The Delinquents Page 13

  But it was a long time, and in the end they were sent home. Lyle had eaten nothing since lunch time and it was obvious that any attempt to feed him would only end in his choking, so Lola mixed him a whisky and hot milk, and when he had finished that she mixed him another.

  In the early morning came Nina Petrides from the corner shop. Lyle had given the hospital the Petrides’ ’phone number and now they wanted to speak to him. It was not quite five o’clock. Nina was in a red silk dressing-gown with her black hair streaming around her.

  ‘Run, run for your life, Lyle,’ she shrieked, ‘and if you need money for a taxi, take it from the till.’

  Lyle was already off. He scrambled into shoes and jeans and pulled on his jumper as he ran. He was back inside a couple of minutes.

  ‘They wanted to know will they operate,’ he said. ‘They say it may kill the kid. What do I care about the kid?’

  Lola and Nina instantly blessed themselves in opposite directions. Such a statement made them afraid. Nina went off to light a couple of extra lamps before the icon, and Lola took Sharon Faylene into bed with her.

  ‘Now,’ she thought, as she tucked the child in between herself and Brownie, ‘now Mavis will be under the anaesthetic, and now is the worst time of all the day or night. It’s not the night, not the day. I hate these hours from four o’clock till seven. Oh God, don’t let her die, don’t let her die.’

  Lyle arrived at the hospital just in time to be told that his son was dead and his wife must have an immediate blood transfusion.

  He gave the blood and came home and slept a little while, then he went back in the afternoon.

  At about three o’clock he rang Nina and sent a message to Lola to bring Sharon Faylene to the hospital. Mavis wanted to see them both. Lola left a note on the table for Brownie, took Sharon Faylene with her milk in a bottle and a change of nappies, and set out. Mavis was unconscious when Lola arrived, but after a while she rallied a little and Lola took the child in to her.

  ‘Mumma,’ said Sharon Faylene, and Lola lowered her to kiss her mother’s cheek. A nurse was present and raised her eyebrows above her sterile mask; but this was merely force of habit. She knew, and Lola knew, that an extra germ or two would not make much difference to Mavis now.

  Sharon Faylene set to work happily practising her walking round and round the benches in the waiting-room, and Lyle and Lola sat down to wait. After tea Brownie arrived with a blanket for Sharon Faylene, which was as well, because Sharon Faylene, after a full, exciting and novel afternoon was disposed to have her milk, an apple and some sandwiches from the canteen and go to sleep—which she did, wrapped in the blanket and rocked in Lola’s arms.

  Visiting time came to an end. Other people went home, but they were allowed to stay. A nurse came and told them they could wait outside the ward, and they sat there huddled together, trying to help Mavis stave off death; but the night wore on, and nurses and doctors came and went, and towards midnight they called Lyle to go in alone.

  Mavis was conscious, and she had been weeping. Now she was long past any such effort, but her face, against the pallor of approaching death, was swollen and blotched and misted over with tears, and as he bent over he saw that her bottom lip was trembling. Gently he kissed it and it steadied, and as on that first day they met, he saw the fear leave her eyes. With some strength that only love could have called forth she managed the shadow of a smile, and his name formed on her lips. She had no strength to give it sound, and then it came with the last life in her body:

  ‘Stay with me, darling. I’m O.K. with you.’

  It was so distinct a whisper that for a moment he almost hoped.

  ‘I’ll stay right here, darling,’ he answered. ‘Now sleep.’

  Then he knelt beside her and put an arm gently under her head. He held her so, and in a few minutes she died gently and painlessly and without fear.

  Early in the morning he came back home to Brownie and Lola, and from then onwards, till they got poor Mavis into the earth three days later, he cried. He sat in the garden with the tears rolling out of his eyes, and he ate nothing and smoked a great deal. Lola, who never cried much over an established fact, got her grief over in one long, passionate outburst of weeping on the night of the death; after that she spent her time brewing coffee for Lyle, and getting Sharon Faylene’s clothes ready for the social worker who was to call and take the little girl to the State Home on the second day after Mavis died. Lola washed napkins, pressed nightdresses and mended and cleaned generally. She worked in a kind of cold fury, stopping every few minutes to hug Sharon Faylene and assure her:

  ‘At least, kiddo, you’re going in smart.’

