The Delinquents (3 page)

‘She is like a princess,’ he thought, ‘an Eastern Princess out of the
Arabian Nights
.’

‘My father just got up one morning and went away,’ she had said.

Brownie had admired her courage. He was inclined to pretend that
his
father was working on the railways in some spot so remote from what is termed civilization in Northern Queensland that it was impossible for him to get quarters for his wife and children. This was only partly true. Father was a fettler. But he was long gone and, for all his children knew, did not care if he never saw them again. They bore him no hard feelings in regard to this for they felt that their mother had asked for it. She had left home first. She had taken her children with her and gone to live with another man.

‘I had to make the break,’ she would say, ‘and I thought I should do it before the children were old enough to understand.’

Of course, as parents will, she put this age at about five years older than she should have, and in this first
de facto
experiment of hers what hell her two prim little daughters went through, one twelve, the other eleven, no one will ever know. Brownie was only four, and even he thought it strange. They had gone away from their house; father was no longer around; the terrifying rows ceased, and they were all living outside Tully somewhere, with a share-farmer called Bob Prentice. It was a small house. A kitchen with a wood stove, two bedrooms and a verandah. Brownie slept on the verandah, and in the night the crying of the curlews terrified him. He started school at Tully. He walked two miles to school and back each day with his sisters; and then one morning he was lifted out of bed in the cold and dark, and his mother dressed him and gave him breakfast.

‘We’re going back to Daddy,’ said Nita, as they walked through the bush carrying their suit-cases. Even Brownie had a little bundle to carry. They had to wait a long time by the roadside before the service bus arrived, and when they finally boarded it he felt somehow that people were laughing at them. He thought it was their battered suit-cases that made him feel so outcast.

‘When I’m grown up,’ he told himself, ‘I’ll have a leather suit-case with gold letters on, like Grandfather Hansen.’

So for a while longer they followed father round from one ghastly little town to the other, depending on where the railways sent him, and then suddenly he disappeared altogether, and everyone was glad. He had not come home from work sober for a long time. Mrs. Hansen, who had done incredible things to her inside in the course of several bathroom abortions, went in and out of hospital, and her husband made her an insufficient allowance which set the pattern of rigid economy in the household which Brownie came to loathe. He was not a greedy little boy. He would gladly have gone without later in the week if they could have lived with a little style on Sunday and Monday. He dearly loved things in style. Rigid, sensible carefulness galled him. All his life he hated sweet potatoes, corned beef, home haircuts, golden syrup, powdered milk and flour bags (they reminded him of sheets).

Then came the war, and the first lodger was called Jack. He departed for overseas, a gallant hero in a slouch hat. He was not very popular, in his absence having entirely omitted to make his landlady an allowance.

‘The mongrel,’ she would say, ‘the lousy rotten mongrel. After all I done for him.’

She cheered up with the advent of the Yank. He was a cheerful good-tempered, middle-aged man, who brought the Hansen children piles of what he called candy. Mrs. Hansen took to going dancing.

‘God knows,’ she would say, ‘I never had any life before, stuck out there in the bush without even a wireless, coping with a drunken husband, three kids and a fallen womb.’

This, of course, was absolutely true.

The American was moved to Melbourne and then came the big adventure of Mrs. Hansen’s life. Small wonder the ladies will never forget the Yanks. ‘I’m sick of this joint and the evil-minded people in it,’ she told her daughters one morning. ‘I think I’ll go South and see if we might make our home down there.’

‘Why don’t you?’ said Nita, who was the second girl and very fond of her father. ‘Please don’t worry about Brownie. We’ll look after him.’ ‘You know, Nita,’ said her mother with seeming irrelevance, ‘you are the image of your Grandmother Hansen. Old bitch that she was.’

So the Yank treated Mrs. Hansen to a holiday down South, and a wonderful time she had. He took her to the State Theatre which was much admired by the Yanks, and they even went to a night club. They were booked into a fairly good hotel which seemed like the Taj Mahal to Mrs. Hansen, and all the time they played a game the burden of which was that only Mrs. Hansen’s impregnable respectability made divorce impossible. His tone seemed to infer that, if it were not for this, both his wife and Goran Hansen would find divorce papers served on them within the week.

Mrs. Hansen played the little game, but in many ways she was a realist. She knew that the holiday was for favours received, that the Yank would go happily back to his wife and expected her to go, if not happily, then at least resignedly, back to that God-awful little town in the sticks.

Whither Mrs. Hansen in due course went, to resign herself to middle age and to accuse her neighbours for many years to come—the virtuous along with the guilty—of ‘carrying on with the Yanks during the war.’

‘Most great lovers if they lived today would be considered juvenile delinquents—Helen of Troy was just twelve years old when she ran away with Paris.’

Havelock Ellis makes this wise observation. Nobody has ever tried to excuse Helen and Paris. They were great lovers. This is the end of the matter. Of Lola and Brownie, Lola was the only one who had characteristics tending to delinquency. She had an inherited love of change and excitement, which so far she had managed to sublimate by sitting alone in hotel rooms reading historical novels and all the poetry she could procure. Her mother could go to a party leaving her tucked up in bed and know that she would be there, asleep, with her head pillowed on an open book, at one, two or three in the morning, whenever the party ended. It was very convenient.

‘You wouldn’t know she was in the place,’ her mother could say; and she felt, and all her friends felt, that surely no mother could ask for more. But adolescence came and stirred her body and tugged at her mind, and she knew she was lonely. And now the stage was set for trouble, for Lola had nourished her mind and her heart on dreams and had an innocent ruthlessness about converting her dreams into reality (and, oh, dear social worker, of all things beware the adolescent dreamer with a bit of guts). She wanted to be loved. Now she began casting Brownie in the rôle of lover, but she was physically immature, and had no real notion or fear of the tumult in the body of the boy.

She was sitting on a cross branch of their favourite frangipani tree down by the river when Brownie asked her:

‘Will you go steady with me?’

And she said:

‘I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it. You may have my hand to kiss,’ and she put out her hand, feeling like Napoleon’s Josephine.

Had she merely said ‘O.K.,’ Australian style, it would have been months before Brownie would have plucked up the courage to kiss her; but now he took the fragile Eurasian hand in his and, instead of kissing it with the courtly flourish her books had taught her to expect, he turned it over and suddenly kissed it hard on the palm. She snatched it away and they faced one another, their eyes dilating. Brownie felt that he would choke, that he would never breathe smoothly again. Then he put his hands up and at last lifted her hair away from her neck.

‘Your neck,’ he said, almost with wonder. ‘It’s warm, darling. It’s so soft and warm.’

He began to kiss her then wildly all over the face and neck and the childish pointed breasts. She began to tremble, but made not one move to repulse him.

‘Don’t be frightened, darling,’ he was saying. ‘Don’t be frightened. Look I won’t hurt you. I’ll take you home now. Don’t shake, darling, don’t tremble. Oh, darling, don’t be frightened of me. I wouldn’t hurt you. You’re so special. You’re such a special little thing.’

He lifted her out of the tree and it was the lightness of the small quivering body in his arms that undid them both and brought their childhood to an end there in the night amongst the long grass and the fallen flowers of the frangipani.

That was when Brownie was a month off fifteen—a big boy, almost six feet tall, who had worked like a man in every school holiday since he was twelve. What are we to do with the great overgrown lads whose bodies are a torment to them? Do the social workers and clergymen, well meaning though they be, really think youth clubs, organized sport, fretwork classes are of any use? Come now! Lola had no faith in the Boy Scouts, the young Liberal Movement, choir practice, the Junior Chamber of Commerce, cold showers (always supposing you could get a cold shower in Bundaberg), or these healthy outside interests they’re always talking about. All she knew was that Brownie wanted her and loved her. He was, she decided, the only person who had ever wanted her exactly as she was, without qualification and condition, therefore he should have her.

By many standards Lola was a fortunate child. True she had no settled home and her parents were separated, but against that it must be considered that she was given plenty of liberty, was never beaten nor bullied (except by the gentlest methods) and was given everything in the way of clothes and education that her mother could afford. There would have been a host of people in Bundaberg to declare that her mother was devoted to her. A hard and humiliating childhood and adolescence had left Mrs. Lovell with the conviction that to be accepted by the professional classes was the end and aim of every right-thinking woman’s existence. She distrusted love and disliked men—they reminded her of Tony Lovell and she looked back on her wild infatuation for him with deepest shame. Lola, she decided, would be well educated, would have a career, would marry, if she married at all, a doctor, a lawyer, a bank manager—a man who wore a public school tie. She would have been astounded to know that one woman could create from her own flesh another so unlike herself. Lola never argued with her mother. The nuns had taught her pretty manners and, at any rate, she knew that arguing would be useless; but while her mother talked to her of the day when she would be a nurse or private secretary or doctor’s receptionist, Lola dreamed of the day when she would be a ballroom-dancing instructress, or travel the country in a carnival caravan; above all, of the man who would worship her, love her, adore her. And now fate had sent along Brownie, the biggest, the handsomest, the gentlest and softest spoken boy in all the town.

Coming home on that first night she sat in the bath a long while and tried to think out the situation. She knew that if her mother knew she would be ill with shock. She knew she might already be pregnant, and, worst of all, according to all she had been taught, the fires of hell were already roaring for her, though of this last she could not be afraid. She found it so hard to believe. She gave up all attempt at coherent thought. It is impossible to reason out anything with a voice inside you, half demented with joy, shouting, ‘I am loved, I am loved.’

‘If mother knew,’ she thought, ‘she would hate me. There are dozens of things about me that mother would hate if only she knew. But whatever I do Brownie loves me. Brownie loves me.’

She was sound asleep with her cheek on her hand when her mother came home.

Brownie had never dreamed of love as an escape at all. From his own observation he had decided that all physical love was dirty—a sort of disgraceful trap into which everybody fell despite their best endeavour. He had watched his mother’s lodgers come and go. Though the American had been unfailingly kind to him he had had the most traumatic effect upon the child, for on a Saturday afternoon the American would come home from camp early, and then he and Mrs. Hansen would lie on Brownie’s bed (presumably because Brownie’s room did not overlook the gossip-hungry street) and there make what, for want of a more appropriate word, must be called love. The Hansen children did not stay around to witness their embraces. The girls went out to tennis and made good Mrs. Hansen’s boast that her girls were wonderful sensible girls, never a day’s worry, mad on sports and their jobs, etc., not interested in boys and all that rubbish at all. The girls never discussed the situation, even with one another. Their humiliation was too great. They merely saved their money and left home as soon as they could. Brownie, by a triumph of
dementia praecox
, often managed to convince himself that it was not happening at all. He would ride away on his bike on a Saturday afternoon and behind him there was nothing—just a vacuum devoid of love, truth or happiness.

‘I’d be frightened I wouldn’t like a Sheila any more after I’d done that,’ he had once said to a more experienced friend who was boasting. But it had not been like that at all. He was already so far gone in revolt against his mother, and Lola was such a polar type to that loud-voiced, fair-skinned, big-framed woman that Lola could do no wrong. Her every word, action and look was a source of beauty and joy to him. He found he was walking around half dazed with the remembrance of the gentleness of her love-making, the fragility of her bones and the darkness of her eyes in the shadows beneath the trees. There was no room in his heart for any feeling of disgust or disgrace.

‘She is beautiful,’ the voice within him cried. ‘She is beautiful and she is good.’

It happened about the time when Bert Prince was at his most obnoxious that Brownie took Lola riding on his bike one evening. He would put her up on the crosspiece and thus they would go for miles, while her mother thought she was with one of her school friends, being helped with her mathematics homework. Well, on this occasion the night was so warm and still that they stayed out much longer than they had planned. Brownie took the precaution of stopping round the corner from home and letting down the back tyre, but even this was not a good enough excuse for his mother, who had been picturing his body caught in a snag in the river for the last hour or more. She fell upon him as soon as he got in the door and administered two heavy slaps across the head, and Brownie, who always felt his body purified by Lola’s love-making said: