The Delinquents (17 page)

‘We’ll go and see Sharo when they let us,’ she said.

‘Sure, Sharo’ll be all right. They look after them well in those places—well, goodbye.’

‘Goodbye, God bless you. Write some time.’

‘Sure, I’ll drop a line.’

‘Take care of yourself.’

‘Same with you two.’

‘Best of luck.’

‘Good luck to you.’

‘Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye.’

Brownie and Lola ran beside the bike a little way, shouting their farewells; then it turned the corner, and as it did so Lyle raised his hand once and looked back at them.

‘And that,’ said Lola, ‘is the last time he’ll ever look back in his life.’

She and Brownie entered the garden of No. 20 and it was very still: no radio, no sound of Mavis singing, no tinkling of the bells on Sharon’s slippers. The bamboo whispered in the wind, and underneath the house a tap gurgled, stopped and gurgled, regular, maddening, solitary. Lola looked at the sky.

‘It only needs the crows to start now,’ she said, and suddenly she was clinging to Brownie, trying hard not to become hysterical, but crying on a note of rising terror.

‘Thank God you’re here, darling; oh, thank God you’re here.’

Brownie held her a moment, stroking her shoulders, then he said:

‘Go in, get the coffee-pot on, we’ve got a lot of work to do. Packing and the rest. We’re moving out of here this afternoon. We’ll stay at a pub or something tonight, and tomorrow I’ll pay off and we’ll light out for Sydney.’

Quickly they dismantled the bed and stacked it back in the shed with a few other bits of furniture. They packed their clothes and sold the mattresses to the Bottle-oh who made his weekly round that afternoon. They had a final cup of coffee, raked out the fire, piled their cases in a cab and they were gone.

Night-time found the house empty of all save the possums, who came scurrying back from amongst the rafters and the shadow-filled trees. Lola had left the little animals some biscuits, some sugar and some peanut butter, and when they had eaten there was nothing left of human love in the empty rooms—nothing save a ball of red paper thrown in one corner and Mavis’s film stars, smiling on the walls.

One morning when he was twenty-one Brownie dressed himself in his new suit (his only suit) and set off to get married. For support he had his old friend the bosun of the
Dalton
who, as he helped him dress, saw fit to reminisce thus:

‘Well, Brownie boy, I’ve had three marriages—all of them spectacular flops. The first cost me fifty quid and maintenance for the kid paid every month right on the knocker till he was sixteen. The second cost me £75 with costs, and two hundred quid in a lump sum. It’s going to cost me £500 to get rid of this last bitch, and worth every penny of it every time, me boy. Here’s your grey tie, son—trust the old Mad Mariner to think of everything.’

‘Gee, I’m nervous,’ said Brownie, trying hard to knot the grey tie.

‘So you well may be, old son.’ The Mad Mariner took the tie and made a beautiful job of it. ‘There you are, nothing to it. It’s the first time hurts the most.’

Brownie laughed.

‘Lovely old best man you turned out to be.’

‘Ah, don’t take any notice of me, Brown, I’m just a sentimental old fool.’

Brownie felt he was bursting with love, delight and confidence. Of course, he had experienced a feeling of misgiving that he could not explain. It was when they first arrived in Sydney and his twenty-first birthday was drawing near. He had always planned to marry the day he turned twenty-one. It had been a day-dream of long standing; and then, as it came nearer to being a fact, he was filled suddenly with foreboding. Lola laughed. She said all men had an inborn resistance to marriage.

‘It’s handed on from father to son,’ she assured him.

‘It’s just the knowledge that, once married, you can never get away from the little dears without a hell of a lot of unpleasantness and expense,’ said the Mad Mariner.

‘It’s not that at all,’ Brownie struggled between amusement, chagrin and inarticulateness. ‘It’s just that—that, oh well, I don’t know, it all seems so awful.’

‘Well,’ Lola tormented him, ‘you’ve been nagging at me for years to make an honest lad out of you. Now it looks like you want to back out. O.K., we’ll forget about it.’

The thought that Lola might not want to tie him down so terrified Brownie that he leaped to the bait.

‘It’s just—well, you know I’ll never leave you. Why do I have to make promises as though I was the sort of dead bastard no girl could trust. Haven’t we always been perfectly all right the way we are?’

This conversation took place about a fortnight before the wedding. The Mad Mariner was visiting them, and they all sat on the balcony of the flat they had taken on the Cross. It was not an expensive flat as King’s Cross goes, being old, inconvenient and not self-contained, but it had one of the best views in Sydney. The land fell away steeply beneath the balcony so that Elizabeth Bay seemed almost beneath their feet. They sat now watching the spangle of lights grow across the darkening water and finishing off one of Lola’s extraordinary meals—lamb chops, because she liked them, spring rolls, because the bosun brought them, fried rice with cabbage because it was her speciality. Now, as she called from the kitchenette behind them, ‘Is it coffee or beer for you, boys?’ Brownie repeated, ‘What’s wrong with all this, aren’t we perfectly happy the way we are?’

Lola did not answer from the kitchen. They could hear her moving around lighting the gas, rattling cups; and then she switched off the light, and in the darkness the lovely smell of brewing coffee crept to them and mingled with the perfume of the oleander, heavy with blossoms beneath the balcony, and the Florida water that Lola always rubbed in her hair. She came across the balcony to Brownie and put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him.

‘You unspeakable cad,’ she said with infinite love.

And now it was the wedding morning. All doubts of the future had been banished by the joyous bustle of the last week or so.

‘I never knew there was so much jazz attached to getting married,’ Brownie confessed.

First Brownie had to be hauled off to a Roman Catholic priest, where he was instructed in the principal points of the Catholic faith.

‘No priest will marry us without,’ explained Lola.

Brownie said that was O.K. He consigned his dreams of a quiet little registry office ceremony to the realm of things best not thought of, or even spoken of if it came to that. Lola, it seemed, had never thought of marriage without the full trimmings, and as she danced around, abrim with excitement, she frequently exclaimed:

‘Gee, Brownie! Am I going to be respectable—the young matron, that’s me from this on.’

So Brownie went off to learn about the Infallibility of the Pope and went shopping for a new suit and kept to himself his fears that he might die of nerves and stage-fright when the great day came.

And then it was the wedding eve, and Lola’s mother was stepping off the plane from Brisbane, stone-cold sober, in a faultless black costume with a rich and mysterious wedding present tucked under the arm. And she and Lola fell upon each other’s necks, all smiles and tears and endearments, which left Brownie to marvel much at the ways of women.

Then Brownie was thrown out of the flat for the night, which left him to marvel more, and particularly at Lola’s explanation.

‘It wouldn’t be the right thing, darling. Wouldn’t be the right thing at all—as well as being terribly unlucky.’

Then Lola was going to Confession, and he was in the back of the church waiting for her—gazing up at a monstrous statue of Michael the Archangel, and torturing himself with the fantasy that the priest might order six months’ celibacy for a penance. However, she came out of the confessional a trifle pink around the ears, but happy, and professing herself to be much relieved in mind. She hauled Brownie off to buy her a cup of coffee, which they had in a little dark espresso down in McLeay Street, and they held hands silently for a long time, like very new lovers indeed. After which they were kissing goodbye outside the flat, and Brownie was holding her with his heart filled with fear, but she put his arms away gently and said:

‘It will be all right tomorrow, darling. You’ll see. Don’t be frightened, Brownie. Wait and see. Tomorrow we’re going to marry and live happily ever after.’

Brownie went round to take a room at the hotel where the Mad Mariner was staying, and the Mad Mariner suggested a night on the town as the only cure for his woeful condition. Brownie professed himself aghast at the idea, so the Mad Mariner, like the true and unselfish friend he was, refrained from all references to high-minded young bridegrooms and contented himself with plying his suffering friend with night-caps of whisky and milk (taken hot—another great remedy of the bosun’s dear old mother back in Limehouse), till at last Brownie turned in, claiming that he was not going to sleep a wink.

The faithful bosun aroused him at half past nine. Brownie swallowed some coffee and got his eyes open properly in the shower. Then came the dressing. The big ritual was on.

And now they were dressed and speeding through the Cross in a taxi; or, more precisely, they were crawling through a near traffic jam and the cab-driver was leaning out every other yard to abuse mugs in Holdens, dills in Station Wagons, bastards in panel vans, etc. But Brownie had the sensation they were speeding in a golden cloud, and then, alternately, that they were crawling to their doom in a tumbril while hostile crowds shouted:

‘There he is, that’s the victim! That’s the victim!’

Then here they were at Saint Canice’s, and the priest was meeting them and shaking them by the hand making gentle little jokes about brides being late, which Brownie could not hear for the roaring in his ears. They waited in the vestry.

‘Lucky for you it’s a mixed marriage,’ said the knowledgeable bosun, ‘or you’d be waiting right out there in the big church, stranded all alone there right in front of the altar, feeling a proper guy.’

‘She’s gone, she’s gone,’ cried Brownie within himself. ‘She’s gone. I’ll cut my throat. She’s late. God, I could belt the daylights out of her.’

There she was getting out of a taxi. She was beautiful, glorious, terrible with banners, in her beautiful, secret wedding clothes. Brownie felt an almost over-whelming urge to rush forward and grovel at her feet in sheer relief. She wore a sheath of golden satin, and a wide white hat, and below it her hair was coiled in an enormous knot on the nape of her neck. Her heels were the highest that could be bought, and her gloves reached to her elbows and fastened with little gilded buttons. She was white and gold from head to toe, and in her hands she carried frangipani and fern.

‘Of course, darling,’ she had said, ‘I can’t go as a bride, but I can be smart. So elegance is the keynote, sweetheart. No good striving for that virginal effect.’

She was dazzling, but had she perhaps neglected the virginal look too completely? However, Brownie noticed she had left off her gypsy earrings, and that the split in the back of the sheath skirt was what might be termed, for Lola, discreet. He decided they looked right enough for the Cross. He had a momentary qualm about his own brand new, American-style suit. It had seemed so glorious at the tailor’s, and now—he grinned to himself.

‘What the hell!’ he thought. ‘I look like a sailor who’s marrying the woman he’s been living with for years.’

The Mad Mariner had arranged himself in a sort of modified Ivy League outfit. The effect sought was one of quiet good dressing, the effect achieved was that the Mad Mariner looked like a commercial traveller in one of the less reputable contraceptives. Lola’s mother, however, lent the necessary air of respectability. She stood there in the beautifully cut costume and a plain linen blouse. She wore English shoes, very little make-up and no jewellery. Lola had insisted on having a few friends along.

‘I’m damned if I’m going to sneak off and marry with only two witnesses,’ she had said. ‘I don’t care what I’ve done.’

So the landlady came along, and the landlady’s daughter, and Joey the landlady’s daughter’s fiancé, and they were all crowding in behind Lola and Brownie; and now the priest was putting his stole around his neck, and the marriage service had begun, and Brownie was precipitated into vast chasms of stage-fright where coherent thought was no longer possible. For some few moments he had a bewildering mental image as of the vestry filling up with those whose lives had gone to make his and Lola’s—his grandmother, Martha Hansen, who would have been near to a stroke had she seen him married by a Catholic priest, his grandfather Hansen who would not have cared where he married, his father of the golden hair and blue eyes, gone no one knew where; and Lola’s Irish grandparents and wandering father and Indian great-grandmother, all were there—thronging and whispering shadows around him.

Lola’s mother was weeping; the tears were pouring down her face. The landlady was crying. Brownie saw, with a flash of horror, that the Mad Mariner himself was noticeably watery eyed, blew his nose like a bugle, and was so shaken out of his usual aplomb that he dropped the ring right at the priest’s feet. Even Brownie, the agnostic, was profoundly moved by the beauty of the ritual. As he promised to love and to cherish, for richer and for poorer, for better and for worse, in sickness and in health, till death, he felt a lump rise in his throat. But Lola! Lola was transformed. She stood, head erect, shoulders thrown back, her eyes tilted with triumph, a faint smile on her mouth, flowers filling her hands, and she made the responses without hesitation, in a clear, ringing voice—Lola radiant, Lola in her glory, Lola the most honest honest-woman in Sydney. Outside the church, of course, the kissing commenced. Mrs. Lovell kissed Brownie, and said:

‘I’m very pleased with my son-in-law.’

Everyone kissed Lola, first and foremost being the Mad Mariner.

‘An old friend’s privilege, my dear.’

Then Lola tossed her bridal bouquet into the air, and it was caught by a little girl who always stood at the gate taking in all the Saturday morning weddings.

‘You’ll be next, sweetheart,’ teased Lola, and the little girl, who hoped to marry Elvis Presley, remembered this years later when she married a sailor in that self-same church.