The Delinquents (7 page)

‘I’ll look after you and keep you warm too,’ said Brownie, ‘if you still want me.’

‘Oh, Brownie,’ she put down her glass and looked at him in astonishment.

‘Why wouldn’t I still want you? Haven’t you always been the only one I ever loved?’

‘Yes,’ said Kath, ‘she’s always talking about Brownie.’

She poured out another drink all round.

‘Have another drink on the happy occasion,’ she said.

Brownie looked down into his glass.

‘I don’t need it now,’ he said.

‘If you two want to go off to bed or somewhere, don’t mind me,’ said Kath. Brownie looked at Lola.

‘What about a meal—it’s nearly five o’clock? You too, Kath,’ he added in the tone of voice which means ‘accept if you dare.’

‘I’m not leaving all this lovely liquor,’ declared Kath. ‘Now run along, kiddies, and be happy.’

Lola hesitated.

‘How will you get on, Kath, for a meal?’ she asked.

Kath eyed three National Servicemen who were drinking at a nearby table.

‘If those guys haven’t the price of a feed between them,’ she said, ‘then I’m slipping.’

Out in the street Lola shivered and pulled the duffle jacket around her.

‘Food!’ she said with glee. ‘Wacko! Come on, Brownie. Tonight we eat. Let’s go to the “Crown”, I want to show you to a few people.’

Seated in the ‘Crown’, Lola ate her way through chicken soup, steak and oysters, pineapple fritters and finished off with coffee and toast. She seemed to know every second girl in the place and hailed them all excitedly, telling them all: ‘This is Brownie!’ And everyone seemed to have heard of him.

As she ate, her face lost its pinched and exhausted look and Brownie became aware that she had developed a certain head-turning quality—whether it was the long-legged, stilt-heeled walk, or the upthrusting breasts, or the sluttish-looking mop of hair, or a combination of all these, he did not know, but he began to feel great pride in his rakish-looking little love as she sat there drinking her coffee and smoking a cigarette. He reached out across the clutter of cups and plates and took her hand between his:

‘Have you got somewhere to take me, honey?’ he asked. She laughed and patted his cheek.

‘Naturally, Brownie,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to come courting. We settled all that under the frangipani trees on the banks of the Burnett River, remember?’

She stood up, put the strap of her bag over her shoulder, turned the collar of her coat up around her face, and put her hands deep in the pockets.

‘Follow me, sailor!’ she said.

Her room was at the top of a house in a terrace in a back street in St. Kilda, and it was the room that Brownie might have expected—small and mean, with damp on the walls and clothes on the floor and the bed unmade. Lola closed the door and leaned against it, facing him, and he saw now that there were tears in her eyes.

‘Oh, Brownie,’ she said, ‘I know it’s terrible and I know I look dreadful, but I’ve been so sick, and maybe I haven’t always done the right thing; but, Brownie, I loved you, I loved you all the time.’

Brownie looked at her, at the thinness of her face and the hollows around her neck, at the streaky blonde hair and the nicotine stains on her fingers.

‘God!’ he thought, ‘she looks as though she’s been starving.’

‘Brownie, say you still want me. For God’s sake say you still want me.’

‘I still want you,’ he said. ‘I want you and love you more than I ever did before in all my life.’

It was midnight. Lola and Brownie had been down the street to buy hamburgers and coke at the all-night hamburger bar at the Junction and now they were back warm and contented in bed. Lola munched her hamburger, curled up in Brownie’s arm, her head resting on his shoulder.

‘Wouldn’t it be good,’ she said, ‘to be a cat and just spend your life eating and sleeping and making love?’

‘Some cats find the alleys a bit cold at times,’ said Brownie.

‘I believe you, Brownie. Believe me boy, I believe you.’

‘Darling, where were you working?’

‘Well really I’m not working anywhere just now.’

‘What work do you do, darling?’

‘Last job I was a waitress. I was in a big place in Collins Street but I got two days notice when the ’flu was coming on me. “You look bad,” the Manageress said. I could see she didn’t want to give me sick pay so she was giving me orders to balls me up all day and then in the end she said I was insolent.’

‘Were you?’ he laughed in the darkness and tightened his arms around her body.

‘Of course I was.’ She laughed too. ‘So in the end she told me “take two days notice”, and I said “pay me off now, I’ll be too sick to work in your lousy drum by tomorrow”.’

‘How long ago was that, love?’

‘Two weeks ago—yesterday was the first day I was up and then I only went out for some rolls and butter and that, and I felt so sick I went back to bed again.’

‘Who looked after you—got your meals and that?’

‘Teddy Langley used to give me tea and toast in the mornings, and sometimes, nearly every night, Kath would bring me a pie, or fish and chips or something, and she’d heat them on Teddy Langley’s gas ring. A few times, though, she went off with some guy or got so rotten she couldn’t come.’ Lola laughed. ‘Once she brought a soldier up here and we had crayfish and beer and all, and the beer sent me to sleep, and when I woke up Kath and the soldier were both in with me, both naked as the day they were born, and the soldier started to go the grope on me, so I woke Kath and said “Do your own dirty work”.’

‘Very funny,’ said Brownie puritanically. ‘I don’t like Kath.’

‘Oh, Brownie, don’t be hard to get on with—we all have to live the best we can, and she’s a good friend.’

‘Sounds like it.’

‘Well, she fed me when I was sick and got the doctor when I was delirious.’

‘Gee, darling, I didn’t know you were that sick.’

‘I wasn’t too bad, sweetheart. Just I don’t seem to have any resistance to colds. Anyway, the doctor prescribed penicillin. It’s free medicine you know, and after that I got on fine.’

‘You’re looking skinny though, darling. Like you haven’t had anything solid to eat for a long time.’

‘I’ve got by all right.’

‘What were you going to do tonight if I hadn’t met you?’

‘Like Kath said—pick up a couple of guys to take us to dinner and then maybe go on to the Troc.’

‘And then?’

‘And then what?’

‘That’s what I’m asking you!’

‘Oh, Brownie darling,’ her voice was beseeching now, ‘life’s so sad most of the time, and we might as well try and enjoy ourselves while we can. If you could only know how cold and lonely and miserable and frightened I’ve been most of the time.’

‘Shush, darling,’ he patted her back gently, reassuring a child. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ve been no lilywhite myself. Nothing’s changed between you and me. Nothing’s changed at all. We’ll be all right now; but we must keep together from now on.’

She began to sob with her head against his shoulder and after a while she fell asleep.

They arranged to meet at six-thirty the next evening, after Brownie finished work. Brownie arrived on the steps of Flinders Street Station at six o’clock and at half-past six she was not there. She had not arrived by seven so he caught a taxi down to St. Kilda. He was almost sick with disappointment and apprehension. ‘If I find her and Kath drinking with a couple of Nashos it will just serve me right,’ he told himself.

But what he found was Lola standing at the doorway arguing with her landlady. The landlady looked irate and Lola looked rueful, but when she saw Brownie she began laughing in a mixture of relief, hysteria and embarrassment and said:

‘Oh, Brownie, isn’t this awful? I was praying you’d come. This old vulture bailed me up just as I was going out, and she says she is going to get the police and turn me in for insufficient lawful if I don’t pay the rent. And I haven’t any money.’

Brownie took charge of the situation.

‘What are you doing to my girl?’ he asked the landlady.

‘Your girl and everyone else’s,’ said the landlady.

Brownie hoped he did not flinch outwardly and he went on courageously enough:

‘How much is owing to you?’

‘Four weeks at thirty shillings a week and ten shillings for gas and electricity.’

‘Don’t pay the old bitch a penny,’ said Lola. ‘Threatening to get me vagged! I kept trying to tell her that if she’d only let me go meet you you’d help me.’

‘I’ve heard that one before,’ said the landlady. She suddenly switched the attack to Brownie. ‘You look the type she’d get in tow.’

Brownie put his hand in his pocket and brought out £2.

‘Here’s a couple of quid off it,’ he said. ‘Now let me have that suit-case.’

The landlady took the money and remained where she was, arms folded. ‘Are you going to stand like Napoleon on St. Helena all night?’ asked Lola. ‘Or can we pack up in peace and get out of your bloody joint?’

So the landlady went away and there was not very much to pack. There were two tight black skirts, both split up the side and broken at the zipper; some black lacy underwear which had been very expensive, but which now looked as though it had been made love to both hard and often; a red polo-necked sweater; the off-the-shoulder blouse and the duffle jacket she had worn the day before; a grubby brassière that smelled of perspiration, Hush and Jicki; a chocolate box containing some costume jewellery (most noticeable being a pair of huge gypsy earrings); some Helena Rubinstein make-up; one towel with Matson Line stamped on it; a copy of the
Shropshire Lad
; a bottle of Widow Wise’s Pills (Ladies end irregularity without delay); and a pair of light blue Sears Roebuck jeans.

