It's Raining in Mango Popular Penguin

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  It’s Raining in Mango

  One of Australia’s most celebrated writers, Thea Astley won the Miles Franklin Award four times – in 1962 for The Well Dressed Explorer, in 1965 for The Slow Natives, in 1972 for The Acolyte, and in 2000 for Drylands. Her other awards include the 1975 Age Book of the Year Award for A Kindness Cup; the 1986 ALS Gold Medal for Beachmasters; the 1988 Steele Rudd Award for It’s Raining in Mango; the 1989 Patrick White Award; the 1990 NSW Premier’s Prize for Reaching Tin River; the 1996 Age Book of the Year Award and the FAW Australian Unity Award for The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow; and the 2001 Tasmanian State Library’s People’s Choice Award for Drylands.

  Thea Astley held a position as Fellow in Australian Literature at Macquarie University until 1980, when she retired to write full time. She died in 2004.

  Also by Thea Astley

  Girl With a Monkey

  A Descant for Gossips

  The Well Dressed Explorer

  The Slow Natives

  A Boat Load of Home Folk

  The Acolyte

  A Kindness Cup

  Hunting the Wild Pineapple

  An Item From the Late News

  Beachmasters

  Reaching Tin River

  Vanishing Points

  Coda

  The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow

  Drylands

  IT’S RAINING IN MANGO

  THEA ASTLEY

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  CONTENTS

  HOW TO GET SACKED

  GETTING TO KNOW THEM

  CROSS THE WIDE MISSOURI

  SINGLES

  HEART IS WHERE THE HOME IS

  RIGHT OFF THE MAP

  GETTING THERE

  THE KISS, THE FADE-OUT, THE CREDITS

  COMMITTING SIDEWAYS

  BUILD UP

  GRASS

  IT’S RAINING IN MANGO

  OLD MAN IN A DRY MONTH

  SOURCE MATERIAL

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The author wishes to thank the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Senior Fellowship on which this book was written.

  Come with me to the point and we’ll look at the country,

  We’ll look across at the rocks,

  Look, rain is coming!

  It falls on my sweetheart.

  A song from the Oenpelli region.

  From Aboriginal Australians by Richard Broome.

  Even at the end of things she is still looking for a reason as she had been at the beginning, puzzling in a muddleheaded way while she watches that fool of a Reever, legs dangling from fifty feet up where he has lashed himself for the third day into the crown of a celerywood tree.

  Along the new road being hacked through the rain forest, bulldozers grumble and snort and shove brutally at the matted green, blades skimming challengingly towards the heads of protesters buried up to the neck or nudging back a still chanting mob of greenies. She shifts the binoculars upwards and catches sight of Reever’s straining face as he peers back down the track through leaves. There’s a gummy smile on his mouth, the set look of martyrdom frozen into a kind of dubious bliss. His greying hair is blowing in jagged slices all over his lined and kindly mug and his hoicked-up skirt and the vulnerability of his middle-aged shanks make Connie want to weep.

  She puts down the binoculars and gets her yard hat, cramming it over her own ashen plaits before blundering out and down the house track to the road.

  Someone has to stop him.

  Defiance has its natural sticking-point and it is apparent that that hot nest of leaves in the upper limbs of the celerywood is it.

  Tough, sun-cured, she lets her anxiety and distress tumble her along that half mile of mud-rut from the house, reeling through downhill years of comers and goers, aware of herself as stayer, the last of the real stayers, she decides, falsely but proudly, as she trots, stiff-necked, to squawk sense into someone.

  For the first time in more than sixty years her solitariness daunts her.

  Sweet reason, she keeps telling herself against all reason, against the ticking of summer grass, against tree hiss, against the whooped amusement of hidden waters. But the lewdly mouldering heat paws at her. She feels that the mob at the bottom of the slope is getting farther away even as she hoists herself across tussocks on the old car tracks; and though their shapes, the faces belonging to those shapes, become humidly vague, voices are clarifying and strengthening all round.

  A hundred yards yet into heat-swing ferociously grabbing.

  You okay?

  A large and strange man is mouthing as he leans over her.

  Has she fallen? She doesn’t remember falling. Doesn’t remember concussion, thud of bone into flesh into earth. There is the sting of grazed flesh, small pains fluttering along one leg. Her eyes, sun-dazzled, are squinting an examination of acres of florid skin close to her, curved in concern. There isn’t a feature in that vast expanse she can recognise, although he is talking with a familiarity that once she might have reprimanded in a stranger.

  You okay, Con old girl? You took a hell of a tumble back there.

  Old age brings weightlessness, her lips pronounce.

  That’s the old Con, the face above her approves. And all its planes shift into laughter. That’s the girl.

  The chanting has stopped. The bulldozer thrums into silence after a last chord-crash of tree. There are so many people all around, and voices are warning other voices to get back, move away, and then someone has hoisted her up in a fireman’s lift and she is being rocked up the track again as if she had never left.

  That was the point, her addle-brain tells her: never leaving; burrowing in; or, if leaving, the brevity of those intermissions gulped by return, by the continuum of the country she knows from the houses that have held her. There had been Europe for a while, the shortest of whiles. There had been America. She could give an intimate tour of unlikely places in southern France, in Denmark, in California, in Texas. There was even a section of street between Second and Third Avenues on the east side of Manhattan that might display its streamers of greeting the moment she returned. So many places like that, willing to be contained by, or to contain, the visitor. Yet she had chosen never to go back to those away places, to what was ephemeral because exotic. Wherever she went a sense of self lamented its lost sense of place, and though the idea of home persisted with the worn toothbrush, the traveling clock dented on one corner, the handbag bric-à-brac, those depositions of self soon lost their meaning in the impersonal rooms of motels or third floor walk-ups.

  Under her closed lids, patterns form, tessellations of family.

  She goes back to the start of things.

  Bugger the reason, she says silently. Her mouth moves later than the formed thoughts that force their shapes upon her lips.

  In this large and airy bedroom, figures prowl about, tinker with louvres, draw curtains.

  You’re cutting the sky, she hears some old lady croak. Don’t do that.

  The acre of face looms.

  You’re a card, Con, its voice says. Regular card.

  There are numerous little irritating ministrations. Someone has placed a wrung-out flannel on her forehead. A knee stings viciously as someone dabs. Her wrists and hands are being sponged and then the palm of her right hand stings in chorus with the knee. She is conscious of water-sips and, under and over the taste of water, the crushed granules of aspirin, bitter on her tongue.

  Get Reever, she commands. Get the fool of a man down.

  But no one seems to hear and she isn’t altogether sure if she has said what she intended saying. All her life has glittered with moments when the words uttered were not those
meant, the phrase angled for caught up and wriggling on the hook of her tongue as something quite other.

  She goes back to the start of things.

  After all, despite all those by-chance places and their strangers who become intimates on North Sea or Sydney ferries, on trains to the Isa or Boston, the bus station encounters in Darwin and Manitoba, the elderly Greek who ran an all-night diner on Second Avenue, the friends of friends in Kamloops, in Kerville, in Dirranbandi, the unexpected confidings of unknowns between planes in Athens and Melbourne, despite all that, only the family as she knows it has cohesion, provides a core.

  As it was. Is.

  Here here here, her mind mumbles. Here.

  Cornelius Laffey.

  Jessica Olive, wife.

  Nadine, George, Harry, question mark, children.

  Leroy, Duke, Bucky, someone or other, husband.

  Will, brother. Self-fleeing brother brother brother.

  Connie, me. Doesn’t matter any more.

  Reever, son. Uptree Reever, mattering, worrying me, Reever.

  So closely meshed, all of us, the nature of our closeness bound up with this place. With family.

  Laffeys. In this rainforest triangle, tented in green. Bedouins of the sticky leaf.

  It had all begun so long ago and remains fresher in the aging memory, the way things always are for the old.

  Cornelius Laffey, born 1838, vanished 1878, rediscovered 1924.

  Jessica Olive, wife of Cornelius, born 1847, died 1927 reaching for the Rosella jam.

  Nadine, their daughter, born 1865, washed out to sea 1879.

  George, their son, born 1868, died 1928 while fencing.

  Mag, wife of George, born 1896, died in flu epidemic 1926.

  Harry, son of Nadine and wandering bushman, born 1878, brought up as a Laffey, died violently 1949.

  Clytie, wife of Harry, born 1884 and long-suffering till 1963.

  Connie, daughter of George and Mag, born 1922.

  Will, son of George and Mag, born 1923, committed sideways 1983.

  Reever, son of Connie and American serviceman, born 1943 and last seen heading north.

  Bidiggi (known later as Bidgi Mumbler), born 1860s, father of Jackie Mumbler, grandfather of Charley Mumbler and great-grandfather of Billy Mumbler.

  HOW TO GET SACKED

  Cornelius Laffey had slipped ashore, father told her often enough, from the dinghy of the sailing ship Jeannie Dove, one steamy late March day, onto burning sand in a place that would later be called Bowen.

  The nothingness appalled him, quite apart from the heat, the mangroves, the flies.

  His soft northern skin, attuned to the Canadian maritime provinces, crisped as if it had been placed on a griddle. He thought momentarily of the grey waterfront of St. John, but flies alone kept him busy. For days the ship’s party had been camped offshore on Stone Island, because the mainland natives—foolishly, all the crew agreed—were preventing their landing.

  Stone Island was nothing like the tropical nirvana his dreamy Celtic soul had imagined. His hands were pulpy from trapping fish in reef pools, his feet skinned and bleeding from coral. He was convinced of error, of misjudgement. He had celebrated his twenty fourth birthday gutting mackerel hauled from the shallows of the most virulent blue waters he had ever seen. His scaling knife slipped and cut his thumb. Scales clung like spangles. From across the channel came the sound of rifle fire as officious colonisers showed the indigenous people what’s what in a ratatat, idiot anticipation of another civil war half a world and half a week away.

  It was 1861.

  That early day in April when the township, cleared of black landowners, was proclaimed, Cornelius was looking for and expecting a frontier magic he still failed to find a month later. Scowling at the hopeless canvas village that scabbed the bay-line, he resolved his stay would be the shortest. He had come to this new southern land as a journalist, trained for something more than sandflies and heat, he thought aggrievedly. With a yearning affection he recalled his old newspaper offices in St. John.

  He’d brought with him a small Columbian press that had been dumped in its crate outside his tent. Visionary plans for a journal unravelled as his days spent themselves in helping other settlers peg out land, dig storm drains and raise pole frames for the first of the slab-and-tin shanties. More distressing was to watch departing squatters riding north and west to select their kingdoms.

  Should he follow?

  At the end of four weeks he managed to bring out a broadsheet, the copy written by candlelight, the type agonisingly hand-set between building bouts in a half-finished shed he had whacked together. The broadsheet was a gossipy farrago of personal encounter and the sort of ferocious political complaint he imagined new settlers expected. He was wrong. They wanted encouragement. They wanted to be amused. His sympathy for the dispossessed blacks infuriated the eighty settlers left in town, and someone threatened to horsewhip him.

  Cornelius pulled down his tent, repacked his little press and with the last of his money took passage on a ketch returning to Sydney.

  “That’s your grandfather, muttonchopped splendid, the cheeky devil,” Jessica Olive had pointed out to four-year-old Connie, who had been nagging for a face, the photograph album dog-eared, pictures spotting with mould from too many Wets, grandfather caught up with after all those years in a magazine clipping of Sydney bohemians her brother had cut out and posted to Jessica Olive when it was too late for forgiveness.

  Found! Sprung! The only nonstayer, sprung! Aging in Darlinghurst Road, some one-roomer lodging boxed round him, chilling in his underwear, the family all loyally hoped, when the plane trees dropped their leaves down the length of Hyde Park.

  Look at him.

  Take a good look. A nice face, really, and always a gentleman, George said Jessica Olive said, even when drunk, the Canadian accent thickening but still lilting. It was those tosspot evenings in Bowen started it, father explained to a glue-eyed Connie, those all-night sprees with drunken packers back from an overland stint. Or farewelling those about to go, dragging sticks and bottles across ripple-iron walls to cheer themselves up while they belted out choruses of “Blow the Man Down.”

  What a training ground!

  Father could still remember dapper Cornelius rolling home along Charlotte Street from the Cradler’s Joy, shantying away in a pleasant tenor between the tent rows of Charco Harbour to tuck a little tune, as he put it, into Jessica Olive’s next pregnancy.

  Connie flicks over portraits in her half-daze between struggles to rise from the bed, mumbling warnings about Reever and Will. There was something to do with Will. She was more afraid for him than for Reever. She couldn’t sort sense from it. Concerned neighbours keep pressing her back with stifling kindness into memories of that ancestor to whom she had never spoken.

  He’s a sepia stranger there, with those other strangers; but this photo, she understood, was taken just after the wedding, grandmother convent-fresh under his arm with five hundred and seventy-two weekly communions behind her and precious little else to come.

  He’d charm the halo off a saint, Jessica Olive had insisted to Connie’s small-girl dubious face as she dabbed at those muttonchops with a small damp finger. Or at least make the saint wear it tipped sideways.

  How? the small girl had asked.

  Oh easily, with his songs and his poems and his gallantries. When he sang “Macushla,” Connie dear, I used to become quite faint. And Nana would laugh for the girl she once was.

  These words were Cornelius Laffey’s last testimony from the one who had known his early manhood best, for he died soon after the clipping unmasked him, and two thousand miles away Jessica Olive, perhaps missing the spleen that had sustained her, followed not long after, as she reached for the breakfast jam.

  “I’ve come all the way from Canada, halfway across the world to find you,” he’d flattered Jessica Olive, blushing in a Sydney tearoom, her brother watchdogging them both through a screen of manly laughter. It wasn’t true
, grandmother admitted. He’d come to make his fortune. But he had a way—a poet’s way—of inflating the moment. These inflationary processes—summertime lunches in the Botanic Gardens, strolling the windy beachfront at Bondi, horse-and-buggy picnics at Lane Cove—quickly became courting ploys.

  There were single flowers with the emotive force of bombs. There were poems. “A little trifle, my dear, a little trifle for a nontrifling occasion.” He turned a neat quatrain. “He’s deep,” Jessica Olive’s mother had warned. But he wasn’t. Jessica Olive was captivated by shallows. Her father, a barrister with a silken Trinity College, Dublin accent beautifully preserved for the colonies, toasted his bum before the fire in their Balmain house and swayed, hands in pockets, to and fro on feet cemented in reality, so used to being paid for opinions he had become socially reluctant.

  “Newspapers!” Jessica Olive’s mother nagged over toast, over morning tea, over lunch, over … “A journalist! My dear child, it’s too …”

  Nevertheless, there she was, dear Nana, in a spring cloud of white silk, orange-blossomed, virginal, nestled under the big Canadian shoulder like a white mouse. They moved to Birchgrove when it was fashionable and the Harbour was blue.

  Instantly pregnant, poor Nana, with Aunt Nadine. About whom the family rarely spoke. Connie moans enviously in her half sleep, recalling a photograph somewhere of a ringleted puss with one of those heart-stopping mouths so fashionably drooping. Nadine at twelve, two years before she ran away.

  “Where to?”

  A compression of lips.

  “But Nana, couldn’t the police … ?”

  “We don’t talk about it, Connie. Not to little girls. Not about things like that.” Rocking fifty years of resentment.

  “But Nana!”

  And after Nadine, George. Cornelius smiling, tipsy, down the late-night length of the four-poster, threatening with its rattles.

  Instead of emotional stasis, the birth of a son stimulated wanderlust, a dream of frontiers. His newspaper was full of longwinded concern about the empty spaces to the north, a region ripe with possibility. There were arguments in the house in Birchgrove, and a Pontius Pilate washing of the hands at Balmain. For three years Cornelius grumbled and agitated and finally managed to persuade Jessica Olive, her will weakened by two miscarriages, that city life was bad for them all.