These were the circumstances of his youth. He would even say he loved the frogs then. They were helpless, fragile, and yet their numbers seemed a source of strength. Enough would survive to return the following year and participate in a fresh orgy of procreation. Yes, he loved the frogs, and the other creatures of the loch; the heron, the pair of swans which returned every spring to breed, the ducks, the rabbits, the stoats. There was a sense of unison, of reassurance in the inevitable circles of nature, and he could sit for hours, or wander slowly around the water, and feel a great energy surrounding him even though he himself might be lazy and listless. But now it was different. Now he was disturbed by frogs. Not those ones, the long vanished amphibians of his childhood. Those were good frogs, country frogs. It was the others that were the trouble, the ones that had come to the city, that were always with him, ever present.
Leonard’s job also caused him anxiety. All day long people kept coming to him with these packages. They handed him the packages and he put them in bags and they gave him money for them. He put the money in the till and gave them their bag and their change and a receipt and they went away. It kept happening.
The packages were all very similar. They were rectangular, full of little black squiggles and lines. Most of them were about six inches by four, and about half an inch thick. Some were much bigger and some smaller, some were hard, others flexible, but really they were all much alike. Although they had different pictures on the front and lines on the back explaining what the packages contained, inside they looked the same. Usually there was some truth in the explanations, sometimes they were utter lies. Leonard knew this because he himself had inspected many of the packages, every sheet that was in them and, what was more, in the right order.
Sometimes he thought – perhaps I need my head examined. A person undertaking such an examination would say, how can you be a bookseller and have such an attitude to books? (That, plus the frogs nonsense.) This is not soap-powder you are selling, it is Literature. Ah, he would retort, you literati always turn snooty when it comes to soap-powder. And yet it serves a definite and worthy function. You don’t find people buying a packet of soap-powder and taking it home and staring at it for hours on end in front of the fire. The people who came into the bookshop, they did this with the packages they selected. They sought enlightenment or reassurance or excitement from the conglomeration of wood-pulp and glue and ink in their lap. Leonard knew, he used to do it himself. These days he didn’t believe the packages contained anything as useful as soap-powder.
One thing about the frogs. It wasn’t just him. He used to think it was, but then he began to see it in other people’s eyes. That haunted, nervous look. You didn’t get like that unless the frogs were bothering you. Of course people tried to stay calm, pretend everything was normal. That was what he did. But sometimes he looked into another face and he knew it was happening there too. Well, it stood to reason really. All these frogs and only being seen by the one person, it just wasn’t credible. Sooner or later, he supposed, somebody was going to have the courage to mention them, and then they’d all start. What do you think’s causing it? We must be doing something bad, that’s why it’s happening. We’re going against nature. We’re holding people under duress. He’d have said something himself but he didn’t like to be the first. It might be dangerous. If the frogs thought you were about to squeal they might make a move on you, take you out. And he didn’t want to speak too soon and find that nobody else had got that worried. Yet. He didn’t want to jump the gun.
* * *
This Literature business. In order to disabuse yourself of the notion that the art of writing is somehow elevated, refined or otherworldly, visit a printer’s or the distribution centre of a large publisher. Leonard went to such a place once in connection with his work in the bookshop. There he did indeed see Literature reduced and diminished. Cursing drivers fork-lifted pallets of Shakespeare as though it were dog food; men covered in sweat and tattoos, their arms dipped to the elbows in grease, operated machines that cut, mashed and pummelled the packages, with not a thought as to their contents. Ernest Hemingway was ruthlessly shrink-wrapped, Virginia Woolf glued and bound; yesterday’s hopeful new writers were dispatched en masse to the pulp chambers. It became evident to him there that against violence all those squiggles and lines were quite powerless.
Things got out of control one afternoon in May, in the shop. He wasn’t feeling too well – slightly nauseous and light-headed. Outside it was raining and the trouble came from there, in out of the wet. He didn’t see it come in but that was the logical source. Also there was a thin pallid young man carrying a large empty sports-bag. He had to be watched. And a middle-aged, well-to-do woman shaking her umbrella and demanding attention.
She came up to the till and said, ‘Do you have that new one by the Balmoral chambermaid?’
Leonard was shaping a reply to her in his head when everything started happening at once. The thin man, who had gone to the horror section, unzipped his sports-bag and began to load it with paperback packages. The woman said, ‘Because if you have I should warn you that I shall never shop here again.’ And a sudden green movement at the edge of his vision caused Leonard to look over at the fiction shelves, where round about the Wilbur Smiths a small single frog perched for a fleeting moment before disappearing with a sideways spring.
‘Excuse me one moment,’ he said to the woman, keeping his eyes fixed on the spot. He didn’t feel under an obligation to her anyway as she’d asked a trick question. ‘A slight emergency has arisen.’ This was an under-statement. It was the first time he had ever seen a frog in the shop. He took a magazine from the counter and rolled it up to make a weapon. The weapon he made was a knobkerrie, a round-headed stick used as a club and missile by natives of southern Africa. He began to move cautiously towards the shelves.
‘Whatever is the matter?’ the woman demanded. ‘Will you answer my question?’
