Eating the Underworld (11 page)

‘Nature,' said the head librarian, sweeping her hand towards the rows of ill-assorted glass containers housing ants, beetles and the mud of the local park. ‘The children are doing projects on natural science for Science Week.'

One of the jars had a curious, oddly familiar shape. Rachel was just reaching out to touch it, when she suddenly shuddered and pulled back. She had remembered her own jar.

Remembering it was like seeing a series of shots cut from a moving film.

The eight-year-old Rachel being handed a jar, heavy with water (and something else?), covered with a tattered paper bag. Rachel carrying the jar, a few paces up from the path leading away from the creek. Rachel peeling away the wrinkled brown covering and …

She is holding the ugliest, most hideous thing she has ever seen. It is moving, pressing its face against the glass directly where Rachel's fingers clasp it. And suddenly Rachel is convinced that the glass is not there. That there is nothing between Rachel and the monster. She tries to tell herself to hold onto the glass. That it is just a frog, that it can't get to her. But it's impossible. She screams and drops the jar and runs.

Even now, Rachel was embarrassed by the intensity of
her response. The sheer repulsion, terror really, the creature had inspired. What had happened to the frog, she wondered? She liked to think of the jar breaking as it fell and the frog emerging; not being trapped in its glass bell forever.

Frogs! That was biology, she thought. Science. Her fairy story for the week. ‘The Frog Prince'.

‘The Frog Prince', Rachel knew, was one of the oldest of fairytales. It dated back to thirteenth-century Germany and had appeared in Britain three hundred years later, encompassing a variety of titles and forms. The stories began differently, but had a similar body and ending.

The original ‘Frog Prince' began with Rachel's favourite first sentence out of all the fairytales: ‘In olden times, when wishing still helped one …' And went on to tell the story of a King's youngest daughter.

Close by the castle in which the Princess lived was a great, dark wood. And in the wood, under the spreading leaves of a lime tree, was a well. The Princess came here often in her wanderings, to sit by the side of the cool fountain and play with her favourite toy—a golden ball. She would toss the ball up in the air and always, its glittering trajectory would curve it straight back into her waiting hand. Always, except once.

The Princess had her hand outstretched as usual, ready for the ball to come to it. Instead, it flew straight past her little hand and off into the well. Shocked, the Princess rushed to the well to retrieve it. But the water was deeper than she imagined and dark, so that she could not see. She began to cry piteously, louder and louder and could not be comforted.

Rachel remembered the horror of that jolt. She had
been sailing along, expecting each day to come to her as surely and easily as a ball caught in the hand. And then she had missed. At the instant of her diagnosis, the day had swerved, sailed past her. And with it, a deck of days, trailing out behind it. All the days in the world that might not now be hers; soaring away from her, higher and higher.

The Princess was distraught now, weeping as if her heart had forgotten how to stop, when a voice from the well called out, gurgling and deep, like the voice of water swelling. ‘What ails you, King's daughter? You weep so that even a stone would show pity.'

Startled, the Princess saw that it was a frog speaking. ‘I would give anything,' she said to the frog, ‘my clothes, my pearls, my jewels and even my crown, if you can bring me my golden ball from the well.'

But the frog was not interested in her possessions. What it wanted was more costly. The frog wanted her to love it. It wanted to be her companion and playmate; to sit at her table, eat from her golden plate and sip from her golden cup. It wanted to sleep in her little bed.

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. The 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.