The Delinquents Page 11

  ‘It would,’ he said, ‘take a bosun and six A.B.’s of the Wilhelmsen Line working bell to bell for six weeks to get this place clean. Still, it can be done. We’ll stay.’

  It was the day they moved in—a Saturday afternoon, still and sunny with the scent of the oleanders heavy on the air. Mavis, Lyle and Sharon Faylene had all gone down to the park to watch soccer practice. The house was silent save for the swish of Lola’s skirts as she danced from room to room and her voice raised in an excited sing-song.

  ‘Oh, Brownie, it’s a beautiful old house.’

  They had come in through the front door and there, right in the hallway, the magic started. Coloured light lying on the floor and the walls; coloured light from the red, blue and golden glass set around and above the door. Light lying like gilt around the black hair pulled high on the crown of Lola’s head. Light the colour of old rose bathing the wondering face of the boy and girl as they stood there hand in hand.

  Light like flame lying across the broken feet of a plaster Venus who stood, suitably draped, in a niche where she upheld a broken gas bracket. And down where the light fell away into darkness they pushed open another door with two broken panels and a handle of amber cut-glass and they were in what must have once been a dining-room. It was wide and high: all its windows looked south-east, which is the only way to look in Brisbane, and all these windows were crammed with the purple arms of bougainvillaea so the glare from outside came through muted and beautiful. At one end was a fireplace such as has not been built in a Brisbane house since the turn of the century at least. It was like a small cavern edged round with Spanish tiles all glazed in a strange design of red and white roses. They were set alternately, first a white rose, then a red, and sometimes a jagged space, the work of time or vandals. It was all surmounted by an overmantel of cedar that had once been polished and carved into a design of vines and more roses that rioted over the myriad small shelves that had held the gilt clock, the Dresden Shepherdess, the Wedgwood jars.

  ‘My head is getting dizzy with fancy fireplaces,’ said Brownie as they walked into the second of the big reception rooms that lay one each side of the hall. ‘Don’t you think they’re a bit much, dear? I mean, if simplicity is good taste and all that jazz.’

  ‘I suppose they are,’ Lola agreed; ‘but I’m sick of simple little modern rooms big enough to hold a bed, a dressing-table, a wardrobe and a douche-can; all this mid-Victorian trimming cheers me up. I suppose I should find it all sad and ruined, but I don’t. It just looks as though it has decorated a lot of living in its time, and it’s ready to decorate a lot more if it gets a chance. Look at that,’ she waved towards the looking-glass that rose above the mantelpiece, flanked by what were supposed to be small Grecian columns made of marble.

  ‘Isn’t it terrific? It reflects nearly all the room.’

  Brownie went nearer and surveyed one of the columns closely.

  ‘Someone has written “Harry and me camped here the night of August 14th, 1950,” ’ he said. ‘Like you said, darling, it’s seen a lot of living.’

  Lola laughed and said, ‘I won’t be squashed. I’m in a poetic mood.’

  They went out on to the verandah that ran round three sides of the house.

  ‘I didn’t know there was so much wrought iron outside New Orleans,’ said Brownie.

  It edged in the verandah to waist height. Like town lace, it ravelled round the house and the bougainvillaea and climbing roses twined amongst it.

  On both the north and south sides of the house there were three bedrooms that connected with the verandah by french windows long since denuded of glass, and at the back of the house a narrow stairway of sandstone steps led down to the garden and the underneath of the house—to the wash troughs choked with weeds and the toilet surrounded by ferns and a bathroom that must have been a housemaids’ hell of mirrors to polish, marble to clean, copper to burnish, a bath the size of a modest swimming pool; and no water laid on at all.

  ‘They must have toiled up and down the stairs with buckets of water,’ said Lola. ‘Ah well, as I remarked to the Duchess only the other morning, I think the working-class was happier in those days.’

  She sat down on the bottom step, and plucked a dog rose and held it crushed up against her cheek.

  ‘Oh, Brownie,’ she said, ‘I can’t believe it. It’s all so beautiful. Let’s stay here till our money runs out.’