‘Please be quiet,’ Leonard said. ‘You’ll disturb it.’ He could cope with them at home – just about – and on the outside. But here, in his place of work – this was a new development. He took a risk and glanced at the woman. It was obvious from her eyes that the frogs had not yet entered her life.
It was tricky. The thief was stacking the horror packages into his bag very neatly and efficiently, as if they were small bricks. But the priority was definitely the frog.
He was halfway to the fiction shelves when the woman said very loudly, ‘Where is the manager?’
‘A good question,’ said Leonard. ‘I should like to know. I think it went in behind the Ps.’
‘This is deplorable,’ said the woman. ‘I refuse to wait a minute longer.’
‘Be patient,’ he said to her, still advancing step by step. ‘They’re not like mice, you know. You can’t just set traps for them.’
Possibly she might have responded, but at this point things took a turn for the worse. The thief, who was returning from the horror shelves with a further selection, let out a cry and dropped the pile he was holding. His open-mouthed stare swung back and forth between Leonard and his knobkerrie and the half-filled bag. From where Leonard was, it was possible to see the sides of the bag rippling and bulging. The thief backed away with his hand to his mouth.
‘Oh my God,’ said Leonard. It was a trap. He started to shout, holding his weapon aloft. ‘Get back! Everybody back!’ The woman retreated. Leonard could feel the sweat breaking out on his face. He wasn’t sure what was happening, if the damage could be limited. He wanted to say something reassuring like, ‘Everybody please leave the premises in an orderly fashion,’ but both the angry woman and the frightened thief had already gone.
Leonard made it back to the counter and pressed the buzzer for assistance. He was breathing heavily and felt very hot. The manager arrived in a hurry. ‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘You look dreadful.’
Leonard tried to explain. ‘This woman didn’t want to buy a package if we had it,’ he said. ‘I don’t feel
well. And look, there’s a bag over there but you mustn’t touch it. You’ll have to phone for the frog disposal squad.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said the manager. This was only to be expected. He reached for the knobkerrie. ‘Stop waving that about before you do yourself an injury, poke your eye out or something.’ The manager came to a decision. ‘Leonard, I’m calling a taxi to take you home.’ Appalling! He couldn’t possibly get in a taxi. ‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘I mean, I’m fine. No I’m not. I’ll walk. Get a bus, I mean. Honestly, the fresh air will help.’
Outside the sun was coming out. The pavements were beginning to steam. Leonard walked along briskly, determined to get home before the next attack. Black cabs swept past him. He tried to get his mind around the possibilities.
What was it all about? This was what people were bound to ask: what was it about? This was what they were always asking. But what did they want to know? Did they want him to tell them what it meant, or what he thought it meant? How could he do that? It might not mean anything. He could tell them only what he believed.
He believed that all the margins of his life were smitten with frogs. They came out of the rivers and drains and out of the old canal beside the street where he lived, and they got everywhere – in the house, in the bedroom, in the bed itself. He opened the oven and they were there, and they sat green and sullen in the saucepans and baking trays in the cupboard below the sink. They were in the fridge and the washing machine and there were a couple of dead ones in the toaster and they got down the sides of the armchairs and into the cupboard where he kept his videos and they sat like little green ornaments on the window ledges. And in the bathroom, that was the worst, it was overrun with them, they climbed the shower curtain and squatted on the soap and left their traces all over the surface of the bath and basin, and they came in clusters up through the toilet. And he dreaded that they would come upon his person, into his clothes and hair, whether he was asleep or awake. This was an awful anticipation.
But, more than this, he feared the aftermath, when the summer came and the sun burnt them up and he would be able to sweep them into the street and reclaim his own territory. He could already see the piles of corpses in the streets, he could catch the first whiff of their stench. And this was only the frogs. He knew there was worse, much worse, to come.
Screen Lives
She was home.
Her clothes still smelt of suntan oil. Her hair retained the thick heavy feel of swimming in the sea, drying in the sun, and with her nail she could still pick a few grains of sand from her scalp. Other parts of her body also, even after a couple of days, retained that salt scent and texture. For example, she loved to nuzzle deep into the crook of her arm and breathe in the beach and the sea, gently rub the soft brown crease with the tip of her nose and let her eye rest, unfocused, on the bleached hairs of her arm, her mind away.
But she was home. Dark Shona beginning to fade again, until next year. There was no escaping that.
Her first morning back at work she chose to wear dark colours. She had toyed with the idea of white, but she didn’t want the others to think she was showing off her tan. Of course she wanted them to comment on it – she was almost black in places – but she didn’t want them thinking that was all her holiday consisted of, just soaking up the sun for two weeks, thoughtless.
On her way to the bus stop some men putting up scaffolding on a block of flats whistled and cheered at her. She kept her head down, angry and embarrassed. She knew she was supposed also to be secretly pleased, but she wasn’t. She had never felt flattered by the attentions of such men; the stupidity and crudeness depressed and frightened her. These ones were putting in a lot of effort. It must be the tan, showing on her legs beneath her short skirt. That was all she was showing.
