The Book of Other People by Zadie Smith

Hartlepool.
     
THANKS TO: THE LORD GOD ALMIGHTY (love You, and everything You do for us), Sharon Osbourne (DA BOMB!), Simon Cowell (I’ve nearly forgiven you!), David and Victoria, Wayne and Coleen, Mum and Dad, baby bruvva, everyone in the Barnet Posse except Nicola Braithwaite, everyone at the Pink Coconut in Bushey. And yo Mr Osbourne! I wrote a book! Even after all what you said about me when I left school! A big shout-out to Jim Johnson for his help in putting this together. Top man.

Lélé
    Edwidge Danticat
    It was so hot in Léogâne that summer that most of the frogs exploded, scaring not just the children who once chased them into the river at dusk or the parents who hastily pried the threadbare carcasses from their fingers, but also my 39-year old sister Lélé, who was four months pregnant with her first child and feared that, should the temperature continue to rise, she too might burst. The frogs had been dying for a while, but we hadn’t noticed, mostly because they’d been doing it quietly. Perhaps for each that had expired, one had taken its place along the river bank, looking exactly the same as the others and fooling us into thinking that a normal cycle was occurring, that young was replacing old and life replacing death, sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly, just as it was for us.
    ‘This is surely a sign that something terrible is going to happen,’ Lélé said, as we sat on the top-floor verandah of my parents’ house one particularly sweltering evening. Even though my father, the former justice of the peace of the town of Léogâne, had died more than ten years ago, and my mother five years before that, I’ve never been able to stop thinking of the place that I, and now my sister, called home as theirs. The dollhouse façade of our wooden ginger-bread had been meticulously sketched by Papa, who’d spent his nights after work updating and revising each detail as their home was built from the ground up. He and Maman had driven to the capital to purchase the corrugated metal and bordered jalousies, a journey which at the time, before my sister and I were born, took several agonizing hours in an old pick-up truck that they’d inherited from my half-French grandfather, the previous justice of the peace. The shell of the truck was still out there somewhere among the dozens of almond trees that dotted our three hectares, its once thunderous engine rusting into the earth, like the neglected memorial it was.
    The air on my verandah was just slightly cooler than it was in either of the two bedrooms where my sister and I slept, just as we had as children, surrounded by shelves lined with leather-bound notebooks filled with the concerns and complaints that had consumed the days, and sometimes nights, of our father and grandfather. Last year, I decided to read all their notebooks before I moved them to the courthouse archive in town. And now, despite her current condition, my sister, who was in the middle of a separation from her husband, was helping me sort through them.
     
    ‘In all of their notes,’ Lélé was saying, ‘I’ve not seen one mention of frogs dying like this.’
    Before becoming pregnant, Lélé had been a heavy smoker, and sometimes when she made some pronouncement - for she had one of those voices with an air of always seeming to be making a pronouncement - she sounded a bit out of breath. This was further aggravated by the fact that she now had a baby pressing on her lungs, I’m sure, but, come to think of it, she had spoken that way even when she was a child, sometimes purposefully emphasizing a lisp that strangely enough made her sound even more certain.
    ‘I’ve talked to a few people about it,’ I told her. ‘I even called some doctor friends in Port-au-Prince.’
    ‘What would doctors know about dead frogs?’ she promptly cut me off. ‘You need world specialists, people who study the earth.’
    Throwing her head back, three long plaits bouncing in the evening air,