The Delinquents (9 page)

‘I’m never available then, love,’ she told Lola, ‘because that’s when me and Snow have the business.’

She was twenty years older than Snow and at least four stone heavier, as well as smelling most nose-searingly of gin: it was apparent that Snow found his sexual duties somewhat onerous, for he always emerged at ten o’clock in a raging bad temper, and kicked the landlady’s cat as though he envied it its castration. Then he would take a heavily disinfected bath. Brownie called him the Solyptol kid!

By the end of October, Brownie was down to his last ten shillings, and the sea was staring him in the face. He said as much to Lief, the dark Norwegian, who was sitting on his bed late one afternoon holding his head in his hands.

‘Yes,’ said Lief. ‘Me, I go back to sea too. Is clean there, away from all this shit. No good drinking all the time.’

He glanced across at Arne, the blond Norwegian, who was lying in a heap in a corner, sleeping with his head on a packet of prawns.

‘I don’t like leaving Lola,’ said Brownie.

Lief began to weep. He said he knew how it was. He left a little girl in Norway. Ah, such a good little girl. Best little girl in Bergen. He was going to get a ship and sail back to her tomorrow. Brownie must not leave Lola. No, no. The Hansens and the Johannsens must stick together. He must insist that Brownie take this fiver and stay a little longer. They would all go down to the ‘Grand’ now and have a drink. Better still they would go and get a supply of schnapps. They would have another party on the spot. Arne must be woken so that he could play the accordion. No sooner said than done. Brownie went off with the fiver and bought the liquor, Lief poured water over Arne’s head till he woke, and by seven o’clock the party was in full swing.

At about nine o’clock Lola and Brownie volunteered to go and buy some beer (this time the Siamese put up the money). This was the unluckiest thing they did in many a long day, for when the beer had been bought and dispatched in a taxi with Utai, Lola, who was just drunk enough to be capricious, decided that she would like to stay at the ‘Grand’ for a couple of drinks. She wanted to see a couple of girls. The police picked them up at a quarter to ten, and this time they had only 2/6 on them.

Brownie was fined for drinking while under age and bound over not to see Lola or try to contact her for twelve months: Lola was put into Jacaranda Flats Girls’ Corrective School. Brownie decided to fill in the twelve months by going overseas, and the day Lola went into Jacaranda Flats he sailed for Stockholm on a Swedish tanker.

By November Lola knew now for certain that she was pregnant, which cheered her considerably, though her mother, who came to see her regularly, obviously thought that this was the worst thing that could have happened.

‘It’s not as though, Lola,’ she said, ‘I wouldn’t give consent for you to marry the great hobbledehoy—I’m past caring now; but you saw how his mother behaved about you, coming into court and breathing fire about what a harlot you were. If either of you expect
her
consent you’re just putting yourself in the way of needless humiliation, and, I don’t know about you, but I’ve had all the humiliation I can stand.’

‘I feel for you,’ said Lola.

Then she said: ‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ for she remembered that when she left Brisbane shortly after her sixteenth birthday her mother had wept bitterly, and Lola had been dressed like a fashion plate and acting as though the world were at her feet. She had had an American on a Pioneer boat to look after her then, and her mother had not stopped her going. She had merely said:

‘I just don’t seem to succeed with you however I try; but if you strike trouble wire for money to come home.’

But her mother had told the Welfare that she was uncontrollable and that she should be put in a home for twelve months—it would give her a chance to learn an interesting trade. Without her mother’s betrayal she would probably only have got three months for a first vag. She had her mother to thank for an extra nine months’ claustrophobic hell while every fibre of her body and soul cried out for the freedom of the streets.

The vocational guidance officer had asked her would she like to take up dressmaking, or a commercial course, or nursing or hairdressing or weaving. Lola had said she would like to learn the guitar and the vocational guidance officer had given her a long spiel about how she should try to break away from the rock and roll crowd, and Lola had not listened. She decided he was a fool and she was right. Finally, to pacify him, she took to thumping away dispiritedly at a typewriter.

‘It may come in handy some day,’ she told the girl in the next seat. ‘When I’m writing my book: “Bastards I have known.” ’

‘What’s it going to be about—men?’

‘Men and social workers.’

‘Shit! Some bastardry,’ said the girl in the next seat.

And then in January came the riot. It was a famous riot, long remembered in the annals of delinquency, and Lola never forgot it in all her life. For when the glorious hysteria and violence was over, and the laundry windows were broken and the bedding burned in dormitory A, and the Matron had had her false teeth smashed by big Daff from the ’Gabba, and the police had been called in and order almost restored, Lola found she was lying on a strip of torn lawn, and she had a black eye and a broken wrist and she was having a very messy miscarriage. Big Daff sat down beside her, exhausted, and took her head in her lap.

‘Shit! you’re a mess, kid,’ she said. ‘You can go. I’ll give you that; but you have to spot too much weight. You’re too titchy to blue on.’

‘What happens now?’ whispered Lola and then fainted clean away.

‘Now,’ answered Daff, watching a party of policewomen and attendants approach, ‘Now we pay very dearly for Horrorhead’s false tats. Look what you’ve done to my friend,’ she told the policewomen. ‘You frigging great animals.’

That was the end of all efforts to teach Lola Lovell a useful trade. They sent her to a convalescent home and patched her up, and then she came back to Jacaranda Flats and sat around dazed and shocked for a few months more. They let her out when she had done nine months because they were sorry for her and because they thought she was hopeless anyway. She was paroled in the care of the famous Mrs. Westbury. The newspapers called her Auntie Westbury, ‘the motherly little lady who has been Auntie to two generations of delinquent girls…’

‘I always have my girls to live with me,’ she told reporters regularly. ‘Half the battle is won if you can just show those poor street rambling kids how much better a life a woman can have right in her own home, and how happy you can be instead of chasing out after cheap thrills around the milk bars and places like that.’

She was a beaming little lady with a large motherly bosom and a face like a pretty doll. She welcomed Lola with high tea and a terrifying array of cakes (all home-made by Auntie Westbury’s own little plump hands) and the best painted china and many lace d’oyleys.

‘They sent me a full report, dear,’ she told Lola. ‘I have it right here.’ She patted her pocket and gave Lola a look like a little bright-eyed bird who is being triumphant over a particularly succulent worm. ‘But we’re just not going to think about it any more. I’m a great one for my own sex and I always say “it must have been the boy’s fault” every time.’

Lola looked at the chocolate cake. Brownie had loved chocolate cake, and she remembered how once they had bought a bag of éclairs and eaten them in the park and fed pieces to the birds. Now she had a vision of him had he been with her now, sitting just across the table from her with a slab of cake in his ugly, gentle hands and the brown curls brushed away from his forehead. How the love and delight in her presence would shine all over his soft honest Scandinavian face. Suddenly she put her head down on the table and burst into a passion of weeping right there amongst Auntie Westbury’s loathsome, bloody cream buns.

A few weeks later Brownie received the following letter forwarded on to him from the Australian Consulate in San Francisco:

‘Dear Brownie,’ it read. ‘Please come home and rescue me I am living at above address. They have paroled me into the hands of a most terrible old woman. I am frightened of her. First time in my life I have ever been really truly frightened. Please excuse pencil and incoherence. I am writing this in the dunny in great haste. It is the only place where I can be sure she isn’t watching me. The Welfare say I must stay here till I’m eighteen. Oh, Brownie, I would not be able to bear it except that I know that you’ll come straightaway. She is a doer of good deeds. Keeps on feeding me up on marmite and wholemeal bread and beautiful food, etc. Says I need building up and I’m not really bad, just need caring for, says to forget everything and I remember you every minute my beautiful, oh my beautiful. She says her own baby girl died and she couldn’t have any more so she decided to devote her life to unwanted girls. I want to scream at her “Brownie wants me, Brownie wants me all the time and I want him”. She’s had a grand old time interfering all these years. Brownie, they took your photo away in the horror chambers and hacked off my hair. She wants to give me a home perm. Says she gives all her girls a home perm and it’s wonderful the difference it makes in your outlook. Remember how long and straight my hair was and how you used to rub your face in it? Says she’ll help me to get a nice job. She’ll help me I can just imagine—nursing or something terrible, I just know. She called in to see Mum the other night. Mum was so pissed she couldn’t scratch herself. “That’s not your fault, dear,” she says. Then she pats me and says, “Poor little thing, I know what it’s been like.” She knows damn all. She keeps on asking awful questions about you. She asked me did I really like having sex (that’s what she calls making love, in an awful smarmy tone of voice), or did I just want to feel that I belonged somewhere. Darling, when I was in the horror chambers I thought of so many things I would write to you when I got the chance, but now all I can think is that I love you and I’m frightened. Please come back straightaway. Lola.’

Poor Lola. Both she and Brownie, used to the Australian coast, had calculated without any knowledge of the length of time it might take for a seaman to be reached on the American coast. Brownie had been trying to get home for a month before he received that letter, and it was another six weeks before he got a tanker out of Galveston.

Back in Australia, Lola waited. She took a job in the cosmetics department of a big city store and she quite enjoyed the work. Aunt Westbury had spoken lovingly of wonderful jobs up the country, of girls of hers who had married thriving dairy farmers and country store-keepers, after having gone to somewhere miles beyond the Black Stump to help look after Mrs. So and So’s children, or to milk the cows.

But Lola was firm. She knew she was not shaping as desired and she had lost none of her initial fear of Mrs. Westbury; but to the country she just could not go. All the time she waited for a letter from Brownie, unaware that the letter he had written within an hour of receiving her address was on its way back to the States, endorsed ‘Not known at this address.’

One day Auntie was entertaining one of her favourite girls. ‘One of my successes,’ she told Lola. ‘I want you to meet her. She just couldn’t seem to keep out of bad company in the city, and when she went up the country she had nothing except a couple of gay little dresses I made her. Now she has her own home and everything a woman could desire, electric stove and wall to wall carpets, and her husband has his own carrying business. She has to bring her little girl down to the Children’s every month. She’s a dear little thing; but she’s got a hare lip and they’re having treatment for it. They always come around here afterwards. They
wouldn’t
miss.’

Lola came home from work and the success was still there sitting with her child on her knee in Auntie Westbury’s kitchen. The success was called Isobel: she wore a floral dress, a brown shorty coat, and one of the home perms which Auntie so recommended as a morale-booster. Lola looked at the child with pity.

‘My Brownie would never have thrown a kid like that,’ she thought. ‘He may not have his own carrying business, but he’d never throw a poor little gargoyle like that.’

‘They’ve got some marvellous costumes down town,’ the success was saying. ‘There was one in powder blue’ (‘get those hips in powder blue,’ communed Lola with herself) ‘but I thought I’d put the money on some of that rubberized lino for the kitchen.’

‘Your home will pay you better dividends,’ said Auntie.

Lola poured herself a cup of tea and wondered what there was about such pronouncements that made her want to shout ‘Shit’ at the top of her voice.

‘How do you like the chocolate cake?’ asked Auntie. ‘Isobel made it for me. She’s a wonderful cook. She’s got a marvellous stove. Thermostatically controlled.’

Lola lifted one eyebrow to indicate that thermostatically controlled stoves left her unmoved.

‘We’re trying to get Lola interested in cooking,’ Auntie went on, ‘but so far without much result.’

‘It’ll come,’ said the success. ‘I bet one day I’ll come down and you’ll be swapping recipes with the best of them.’

‘Never,’ said Lola with fervour. She went on to say that it must be very tiresome having to tend a kitchen full of bright, shining dishwashing machines, magical stoves, mixmasters, and all the rest of it.

‘Well,’ said the success, ‘it’s just that there’s something about it that makes every woman worthy of the name just love to do it.’ And Auntie went on to say that there was a great satisfaction to the womanly heart in lifting a beautiful chocolate cake out of the oven. Lola drank her tea and looked through the kitchen window. The success and Auntie went on to discuss the success’s kitchen garden, which, it appeared, was doing ‘real well,’ but was much plagued by the snails, so the success was going to get a couple of those, what do they call them? Muscovy ducks to eat them up. And the success was knitting harelip a lovely fair-isle jumper, and Auntie became quite animated at the mention of fair-isle. On and on it went. All the old and beautiful arts of cooking and sewing and making a home swamped in a sea of banality that was too cloying to be quite real, even taking into account the two protagonists. It was unbelievable. It sounded like a programme to teach New Australian women English. Lola fought down a desire to laugh hysterically, or else to say,