The Delinquents (8 page)

‘You know what the Union says about women on board. Did you both pass out with the grog or something?’

Brownie, shivering in his jeans and rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, knew that the bosun was trying to provide him with a loophole, but somehow he could not take it.

‘No,’ he said, ‘that’s my girl. The one the police took away from me. I just found her again last night.’

‘She looks like she’s come a long way from the old home town,’ said the bosun.

‘I suppose so.’

‘Where did you pick her up again?’

‘What’s it to you?’

‘O.K. O.K. Just be careful she doesn’t give you a dose or something.’

‘She’s not like that.’

‘Of course not,’ the bosun hastened to agree; he could not forbear to add, however, that it was a well-known fact that the worst dose of all was the dose you got from a virgin.

‘She’s been very sick with ’flu,’ said Brownie, ‘and she hasn’t any money.’

‘No job of course?’

‘No job.’

Outside the Melbourne rain rattled on the deck.

‘I wouldn’t put a dog out in this,’ said the bosun. ‘You’d better put her in my cabin; it’s supposed to be locked.’ He handed Brownie the key.

‘Mind you, if you’re caught, I know nothing about it at all. Only for a couple of days it is, till you find her somewhere else and she gets a chance to pull round.’

Lola stayed in the bosun’s cabin a fortnight, for the ’flu, half arrested by insufficient penicillin, and encouraged by cold and sherry and intensive love-making, returned in virulent strength, and for a week she scarcely left her bunk. For the first couple of days she was very feverish: she lay shivering and sneezing while Brownie and the bosun ran her relays of hot tea and Aspros, lemon drinks and hot rum and lemon—this last was a sovereign cure of the bosun’s dear old mother back in Limehouse, and they poured it into Lola till she was in danger of D.T.’s, a side effect of the cure that had never distressed the bosun’s dear old mother.

‘You really shouldn’t be sleeping with her,’ he said on the third day when he had taken her temperature with the thermometer burgled from the second mate’s cabin.

‘Are you going all moral on us?’ asked Lola.

She was sitting up clad in a black satin slip and a ship’s blanket, and the general effect was both cheerful and cheeky despite the temperature. ‘Get your lunch into you and give less slack,’ said the bosun.

He had gone ashore to personally supervise the cutting of the chicken sandwiches she said she wanted, and now he stood watching her eat, his face (and it was a grim old face even as bosuns go) wreathed in a look of imbecile doting.

Lola reached out and patted his hand.

‘Gee, you’re good to me,’ she said.

‘Why shouldn’t I sleep with her,’ said Brownie brusquely. He was finding the bosun, in his role of kindly old guide, confidant, philosopher and friend, a bit much.

‘Good grief, the girl’s got a temperature of 101, it hasn’t gone down for days.’ The bosun’s voice was one long cadence of righteous indignation. ‘It’s no time for love-making. You could give her pneumonia.’

‘Is that all?’ said Lola. ‘I thought you were going to say “you could give her a baby!” ’

‘There is that too,’ said the bosun, ‘but that’s his blue. Now I’m going to the galley to get your coffee, and I want to see every bit of your lunch gone when I come back.’

‘What a fatherly old soul he turned out to be,’ said Brownie. ‘I’m impressed. “You shouldn’t really be sleeping with her”,’ he mocked the bosun’s tone of concern. ‘AAAAH—he’d be up you like a rat up a drain-pipe, given the chance.’

Lola laughed and blew him a kiss.

‘Don’t blow kisses with your mouth full of chicken sandwich.’

‘Come on, Brownie darling, be gruntled.’

Brownie grinned, but he stuck to his point. He would watch the bosun, he said, and while he was on the subject would Lola please don a jumper or the duffle jacket over the black satin slip next time that she had her temperature taken. ‘That dockside waif act,’ he said, ‘might be very romantic to shore types, but it only meant the one thing where sailors were concerned.’

The next morning her temperature was almost normal and the bosun decided she could get up for a while, provided she was wrapped up warm.

A ship docked in Melbourne in winter is not the ideal place for a convalescent, and when, added to the damp and emptiness, there is the fact that there is neither light nor heating for the length and breadth of the ship, it is surprising that Lola did not go down with the pneumonia that the bosun predicted. But she was too happy to be ill. Her day began at about ten in the morning. Before that she was locked securely in the cabin for the mate came down early to give Brownie and the bosun detail for the day. The mate out of the way, she would appear wearing jeans and a couple of Brownie’s jumpers for warmth, full makeup, the gold cartwheel earrings and the hair pulled on the top of the head. Then she would prepare morning smoko. She liked the galley where the primus stove provided to heat Brownie’s food made the atmosphere pleasantly oppressive and warm as the day went on. She would sit there for hours, frying the sausages and tomatoes or heating the fish and chips or sometimes trying a little adventurous cooking. Her masterpiece was caramel, made by boiling a tin of condensed milk till the contents were yellow and syrupy. She and Brownie loved it. The bosun was twenty years older and not so keen. She darned all their socks and read several books in the ship’s library. It puzzled her a little that seamen, with all the wonders of the world just a voyage away, in a manner of speaking, should take such an interest in the impossible marvels of the more lurid type of historical fiction—what Brownie called ‘lusty busties’.

‘Wouldn’t you think they would read Joseph Conrad?’ said Lola innocently. She had just discovered Conrad, and had decided he was her favourite author.

‘Who’s he?’ asked Brownie.

Lola explained. Brownie snorted. He said that if Joseph Conrad was a sailor he should have known better than to go writing about the sea—and who wanted to read about the sea anyway.

‘I do,’ said Lola.

‘You’re an idiot,’ said Brownie with affection.

Her favourite time was in the evening when the deserted docks were silent and the bosun had gone ashore, and she and Brownie sat with the primus brewing up endless cups of coffee, while they talked about what they were going to do, and how they were never going to be parted again, and all the adventures that would befall them when Brownie was captain of his own trading schooner. Sometimes they were invited by a couple of Brownie’s deck-boy friends, and then he was very proud. These boys had girl friends, but he was the only one in his crowd actually living with a woman—and installed on the ship into the bargain. He felt this called for a little showing off. So they had a couple of very enjoyable parties. They bought some spring rolls and beer, and the other two deck-boys brought a girl and a bottle of wine apiece, and there was a Jamaican with a portable record player and some Scotch, and one of the toughest old bats around the Melbourne waterfront whom he treated with almost unbelievable courtesy. They crowded into the bosun’s cabin with the music going full blast. They sang; they told stories; they boasted of their encounters with the police—with the exception of the Jamaican’s woman, who did not want to put amateurs out of countenance. None of the women were working, and none of them had really enough to eat or enough clothes to keep them warm, but they sat there in their tight skirts, drinking out of the bottle and making love to their men, and had any officious, interfering welfare worker tried to drag them away to the well-lit, well-run, well-fed suburbs on the other side of the river they would have fought like tiger-cats.

It was on the next pay-day (all Australian seamen are paid about the first and the fifteenth of the month) that the vice squad swooped. There had been rumours of a social life much too enjoyable for sailors going on in these empty docks; and then two fourteen-year-olds had been picked up selling themselves at ten shillings the throw to the crew of an American tanker. The police took them home and told their parents, who had thought they were at basket-ball, and the next day they were back again at their price-cutting. They had to be taken in. And then the Jamaican and two friends, also Jamaican, who had taken a flatlette in St. Kilda, and who had thought they were sheltering three charming and cultured young ladies, refreshingly free from racial prejudice, found, simple fellows, when they came home from wielding their paint-brushes and chipping hammers, that they were on a charge of having allowed the premises to be used for purposes of prostitution.

And so, on the first of September, the wharves echoed to the rumble of police cars and the shrieks of harlots—skilled and semi-skilled.

The
Dalton
lying stodgy and dark by the wharf escaped all suspicion, but later that night, when all the hubbub had died down, Brownie, Lola and the bosun took counsel over a cup of coffee.

‘It’s been fun,’ said Lola, ‘but it’s time I got a job.’

Early next morning Brownie fetched a taxi from the dock gates and got her safely off the ship. With her skirt pressed, a new black jumper, gift of the bosun, and a pair of stockings, Brownie’s contribution, she was sufficiently tidied up to land a drink waitress’s job; and when the strike ended and the
Dalton
sailed for Sydney, a week later, she had quite a little nest egg saved up out of tips—more than enough for her train fare to Sydney.

In Sydney she and Brownie had a glorious week doing the Cross, which culminated in a rather uncomfortable little interview with a policeman outside Bert’s milk bar; after which Lola, very wisely, caught the train up to Brisbane, where she waited for Brownie, who arrived two days later.

In Brisbane, Brownie paid off. He was now out of his deck-boy’s time and he had his wages and thirty pounds accumulated time. They decided that Lola should not get a job till the thirty pounds were gone and Brownie had picked another ship. So they took a room in Spring Hill and proceeded to spend Brownie’s fortune. It was a terrible room in a frightful old house, but there was a frangipani tree bursting into flower outside the window and Lola brought a Chinese lantern to hang over the electric light bulb, and a secondhand shawl of Jap silk to drape across the bed, and Brownie said the effect was fabulous. He bought her a new black skirt (skin tight of course), and a pair of gold matador pants (also skin tight). These last Lola usually wore with a shirt of Brownie’s, which he had outgrown. With the sleeves rolled up and the buttons undone to the waist, it was very sharp, and the girl in the next room said she had just the belt to set it off. She would sell it to Lola for 2/6. It was a good four inches wide, that belt, and studded all over with imitation American dollars.

‘I’m getting too fat for it love,’ said the girl in the next room. ‘It’s the frigging grog. It’s just right for you.’

Thus dressed, and with a rich gentleman friend with thirty pounds in his pocket to pay her rent, Lola was qualified to sally out and give cheek to the police whenever she met them. She met them first one evening in Wickham Terrace. She and Brownie had just got out of bed (and looked like it) and were wandering along looking for somewhere to have a steak to keep up their strength. The police sprung them from a doorway, and, of course, separated their quarry before they started questioning. Luckily, Brownie and Lola (wise since their brush with Bumper) had rehearsed for just such an occasion. So Lola decided to play them along a little.

‘You’re a stranger here aren’t you?’ said her policeman.

‘Yes.’

‘Are you from Sydney?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Confidentially, Officer, I’m Kate Leigh without her fur.’

‘Don’t get cheeky. What’s your name?’

‘Lola Hansen.’

‘Are you working?’

‘No.’

‘Don’t you think you’d better get a job?’

‘No.’

‘Well I think you’d better.’

‘O.K., Officer—you can take it up with my husband, he doesn’t believe in married women working.’

‘Is that bodgie your husband?’

‘He’s a seaman, registered at the pick-up, and he’s got money in the bank. You can’t touch him.’ And diving into the shoulder-strap bag which was, as usual, swinging bulging in one hand, and coming forth in triumph with a bank book, ‘Here’s identification.’ The account had been made out jointly in the names of Lola Mary Hansen and Goran Olaf Hansen and it still contained twenty-five pounds. Triumph! Complete triumph! Lola and Brownie felt almost sorry for the police; and the police, who were just ordinary beat-sloggers and had not achieved the misanthropy necessary to making a success of the vice squad, felt almost sorry for Brownie and Lola.

Where they lived everyone considered that Lola had been tremendously witty in this little brush with the Force. She began to feel that she should be very pleased with herself.

‘But give them no cheek, Darl, when you’ve got no dough in the kick,’ said the girl from the next room, who was a very wise girl indeed.

So for a few weeks Lola and Brownie had a wonderful time. They got up when they liked, went dancing, drinking and eating when they liked, and Brownie kept saying that he really should go down to the pick-up and see if there were some short-run ships on the roster. But somehow it seemed too hard to face the fact that all this must come to an end; and the atmosphere where they lived was very matey, idle and relaxing. Nobody worked and everybody seemed to get by all right. There were two Norwegians who had paid off from the Tangalooma whaling station with two thousand pounds apiece and were being helped to spend it by every good-time Charlie in Spring Hill—black, white or brindle. They threw parties every night to which all were welcome. There was a blonde called Edna who went out every evening baby-sitting, she said; and the girl whose figure had gone to the grog. Her name was Dawn, and she was very scornful of Edna’s baby-sitting. Dawn was a prostitute, straight out, and said so—no baby-sitting alibi for her. In the room on the other side of Brownie and Lola there were three Siamese University students, who were concentrating their studies on the rowdier side of Australian social life. And then there was the landlady who was fat, bleary and alcoholic, but very kind and easy going, and not prone to the terrible little ‘Please switch off the light’ and ‘Please keep the bathroom clean’ notes to which her profession is so addicted. Last of all was her lover, Snow—a terrible, red-eyed, weedy seventeen-year-old, who was in a chronic state of stomach upset because he could not keep up with her in the drinking. His duties were light (depending how you looked at it), consisting as they did of making a pretence of cleaning up the yard and making love to the landlady regularly every morning between nine and ten.