, the frog who had followed her home was knocking and knocking on the door, calling, ‘Princess, youngest princess, open the door for me. Do you not know what you said to me yesterday, by the cool waters of the well? Princess, youngest princess, open the door for me.’

  The Princess was frozen to her bones, brittle as glass, as the King, who knew the rules, made his pronouncement. ‘That which you have promised, must you perform,’ he said. ‘Go and let him in.’

  And she had no choice, but to open the door to the slimy creature, who followed her step by step to her chair. ‘Lift me up beside you,’ it said. But she cringed and resisted until the King commanded her to do so.

  And when the frog was seated beside her, it said, ‘Now push your little golden plate nearer to me that we may eat together.’ And the bile rose in her throat and she jerked her head involuntarily, at the thought of her lips touching something that its frog lips had touched.

  But the King looked at her and she obeyed, stomach clenching and throat choking, with every tainted mouthful. The frog, however, was enjoying its meal. ‘I have eaten and am satisfied,’ it said, ‘now, carry me to your little room, make your little silken bed ready and we will both lie down and go to sleep.’

  And at that, the Princess began to cry. But the King grew angry and said, ‘He who helped you when you were in trouble ought not afterwards to be despised by you.’

  Trembling with disgust, the Princess picked up the frog between two fingers and, holding it as far away from herself as she could, carried it up the stairs. In her bedroom, she found a spot for the frog in the corner and warily backed away to the safety of her bed. But once she was under the covers, there was the soft slap of wet, webbed feet on the floor. The frog had crept up to her and was saying, ‘I am tired. I want to sleep as well as you. Lift me up, or I will tell your father.’

  And finally, it was too much for the Princess. She picked up the repellent creature and threw it splat! so that it burst against the wall.

  Rachel paused in her reading, puzzled. Something odd was happening here. This wasn’t the way fairytales usually went. In fairytales, the heroes and heroines were supposed to keep their word; to honour their promises. What was going on here? Why did the Princess renege on her agreement? Why did it involve such violence? And what had really followed the Princess home from the well?

  Rachel frowned at the page, looking for clues. They didn’t offer themselves. She turned to her shelf for another book, flicking through to its version of ‘The Frog Prince’—an old Celtic variation. Perhaps the other frog stories held the answers?

  But they were all similar. In each, the girl was helped by the frog in return for a promise that the frog could come and live with her. And each story shared a violent ending—the frog had to be flung against a wall, or have its head chopped off by the girl.

  It wasn’t quite the ending of course, because in all the frog stories, once the frog had been smashed or beheaded, the wicked enchantment was broken and the frog transformed into a golden, glorious, prince. But ‘The Frog Prince’ was clearly a story that eschewed sweetness and light, where spells were not broken by the mere soft touch of a kiss.

  When she finished chemotherapy, Rachel had thought that the story had finished. She had pulled herself up, out of the smooth, enclosed walls of illness. She knew where she was heading. It was towards what she had seen all through her illness, golden and glittering, high above her; above even the odd, refracted image of herself that she sometimes saw, wavering and uncertain, as though reflected in water.

  It was the world she was heading for. And when she finally broke through the cool, translucent surface, she knew that she had made it. She was home free. What she didn’t know, was that something had followed her home.

  It seemed to Rachel that in the year after chemotherapy, the universe had taken her by the throat and was swinging her, ever more wildly—thwack, thwack—against a wall. She fought at first, writhing madly, calling, trying for words. It was impervious. She became passive, curling into herself, protecting herself, tight as a ball. And still it continued. By the end of the year, when the worst was over, Rachel felt that she had burst.

  ‘Why? Why? Why?’ was all she had asked that year. No-one had been able to tell her. It was what she was asking now, as she read through the fairytale.

  There were other fairytales involving marriage to beasts or animals. Overall, the girls in those stories were good girls, gentle ones, dutiful daughters. They had been given away, as part of an inadvertent bargain by their fathers, to be wedded to beasts or monsters. The endings of these stories were very different to the frog stories. In these, the girls accepted their fates sadly, tended to their beasts and, in the end, fell in love with them. Their monsters were transformed by love, a look, a tear. Why not the Frog Princess?

  Rachel spread out ‘The Frog Prince’ and its variants before her. The answers had to be in here.

  In one story, the Princess had made her bargain with the frog in order to recover a lost possession. In another, she had done it to cure her ailing mother. In the third, it was to obey a feared and evil stepmother.

  After these differing beginnings, the stories merged. The frog followed each maiden home. The girls were reluctant to keep their promise. There was the same violent resolution—the frog had to be smashed or beheaded. The stories were perfectly clear: to break the enchantment, the frog had to be cast away, not kissed; rejected, not embraced.

  So what was it? thought Rachel, irritated. What made these frog stories different from the other beast–husband ones? She had a sudden flashback to childhood dinner tables at the Jewish festival of Passover, where the escape of the Jews from enslavement in Egypt is celebrated. As the youngest child, Rachel would chant the required ritual question, ‘Why is this night different from all others?’

  Rachel leaned back. There were frogs in that story too, she thought idly. They were one of the plagues unleashed upon the Egyptians. T
he Israelites had escaped in the wake of those plagues, led by Moses towards the desert. At their moment of gravest danger, they had experienced the miraculous parting of the Red Sea. They thought they had got away, but they had carried something with them. Only forty days after witnessing the miracle, they had flowered with doubt. They had broken the sacred covenant they lived by, made a new one with a false god.

  The covenant! Rachel sat up suddenly. That was what the frog stories were about—covenants. Each of the girls had struck a bargain with the frog. That was what was different from the other stories. In the other beast–husband stories, the girls had been passive, the victims of someone else’s bargain. In ‘The Frog Prince’ stories, the girls had struck the agreements themselves.

  ‘The Frog Prince’ girls had made their bargains for various reasons—to recover something precious, to heal a mother, appease a tyrant. Each girl had spent the rest of the story trying to deny the cost of those bargains, but they had made the bargains themselves.

  Rachel sat very still. Had she made a bargain with the darkness that had followed her home? At first, she had thought that what she was feeling was grief; the grief of a survivor who had believed she would not have to mourn. Later, she had seen that it was more than that. It was what the grief had opened up for her—cracks, a maze of fine, angular lines, running all the way back into her past.

  Recovering something lost, healing a mother, evading a bully—these were bargains that everyone understood. They were bargains that Rachel knew well. What she had never understood was the cost.

  That was what the stories did, she thought. In all three stories, the girls were dragged, pushed, forced to look full-face at what they had done, the true cost of what they had agreed to—to carry the frog with them, every minute of every day of the rest of their lives.

  Finally, they had been made to see that it was unbearable. They had made agreements that they could never, should never, keep. Untenable agreements. And they had not wanted to know.

  They had not wanted to know. And finally Rachel saw. That was it, she thought, the answer to the mystery. That was why the violence had been necessary—it was the violence of recognition; the violence of splitting open secrets, the truth, innocence, the frog; the force that they had allowed to bind them; the energy necessary to break free.

  And it was only then that Rachel remembered that the original ‘Frog Prince’ tale had an alternate title. It was also called ‘Iron Henry’.

  Henry was the character who appeared only at the very end of the story, when the wicked spell had already been broken. He was the enchanted Prince’s faithful servant who had come to drive the couple home to the Prince’s kingdom. Henry who, in his grief, had wound three iron bands tight around his heart, to keep it from breaking with sorrow during his master’s absence.

  As they ride home happily in the splendid, shining carriage, the Prince and Princess heard, in quick startling succession, three loud cracks, each as sharp as the sound of gunfire. What was it, they asked, alarmed? Was something wrong? Was it the carriage tearing and falling apart? But no, the answer came back, it was Henry. With his master now redeemed and free, one by one, the bands were bursting, releasing, springing away from his faithful heart.

  PART TWO

  IT IS LATE NOVEMBER 1995, twenty-one months since my diagnosis. My scar is a fine, pale silver line, reaching from my navel to my pubic bone. I like it. It reminds me of knights of old with their scars earned through honour. And like them, it comes from another time—I’m fit and well and the cancer story seems a long way behind me. I’ve been told that I have a ninety-five percent chance of cure. Ninety-five percent seems close enough to one hundred percent and for a long time now, I have been assuming just that. I have blood tests every three months to check the levels of Ca125, an ovarian tumour marker. For at least a year, I have been feeling so laissez-faire about them that I haven’t felt even a twitch of anxiety as I ring up to get the results. I had cancer, I was extraordinarily lucky, I’m cured. That’s the way it reads to me.

  It’s been a time of rebirth and renewal. I’m feeling terrific. I have loads of energy. My poetry book is nearly ready for publication. The poems in it have won three major literary awards in manuscript form and it feels like a wonderful omen. There are days when I have to restrain myself at some point from jumping high up in the air and shouting, ‘Yippee!’

  I’m working on another book as well. Greg has asked me to co-author a book on ovarian cancer with him. As part of this new arrangement, I’ll change doctors—it’s too confusing to mix the different roles. Greg is in the process of thinking about who he’ll suggest as my new gyn-oncologist.

