Sometimes the toads would just sit out on the lawn, a choreographed semi-circle of horror, reverberating their low growly groan around our blonde weatherboard house in a way that tickled my spine.
If I had enough courage I’d shine our biggest torch out into their direction to scare my slight body by the sight of their unblinking eyes.
I became fixated on the cane toads at the same time my grandmother got sick. They provided a distraction from the sadness that crept through under the closed doors and drifted through the damp clouds of humidity that coated every wall.
The other distraction was my neighbour, Johnny. He was a bit older than me and seemed to know more. Often we talked about the toads. He said there were many ways to kill them – you could put salt on them and they slowly shrivelled, you could hit them with a golf club, whack them with a cricket bat, but the most humane way, he told me, was to catch them in a plastic bag and put them in the freezer.
I thought about our freezer. It was fairly small, bursting with chicken nuggets and rainbow paddle pops, which my mum always got me through the summer holidays. Since my grandmother got sick my mum started buying them every week and she’d wink at me after dinner each night which was my cue to go and get one from the freezer.
Most nights after dinner I sat with Johnny on the veranda with our spotlights, sometimes in silence.
“How’s your grandmother?”
“Not well.”
I heard a grunt from the bushes and shone the torch. Nothing.
“Where did they even come from?”
“What?”
“The toads.”
“I don’t know, the bush?”
I thought about the question a lot when I was trying to get to sleep. Why were those gnarled hopping beasts even here? Different people had different explanations. My mother was a scientist and told me that the settlers brought the cane but it got eaten by the cane beetle so they brought the cane toads to eat all the cane beetles but things had gotten out of control.
“And what will come to eat the cane toad?” I asked her one night.
She shook her head and told me to go eat a paddle pop.
My grandmother wasn’t a scientist and when she was sitting out on the veranda in the sunshine with her cup of tea I asked her about the toads. She relayed to me the story of pandora’s box and how the temptation to open the box was so strong that in that moment all the badness and suffering and pestilence of the world escaped, including the cane toads.
The next evening I reported back to Johnny about the origins of the toads but he didn’t seem convinced.
“Time to practice getting rid of them. Go on.”
He handed me a plastic bag and I looked down at it for a while. Then I walked towards the croaks and with his torch giving me just enough light I quickly pounced and enveloped its writhing leathery skin in the bag. I was surprised, I didn’t think it would be so slow, and after twisting up the bag to keep it secure I walked back to Johnny holding tight as the plastic bag moved around with the mysterious strength of the little toad.
“What now?”
“I guess just hit it on something to knock it out a bit.”
I half-heartedly knocked it on the ground, but it didn’t slow down much. So I quickly walked back inside and shoved it in the freezer. Then I went to bed and thought again about where they had even come from and why they were here and throughout the night I could hear my grandmother coughing and sometimes the lights went on and sometimes they clicked off and in my half sleep I thought I heard an ambulance siren.
In the morning I looked at the fridge but tried to distract myself by doing something else. There was a note on the kitchen table from my mum saying that she had gone to hospital with my grandmother.
So I sat with Johnny for a while on the veranda.
By evening they still hadn’t come home.
In moments like those I had a deep craving for a rainbow paddle pop, so I walked into the kitchen and stared at the freezer. The sweat pouring down my back I wrapped my hand around the handle and with a deep breath pulled against the seal. There were just two unblinking eyes staring back, its toes the color of dirt poised sloppily on the frosty wrapper of my ice-block. I stared a little longer and its eyelids slowly closed and opened. I shut the freezer.
Out in the bushes, invisible, they grunted triumphantly into the humid summer air.
Fiona Murray lives in Sydney where she is a writer and social worker.
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