The Delinquents Read online

  But what he found was Lola standing at the doorway arguing with her landlady. The landlady looked irate and Lola looked rueful, but when she saw Brownie she began laughing in a mixture of relief, hysteria and embarrassment and said:

  ‘Oh, Brownie, isn’t this awful? I was praying you’d come. This old vulture bailed me up just as I was going out, and she says she is going to get the police and turn me in for insufficient lawful if I don’t pay the rent. And I haven’t any money.’

  Brownie took charge of the situation.

  ‘What are you doing to my girl?’ he asked the landlady.

  ‘Your girl and everyone else’s,’ said the landlady.

  Brownie hoped he did not flinch outwardly and he went on courageously enough:

  ‘How much is owing to you?’

  ‘Four weeks at thirty shillings a week and ten shillings for gas and electricity.’

  ‘Don’t pay the old bitch a penny,’ said Lola. ‘Threatening to get me vagged! I kept trying to tell her that if she’d only let me go meet you you’d help me.’

  ‘I’ve heard that one before,’ said the landlady. She suddenly switched the attack to Brownie. ‘You look the type she’d get in tow.’

  Brownie put his hand in his pocket and brought out £2.

  ‘Here’s a couple of quid off it,’ he said. ‘Now let me have that suit-case.’

  The landlady took the money and remained where she was, arms folded. ‘Are you going to stand like Napoleon on St. Helena all night?’ asked Lola. ‘Or can we pack up in peace and get out of your bloody joint?’

  So the landlady went away and there was not very much to pack. There were two tight black skirts, both split up the side and broken at the zipper; some black lacy underwear which had been very expensive, but which now looked as though it had been made love to both hard and often; a red polo-necked sweater; the off-the-shoulder blouse and the duffle jacket she had worn the day before; a grubby brassière that smelled of perspiration, Hush and Jicki; a chocolate box containing some costume jewellery (most noticeable being a pair of huge gypsy earrings); some Helena Rubinstein make-up; one towel with Matson Line stamped on it; a copy of the Shropshire Lad; a bottle of Widow Wise’s Pills (Ladies end irregularity without delay); and a pair of light blue Sears Roebuck jeans.

  ‘Get into the jeans,’ said Brownie.

  ‘Browning darling, where are we going?’

  He laughed across at her where she stood by the suit-case. She was dressed as when the landlady attacked her—ankle-strap shoes and a black satin slip. She had draped a long black stole, hand-knitted in wool, around her shoulders for warmth, and she was making a terrible job of the packing.

  ‘Darling,’ he said, ‘leave it all to me. You need someone to look after you as usual—Lord you’re a useless little thing. Just put the things you need for the night in your handbag’ (Lola promptly tipped the make-up and the jewellery into the shoulder-strap bag) ‘and get into your jeans and do what you’re told like a good little girl. Have you got any flat shoes?’

  A frantic search found a pair of little flat velvet slippers such as matadors wear, under the wardrobe; socks to wear with them this cold night were not forthcoming, and then Teddy Langley, coming in to invite them for a farewell drink, offered a pair of navy blue two-way stretch. Lola introduced Brownie with the usual formula:

  ‘Teddy this is Brownie that I was always talking about.’ Then she put on the socks and turned them under at the heel.

  ‘So much more comfortable than taking in the slack at the toes,’ she told them.

  They had the drink with Teddy and were ready to go. At the last moment Teddy took his football supporter’s cap from his pocket and set it on her head. It was a knitted cap with a pom-pom, white and black, for Teddy was a Collingwood supporter by religious conviction.

  ‘There you are you one-eyed Demon fan,’ he said. ‘I suppose it’ll kill you to wear it, but you have to keep dry; you’ve been very sick.’

  ‘Can you grab a cab while I get the case downstairs?’ said Brownie, who did not much care for it when Lola woke the protective instinct in other males. Teddy got the cab and Brownie carried her case. Lola left in style.

  ‘Wacko! Who would have thought that I’d drive away in a taxi?’ she said. ‘Now, Brownie, what gives with you, where are we going?’

  But he wouldn’t tell her till they got out at Flinders Street Station and cloaked her suit-case in the baggage-room.

  ‘Now look, Lola,’ he said. ‘Come and eat and I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. You’ll have to be careful and do everything I say because it’s a risk, but it’s our only chance to be together—O.K.?’

  She nodded at him like a docile child.

  ‘You’re looking after me now,’ she said.

  So, sitting in the Greek’s over spaghetti and meat balls, he told her:

  ‘Look, Lola, I’ll have to get you in off the street somewhere tonight or you’ll be vagged; and I haven’t got much money left so I’m taking you down on the ship.’

  Lola looked eager.

  ‘I’ll like that,’ she said.

  ‘It’s not that much,’ he warned her. ‘Nothing like parties on ships and so on. We’ve been laid up for six weeks. I suppose you’ve heard the miners are on strike?’

  Lola had heard it vaguely.

  ‘Well, the ships are tied up for lack of coal, or the shipping companies are saying they have no coal, that way they make the miners look bastards, and on my ship they’ve only kept me and the bosun working by. I’ll try and get you on board for tonight and maybe tomorrow you can get a job somewhere, just to keep you going till next pay-day—that is, if you’re well enough, darling. The bosun is living in a pub up on shore. He comes down in the morning and puts me on the shake but I’ll have you out of the way by then. Want to give it a go?’

  ‘O.K. Let’s go.’

  He zipped her bag inside his leather jacket, turned her coat collar up around her face and pushed her hair under the stocking cap. Sitting in the back of the taxi, trying to look like another deck boy, she drove through the wharf gates.

  Once on the ship Brownie had to light a kerosene lantern to take her forward, for without coal the ship was without electricity. She lay a lifeless thing, cold, her woodwork and bulkheads damp to the touch, but Lola went below joyfully.

  ‘Brownie,’ she said, ‘this is wonderful.’ She looked around the lantern-lit cabin and sat down on the bottom bunk.

  ‘Isn’t it silent,’ she said, ‘right down here? I feel like we are at the bottom of a well, walled away from everything. At last I feel like nothing can harm us.’

  Brownie sat beside her and put his arms around her.

  ‘I’d like to wall you away from everything,’ he said, ‘and love you and love you hard for a hundred years.’

  As events fell out Lola did not have to slip ashore early in the morning, for both she and Brownie overslept and they woke to find the bosun standing over them. He called Brownie outside and said:

  ‘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 mo
ney.’

  ‘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 coffe
e.

  ‘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.