  A few months ago, a friend was waiting on the results of a breast lump biopsy. It came back benign. Heady with relief, she said to me, ‘How long does it take before this feeling wears off? How long before you stop appreciating how incredible it is to be alive and you just get back to being normal?’

  As soon as she asks it, I know it has already happened to me. When did I stop feeling amazed and start to take things for granted again? I can’t remember. I want to stay amazed. I want to remember how lucky I was and how extraordinary the ordinary world is. I begin looking for a pendant or bracelet that I can inscribe and wear; a talisman to remind me.

  I look in shop after shop, but nothing catches my eye. Finally, I forget about it. I am busy in my psychology practice and polishing my poetry book. I also have to prepare for a hypnosis workshop I’ve been asked to run in Perth.

  Three weeks before I fly out to Perth, I am flying on foot down Chapel Street. I have to pick up something in an unfamiliar part of the street. As I hurry along, a movement in one of the shop windows catches my eye. An assistant is laying out a tray of pendants. They’re engraved with a mixture of odd angular patterns. One in particular draws me in to find out more.

  They are Viking Runes, the assistant explains. An ancient, alphabetic script, whose letters carry many layers of meaning. The one I have picked is called Peorth or Perth. It signifies rebirth and renewal after chaos or death. I am enchanted, I have found my talisman.

  I get the back of it engraved with the words, I am very pleasantly surprised—the first words I heard in that strange, dark sleep on the operating table. They ushered me in to my second chance at life. As I look at the rune hanging around my neck, I think how odd it is that I should pick a rune called Perth, just weeks before going to Perth for the first time.

  A few days before I leave for Perth, I get a phone call. It is from the Northern Territory. They are ringing to tell me that I’ve won the Northern Territory Government Literary Award, a prestigious prize also known as the Red Earth Award.

  I effervesce happily on the phone. The presentation dinner, it turns out, is the evening of my last Perth workshop. Geographically challenged as I am, I suggest that maybe I could drop by the Northern Territory on the way home from Perth. My reasoning runs thus: Perth is a long way away from Melbourne. Darwin is a long way away from Melbourne. Therefore the two cities could be close. There is a long silence on the other end of the phone. Then with slow, careful enunciation it is explained to me that no actually, there is a distance of, say, approximately a continent, between Darwin and Perth.

  I get onto the Perth plane still high from the Red Earth win. The red earth of the Northern Territory and Perth, in Western Australia, will be inextricably linked for me from then on. The next time I see Perth, this link will have become part of one of the most eerily lovely stories of my life.

  The day after I come home from Perth, I have my three-monthly Ca125 blood test. It’s the last one before I graduate to six-monthly tests. It’s part of the step-by-step progression to a pronouncement of cure. Three-monthly tests for the first two years, six-monthly tests for the next three years and then once annually for the rest of my life.

  A few days go by. It is nearly time to ring for the results of my blood test, but I am so blasé about it by now, that I have literally forgotten about it. It’s been a busy,
but pleasant week, so it is startling to wake up shaken on Friday morning, gripped in the after-effects of an intense nightmare.

  In my dream, I am going swimming at a local pool. I leave my bag and clothes, which consist of two white blouses with fine blue stripes, tucked away by the side of the pool. When I come out of the pool, I discover, to my horror, that someone has taken my bag and deliberately left it out on the open bench so that it will be stolen. Everything that identifies and empowers me—my cards, my keys and my telephone numbers—were in that bag. I feel stripped and bereft. I walk to the tram stop to try to get home. I need to get a number 15. Just as I get to the stop, I see the number 15 rolling away from me. I try to catch it, but it is too late. Tram after tram goes by, while I crane my neck, desperately trying to see their route numbers. Finally, I see it—another number 15. I jump on board, only to realise to my horror that it is not a number 15 after all, it is a number 42. I’m distraught. All I want to do is get home and this tram is taking me further and further in the opposite direction. The tram forges straight ahead, without making any stops, and then, to my astonishment, I see that it is heading right into the bay. With impeccable dream logic, it glides smoothly on top of the waves, out to an island in the centre of the bay where it stops. I get out, knowing that I am stranded here for the night. As I look through my clothes, I discover to my amazement the missing bag, concealed under the second pin-striped blouse. I realise it was hidden there to frighten me. I settle myself down for the night, knowing that I’ll be able to get back in the morning.

  When I wake, I feel almost breathless from the intensity of the dream and the memory of the trams flashing by me, wrong number after wrong number, as I search frantically for the one that will take me home. I am mystified by the dream. Life has been going along peacefully. I can’t relate it to anything happening internally or externally.