Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [4]
“Mum!”
“My frog book was vague about their palatability.”
“It probably didn’t want to encourage people like you.”
But then we found an old Tonga man collecting the frogs in a reed basket.
“See,” said Mum, “you’re overreacting, Bobo. I imagine lots of people eat them.”
She asked the man if the frogs made good eating, but as she spoke no Tonga and the sekuru spoke no English, the conversation was reduced to pantomime. Mum hopping about and croaking while chomping on a fistful of fresh air and the ancient Tonga man blinking at Mum and shoving heaps of snuff at his nose, which he sneezed back at us in little toxic, black clouds. From inside the reed basket, the bullfrogs growled and hissed. Just as I was about to point out that this cultural exchange was getting all of us nowhere and some of us embarrassed, the sekuru grasped Mum’s meaning. He unfurled his reed basket, seized a bullfrog by the throat, and lunged at us with it, grinning generously and gesturing that we should have it. The bullfrog barked and bared his fangs at me.
There is not, in any of the teach-yourself books of the local languages that line the shelves of my parents’ bathroom bookshelf, the useful phrase “Thank you for your kind offer but I am a vegetarian.”
Mum, who is an extreme omnivore, took the bullfrog back to the kitchen but lost her nerve at the last moment and set it free, whereupon it leaped under the firewood pile and glared at us with a mixture of alarm and disdain for the next several days. When it eventually died—which it did behind the pantry—it swelled up to the size of a soccer ball and Mum (who is of Scottish descent and has lived in Africa all her life and therefore cannot, both from habit and blood, waste anything at all) said, “What a pity it’s so smelly now. It might have made an interesting lamp shade.”
MUM AND DAD don’t have a house to speak of on their fish farm, which is fine for most of the time. Usually, walls are an unnecessary barrier to what little breeze might condescend to lift off the Pepani River and swirl around our legs and shoulders as we sweat over our meals under the tamarind tree. The kitchen is a roof held up by four pillars and a half wall. The entire south side of the kitchen is taken up with a woodstove and a heap of firewood. The north side houses shelves of crockery and Mum’s shortwave radio, perpetually tuned to the BBC World Service. The east is open to stairs that lead up through the garden to the workshop and offices, down which rain cascades in what might be a picturesque waterfall if it didn’t back up into a small, greasy eyesore of a pond in the kitchen.
In this thoroughly quenching rainy season, Mum glared at the sky and said to it in a loud voice, intended for my father’s deaf ears, “My roof leaks.” And, “Can’t you see, we don’t have walls in our sitting room?” But Dad smoked his pipe in silence, absorbed in Aquaculture Today, apparently unaware that he was being rained upon until Mum said, “Tim, if you sit there much longer in that rain, you’ll take root.”
Then Dad folded up his magazine and said, mildly, “What’s that, Tub? Time to get to work, is it?”
So, Mum and Dad covered their heads with tents of plastic and squelched up to the ponds to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to their fish, which, contrary to all logic, do not seem to like rain. And after lunch (a meal that consisted of several pots of tea and a banana) Mum and Dad trooped down to the end of the farm (shrinking hourly, as chunks of real estate were torn off by the powerful current and swept off down the Pepani to Mozambique) and stood dismal and worried on the riverbank, anxiously looking upstream, toward the brothels and taverns that make up the heart of the town of Sole. Clearly, if the rain kept up, we’d soon be knee-deep in waterlogged prostitutes and drunk truckers.
Day after day I kept to the shelter of the tamarind tree, in the company of the more sensible dogs, and drank cup after cup of tea. I read my way forward and backward through Mum’s library and watched