  She took the child into Coles and bought her overalls with a rabbit on the bib and slippers with bells on the toes. Sharon Faylene derived tremendous joy from those slippers; they tinkled when she walked, and she kept trying to dance and draw more music from these wondrous things on her feet. She sat down, she pulled them off, she chewed them, she rattled them, and in the end she kissed them. It was her last night home, and she seemed to be having a very good time, but once she stopped and looked around and asked:

  ‘Where Mummy?’

  And she refused, absolutely, to go into her cot. She insisted on sleeping with Lyle. Lola heard him sobbing in the night, and went in to him and said:

  ‘I’d take her you know, Lyle, but I wouldn’t be allowed. I’m an old lag like yourself.’

  ‘Sharon you mean?’ asked Lyle.

  ‘Of course, who else would I be offering to take.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I was thinking about Mavis.’

  Lyle began to cry again, and Lola got him some cigarettes, felt Sharon Faylene to see if she were still dry, and then went back to bed.

  Lyle and Mavis had never quite realized that they had had Sharon Faylene. Perhaps now it was just as well. Then she heard Lyle call from the next room:

  ‘Lola, will you give her to the Welfare woman tomorrow. I don’t think I could do it. I don’t think I can bear to be around.’

  The Welfare woman came up the drive next day and was pleased with what she saw. There was washing on the line, there was no stack of bottles around. Someone had painted the front door; the roof was mended.

  ‘Poor little things,’ she told herself. ‘Somebody has tried.’

  And she resolved not to lose kindness, no matter how she was greeted.

  She was greeted with a wave of silent hostility enough to knock even a social worker off her feet. She saw a girl sitting on the floor playing with the baby. The girl was dark, wearing tinsel-flecked eye shadow, a cotton frock with a low-cut neckline, and thrown over her shoulders a coat of black fur fabric. She was rolling a ball of red paper towards the baby girl, and the baby girl was laughing and grabbing it out of her hands. On the sofa against the back wall was a half naked boy. He wore only jeans, and he lay with his hands behind his head and his face in profile to the woman from the Welfare. The girl at least looked at her. She raised the tinselled eyes in one long insolent stare—then she went on playing with the baby girl.

  ‘Is this the little girl?’ asked the Welfare worker.

  ‘Yes,’ said Lola.

  ‘She looks very nice and clean and healthy,’ said the woman.

  ‘Yes.’

  Lola rose from the floor and picked up Sharon Faylene and hugged her.

  ‘Goodbye, Sharon,’ she whispered.

  Sharon Faylene was dressed in her best crocheted coat and her blue shoes. She looked from Lola to the social worker. Then she took a handful of Lola’s hair and hid her face in it. Lola tucked her on her hip and walked into the bedroom. She came back with a suitcase, which she thrust at the woman from the Welfare.

  ‘There’s everything there,’ she said; ‘dresses, jackets, napkins, and they’re all washed and ironed and she’s washed and fed. The kid is not going in for neglect, you know.’

  This last was an unfortunate remark. The woman from the Welfare had been deciding for some minutes past that she hated t
his girl who belonged to the big beautiful boy, sprawled silent there beside the window—the sun glittering on his body.

  ‘Don’t I know you?’ she asked Lola.

  ‘No you don’t,’ said Lola.

  ‘Haven’t I seen you in court?’

  Brownie spoke.

  ‘What’s it to you?’ he asked.

  Lola handed Sharon Faylene to the woman from the Welfare.

  ‘I was bagged for a stretch a couple of years ago,’ she said. ‘Mind you don’t turn my little mate into a vagrant.’

  ‘Are you working now?’ asked the woman from the Welfare.

  ‘Listen, don’t talk to me like you were a plain-clothes cop.’

  Brownie turned and looked at the woman.

  ‘I’m keeping her,’ he said. ‘Any more questions? No. Well, get going.’

  The woman from the Welfare went away with Sharon Faylene in her arms and Sharon Faylene seemed quite contented. All the way down the garden path she waved and blew kisses to Lola.

  ‘She’ll like the ride in the car,’ said Lola, and then she started to cry. Lola always wept very silently with the mascara running down her cheeks.

  They were standing outside the gate—Lola, Brownie and Lyle. It was the day after Sharon Faylene’s departure. Mavis had been buried in the morning. Now there were just the three of them, and Lyle was going away. He was standing now astride his bike, hands grasping the handlebars, knapsack strapped on his back. Straight after the funeral he had come home and packed the knapsack. Lola had looked at him across the grave and seen that he was no longer in tears. For the first time in three days he was calm. He wiped his eyes as the earth thudded in, filling the grave, and when the Minister (Church of England—they had dim recollections of Mavis having said once or twice that she had been christened Church of England) told them it was time to leave, he went without any backward glance or seeming distress. He had been very silent on the way home, and as soon as they arrived he had gone into the bedroom and they heard him moving around. Lola, making coffee and sandwiches in the kitchen, listened from time to time, but she heard no further grief. At last he came out with the knapsack on his back, wheeled his bike from underneath the house and told Lola and Brownie:

  ‘I’m going.’

  ‘At least take ten minutes to have some coffee,’ cried Lola.

  So he did. He drank three cups of coffee and ate two rolls with salami sausage and mustard, and Lola packed him some cheese sandwiches and bananas to eat on the road.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

  ‘First I’m off to Mount Isa. I fixed up about a job there yesterday while I was out when the woman came for Sharon. When I’ve made enough money I’ll move on. I’ll see the world if I do nothing else. It’s what I always wanted to do.’

  So now they were bidding him goodbye before he set off to see the world. Lola looked intently at him. His face was exhausted now of every emotion, drained even of grief, and now Lola felt that, in some way she could not understand, he was relieved. His love was dead. He would never love again. The terrible burden of love lifted from his shoulders for ever, he looked up at the distant hills.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘this is it.’ And then. ‘I’ll never marry again.’

  Both Lola and Brownie felt uncomfortable. There was no answer to make. So Lola said:

  ‘I don’t think you ever will either.’

  ‘I couldn’t,’ Lyle still looked away towards the hills as he spoke. ‘I couldn’t live through it ever again. And I couldn’t feel that near to anyone again.’

  He shook hands with Brownie, and Lola impulsively threw her arms round him and hugged him.

  ‘We’ll go and see Sharo when they let us,’ she said.

  ‘Sure, Sharo’ll be all right. They look after them well in those places—well, goodbye.’

  ‘Goodbye, God bless you. Write some time.’

  ‘Sure, I’ll drop a line.’

  ‘Take care of yourself.’

  ‘Same with you two.’

  ‘Best of luck.’

  ‘Good luck to you.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  Brownie and Lola ran beside the bike a little way, shouting their farewells; then it turned the corner, and as it did so Lyle raised his hand once and looked back at them.

  ‘And that,’ said Lola, ‘is the last time he’ll ever look back in his life.’

  She and Brownie entered the garden of No. 20 and it was very still: no radio, no sound of Mavis singing, no tinkling of the bells on Sharon’s slippers. The bamboo whispered in the wind, and underneath the house a tap gurgled, stopped and gurgled, regular, maddening, solitary. Lola looked at the sky.

  ‘It only needs the crows to start now,’ she said, and suddenly she was clinging to Brownie, trying hard not to become hysterical, but crying on a note of rising terror.

  ‘Thank God you’re here, darling; oh, thank God you’re here.’

  Brownie held her a moment, stroking her shoulders, then he said:

  ‘Go in, get the coffee-pot on, we’ve got a lot of work to do. Packing and the rest. We’re moving out of here this afternoon. We’ll stay at a pub or something tonight, and tomorrow I’ll pay off and we’ll light out for Sydney.’

  Quickly they dismantled the bed and stacked it back in the shed with a few other bits of furniture. They packed their clothes and sold the mattresses to the Bottle-oh who made his weekly round that afternoon. They had a final cup of coffee, raked out the fire, piled their cases in a cab and they were gone.

  Night-time found the house empty of all save the possums, who came scurrying back from amongst the rafters and the shadow-filled trees. Lola had left the little animals some biscuits, some sugar and some peanut butter, and when they had eaten there was nothing left of human love in the empty rooms—nothing save a ball of red paper thrown in one corner and Mavis’s film stars, smiling on the walls.

  One morning when he was twenty-one Brownie dressed himself in his new suit (his only suit) and set off to get married. For support he had his old friend the bosun of the Dalton who, as he helped him dress, saw fit to reminisce thus:

  ‘Well, Brownie boy, I’ve had three marriages—all of them spectacular flops. The first cost me fifty quid and maintenance for the kid paid every month right on the knocker till he was sixteen. The second cost me £75 with costs, and two hundred quid in a lump sum. It’s going to cost me £500 to get rid of this last bitch, and worth every penny of it every time, me boy. Here’s your grey tie, son—trust the old Mad Mariner to think of everything.’

  ‘Gee, I’m nervous,’ said Brownie, trying hard to knot the grey tie.

  ‘So you well may be, old son.’ The Mad Mariner took the tie and made a beautiful job of it. ‘There you are, nothing to it. It’s the first time hurts the most.’

  Brownie laughed.

  ‘Lovely old best man you turned out to be.’

  ‘Ah, don’t take any notice of me, Brown, I’m just a sentimental old fool.’

  Brownie felt he was bursting with love, delight and confidence. Of course, he had experienced a feeling of misgiving that he could not explain. It was when they first arrived in Sydney and his twenty-first birthday was drawing near. He had always planned to marry the day he turned twenty-one. It had been a day-dream of long standing; and then, as it came nearer to being a fact, he was filled suddenly with foreboding. Lola laughed. She said all men had an inborn resistance to marriage.

  ‘It’s handed on from father to son,’ she assured him.

  ‘It’s just the knowledge that, once married, you can never get away from the little dears without a hell of a lot of unpleasantness and expense,’ said the Mad Mariner.

  ‘It’s not that at all,’ Brownie struggled between amusement, chagrin and inarticulateness. ‘It’s just that—that, oh well, I don’t know, it all seems so awful.’

  ‘Well,’ Lola tormented him, ‘you’ve been nagging at me for years to make an honest lad out of you. Now it looks like you want to
back out. O.K., we’ll forget about it.’

  The thought that Lola might not want to tie him down so terrified Brownie that he leaped to the bait.

  ‘It’s just—well, you know I’ll never leave you. Why do I have to make promises as though I was the sort of dead bastard no girl could trust. Haven’t we always been perfectly all right the way we are?’

  This conversation took place about a fortnight before the wedding. The Mad Mariner was visiting them, and they all sat on the balcony of the flat they had taken on the Cross. It was not an expensive flat as King’s Cross goes, being old, inconvenient and not self-contained, but it had one of the best views in Sydney. The land fell away steeply beneath the balcony so that Elizabeth Bay seemed almost beneath their feet. They sat now watching the spangle of lights grow across the darkening water and finishing off one of Lola’s extraordinary meals—lamb chops, because she liked them, spring rolls, because the bosun brought them, fried rice with cabbage because it was her speciality. Now, as she called from the kitchenette behind them, ‘Is it coffee or beer for you, boys?’ Brownie repeated, ‘What’s wrong with all this, aren’t we perfectly happy the way we are?’

  Lola did not answer from the kitchen. They could hear her moving around lighting the gas, rattling cups; and then she switched off the light, and in the darkness the lovely smell of brewing coffee crept to them and mingled with the perfume of the oleander, heavy with blossoms beneath the balcony, and the Florida water that Lola always rubbed in her hair. She came across the balcony to Brownie and put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him.

  ‘You unspeakable cad,’ she said with infinite love.

  And now it was the wedding morning. All doubts of the future had been banished by the joyous bustle of the last week or so.

  ‘I never knew there was so much jazz attached to getting married,’ Brownie confessed.

  First Brownie had to be hauled off to a Roman Catholic priest, where he was instructed in the principal points of the Catholic faith.

  ‘No priest will marry us without,’ explained Lola.

  Brownie said that was O.K. He consigned his dreams of a quiet little registry office ceremony to the realm of things best not thought of, or even spoken of if it came to that. Lola, it seemed, had never thought of marriage without the full trimmings, and as she danced around, abrim with excitement, she frequently exclaimed: