The Delinquents (11 page)

‘I must die soon at this rate,’ she told herself, ‘and then it will all be over.’ She then remembered that it was her eighteenth birthday and she began to laugh, and Dawn came in soon afterwards and joined in the joke. Dawn was in a good temper again now. She had an American sailor (merchant service) on one arm and a bottle of cognac under the other, and the liquor she had consumed already that afternoon had pushed away, at least for a while, the fears that always crowded around the very roots of her heart—fears of being an old, fat, starving harlot. She felt full of well-being.

‘Say, honey, you got a little friend my buddy can screw?’

She decided to mix business with pleasure.

‘Let’s take this poor kid to the party,’ she said. ‘Her man’s away in the States and her mother’s a drunk; she’s just got out and she hasn’t been too good. I’ve been looking after her. Come on, a party would do her the world of good on her birthday.’

‘You eighteen?’ asked the Yankee suspiciously. Privately he had thought she was about fifteen. ‘My buddy don’t want no jail bait.’

When he had been assured that she was not below the age of consent, and also that her illness was nothing to do with venereal disease, he said she could come to the party.

‘I have to ask for my buddy,’ he explained. ‘He’s kind of bashful.’

Lola had a cognac and said she felt much better. Then, while Dawn and Elwood were in bed, she had a long hot bath which eased the pains of pleurisy temporarily; but by the time they arrived at the party she could scarcely breathe.

It was a very noisy party. Half the crew of Elwood’s ship had taken over a small sly grog that called itself a night club on Breakfast Creek Road. Dawn, who was now well away in her rôle of benefactress to starving delinquents, decided that what Lola needed was something hot to eat. So Lola found herself with a plate of spaghetti and meat sauce steaming in front of her, and the smell of oil and meat almost made her vomit. Somehow her head was hurting her so much that she had to struggle to distinguish one sound from another, and yet she decided that she could not be going deaf, because through the roaring in her ears she could hear Dawn’s voice exhorting her in a kind of genial bullying:

‘Get that into you, kid, go and get stuck into it.’

Lola laid down her fork and looked at the ring of faces round her and the oily food before her.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t.’

‘Get it into you,’ ordered Dawn, ‘or I’ll rub it in your hair.’

‘Come on, baby, have another drink,’ said Elwood. ‘You’re no good to any man the way you are.’ Elwood’s friend, who was quite a kindly kid when there was no audience around, looked at her anxiously, and then he was putting his hand around her breast and saying:

‘You fretting about that guy of yours in the States? Forget about him, honey—he’s spoiling our night.’

Then Lola struck his hand away and began to scream at them all:

‘Leave me alone, all of you, can’t you all see that I want to be left alone?’

Dawn sprang up and smacked her across the face.

‘Shut up,’ she said. ‘Pull yourself together. Do you want the cops in?’

‘Be quiet everyone,’ said a Middle West accent somewhere at the end of the table. ‘I got something to say to the poor kid. Now listen to me, baby. You listening? I got news for you.’

Lola leaned forward. He seemed to be sitting a long way away, but he did seem an understanding type and she tried to put what she hoped was a polite and interested smile on her face.

‘You listening?’ he asked again.

Lola nodded. She tried to concentrate, and then the face at the end of the table seemed to float towards her—a moment ago it had been almost unseen, now it was a distended horror of a face within about an inch of her own. Its eyes were wrinkled up into slots, the cheeks blown out wide—two monstrous bladders sucking in air and then the air was expelled in one long, loud, expert raspberry.

‘Now, doll baby,’ said the voice that apparently belonged to this nightmare face, ‘don’t go making any more rebop or I’ll smack your pretty fanny for you.’

Everyone was laughing, so Lola laughed too. It would never do to let them know that she did not know what the joke was. And someone was saying, ‘That’s a good girl,’ and pouring her a drink which she swallowed down, not because she wanted it, but because they all seemed to grow so angry with her if she were not obedient; and then everyone seemed to be dancing, and she was sitting all alone and she poured herself another drink. It was a long glass. She went on pouring and pouring. No hope of filling that glass, and then she saw that it was filled. It was just a seven-ounce glass and she had poured liquor all over the table. She must go away. They would be furious. Dawn would start beating her again. That terrible face would come back. Luckily they would not find her because she was underneath the sea. The waves were roaring above her head, but she was not drowning, the waves were hiding her and she was sitting on a rock listening to the music coming from so far away. But she would make sure. She would just slip into the cave beneath the rock. But perhaps that was a mistake, for in the cave it grew very dark, and she had always been afraid of the dark, and a tiger came in and lay down beside her and the pain in her side grew so terrible that she did not know what was happening until she saw that the tiger, of course, was tearing her ribs away; but she must be quiet, she must not scream, she must stay with the tiger till Brownie came to rescue her. The tiger was preferable to Dawn and the rest. She must not scream. Brownie would not be long now. She had written to him. She must not scream.

The police found her there at about one in the morning. She was quite alone. All the rest of the party had gone. She lay beneath the table, covered in cigarette butts and the spaghetti and sauce which the jester from the Middle West had tipped over her, to keep her warm, as he said.

‘This looks like the one Auntie Westbury rang about tonight,’ said one policeman to the other.

They had dragged her out from underneath the table and were trying to make her sit straight on a chair and give her name and address, if any. ‘She said she wanted her brought in for parole-breaking before she turned eighteen next week.’

‘I am eighteen tonight,’ Lola was momentarily lucid with hatred, ‘as the old smiling ghoul well knows. She rang up and shelved me tonight because she has been sweating on this very night, just waiting to see me in the hands of the cops instead of in the Children’s Court. A tiger is eating me,’ she added in the same reasonable manner.

‘Do you think she’s stacking on an act?’ asked the younger cop. ‘Or do you think she’s sick, or in the D.T.’s?’

‘All three,’ said the other cop. ‘We’ll get the doctor to have a look at her when we get in.’

So it was that Lola came back to sanity a couple of days later and found that she felt cool again, the pain in her side was much better and she was lying in bed in prison hospital.

She got three months for vagrancy and, as she had spent more than a month of her sentence in hospital, she managed to get through the remainder without too much trouble, and Brownie was waiting for her when she got out.

He stood in the burning sunshine outside Central wearing his Sears Roebuck jeans and a beautiful American jacket and his arms full of parcels—American clothes that he had bought for Lola and two dozen red roses that were beginning to feel the heat. He had been waiting since about nine o’clock and now it was eleven and Lola had just arrived. She was bustled out of a car by two policewomen and taken inside for a few minutes. Then she was out on the street again; they began walking slowly towards each other—slowly as though they were afraid to meet and touch—and then, when they were near enough for him to see the tears on her cheeks, she broke into a run and he put out his arms and folded her in amongst the crushed-up clothes and the ruined red roses.

‘Oh, Brownie,’ she kept sobbing, ‘I knew you’d come. I knew you’d come as soon as ever you could, so I was waiting for you and I was being true all the time, honest to God I was. I swear to God. I know they always try and make vagrancy sound like prostitution. Please, Brownie, you got to believe me. I swear to God, Brownie. I swear to God—’

‘Hush,’ he rocked her gently because it hurt him to hear her.

‘It’s O.K., darling. I knew you’d wait for me as long as there was any chance at all that I’d ever get back. I know you are sick and you couldn’t get a job. Oh, darling, darling.’ He began to laugh at her gently. She was racked with sobbing now. She was quite frantic with relief.

‘Easy, honey, easy.’ He dragged a blue silk scarf out of one of the parcels (it had a palm tree at each end and it said: ‘Welcome to Honolulu’!) and began to wipe her eyes and his own indiscriminately. ‘I was talking to a copper on the ’phone. He told me how sick you were and, look, we’ve got everything. I’ve got us a little flat over in West End and I’ve got three months’ relieving work on the rugs. Three months in the Port of Brisbane, and I won’t even have to think of going away; and when that cuts out I’ll put myself on to the river roster and I’ll just be a home-port man. Come on, darling, stop crying.’

Lola looked up. Her eyes were happy even though her face was still wet, and she mopped at her cheeks with the blue silk scarf.

‘Brownie,’ she said, ‘if we don’t put a foot wrong they can’t touch us now, and we’re going to be such a square old couple they won’t know us. I’m never going back in there while there’s a breath in my body. When we get short of dough, I’ll get work. They’ll never have the satisfaction of vagging me again.’

Brownie laughed and whistled to a taxi that was cruising hopefully nearby.

‘That’s the spirit, small one. Now get in this cab and we’ll go home, and I’ll show you all your lovely States-side presents.’

Lola leaned on the window ledge and looked down into the darkening garden.

It might be haunted, she thought, with the instinctive intuition that every garden planted long ago is haunted. And this was one of the oldest gardens in Brisbane—old, overgrown and neglected: magnolia, mango and paw paw trees shading the roses that had survived the years without care and reverted to their original single-petalled state; bougainvillaea that swarmed about the house as though to push it into the earth, and everywhere springing clumps of pampas grass and bamboo, making small jungles where the frogs croaked and the snakes hid and the children played in fine weather, till their mothers came and ordered them home, scolding and threatening, and warning them against snake-bite, and looking with unfriendly eyes at Lola and Mavis and their men.

‘Soon it will be dark,’ said Lola, ‘and the wind will drop and the frost will come in from the Downs, stretching out its hands like big frozen claws to grab me and chill the marrow in my bones.’

‘You’ve got me to keep you warm,’ said Brownie.

Lola turned and smiled at him. She did not say: ‘Brownie, you can keep me warm just as long as life or fate or whatever it is, or whatever people call it, allows you. In one second all this could go—the garden, the house and the two of us together. In one second there could be nothing but the wind howling across the place where we were.’

Instead she said: ‘We’re right for tonight anyway, so that’s all we need to worry about. Now I’m going to shut out the frost and stoke up the fire.’

She closed the window with a strange little ceremonial flourish, as though she were finishing a ritual. For in the Brisbane winter the west wind blows all day across the city, and while the wind blows the sun shines clear and warm, so that you have only to get in the lee of a sheltering wall to be warm again; but at night the wind drops, and then the cold comes creeping in from the hinterland to nip the city right to the edges of the river and the shores of Moreton Bay.

So every night Lola went about the house, with her black woollen stole pulled right around her, shutting the windows, lighting the lamps, putting wood on the fire and stirring the soup in the pot. It was in truth a ritual, an invoking of domestic magic, drawing a ring of enchantment around herself and Brownie. And outside—outside was the rest of the world and everybody in it.

Mavis and Lyle were at the pictures. They had gone to five o’clock session and taken Sharon Faylene with them. Sharon Faylene, eighteen months old, not walking, not talking and heavily bronchial, should not have been out on such an evening, but Mavis, who was expecting another child in three months’ time, was taking in all the shows she could.

‘God knows when I’ll get out when I have two of them on the hip,’ she would say. And she was attempting to saturate her system in the glorious freedom of the shops, streets, hamburger joints, theatres and milk bars, against the time when, little by little, the walls of the kitchen would close around her for ever.

She was also adding to her collection of records against the dreadful day.

‘At least I’ll have some music when I can’t get out any more,’ she would say as she arrived home with another second-hand long-player under her arms. Then she would add it to the neat pile beside the radiogram, which had the distinction of being the only hire purchase she and Lyle had ever completely paid off. They had bought it soon after they had married, and they were married three days after they stepped off the migrant ship in Sydney. They had met on the ship, and Mavis was pregnant by the time they reached Australia; so they had married and set out for the lush tropical Queensland that Lyle had read about. Expecting something like a Pacific island—coconuts, blue lagoons and the works—they had, naturally enough, been disappointed in Brisbane. But not in each other—they were in love with the fierce absorption of people who supplied each other with the only emotional reality they had ever known. Mavis was an only child. She could scarcely remember her father who had been killed in one of the first air-raids on London. Her mother had sent her to the country, where she was presumed to be safer and was certainly not as damnably in the way as she would have been at home getting under foot and lousing up her mother’s widowhood. Mother had gone into munitions and had almost married several Americans. When Mavis came home to London she was twelve—lumpy, uninteresting and adolescent. Her mother took one look at her and packed her off to a cheap boarding-school. In the holidays she sent her to the pictures. It seemed the only thing to do with her.