The bag was full of yellow plastic frogs, the whole ditch was full of them. At first she thought they were real frogs that had frozen to death and she had tossed them back because she was afraid they might be poisonous. But when the frogs didn’t move she picked one up again and that’s when she saw the price tag on its underside. She had kept the bag and when she arrived at the next town she poured them out on the pavement and waited. She wasn’t sure if she was waiting for the frogs to come back to life or for someone to buy them but she didn’t even care.
That was where she was when I came past. When I saw Laurinda crouching over her pile of frozen plastic frogs I knew I had to stop. I asked her if she had seen my monkey but she shook her head and I stayed and then she told me her story. I remember her voice. It was like the voice of the earth, of earth and pain, a hoarse voice that comes singing from a great distance.
I can’t remember when this happened any more. It might have been yesterday or a thousand years ago. It doesn’t matter. But today when I woke up I remembered what she had told me and the fact that this memory that has been gone so long has now returned is the most important thing that happened to me today.
Tea-Bag finished talking and sat down. The blank piece of paper she had been holding she now folded and laid in front of her on the table. Everyone in the room was silent and still. Humlin wondered what they all felt, if they felt that they had been through something earth-shattering, as if Tea-Bag’s narrative had painted the room in new colours. It’s deeper than that, he thought, but it goes so deep I can’t express what it is.
In this atmosphere that was like the silence after an earthquake, Leyla got up. Humlin thought she looked like she had put on even more weight since last time. But nonetheless she seemed to shimmer. She was smiling.
It was as if Tea-Bag’s big smile was being passed around the girls like a baton. Now, in the moment that Leyla got to her feet, it was her turn to wear it.
<p>15</p>The words started coming out of Leyla’s mouth first as a gentle trickle and then as an ever-increasing flood. She spoke in a low voice, forcing Humlin to lean forward to catch her words about the unexpected things that had happened to her on this frozen late-winter’s day.
Oh God, I say, oh God, and I know I shouldn’t use his name in vain but I am anyway, I’m going to say ‘Oh God’, because nothing was the way it should have been when I woke up today: everything was wrong. I remember thinking that it was going to be just another forgettable day. Yet another day that was not going to leave any traces, only sweep through my life like a stray wind. Another day that would make me feel like it was mocking me.
