The Delinquents Read online

  The following night he went home to see his mother. She greeted him tearfully, for she had read the Shipping News the previous night and knew that the Dalton had been in port for more than twenty-four hours. Where had Brownie been the night before?

  ‘I was gearman,’ said Brownie, falling back on a great old sailor’s standby.

  He further covered himself by saying that there was no phone connected to the ship, and he thought he would have to work the next night. ‘I never seem to see much of my children,’ said Mrs. Hansen. ‘I’ve done nothing except stay at home and bawl my eyes out since you went away, Brownie.’

  ‘I missed you too,’ said Brownie, who was the soul of politeness. Actually he wished he had missed her. It would have seemed more normal. He wished he even cared enough about her to want to hurt her. To want to point out that as soon as she found a man to bear her company she would weep no more for her children. It was with something like pain that he realized that he felt nothing with regard to his mother, except a desire to withdraw from her as much as possible.

  ‘Of course your sisters should not have gone off to Cairns like that,’ said Mrs. Hansen. ‘I’m deeply hurt. They know my health is not the best.’

  Brownie’s sisters, Nita and Kristine, were always leaving home. They were, respectively, seven and six years older than Brownie, and they were good, sensible and kind-hearted girls, well able to take care of themselves. What they thought of their mother Brownie did not know. They never discussed it with him. They would suddenly announce that they could not live their own lives home with their mother—then they would go. The first time it happened was in Bundaberg. Nita and Kristine had come down to Brisbane. That was in the time of Bert Price. Bert Price was the lodger (Mrs. Hansen always had lodgers, never lovers). He was short, squat and semi-illiterate, and wore horn-rimmed glasses and an apparently irremovable felt hat. He was a cockroach exterminator, which is not a romantic trade in the North—and he hated Brownie. The girls were working and old enough to leave. Brownie found the situation unbearable, but he was not quite thirteen, so he stayed at home and took to reading cowboy novels and the Arabian Nights. Mrs. Hansen blamed this sudden interest in literature for his increasing stupidity at school. He had been a very clever little child. Now study seemed beyond him.

  ‘It’s all this damned reading,’ his mother would say again and again. ‘My God, if I’d had your chances to be educated I shouldn’t have wasted them. Look at your cousin Ted in the permanent public service. Do you think he wasted his time reading? No, he improved himself. Now he’ll never be out of a job as long as he lives. Why don’t you do some grammar? Haven’t you got arithmetic to learn? What about geography?’ She would look scornfully at the Fitzgerald translation. ‘What good will that rubbish do you?’

  The only alternative to reading seemed to be to get out of the house as much as possible. His mother said he was running wild and would end up like his father, and Bert took it upon himself to perform such fatherly duties as thrashings, etc. Brownie was a big boy. At thirteen he was five feet, and taller than Bert, and he fought him with all the strength of his unset limbs; but thirteen against a heavily muscled forty is not a fair match.

  Now every woman who permits her lover to beat her husband’s children sacrifices them to sexual expediency. The children know this, and they never forgive her. The woman knows this also—therefore, because we must all try to live with ourselves when all is said and done, she tries to rationalize. So it was with Mrs. Hansen.

  ‘He done it for your own good, Brownie,’ she said. ‘You need a father’s discipline.’

  Brownie turned away. He did not trust himself to speak. He could have cried with hatred and loneliness. Then one night he met Lola. Bert was away somewhere in the country, ridding some cane-farmer’s house of vermin. Mrs. Hansen was in bed. Brownie climbed out of his bedroom window and went off into the frangipani-scented night. He intended walking down to the river to look at the ships, and when he was passing Harris’s she spoke to him.

  ‘Hullo, Brownie.’ She was standing under Harris’s oleander tree, pinning one of its flowers into her hair.

  ‘Hullo,’ he said.

  He had seen her before. She went to the Convent on Bourbon Street, and the other children called her the Creamy. She had come from Singapore with her mother early in ’42. That was a long time ago now, but there was still an odd sing-song lilt in her voice.