‘Get into the jeans,’ said Brownie.

‘Browning darling, where are we going?’

He laughed across at her where she stood by the suit-case. She was dressed as when the landlady attacked her—ankle-strap shoes and a black satin slip. She had draped a long black stole, hand-knitted in wool, around her shoulders for warmth, and she was making a terrible job of the packing.

‘Darling,’ he said, ‘leave it all to me. You need someone to look after you as usual—Lord you’re a useless little thing. Just put the things you need for the night in your handbag’ (Lola promptly tipped the make-up and the jewellery into the shoulder-strap bag) ‘and get into your jeans and do what you’re told like a good little girl. Have you got any flat shoes?’

A frantic search found a pair of little flat velvet slippers such as matadors wear, under the wardrobe; socks to wear with them this cold night were not forthcoming, and then Teddy Langley, coming in to invite them for a farewell drink, offered a pair of navy blue two-way stretch. Lola introduced Brownie with the usual formula:

‘Teddy this is Brownie that I was always talking about.’ Then she put on the socks and turned them under at the heel.

‘So much more comfortable than taking in the slack at the toes,’ she told them.

They had the drink with Teddy and were ready to go. At the last moment Teddy took his football supporter’s cap from his pocket and set it on her head. It was a knitted cap with a pom-pom, white and black, for Teddy was a Collingwood supporter by religious conviction.

‘There you are you one-eyed Demon fan,’ he said. ‘I suppose it’ll kill you to wear it, but you have to keep dry; you’ve been very sick.’

‘Can you grab a cab while I get the case downstairs?’ said Brownie, who did not much care for it when Lola woke the protective instinct in other males. Teddy got the cab and Brownie carried her case. Lola left in style.

‘Wacko! Who would have thought that I’d drive away in a taxi?’ she said. ‘Now, Brownie, what gives with you, where are we going?’

But he wouldn’t tell her till they got out at Flinders Street Station and cloaked her suit-case in the baggage-room.

‘Now look, Lola,’ he said. ‘Come and eat and I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. You’ll have to be careful and do everything I say because it’s a risk, but it’s our only chance to be together—O.K.?’

She nodded at him like a docile child.

‘You’re looking after me now,’ she said.

So, sitting in the Greek’s over spaghetti and meat balls, he told her:

‘Look, Lola, I’ll have to get you in off the street somewhere tonight or you’ll be vagged; and I haven’t got much money left so I’m taking you down on the ship.’

Lola looked eager.

‘I’ll like that,’ she said.

‘It’s not that much,’ he warned her. ‘Nothing like parties on ships and so on. We’ve been laid up for six weeks. I suppose you’ve heard the miners are on strike?’

Lola had heard it vaguely.

‘Well, the ships are tied up for lack of coal, or the shipping companies are saying they have no coal, that way they make the miners look bastards, and on my ship they’ve only kept me and the bosun working by. I’ll try and get you on board for tonight and maybe tomorrow you can get a job somewhere, just to keep you going till next pay-day—that is, if you’re well enough, darling. The bosun is living in a pub up on shore. He comes down in the morning and puts me on the shake but I’ll have you out of the way by then. Want to give it a go?’

‘O.K. Let’s go.’

He zipped her bag inside his leather jacket, turned her coat collar up around her face and pushed her hair under the stocking cap. Sitting in the back of the taxi, trying to look like another deck boy, she drove through the wharf gates.

Once on the ship Brownie had to light a kerosene lantern to take her forward, for without coal the ship was without electricity. She lay a lifeless thing, cold, her woodwork and bulkheads damp to the touch, but Lola went below joyfully.

‘Brownie,’ she said, ‘this is wonderful.’ She looked around the lantern-lit cabin and sat down on the bottom bunk.

‘Isn’t it silent,’ she said, ‘right down here? I feel like we are at the bottom of a well, walled away from everything. At last I feel like nothing can harm us.’

Brownie sat beside her and put his arms around her.

‘I’d like to wall you away from everything,’ he said, ‘and love you and love you hard for a hundred years.’

As events fell out Lola did not have to slip ashore early in the morning, for both she and Brownie overslept and they woke to find the bosun standing over them. He called Brownie outside and said: