We publish quality short stories, poetry, extracts from forthcoming novels, and articles and essays on topics of social, environmental and cultural significance.ISSUE NO. 111
SUMMER 2007
MEMOIR
Lyn Reeves
A Memory of Mangoes
Have you tried listening to mangoes, following their scent? Mangoes are the most sensual of fruits; an ambrosia of flesh and juice; a bursting envelope of summer.
I begin with the first mango. I was thirteen and my best friend was Hermione. An exotic name. An exotic girl with her huge green eyes, her thick tawny blonde hair, the purple-red birthmark that stained her leg. Her family had come from England on the ten pound scheme. Mother, father, grandmother, two girls and a boy. They spent their first months, years, I’m not sure how long, in a camp which I suppose must have originally housed postwar refugees, before the move to a simple house at Malabar.
We were in sixth grade when I first went to her home. We’d been in trouble for passing notes in class, but when we stood before the headmistress and explained that Hermie had a new sister, we were forgiven. Her secret revealed, she insisted I go with her after school, travelling the dozen extra tram stops past my own suburb to see the baby.
I don’t remember much about the visit, just the strangeness of a household of strikingly beautiful females with pommy accents, the little village-like suburb with its quiet grassy lanes and sprawly hedges. It was the first time I’d been invited into another family’s life, easily, openly, a family other than my loud, beer-drinking relatives. I became a regular at their table.
Malabar was not a ‘good’ suburb. It was close to Long Bay Gaol and the sewer outlet spilled into its sheltered bay. Norah, Hermione’s mother, had not come to a new life in a new country to be deposited in a backwater. She wanted to improve her lot. Not long after I met them they moved to a brick bungalow in Coogee with large rooms, a sunny kitchen and dining room, and a porch. They painted everything white. There were no curtains on the windows, no beds – just mattresses on the floor, no furniture at all in the lounge room, yet it had an elegant and spacious feel.
When I stayed over, Hermie and I slept in the same narrow bed in the room she shared with her older sister, Ella, with eyes larger than Hermie’s. Come hither eyes, my mother called them, disapprovingly. Her lips were full and pouty, and she would flick back her thick, fair hair with a practised toss. She wore her brown pleated school tunic way above her knees and pulled in tightly at the waist, to emphasise her big bosom. Her voice was slow and husky and sounded very posh.
Her mother spoke in posh tones too, but her father, six foot, black curly hair, gorgeously handsome, had a Manchester accent. A tradesman and a soccer player, he didn’t share Norah’s ambitions to better themselves. He was content enough with things as they were.
Ella and her father fought ferociously, but Hermie adored him. He seemed funny and kind, with a resigned wistfulness about him. Hermie often dragged me along with her to visit him when he was in the house alone, after Norah had suddenly taken the kids and left. We’d always find him in the smallest bedroom, lying in a single bed under a dingy grey blanket, the brown holland blind pulled down to block out the daylight. He’d receive us with gentleness and jokes. Hermie took him food, made him tea. She was the only one of the children who went to see him during that sad time, before he disappeared entirely from their lives.
Norah had uprooted herself, her ailing mother and four children and rented a fibro shack at one of the northern beaches – I don’t remember which one, I just remember the empty beach, the clean white sand, the red-hot pokers incandescent in the overgrown garden, totems of desire spearing the summer sky, pulsing red and yellow against the brittle blue.
It was school holidays and Hermione and I were inseparable, spending long hours on the beach wrapped in girl-talk. Norah seemed to breathe in everything around her like a balm, the salt wind, the warm air. The grandmother mumbled in the background, complaining. She was always complaining, berating the children for their modern ways as she shuffled laboriously on her walking frame, always in her blue flannel dressing gown. She’d brew strong pots of bitter tea. I like to strain the tea leaves with my teeth she’d say.
I want a mango, the old woman announced one morning. Get me a mango. Where on earth would we find a mango, Mum? Norah asked impatiently. It’s the season for mangoes. I must have one. I haven’t had one since India. Hermie found her a mango. I don’t know where. She was gone all morning and halfway into the afternoon, but she brought one home for her Gran. I’d never even seen a mango before. Alien, heart-shaped, a yellowish colour blushed with rose. The slit of the knife, juice streaming from the cut, the shiny thick skin, peeled back, revealing the soft fibrous flesh beneath. Slippery on the tongue, a bit like peach but with more wildness in it, arresting.
I had just the tiniest sliver. The largest portion was reserved for the grandmother. The seed’s the part I love best, she said, as she shuffled out to the back verandah of the shack to eat it alone in the afternoon sunlight.
When I think about mangoes now, having glutted myself so many times with their exotic sweetness, I wish she had eaten the whole fruit herself, not shared it with us. I hope the taste of it for her was pleasures relived. For me it was a taste of pleasures to come.
There are so many tracks leading off from that day in the dunes, stories of my friendship with Hermione that lasted into my twenties. Some of those tracks I will explore. For now I’m listening to the mango, following its scent. It leads me to an old weatherboard farmhouse, set in a valley enclosed by soft hills, a creek running through it. Beside the house, two mango trees.
Who knows how old those trees were? Everything grows so quickly in that lush climate, spiralling towards the sun and rain, nourished by rich soil, heat and cyclonic weather. Taller than the house, they stood four metres apart, their branches touching, their trunks solid and strong. The earth around them bare where the cows congregated, wearing the grass away, leaving a deposit of manure that further fuelled the trees’ growth. The bottom leaves were cropped like trees in a park by the cows, who lifted their reddish-brown necks to munch the foliage, stretching to grasp the oval fruits with their rubbery lips and fat tongues. When the mangoes began to ripen it was a race to see who got to them first, the cows, the flying foxes, or me. Mango season was the soft thud of falling fruit, the wet chomp of skin, flesh and seed and the plop of steaming cakes of dung.
These were turpentine mangoes, not prized by the locals, especially since the Bowen and peach varieties further north surpassed them in taste and smoothness. The turpentines were stringier, with a slight sharp behind the sweet, but luscious all the same.
I made mango chutney with what we couldn’t eat between us, mixing the fruit with sugar and spices, sealing and storing the jars. Part of my drive for self-sufficiency, along with the cottage cheese from the goats I milked each day, the wild lemons I harvested when the green skins began to lighten, and stored in a box of sand. Produce to take to the weekly barter… where we met. And he drove me home in his VW. It was a choice between a lift with him or pillion on a motorbike, and since I had my collie dog with me I took the option of the car. We shared the pumpkin-bread and tomatoes I’d got in exchange for my home-made chutney and cheese, together with other delicacies from my store.
Mango Chutney
Gather the green mangoes from the tree before the cows get to them. You will need about ten large to medium fruits. Peel them and slice them up into very small pieces. When peeling a mango you will find that if you pull back the skin from the stalk it will come away more easily and leave more flesh behind. Grate two ounces of green ginger – you can find it growing wild around here – and finely chop a knob of garlic, peeled. Mix through the fruit. Then take half a pound of seeded dried chillies and crush in a mortar and pestle. Add enough vinegar to make a smooth paste. To this add half a pound of sugar and half a pound of salt and mix all ingredients together thoroughly. Fill jars that have been washed and placed in the oven at a low setting to dry. Seal the jars and leave out in the sun for two weeks.
He stayed for more than two weeks, filling the house with music. There were long starry nights in the paddock around a campfire that drew people out of the hills to its blaze. The valley rang with the sounds of their guitars and flutes and drums and the drone of his sitar.
Every morning the goats, who slept under the house, butted the bedroom floorboards, waking us. I knew that each day brought us closer to the time he had to leave on his journey north, back to his family. When that time arrived I went with him in the little green car, leaving behind the house with the mango trees, the creek, the goats and bantam hens, the wild lemon and guavas, the soft green hills. We left all that and headed into fire.
The further north we travelled the more oppressive the heat, the more uncertain I became about the choice I’d made. Beneath my sarong, the curve of my ripening belly, smooth and plump as the cheek of a mango.
Our destination: a small cleared acreage in the rainforest where several families had come together to build fragile shelters and impossible dreams. Lethargy hung heavily on the dusty palms panting for the long overdue wet season to break. The faintest wisp of wind was a welcome draught in the brittle, tinder-dry atmosphere. I longed for the safe enclosure of the valley I’d left, its cooling creek and shady trees.
For respite, we left the other settlers and set up camp among the pandani and she-oaks on the nearby beach. Although the alluring blue water promised refreshment, it harboured deadly jellyfish. We longed to but could not safely swim. But, the mango wine! Fermented juice, within the still intact fruit.
Here, mango trees grew close to the sand. When the ripe fruit dropped, instead of falling into mud and cow dung like the mangoes back at Coopers Lane, they lay on warm white sand, and if they didn’t burst they grew softer – capsules of distillation alchemising the flesh to wine. Just one small sip was intoxication, sucked from a hole pierced in the skin. An intoxication that is somehow bound up with the heat, the bare skin spread with mango juice, the taste of that liqueur mixed with the sweat and salt of our bodies.
Once I knew a man I thought I might marry. I gave him a mango. When he ate it with a knife and fork, I knew it would never work between us.
LYN REEVES lives in Hobart where she finds the inspiration to write poetry, haiku and fiction.
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