IT WAS NO USE. JOANNA LAY AWAKE, THE BOTTLE an unforgiving lump that made her ear throb. Trying to sleep was the least useful way to get to sleep. You had to approach yourself slowly with a biscuit in the hand, a shy bokkie in the zoo. Joanna had learned that in the long, sleepless night that had been her Matric year, a waking nightmare when every hurdle, once cleared, seemed to reappear ahead of her. When she thought about it now, her girlhood puzzled her. While she was in it, she thought that life was elsewhere; now that she was nearly thirty, those same teenage years seemed to be bathed in a stuttering light. There was something clear and powerful about girlhood – nothing saintly, but directed, the bodies of her age-mates loosed like arrows from the bow of a dispassionate huntress. Every grim Diana in every book had spoken to Joanna; every hapless man pulled apart by hunting dogs provoked a joy that burned in her chest, indigestible. Her parents’ lives were prosaic: the pictures spoke in tongues.
And now she understood why. She could hear Jan. His breath caught in his throat every few seconds in quick burps that she had, until James was born, been able to sleep right through. Outside the rain pattered endlessly on.
She thought she hadn’t slept but a noise had woken her from a dream where Saartjie was whispering some warning in her ear – whispering or singing – and now her body thought it was morning. A hundred clocks, and none of them was properly set: everyone, everyone else was asleep, even James. Behind the blackout material, she knew that the patchy full moon was tilting on its axis, powdering the house with light. She cocked her head and listened, and the growling came to her and was swept away again as the wind blew in gasps.
Viola, thought Joanna. Viola is coming to get me.
There it was again. Was Jan making the noise? What was it?
Now it was gone. Insects?
She gave up and felt for her boxers in the dark. She closed James’s door and tiptoed down the passage again. Bella got up from her sheepskin in the bathroom and wagged her tail. “Lie down,” said Joanna softly. The weird snoring was coming from outside, short bursts of sound laid over one another. She leaned against the back door so that it yawned open but heard only the rain on the terracotta.
Nothing.
No. There it was! She thought of those wooden frogs with the ridges on their backs. You stroked them with a stick and they croaked.
Now the gurgling was further away. “Just go and look,” she said to herself. “Just go and bloody look and go back to bloody bed.”
She went as silently as she could through the courtyard, trying not to slip. She felt wet fur pressing against her legs. Joanna whispered, “Go and lie down, Bella. It’s just me, you silly dog.” The sheepdog shook herself and padded back inside. When she was wet she looked like a fox or a wolf. Joanna often got a fright seeing the domesticated millennia so easily shrugged off.
She made her way around the side of the house to the front and started at the arch. She touched the sentry frog on the gatepost for good luck. He was plated silver in the rain, armoured, ready to defend.
Something rustled in the proteas behind her and Joanna squeaked, then clapped a hand over her mouth as a shape sprang at her. It was a frog – a real one. A big bugger, too, nearly half a ruler wide. He squatted on the grass and regarded his plaster likeness, his throat throbbing. The croaks were quick, one second at a time, but he kept up the call, persistent and worried as a foghorn.
Behind Joanna, other frogs answered him.
She wanted to laugh with relief. She sat back on her heels in the drizzle and scrutinised the frog. She had never seen one this close before. Under the moon his markings were tortoiseshell, exact, bleached out over his flagging stomach. If she had been standing over him Joanna would have mistaken him for a puff adder.
“Hello, Freddy,” she said.
She wanted to know what he felt like. Joanna reached her hand towards him in increments. She actually had her hand on his back – Press me. I squeak! – when he shook her off resentfully and leapt for the stone wall. He paused briefly and then squeezed himself through the hole at the bottom.
That’s what they are, Joanna realised. Frog-flaps!
There was more rustling. Joanna sat flat on the soggy lawn to watch as about twenty frogs elbowed their way through the dripping fynbos and headed towards the wall. One by one – it was all very orderly – they squashed themselves through the gaps and hopped off down the street.
She got up and peered over the wall, her shorts wet. “Don’t you want to join your friends?” Joanna whispered to the cement statue. The frogs were hopping, determined, up Recreation Road.
Some of the frogs were keeping to the pavements, but the bolder ones were making the most of the wet tar. They were heading straight for the split tree. There it was, its branches forked like the limbs of a man standing on his head.
Not a man, thought Joanna. A woman. We’re the ones who spend our lives worrying about when our legs are open, if they’re open too much, or not enough.
The frogs had finished their passage through her garden. Joanna walked gingerly back around the house to get her car keys. She clicked the Yale on the back gate open and then heaved a stone behind to keep it superficially closed. Bella crouched down to stick her snout through the cat-flap. “I’ll be back now,” Joanna told her. “Stay!”