In Crete she had gone topless on the beach, and if anyone had been eyeing her up they didn’t let on by shouting and whistling. Most of the women were topless. In fact, it was the few who weren’t that you noticed. All sizes and shapes of breast acquired a normality that was, after all, only normal. Even the men didn’t seem to bother. Sometimes, though, she found herself looking at the other women, comparing. She liked her own breasts best. Lying with her back to the sun and resting on her elbows while she read a book, she cradled them between her arms, moving herself forward so that the nipples brushed against her forearms. Then she would find that she hadn’t been reading the words in the book at all, and that her nipples were hard and wanting, and she would have to lie flat for a while, pressing her body into the towel and the beach below, blanking the ache from her mind.
A hook had lain in the pit of her stomach, gently goading her, sickening her, but now she thought she could feel it beginning to unbend and soften. For months her life had been in limbo. She had become aware of her dissatisfaction, but instead of trying to identify the source she had waited, as if for inspiration. She was waiting for her life to change.
Then one day she woke up and realised it would not happen. Something could come over your life, a mood, a feeling, but it had to be acted upon. Otherwise it simply weighed you down, daring you and subduing you at once.
She would never know what came first – this mood of disenchantment, or Devlin. Devlin had crept up on her too – he was no vision appearing suddenly, blinding her with love. In fact she hadn’t even liked him much, to begin with. When she started working there she remarked upon his name – was it Irish, she wondered – and he said, ‘It’s after the character in Notorious – you know, the old Hitchcock film?’ She nodded, of course she knew it, and he went on, ‘My mother loved Cary Grant and my father loved Ingrid Bergman, so I suppose if I’d been a girl I’d be Alicia. It could be worse, I could have been a football team.’ But he said it in such a practised manner that she thought, you think you are Cary Grant, don’t you, you smug bastard. Even though he didn’t look in the least bit like him, he was fair and a little ungainly, not smooth at all.
So probably it started not with Devlin but with the mood, within herself. But she could never be sure.
Or it might have been George. She was not so self-centred as to assume that change came only to her alone. George too was changing. They’d been going out for a year, long enough to breed boredom, not so long that she was afraid to let go.
So this day came when she woke up and decided to act. In the evening she phoned George. It was cowardly but she didn’t want to face him. She didn’t want a scene. ‘George, I want to stop seeing you.’ ‘George, I don’t want to go on seeing you.’ She rehearsed the two lines, wondering which was better, more truthful.
It didn’t matter. She didn’t use either, and he didn’t fight about it. She said, ‘George, I feel things have changed. I don’t think there’s much point in us going on with each other.’ He agreed. This made her more certain that she was doing the right thing, that he too was changing. If he had fought to keep her, she might have had doubts. But he just said, ‘All right.’ It would have been hurtful if she had felt differently: she wasn’t important to him after all. And so he passed out of her life, almost as if he had never been there.
But what if one person changed and the other didn’t? That was when things became truly awful. What if this happened to married people – as it did – people who had grown so accustomed to one another that if one changed it was like tearing a chunk out of the other? The very thought of such trouble made her feel sick and weak.
And then she got over thinking he was too smart. Devlin. They made each other laugh. There was a cheap reissue of Notorious on video, and she bought a copy and watched it through. The lines and the shots came back to her just before they happened, so that they arrived like old friends. She watched it again the next night, understanding what a great, almost perfect film it was. In the morning she wanted to show off her appreciation to him, so when he came on the internal phone to her she contrived to interrupt him: ‘What’s your name? What’s your name?’ She heard his voice, surprised, a little offended per
haps, say, ‘It’s Devlin, Shona,’ and then she hit him with it: ‘Well, you showed that cop something and he saluted you … Why, you double-crossing buzzard, you’re a cop!’ The joke was over-constructed but he got it, he laughed.
After that they both began to work it into every conversation, trying to outdo one another. He’d come to her office and say, ‘We’ve got a problem here,’ and she’d break into it, saying, ‘What’s the matter? Don’t look so tense,’ and he wouldn’t say anything, just stare moodily out of the window, so she’d go on, ‘Look, I’ll make it easy for you: the time has come when you must tell me that you have a wife and two adorable children and this madness between us can’t go on any longer.’ Then, he’d say, ‘I bet you’ve heard that line often enough,’ and she’d say, ‘Right below the belt every time,’ and he’d break it off saying, ‘Actually, it’s this contract, it needs to be redrafted.’ Or she’d be coming down with the flu and he’d say, ‘You don’t look so hot. Sick?’ And she’d muster a smile even though she felt dreadful, and say, ‘No. Hangover,’ and he’d say, ‘That’s news. Back on the bottle again.’ It was funny, and nobody else could join in, because it was just them, Cary and Ingrid. It was romantic. They both laughed but it was romantic. They were living out the movie.
After she had spoken to George she phoned her sister Louise. For the last three years they had gone on holiday together. She had been going to break the habit this year – she had been going to go with George – but now she phoned her to discuss destinations. They settled on Crete. They had always gone for islands: the Canaries, Corfu, Corsica, and now Crete.
Republics of the Mind Page 3