The Delinquents (6 page)

Mrs. Hansen, consumed with anxiety as never before, now took it upon herself to lecture and warn him every night. She warned him to save, she warned him about women, she warned him against girls and about venereal disease. Night after night as she sat and sewed her voice went on and on, filling the kitchen with fear and Brownie did not listen. He had withdrawn from his mother for ever. She would never touch him again. He found he could sit and think quite comfortably while the tide of his mother’s ignorance, superstition and insecurity flowed around him.

‘You know, Brownie, you want to be careful of the drink. I was never a wowser but I’d be just as glad if you never touched it. Look at your father. Look at those old pensioners you see outside the wine shops on pension day. You know it’s in you. That’s why I’m warning you. I’m only telling you. I’ve told the girls too. Of course Kristine’s all right, but Nita gets real upset. You have to be real careful what you say to Nita, but it’s my duty. I just showed her an old woman sitting in the gutter outside one of these plonk shops in the Bight. She was helpless. She couldn’t scratch herself. It was dreadful to think a woman could fall so low, and I just said to Nita “Any one of us could come to it, Nita; you want to always remember that. The weakness is in you from your father,” I said…’

Brownie said ‘Yes, Mum’ and ‘No, Mum’ at regular intervals, and thought it was not to be wondered at that the girls had gone back up North, and wished he had enough money to go to the pictures, and wished his job were not so dull, and wished he had something to read, and wished he could find Lola.

*

Meanwhile Lola’s mother had decided she would send her daughter back to school and Lola had gone, apathetic but unprotesting; but it had not been a success. She could not concentrate; she lost weight; she made no friends, and she took to waking in the night, shaking and sobbing. The doctor said she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and must have rest. After that she moped around the hotel reading magazines, crying and sleeping.

Then she began to go around with Kath. Kath cleaned out the bedrooms and helped in the bar at rush hours. She was neither very intelligent nor particularly kind, but she had the one good point of never questioning anything that anyone did and Lola found this restful. The first time they went out together they merely went to the pictures and had supper with a couple of national servicemen whom Kath seemed to know well—indeed she seemed to know every Nasho in Brisbane.

‘What did you think of those two?’ she asked Lola next morning.

Lola shrugged.

‘I’m not keen on Nashos,’ she said. ‘I prefer bodgies.’

Once, about six months after he went to sea, they almost found each other. It was in the lounge of the Grand Hotel.

Brownie went round from the front bar to pick up a couple of bottles of wine from the bottle department. He stood in the lounge doorway drunk and very handsome, looking the field over and wondering if it would be worth while picking up a woman, or if he would go back on board and drink the sherry, and then the woman picked him up. She rose unsteadily from her chair, put her arm through his and said:

‘Come on, Johnny, let’s go.’

Lola was inside in the toilet being very sick. She came out no more than thirty feet behind Brownie and the woman, but she saw nothing—nothing except the ground heaving beneath her feet and the stars falling out of the sky. She clung to the hotel wall vomiting and weeping and exclaiming:

‘Christ, I’m drunk. Oh hell, I’m drunk. I’m bloody, stinking drunk.’

She looked as unpleasant a little delinquent as ever made a policeman’s mouth water. From this predicament she was rescued by a shearer who was staying at her hotel. He got her into a taxi and took her home to her mother.

‘You’ll want to take better care of her,’ he told Mrs. Lovell, who was having a good-night beer in the kitchen with the Chef and the Manager.

Mrs. Lovell went into the usual old mother-love routine, with the manager echoing her like a Greek chorus.

‘At any rate,’ she concluded, ‘I do not propose to have a common shearer dictate to me.’

The common shearer laughed in her face.

‘Don’t make yourself sound silly,’ he advised. ‘That kind of talk went out with buttoned boots. And what’s so great about you. You’re just a phoney kidding phonies. You haven’t got education or class or self-respect or even common sense. I come from where there are still a few real ladies kicking around, and they’re recognized as such even if they work like horses—so I know. Now get hold of this poor kid and bath her and get her to bed.’

Lola was sitting on the bottom of the stairs, wailing and disconsolate.

‘I want Brownie,’ she wept. ‘I want Brownie.’

She put out a hand and clung frantically to the shearer begging:

‘Don’t go, Clancy. Don’t go. I’m so miserable, I’m so lonely and frightened and cold.’

Next morning Mrs. Lovell and Lola had a talk. It was the only talk they ever had that was shorn of all mother to daughter trimmings. It was quite a brutal little conversation, Mrs. Lovell began it by asking Lola if she had any desire to do anything decent with her life. Lola said, what was the use? Mrs. Lovell said that she had apparently been mistaken in her daughter. She had hoped for a decent life for her. That was why she had made sacrifices to send her to expensive schools. She had wanted her to meet the right people, become educated for a good job (private secretary, doctor’s receptionist…), and in the long run marry someone who would provide her with all the things that Lola’s father had never provided for Lola’s mother, etc., etc. However, it now seemed that all maternal sacrifice had been in vain; Lola must just be bad like her father.

‘That’s it, I’m bad,’ said Lola.

Mrs. Lovell flared into impatience at this carefully calculated insolence.

‘Well, I don’t advise you to be too bad while you’re under sixteen and still in my care,’ she concluded, ‘because I’d just as soon put you in a home for uncontrollable girls as look at you. When you’re sixteen I wash my hands of you. You can please yourself what you do.’

‘I’ll keep you up to that,’ said Lola.

Then her mother hit her across the face and threw herself down on the bed sobbing.

‘What’s wrong with you, Lola?’ she cried. ‘I look at you and wonder what goes on in that mean little inside of yours, and I just don’t know. I don’t know you at all.’

‘Why should you?’ thought Lola. She felt a little sorry for the woman sobbing on the bed, but she could not be bothered with talking to her. It flashed through her mind that she could say: ‘I waited alone all the years of my childhood for you to come and get to know me,’ but she decided it would be pointless now; and at any rate it might give her mother the satisfaction of thinking that she had been hurt. And had she been hurt? She did not know herself. She turned away from her mother and looked out of the window.

The woman who had picked up Brownie was a prostitute called Jan. Or rather she called herself Jan, but that has become a popular name in the profession of late years. Her name could quite possibly have been Ethel or Gwen. In common with most prostitutes, she had a pathetic story. Hers was that she was the daughter of a wealthy family in Sydney and had been well educated; but having had her face badly smashed around in a car accident she had decided not to care any more, and had apparently chosen prostitution as a means of going to waste which involved the least work and the most free drinks. She stuck to her story with a wealth of detail and it is certain that she spoke well when she so desired. Apart from that she was a big, sloppy woman in her early thirties and looking older, with a badly broken nose and a collection of angry-looking scars along her left jaw.

When she and Brownie awoke it was already early afternoon and they were both still a little drunk.

‘No point in you going back to your ship today, love,’ said Jan. So they repaired to the ‘Grand’ to pull themselves together with whisky and soda. Then they went out for a hamburger and came back for some solid drinking. Brownie being out of money, Jan paid. He dragged himself back on board the next morning and was not even logged. His mates had covered up for him, feeling that every deck boy is entitled to one bender on a prostitute’s money.

‘It’s part of your education,’ said the bosun.

She used to wait for him at the dock gate after that and he found himself the recipient of much ribald congratulation.

‘How’s our deck boy?’ said his older shipmates. ‘He’s got a whore keeping him.’

Brownie felt very big. He only regretted that he frequently found Jan so very repulsive.

The next time the
Dalton
got into Brisbane she gave him a watch. However, some of her professional colleagues told him that it had been stolen from one of her customers, so Brownie, always a fair-minded lad, at least where his own sex was concerned, made her return it. Frantically she maintained that she loved him, and twice she infected him with the least dignified of parasites—lice. This caused so much merriment amongst his shipmates to whom he went for advice (and some very macabre advice was forthcoming) that he made a great joke of it also, though secretly he was disgusted and horrified to the very depths of his adolescent puritanical soul. The cleansing process almost caused him to vomit, nevertheless it had to be. Setting aside such jocular suggestions as castration and cauterization, he decided upon insecticide, and being too shy to walk into a chemist and demand blue ointment he performed the purification with Mortein plus. It is one hundred per cent effective, but has the one disadvantage that it removes anything up to about three layers of skin along with the parasites. So much for the first time. On the second occasion that he found himself infected he was more than a little annoyed.

‘She sure seems to be the careless type,’ said the bosun. ‘Don’t you find it a bit off putting?’

Brownie did, and the next time that he and Jan took to bed he pleaded alcohol and went to sleep. When he woke up he dressed straight away, took his shoes under his arm and sneaked out. Apparently Jan never forgave the slight to her professional pride, for when he was back in Brisbane a couple of months later she came down to the ship all friendliness and relatively spruce looking: ‘If Brownie would give her a couple of quid for a drink,’ she said, ‘and a quid for the hotel room, she would fix everything and meet him at the dock gates that evening.’

Brownie, on whom the celibate life had been weighing heavily, gave her the money and that was the last he saw of her for many a long day. From then on he ignored women till they became a matter of utmost physical necessity, and all the time he kept on looking for Lola.

*

He found her at last in Melbourne on a wet August day about twelve months after he went to sea. It was pay-day and he was in the ‘Havana’ wine lounge getting drunk. It was his practice to get drunk on payday; and as he had a grown man’s capacity and a deck boy’s pay, he drank wine, which was cheaper and quicker. And then he saw her. The ‘Havana’ was in a basement and Lola came down the stairs with a big, wide-shouldered girl whose hair was dyed an unfortunate shade of red, and they sat at a table near the wall and ordered a bottle of dry sherry.

Coming in they had not seen Brownie, who was in a corner by the bar, and now they sat with their backs to him. Brownie’s first reaction was that it could not be Lola. She looked terrible; half starved and sick and grubby and wretched, and she had blonded her hair, which did not suit her, and it was going black along the parting.

‘God,’ he thought, as he made his way between the tables, ‘what have they done to her?’

Now he was standing behind her and he put his hand on her shoulder and said:

‘Do you mind if I join you girls?’

She turned and looked into his face, and immediately she stood up and he took her in his arms. She was weeping and laughing and exclaiming all at once:

‘Oh, God, Brownie, it can’t be you, it can’t be you. Oh, Brownie, Brownie, darling.’ And then to the other girl, ‘Kath, this is Brownie.’

‘Hell, I’ve heard plenty about you,’ said Kath.

Lola moved around to the wall side of the table, where the seating was a long settle-type bench covered in red velvet and running the length of the room. Brownie moved in beside her and they sat very close, holding hands. Kath said:

‘Look, I think I’ll go over and collect your bottle, otherwise some thirsty bum will whizz it off.’

When she came back Lola introduced her:

‘This is my girl friend Kath Thomson.’

Brownie smiled politely and surveyed her with distaste. She was the type he particularly disliked, big and hard-faced, with square hands like a man.

‘How did you get down this far?’ he asked Lola.

‘I followed the fleet,’ said Lola, which Kath seemed to think extremely funny.

‘Not Pussas, I hope,’ said Brownie.

‘Pussas! We wouldn’t have them on our mind,’ said Kath.

Lola leaned one arm on his shoulder and sipped her sherry with her body pressed against his.

‘Are you a big merchant-service sailor now?’ she asked and he heard with delight that the sing song had not quite gone from her voice.

‘That’s right.’

‘You’re just about Captain now, I suppose.’

‘In two months time I’ll be a bucko.’

‘J.C. a bloody deck boy,’ said Kath. ‘I thought you were older.’

‘He’s old enough to take care of me, aren’t you, Brownie?’ said Lola. ‘Look I’m real warm now.’ She wriggled happily in his arm. ‘That’s the first time I’ve been warm since I came to this lousy hole.’

It was small wonder that she was not finding the Melbourne winter very snug, for she was most unsuitably dressed for it in a narrow black skirt of a very light woollen material and a not very fresh-looking embroidered blouse, with a draw string through the neck. She wore the drawstring loose, and quite an amount of breast was disclosed. Over this she wore a fawn duffle jacket with no hood. It was somewhat too large for her, but it was a good warm jacket; however, in a Melbourne winter one warm garment is no more than a daisy in a bull’s mouth. The ensemble was finished off with bare legs and ankle-strap shoes, and a huge shoulder-strap bag of black patent leather with a plastic clasp that was vaguely heraldic.