Joanna had always liked to drive without shoes. You could really feel the pedals, and she could work the clutch with her big toe. Oswald had told her once that people went barefoot because it put the soles of your feet in contact with the Earth. Joanna had pointed out that it didn’t need a genius to work that out, but he had shushed her and gone on, wagging a segmented finger.
“Not only the Earth,” he said, “but everything in it.” Joanna had thought immediately of the split pine tree, its roots creeping towards their house on Plantana Avenue, aggregating every event in Fish Hoek, first communions and Matric failures, thefts and smacks and hugs. Births, of course. And deaths. “Everything in the ground,” Oswald had repeated – he was so hard to stop, once he got going – “and everything under it.”
Now, as Joanna heeled-and-toed out to the waiting car, Oswald would say that she was walking on every person who had ever lived or died, or who ever would. The ancestors weren’t just the people who had come before her: they were also the ones who hadn’t been born yet, or been born at the wrong time and gone back under the Earth to wait for another chance.
“Sorry, guys,” said Joanna.
Getting into the seat on the driver’s side broke her contact with them. Joanna turned the key, fisted her hand around the gear lever, and reversed out of the driveway.
Her wipers weren’t working properly; neither were the headlights. Joanna drove carefully up Recreation Road. The Fish Hoek streets were empty and dimly lit. She knew that some of the frogs on their journey were being squashed under her tyres, but she tried not to think about it. You could get through lots of things if you just didn’t give them room.
The two boys were making their way past Marina Gardens. One was wearing a black baseball cap against the rain; the other was hooded like the Grim Reaper. Where their features should have been there were only pools of darkness, and the smoke from the fat one’s cigarette grew ragged into the rain. The hoodie, thought Joanna. There was some talk about outlawing them in the U.K. but that would never happen.
As Joanna waited for the spectres to pass, her car idling, the larger one leapt suddenly sideways, legs drawn up like a chubby Charlie Chaplin, against the streetlight. His grunt was magnified in the deserted street. The light blinked obediently out.
The little one said nothing, but kept walking, his legs spidery and quick. The fat boy’s hood fell back as he righted himself again, but Joanna could see only that he was flabby, blurred, as if his shape hadn’t been decided. They walked on, knees jerking like puppets.
As they emerged from the shadow, Joanna saw the back of the big boy’s top. It flashed the spine of a life-sized skeleton, white on black, that shook and capered as the two disappeared up towards the stand of pine trees at the bike track.
Not boys – misshapen young men, like the shoemaker’s elves.
Beelzebub likes the runts, said Doctor Renfield. They have a good line in resentment, and they’re always ready to rumble. Strong fuckers, too – look at that little one’s wiry arms! You know why, Joanna? They’re used to fighting for what they have.
Bastards, thought Joanna. I bet they’re the ones defacing the cave too. She waited until they had dodged past the traffic circle and made their way between the wet pines.
She took the second arm left out past False Bay Hospital, where My-Wife-Gladness was probably on night shift. Joanna gave her a little courtesy wave out of the window. (Why doesn’t the Queen wave with this hand? asked Doctor Renfield. Because this is my hand! Ho ho ho!)
As she motored along Kommetjie Road, Joanna couldn’t believe that there wasn’t a single other vehicle on the streets. Ah, Fish Hoek.
You don’t know where you’re going, do you? asked Doctor Renfield.
“Shut up,” said Joanna. “I’ll do the driving.”
She squinted through the windshield. Were those little lights? Why were they moving around? Oh, God. Was it a search party?
Joanna kept going all the way up onto the Silvermine Road. In the rain the lights grew larger and clearer and took the shape of torches and lanterns and two arc lights, the type they used on set, she thought. Jan would know what they were.
People in raincoats were lined up on the road, waving their arms and shouting. Joanna looked up at where they were pointing, and that was when she saw that it was raining frogs.
She pulled over involuntarily, her arm jerking the steering wheel in the kind of lurch she gave when she woke from a nightmare. But it was true. The tarmac had disappeared under the carpet of creatures, slick as mermaid’s tails in the bright light of the moon. They crouched like athletes, legged over one another, tumbled, regained their balance, and leapt.
And leapt and leapt and leapt.
It confused the brain. You had to choose one frog and watch it to see what they were all doing, otherwise it was like watching James’s kernels popping in the pot. The frogs were rasping out quick grunting snores that scratched and rasped at her eardrums.
She wasn’t the only person who’d stopped to watch. There were other cars parked on both sides of the verge, making a deliberate corridor for the frogs like the guard of honour Joanna and Jan had walked through at their wedding. Some of the cars had big stickers in their rear windows. She stuck her head out of the window. TOADNUTS! said one sticker. NOORDHOEK UNPAID TOAD SAVERS! Another sticker said RAINY NIGHTS! There was a coy picture of a toad looking back over its shoulder. It was outlined in a large red triangle like a road sign. The script at the bottom read: SAVE THE WESTERN LEOPARD TOAD!!
The whole road had been cordoned off. Here came a man in a yellow slicker and gumboots. The reflective tape on his long coat flashed at Joanna, blinding her. She brought the Golf to a complete stop.
The man – It’s Blue Anorak Man! said Doctor Renfield. What a cunning disguise! How are you, friend? – leaned familiarly into the driver’s window. Joanna looked around, but there were no police on the scene. She couldn’t see anything that identified the man as an official. She half-expected him to thrust the torch under his chin and gibber at her.
He was pop-eyed with excitement and breathless, gasping out the words. He had to half-shout to make himself heard over the rain and the susurration of the frogs.
“Sorry, but you’re going to have to go back. Use Boyes Drive if you need to leave the Valley.”
“What’s going on?”
“Toad moon!” He pointed up through the clouds that were clearing a little overhead. Pant, pant.
“Excuse me?” Joanna wasn’t sure if she’d heard right.
“It’s mating season! The toads are crossing! They’re trying to reach the wetlands!” Red with high drama, the man threw his torch arm over his head, showing Joanna Silvermine in its entirety. She heard it again – the indecent growling croak that was the sound of a thousand Western Leopard Toads trying to get where they needed to go. The two humans were in the very middle of the migration: even with the road closed the toads were steamrolling any obstacles. It reminded Joanna of the U2 concert she had once been to in Green Point Stadium. Stunned into silence in the face of that snore-roar, she was glad that she had stayed in the car. Toads began to stream over the vehicle, legions landing on the roof, scrabbling at the passenger window as if they were trying to get in. She hunched instinctively against the thuds, goggling at the flying legs, the pale plopping stomachs, the sheer determined hordes that made up the miracle. And each toad knew that he was special, was different, was fated to make it to the mating pools!
Joanna stared. Each one was different, actually. The markings were like fingerprints.
“Happens every August,” said the man, with satisfaction. His breathing was finally slowing. He didn’t seem to mind standing in their path. He added, unnecessarily, “They’re endangered, you know. We have to stop the cars from, from, massacring them.” He didn’t say you people but that was what he meant, thought Joanna. He was this close to calling me a murderer! And he looks so normal. Nothing about the guy says TOADNUT.
“Do you want to touch one?” he shouted.
“What?”
“Do you want to hold a toad?” He laughed at her. “Really.”
Joanna opened the car door and stepped out onto Silvermine Road.
“Come this way,” said the man. His slicker showered her bare feet with droplets of water. The tar was warm, slick with the end of the rain and what was probably the end of a few unlucky pilgrims, and she stepped carefully.
He took her to the side of the road, into the path of the oncoming toads who, unsurprised, divided and went around them. He put his torch carefully in his pocket, leaned down and scooped up a toad that was slower than his age-mates. The man cupped the creature between his palms, careful not to squash him, and held the handful out to her like a magician.
Joanna took the toad, whose markings cloaked him like a Rorschach test, equal and opposite, perfectly balanced. He filled her hands. And he was warm, not as slimy as she had expected.
“But he’s dry!”
The man nodded, pleased. “Yes. That’s the difference between frogs and toads, you know. Frogs feel wet. Toads are dry.”
The toad waited patiently throughout her inspection. Joanna examined the therianthropic markings, the great jewels of his eyes. He did look a bit like a leopard. Or a giraffe. Or a little girl whose mother had died, and whose face had been marked with grief.
His legs spasmed, electric. Joanna set the toad down on the tarmac and wished him luck. He sprang off, the twin engines of his legs propelling him.
Back in her car, Joanna stayed as long as she could, making the magic last. There were a hundred weird stories with headlines like THE DAY IT RAINED FROGS! The articles inevitably went on to mention The End of Times, but Joanna just felt sorry for the creatures. They were the universal victims, the little guys caught up in tornados and dumped somewhere far from home, thousands of little frog-husbands having to explain to thousands of little frog-wives exactly where they had been.
Maybe they were glad to get away, said Doctor Renfield. Isn’t that right, Joanna?
She watched the man marching off in his gumboots, waving his torch and hailing the next driver foolish enough to ignore the barrier.
In the end the toads were quick about their business. In an hour, at most, they were gone, and Joanna’s feet were freezing. “Here’s one for your joke books, Dad,” Joanna said out loud. “Why did the toads cross the road?” She began to giggle.
They just do, said Doctor Renfield. There’s nothing croak-and-dagger about it.
Joanna couldn’t stop. She laughed and coughed and coughed and laughed and the fit only let up when she banged her head down by mistake on the steering wheel.