  ‘You’re Lola aren’t you?’ he asked, pretending that he knew nothing about her—that he had scarcely noticed her before.

  ‘Of course I’m Lola.’

  ‘Does your mother know you’re out?’

  ‘Does yours?’

  ‘No,’ he admitted.

  ‘Neither does mine,’ she climbed over the fence and stood on the pavement, facing him, ‘but gee, Brownie, I get so bored.’

  ‘So do I.’

  Her eyes widened with surprise.

  ‘Why do you get bored? You’ve got all your own house. We’ve only got a tiny little room at the hotel.’

  ‘I know,’ Brownie tried to explain, ‘but Mum makes me go to bed early because she believes in getting up early, and if I read in bed she says it’s bad for the eyes and a waste of kerosene.’

  ‘So you nicked out, eh? O.K., so I nicked out too.’ Brownie laughed.

  ‘You’re a funny girl,’ he said. ‘Where is your mother?’

  Lola made a vague gesture.

  ‘Gone to a party with some Yankees off the ship down at Port Alma. I don’t know where the party is.’

  Brownie nodded. He knew about Yankees. Before Bert Price there had been an airman, and before the airman, the Yank. That was in the days of the war. Brownie began to feel the first glimmerings of the fellow feeling that makes us wondrous kind.

  ‘I’d better look after you,’ he said. ‘Where were you going?’

  ‘Down to the river to look at the ships,’ she said. ‘But now I’m out I’m a little frightened. You take me, then I won’t be scared. Don’t you get scared out by yourself at night, Brownie?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Brownie.

  Afterwards he kept remembering things she had said as they sat on the river bank.

  ‘Where I come from the stars are bigger than they are here, and so close, Brownie, you feel as though you could touch them with your hand.’ She put up a hand in illustration and he had thought, ‘Her bones are so small and gentle. Her wrists look as though I could break them with one hand,’ and he wanted to put his hands under the heavy mass of her hair and lift it away from the thinness of her neck.

  ‘My name,’ she said, ‘is really Lotus. My father calls me Lotus because it is the flower of faithfulness in the East. But mother always calls me Lola. She says it is enough to have Eastern blood without an Eastern name. Oh Lord, I shouldn’t have told that. Promise you won’t tell anyone. Mother says that here in Australia no one would ever guess.’ Brownie promised. She leaned towards him so he could smell the sweetness of the oleander flower behind her ear. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘we have a secret.’

  ‘She is like a princess,’ he thought, ‘an Eastern Princess out of the Arabian Nights.’

  ‘My father just got up one morning and went away,’ she had said.

  Brownie had admired her courage. He was inclined to pretend that his father was working on the railways in some spot so remote from what is termed civilization in Northern Queensland that it was impossible for him to get quarters for his wife and children. This was only partly true. Father was a fettler. But he was long gone and, for all his children knew, did not care if he never saw them again. They bore him no hard feelings in regard to this for they felt that their mother had asked for it. She had left home first. She had taken her children with her and gone to live with another man.

  ‘I had to make the break,’ she would say, ‘and I thought I should do it before the children were old enough to understand.’

  Of course, as parents will, she put this age at about five years older than she shou
ld have, and in this first de facto experiment of hers what hell her two prim little daughters went through, one twelve, the other eleven, no one will ever know. Brownie was only four, and even he thought it strange. They had gone away from their house; father was no longer around; the terrifying rows ceased, and they were all living outside Tully somewhere, with a share-farmer called Bob Prentice. It was a small house. A kitchen with a wood stove, two bedrooms and a verandah. Brownie slept on the verandah, and in the night the crying of the curlews terrified him. He started school at Tully. He walked two miles to school and back each day with his sisters; and then one morning he was lifted out of bed in the cold and dark, and his mother dressed him and gave him breakfast.

  ‘We’re going back to Daddy,’ said Nita, as they walked through the bush carrying their suit-cases. Even Brownie had a little bundle to carry. They had to wait a long time by the roadside before the service bus arrived, and when they finally boarded it he felt somehow that people were laughing at them. He thought it was their battered suit-cases that made him feel so outcast.

  ‘When I’m grown up,’ he told himself, ‘I’ll have a leather suit-case with gold letters on, like Grandfather Hansen.’

  So for a while longer they followed father round from one ghastly little town to the other, depending on where the railways sent him, and then suddenly he disappeared altogether, and everyone was glad. He had not come home from work sober for a long time. Mrs. Hansen, who had done incredible things to her inside in the course of several bathroom abortions, went in and out of hospital, and her husband made her an insufficient allowance which set the pattern of rigid economy in the household which Brownie came to loathe. He was not a greedy little boy. He would gladly have gone without later in the week if they could have lived with a little style on Sunday and Monday. He dearly loved things in style. Rigid, sensible carefulness galled him. All his life he hated sweet potatoes, corned beef, home haircuts, golden syrup, powdered milk and flour bags (they reminded him of sheets).

  Then came the war, and the first lodger was called Jack. He departed for overseas, a gallant hero in a slouch hat. He was not very popular, in his absence having entirely omitted to make his landlady an allowance.

  ‘The mongrel,’ she would say, ‘the lousy rotten mongrel. After all I done for him.’

  She cheered up with the advent of the Yank. He was a cheerful good-tempered, middle-aged man, who brought the Hansen children piles of what he called candy. Mrs. Hansen took to going dancing.

  ‘God knows,’ she would say, ‘I never had any life before, stuck out there in the bush without even a wireless, coping with a drunken husband, three kids and a fallen womb.’

  This, of course, was absolutely true.

  The American was moved to Melbourne and then came the big adventure of Mrs. Hansen’s life. Small wonder the ladies will never forget the Yanks. ‘I’m sick of this joint and the evil-minded people in it,’ she told her daughters one morning. ‘I think I’ll go South and see if we might make our home down there.’

  ‘Why don’t you?’ said Nita, who was the second girl and very fond of her father. ‘Please don’t worry about Brownie. We’ll look after him.’ ‘You know, Nita,’ said her mother with seeming irrelevance, ‘you are the image of your Grandmother Hansen. Old bitch that she was.’

  So the Yank treated Mrs. Hansen to a holiday down South, and a wonderful time she had. He took her to the State Theatre which was much admired by the Yanks, and they even went to a night club. They were booked into a fairly good hotel which seemed like the Taj Mahal to Mrs. Hansen, and all the time they played a game the burden of which was that only Mrs. Hansen’s impregnable respectability made divorce impossible. His tone seemed to infer that, if it were not for this, both his wife and Goran Hansen would find divorce papers served on them within the week.

  Mrs. Hansen played the little game, but in many ways she was a realist. She knew that the holiday was for favours received, that the Yank would go happily back to his wife and expected her to go, if not happily, then at least resignedly, back to that God-awful little town in the sticks.

  Whither Mrs. Hansen in due course went, to resign herself to middle age and to accuse her neighbours for many years to come—the virtuous along with the guilty—of ‘carrying on with the Yanks during the war.’

  ‘Most great lovers if they lived today would be considered juvenile delinquents—Helen of Troy was just twelve years old when she ran away with Paris.’

  Havelock Ellis makes this wise observation. Nobody has ever tried to excuse Helen and Paris. They were great lovers. This is the end of the matter. Of Lola and Brownie, Lola was the only one who had characteristics tending to delinquency. She had an inherited love of change and excitement, which so far she had managed to sublimate by sitting alone in hotel rooms reading historical novels and all the poetry she could procure. Her mother could go to a party leaving her tucked up in bed and know that she would be there, asleep, with her head pillowed on an open book, at one, two or three in the morning, whenever the party ended. It was very convenient.

  ‘You wouldn’t know she was in the place,’ her mother could say; and she felt, and all her friends felt, that surely no mother could ask for more. But adolescence came and stirred her body and tugged at her mind, and she knew she was lonely. And now the stage was set for trouble, for Lola had nourished her mind and her heart on dreams and had an innocent ruthlessness about converting her dreams into reality (and, oh, dear social worker, of all things beware the adolescent dreamer with a bit of guts). She wanted to be loved. Now she began casting Brownie in the rôle of lover, but she was physically immature, and had no real notion or fear of the tumult in the body of the boy.

  She was sitting on a cross branch of their favourite frangipani tree down by the river when Brownie asked her:

  ‘Will you go steady with me?’

  And she said:

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it. You may have my hand to kiss,’ and she put out her hand, feeling like Napoleon’s Josephine.

  Had she merely said ‘O.K.,’ Australian style, it would have been months before Brownie would have plucked up the courage to kiss her; but now he took the fragile Eurasian hand in his and, instead of kissing it with the courtly flourish her books had taught her to expect, he turned it over and suddenly kissed it hard on the palm. She snatched it away and they faced one another, their eyes dilating. Brownie felt that he would choke, that he would never breathe smoothly again. Then he put his hands up and at last lifted her hair away from her neck.

  ‘Your neck,’ he said, almost with wonder. ‘It’s warm, darling. It’s so soft and warm.’

  He began to kiss her then wildly all over the face and neck and the childish pointed breasts. She began to tremble, but made not one move to repulse him.

  ‘Don’t be frightened, darling,’ he was saying. ‘Don’t be frightened. Look I won’t hurt you. I’ll take you home now. Don’t shake, darling, don’t tremble. Oh, darling, don’t be frightened of me. I wouldn’t hurt you. You’re so special. You’re such a special little thing.’

  He lifted her out of the tree and it was the lightness of the small quivering body in his arms that undid them both and brought their childhood to an end there in the night amongst the long grass and the fallen flowers of the frangipani.

  That was when Brownie was a month off fifteen—a big boy, almost six feet tall, who had worked like a man in every school holiday since he was twelve. What are we to do with the great overgrown lads whose bodies are a torment to them? Do the social workers and clergymen, well meaning though they be, really think youth clubs, organized sport, fretwork classes are of any use? Come now! Lola had no faith in the Boy Scouts, the young Liberal Movement, choir practice, the Junior Chamber of Commerce, cold showers (always supposing you could get a cold shower in Bundaberg), or these healthy outside interests they’re always talking about. All she knew was that Brownie wanted her and loved her. He was, she decided, the only person who had ever wanted her exac
tly as she was, without qualification and condition, therefore he should have her.

  By many standards Lola was a fortunate child. True she had no settled home and her parents were separated, but against that it must be considered that she was given plenty of liberty, was never beaten nor bullied (except by the gentlest methods) and was given everything in the way of clothes and education that her mother could afford. There would have been a host of people in Bundaberg to declare that her mother was devoted to her. A hard and humiliating childhood and adolescence had left Mrs. Lovell with the conviction that to be accepted by the professional classes was the end and aim of every right-thinking woman’s existence. She distrusted love and disliked men—they reminded her of Tony Lovell and she looked back on her wild infatuation for him with deepest shame. Lola, she decided, would be well educated, would have a career, would marry, if she married at all, a doctor, a lawyer, a bank manager—a man who wore a public school tie. She would have been astounded to know that one woman could create from her own flesh another so unlike herself. Lola never argued with her mother. The nuns had taught her pretty manners and, at any rate, she knew that arguing would be useless; but while her mother talked to her of the day when she would be a nurse or private secretary or doctor’s receptionist, Lola dreamed of the day when she would be a ballroom-dancing instructress, or travel the country in a carnival caravan; above all, of the man who would worship her, love her, adore her. And now fate had sent along Brownie, the biggest, the handsomest, the gentlest and softest spoken boy in all the town.

  Coming home on that first night she sat in the bath a long while and tried to think out the situation. She knew that if her mother knew she would be ill with shock. She knew she might already be pregnant, and, worst of all, according to all she had been taught, the fires of hell were already roaring for her, though of this last she could not be afraid. She found it so hard to believe. She gave up all attempt at coherent thought. It is impossible to reason out anything with a voice inside you, half demented with joy, shouting, ‘I am loved, I am loved.’