It's Raining in Mango Popular Penguin by Thea Astley

Author:Thea Astley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742284101
Publisher: Penguin Group Australia
Published: 2010-05-28T04:00:00+00:00

BUILD UP

He wasn’t one of your Hi-there born-agains with a king size bedroom voice deep and comfily American, a personality that stroked conscience and wallet into instant release. Chant would trumpet God loves you loves you loves you so forcefully and fiercely convinced, the listener trembled at such divine interest.

“This world,” the prophet man in the angle of the Swiper’s Arms veranda was racketing, “has its sickening limitations.” He demonstrated limitations with his hands. “Worldly goods!”—he dismissed them with a pudgy wave. “Power and fame!”—a snap of finger and thumb. “What we are seeking,” he shouted, “is the extraterrestrial infinity, the infinity of the miracle.”

“Bullshit,” Reever thought, watching the speaker and the acolyte mob that had moved beer glasses closer to revelation. Bullshit.

All the same, he edged a little closer as well to take soundings of this watery piece of humanity togged up in a cobalt sheet. The face didn’t match the words—or the voice for that matter. There was no congruence between utterer and that which was uttered, for when the voice began unrolling its thesis, there were both stridencies and a rich gravy-like quality that battled together. Even drinkers lounging under the mango trees by the fence had turned to stare when the prophet first spoke.

But the face was a florid turnip with a small pouting mouth that anticipated high pitch, and beneath that a submissive chin alien to the dogmatism of the tongue. The hair was a sandy thinning flat-cap on that football skull and the eyes, yes, Reever could just make out the eyes, might have been small excisions from the toga.

“Miracles all about us,” the voice went on, “we have only to look. If you know how. If you know the secret of looking. The world is its own miracle. And you. You are your own miracle, you yourself your own miracle.” The voice dropped a perfect third. “Think of that.”

Reever couldn’t help glancing then at a couple of Murris collapsed drunken by the outhouses and found himself whispering “Yeah, think of it. Think of it, Garfield, you’re your own miracle, mate, and we’ve helped you be that way. You too, Chock!”

The inky voice of the speaker was processing all the permutations of the banal, but the crowd of listeners, instead of fidgeting, of growing restless, was riveted on the pulpy face and goldfish mouth through which these plangent nothings pumped. Reever tried catching the eye of one after another of his friends to tip them the full slow ironic wink but they wouldn’t, couldn’t look. Maybe that was a miracle in itself.

“Prayer,” the blue turnip was pronouncing, his exhortations vertiginously out of place in the humid blue of the afternoon, “prayer” (here it comes, thought Reever) “the greatest miracle of all because it is your direct—yes, I repeat that—direct line” (oh a comic! a swinger! a with-it techno!) “to God, can work further miracles for you. For you personally.” (What about impersonally?) “Palpable miracles” (Palpable, eh?) “that can only extend your further belief in prayer.

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