Free Frog Music by Emma Donoghue Page A

Arthur could well have worked up a wave of bitterness big enough to extinguish any last trace of parental feeling. After all, if Arthur’s capable of firing through a window at the women he’s claimed to love for nine years, then he must be equally capable of ridding himself of the inconvenient burden of P’tit. It would be so much easier than killing a woman. A one-year-old who can barely sit, who hasn’t yet figured out how to crawl, let alone walk or run … it wouldn’t even take a bullet.
    No. Stop it. You don’t know. So don’t speculate .
    She presses her last few bits of clean linen into the bag to block P’tit’s things from her view. Her face is slick with sweat. This weather must be about to break; how much heat and humidity can the air hold? “Then I was gayest of the gay — ” Curse it, how does it go?
    Jenny would know. Would have known, Blanche corrects herself. Hundreds of songs cached in that narrow head; thousands, maybe.
    A quick squint at her face in her tiny mirror tells Blanche that she can’t do much except rub Jenny’s blood off it with the smeary rag. Don’t dwell on it. Blood’s just blood , isn’t that what Jenny told old Maria? The tiny cut on Blanche’s right cheek from the window glass has formed a little scab already; how fast the living body tidies itself up. She pulls her lank brown hair into a knot, nets it, and stabs it with half a dozen pins.
    Snap goes the clasp of her carpetbag. Blanche gathers her stained clothes into a bundle with shaking fingers.
    The tune finally comes to her in a rush: one of Jenny’s. Delivered with a stage frown, but a smirk behind it, and a few syncopated steps.
Life was a rosy dream I vow ,
It seems a horrid nightmare now!
Then I was gayest of the gay ,
But I have got the blues today .
    Blanche puts up her parasol with a click of steel. The green silk blocks the worst of the light. Emerging from behind the hanging sheet with the rank bundle of clothes gripped and held at arm’s length, she stares around for anywhere to dispose of it.
    Near the pond, a tiny bonfire sends up its smoky flag. A small child beside it. As Blanche gets closer, she sees it’s John Jr. With dry eyes he blinks up at her from where he squats. One hand is tucked into his belt, the hurt shoulder held high.
    Paper flares and blackens: an old volume that says Ragged Dick , something about A Bad Boy … John Jr. leans in to stir up the fire with a long stick. Blanche recognizes the green and gold binding of Around the World in Eighty Days . “What are you burning her books for?” she demands.
    “She gave them to me,” he sobs.
    Well, it’s as good a way of grieving as any, Blanche supposes, even if there is something heathen about it. Jenny would have done the same. If things had gone the other way last night—if it were Blanche who’d met Arthur’s bullets with her body—then Jenny would probably be chucking not just Blanche’s clothes but every trace of her on a bonfire this morning.
    “May I—” She gestures with the bundle instead of speaking the words.
    His face turns puce. One of these boys caught in the quicksand of puberty who’re mortified by everything to do with the opposite sex, Blanche decides. Ignorant about the whole business, trapped here with no girls to ogle except his big sister; the less he knows, the more his imagination bulges. A handshake from a farmer’s wife could probably make this lad hard, let alone the sight of the underclothes of a genuine Parisian burlesque dancer. Not that he’s likely to be aware of exactly how Miss Blanche earns her daily bread, but instinct always trumps knowledge.
    There’s a mongrel beside her, sniffing at the bloodstained folds excitedly. She kicks at it.
    John Jr. leaps up so fast Blanche is startled into taking a step backward. But the boy’s seizing the clothes with one arm, pressing the whole foul mass of them to his chest. Blanche is ludicrously embarrassed that a stripling of twelve is handling her