  When Mavis and Lyle and Sharon Faylene came home from the soccer the house-cleaning was already on. Brownie had picked the lock on the shed at the bottom of the garden and discovered two chairs, a chest of drawers and the most beautiful iron bedstead. Lola had been down the street and returned with hamburgers, cokes, sand-soap, bar soap, kerosene, phenol and Brasso. Brownie was scrubbing the bed, piece by piece, in his own special solution of kero, phenol and sand-soap, and as he finished Lola carefully polished the brass spikes, globes, crescents and assorted squiggles with which it was decorated.

  ‘I do hope the landlord doesn’t mind. He never said anything about furniture,’ said English Mavis.

  ‘Need the landlord know?’ said Australian Brownie. ‘Anyway, I’m not sleeping on the floor when there’s a bed around for all the landlords in the world.’

  So that night, when the possums peered through the holes in the ceilings of what had once been the blue bedroom they beheld a strange sight—an iron bedstead, freshly polished, was pushed against one wall and a stack of suit-cases stood in the corner. Across the wires of the bed were thrown an assortment of sheets and coverings, most of them bearing such markings as Union Steam Ship, Howard Smith, Brisbane Harbour Trust, and amongst this stolen linen, thrown together in the cleft where their weight made the bed sag almost to the floor, lay a human boy and girl. The possums crept forward in the moonlight and stared at the sleeping figures. The boy lay on his back, stark naked, his head thrown back, one arm folded across his chest, the other flung out in a protective curve around the girl. The girl looked very small beside the boy. Her long hair spread dark across the pillow and curled like a fetter across the strength of the boy’s forearm. She wore a petticoat of torn black lace and one of the boy’s shirts; but her face they could not see, for she slept with her hands shielding her head as a child lies in the womb. The little animals backed away. On the floor and the walls and even the ceiling they smelled the strange human smell of disinfectant and scrubbing, and for this, with sure instinct, they blamed the boy. But through the acrid, nose-itching aura of soap they smelled something else—something they knew—the infinitely older, erotic, heavy sweetness of the frangipani. Someone had gathered an armful and set it in a broken saucepan on the floor at the foot of the bed. This, decided the possums, was the work of the girl.

  In the weeks that followed Brownie worked on that house as only a Nord can work. He scrubbed floors, mended shutters, cleaned the stove, threw out the gas stove, made shelves and tightened the wires of the bed.

  And now began what was for all four the happiest time of their lives. Lyle did well at his job and Brownie got work on the harbour pilot boat, which meant he was usually home every night. Lola left work to have more time with Brownie and to help with the cleaning up and renovating. Within the first week Brownie had lugged home a second-hand interior-sprung mattress, and Lola had made a mosquito net for the bed out of pieces of netting she had picked up cheap at a job-lot shop. She used to sit on the top of the front steps, clad in her matador pants and skin-tight sweater, Brownie’s battery set wireless beside her, and sew the net that frothed around her, while Brownie worked on repairs to the roof and Mavis sat smoking and staring into space, and Lyle nailed canvas across the french windows of the bedrooms. All this cheerful, if bizarre, domesticity, and so much hit-parade and pegged pants and young masculinity stripped to the waist and getting the sun stirred the locals to a frenzy of indignation. They spoke of the bodgies down in number twenty as though they were a collection of dangerous and habitual criminals. Lola, said the women, was no good. You could see at a glance
she was no good. She reminded them, they said, of someone who had been in trouble, and they dug back in the recesses of their minds (ill-ventilated and sunless rooms, the walls papered with pages out of Truth, according to Brownie) and assured themselves that they were certain that they had seen Lola’s picture somewhere.

  ‘It was when the cops raided that place in Margaret Street,’ they said.

  And now she was living with that young sailor. It was a shame. He calls her his wife. They would never believe that, but she was just the sort who would always get a man to keep her. Not that she’d have any children. That sort never did. Much too sly. Not that it was to her credit. Quite the reverse. There was that other poor big slob. She was expecting again. It shouldn’t be allowed. She had no idea how to look after the one she already had, and it wasn’t walking yet. Some husbands had no decency. It seemed it was very difficult to satisfy the good ladies of West End as to suitability for parenthood—some were too crafty, some too silly, and in the meantime Lola, Brownie, Mavis and Lyle went on their way uncaring. They were living by their own rules and happy in the process—a sight to arouse anger, hatred and resentment in any suburban street. And while they sewed and cooked, scrubbed, made love and danced to the music of the battery set the old house won back a little of its bloom and was no longer derelict. It was a real human shelter again with even a baby between its walls, and Sharon Faylene began to bloom. She began to pull herself up by the furniture and try to walk around; and she began to say a few words that could be translated, with a lot of love, as ‘Hi’ and ‘Dadda’ and ‘Auntie Lole’. All this was mostly due to Lola, who had a genuine, if disorderly instinct for housekeeping and children, and who had, during both her pregnancies, done a little reading on the subject. It was she who decided that Sharon Faylene should be on mashed vegetables—should have been on them long ago—and Sharon Faylene, who apparently had been sick and tired of over-sweetened milk and fancy biscuits, took to more savoury foods with a will. She had her vegetables with a little salt and plenty of butter, and broth with Oxo cubes added for extra strength, and occasionally a small piece of chicken, and a bit of T-bone steak to chew every Thursday night.

  ‘Got to get the old strength up for Friday,’ Lola would say.

  ‘I never saw a child come on like our bubby has,’ Mavis would say. ‘She’d do anything for you. Say “Hi, Auntie Lola”.’

  Sharon Faylene surveyed her mother, owl-eyed, then she burped and went on chewing her underdone steak. Her teeth were coming late, but she was proud of them and enjoyed playing cannibals on T-bone night.

  As May wore on and the first winds thrust in through the chinks in their shelter Mavis tried pasting pictures of film stars over the cracks in the walls. Assisted by Lola and Sharon Faylene, she had a plentiful supply. The baby girl sat on the floor handing up pictures of the famous registering delight, wistfulness, tragedy or sexual frenzy, and remarking of all, irrespective of putative sex, ‘Pretty lady, pretty lady.’

  That night was chilly. The cold wakened Lola at about one o’clock and she crept, shivering and complaining, out of bed to look for a pair of Brownie’s woollen deck socks, and to spread his duffle coat across the foot of the bed. Pulling on the socks and huddled in the duffle jacket she stood at the window for a while. The night was still and beautiful; not still with the languorous restfulness of a summer night, but held motionless in a cold stillness, so that the garden was like the enchanted garden in an old story; and the stars hung in the sky like polished steel, and the footsteps of someone passing in the night rang on the hardening ground. Then, as the girl looked into the moon-stricken garden she saw, first running along the top of the bamboos and then, a little stronger, bending the branches of the oleanders and frangipani, the first ripple of the west wind. Afraid, she crept back to bed, and Brownie stirred in his sleep and gathered her in against the warmth of his body.

  ‘Where have you been?’ he asked, half asleep.

  Lola could not keep her fears to herself.

  ‘Oh, Brownie,’ she said. ‘I saw the Westerlies arrive.’

  ‘One thing’s certain,’ said Brownie; ‘those bloody silly pictures will never keep it out. I’ll get some putty tomorrow and do a proper job.’ He hugged her against him. ‘I’ll make sure the wind doesn’t blow cold on you.’

  Lola laughed at him.

  ‘You be the caveman, and sleep across the mouth of the cave to keep away the evil spirits and the sabre-toothed tigers,’ she said.

  Brownie thought this a pleasing plan. He fell asleep, unafraid of the tigers of this or any other age; but the woman who crouched behind his shoulders lay awake staring into the dark. In the morning they found the pictures of the famous, still registering delight, wistfulness and sexual frenzy, crumpled and torn, blown into the corners and under the furniture or hanging in strips from the walls—poor pretty ladies, poor pretty ladies.

  So Brownie puttied up the cracks in good sea style, pressing in the putty with his thumb and smoothing it with a deck knife, and Mavis dipped again into her library and came forth with more glossy portraits to paste over the repairs.

  ‘Look at old Sharo,’ she said. ‘Proper film fan she’s getting. She knows Rita Hayworth from Lana Turner already. You know, I never thought I’d fall in once—let alone twice.’

  Lola was up on a packing-case, paste-pot in hand, putting up the pictures as Mavis handed them to her. She asked:

  ‘What made you think you’d never fall in?’

  ‘Well I’d been lucky till I met Lyle. ’Course, I didn’t like it much till I met Lyle if it comes to that. I only did it to oblige, as you might say. But Lyle is different.’

  ‘You might have known a Geordie would get you up the spout as quick as look at you,’ said Lola, who had the traditional respect for the virility of north-country men.

  Mavis seemed unconvinced.

  ‘Suppose so; but look, it never seems to happen in the pictures like that. If they make a picture about people having a baby, they make it real light-hearted, and they’ve got everything for the kid an’ all; the mother-to-be is knitting; they’re not worrying about money, and they have one of those real fabulous Hollywood homes. Anyway, who would think I’d be so stiff as to fall again? I used fizzers, too, because they told me to take care. It took me five days to have Sharon Faylene and then they had to cut her out. They said another one might kill me.’

  Lola had long ago lost her capacity for healthy horror, so now she looked at her friend with the complete absence of hope that had taken its place.

  ‘You mean to say,’ she said, ‘they told you another kid might kill you and yet they didn’t tie your tubes or anything?’

  ‘No. I asked one doctor what I should do, and he said “make your husband sleep on the roof”.’

  Lola forbore to say what she thought of such very ethical humour.

  ‘In Sydney,’ she said, ‘they’ll fix you up with a Dutch cap at a place called the Racial Hygiene Bureau, or something like that.’

  ‘Nothing like that in Brisbane,’ said Mavis.

  ‘No,’ Lola agreed with venom. ‘Nothing like that in good old, sweet old, wholesome, pure little Brisbane, best little town this or any side of the Black Stump, where the old-fashioned virtues are practised, and familes are large as of yore, and the peasants are contented, if poor. God, how I detest this cruel bastard of a place!’

  Mavis began to laugh.

  ‘You’re fabulous when you get sarcastic,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I suppose I could have got fixed up, but I didn’t have any money, and I wasn’t game to have a go at it myself.’

  ‘Hell, no,’ agreed Lola.

  ‘Anyway, now it’s too late.’

  ‘Yes, I don’t think anyone for any money in the world would touch you at five and a half months,’ said Lola, whose knowledge of human greed was extensive, but not yet complete.

  ‘No, nobody would touch me at five and a half months that’s for sure,’ said Mavis. ‘Look at Sharon kissing Tony Curtis.’

  �
�Don’t you think you should go and have an examination or something?’ Lola was anxious. ‘People are supposed to be examined every month when they’re pregnant.’

  ‘Oh, I did when I was about two months. I went up and booked in as soon as I got back to Brisbane, and they said nothing about stopping it so I can’t be in any danger after all. They stop a pregnancy if there’s any danger to the mother’s life, don’t they?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right, so they do.’ Lola knew that this was true of Sweden: she was doubtful if it applied to Queensland, but she decided it would be kinder to keep her doubts to herself.

  She sat down on the top of her packing-case.

  ‘Nevertheless, Mavis,’ she said, ‘I think you’re lucky to have your baby.’

  ‘Couldn’t say,’ said Mavis, ‘what makes you think so?’

  ‘Well, like I told you a long time ago, I’ve lost two. The first time it was my own fault. I let my mother get rid of it. Well, it’s a terrible feeling. A real bad feeling.’

  ‘Can’t see it was your fault. You were only a baby yourself.’

  ‘Maybe—but if I’d put on a real struggle there was nothing my mother could have done. I could have said I’d go to the police or something.’

  ‘Hell! You can’t copper on your own Mum.’

  ‘No, of course not; but I could have just threatened or something. Oh, I could have done something.’

  Lola began to cry, turning her head, hysterically, from side to side.

  ‘You see,’ she went on, ‘I know what I’m talking about, because when I sat there in Dawn’s with the pleurisy I was nearly a week there, feeling like I was going to die, and the only feeling I had left was sorrow about that baby. I’m going to die, I would think, and there’ll be nothing of me left at all because I let them kill my life. I can’t tell you, Mavis, how I wanted a child then—some of my own life to leave behind.’

  By this time Mavis also had the tears streaming down her face.

  ‘Lola love,’ she begged, ‘don’t think about it. It never does any good to think about things.’