The Delinquents (10 page)

‘Oh, Stephanie. They are Muscovy ducks. They are not Muscovy ducks, Stephanie. The ducks are called Muscovy ducks.’

It was quite obvious that they were talking at her. This is perhaps the meanest of all female tricks, because if those on the receiving end of all the propaganda and innuendo dare to protest they immediately face a charge of paranoia.

‘Why should we be trying to impress you? What makes you think you’re so important…?’

‘Excuse me, there’s the postman,’ said Lola.

‘Nothing today, love,’ said the postman. ‘Looks like you’ll have to write yourself one.’

Lola tried to smile and then the postman looked at her again. He had delivered letters for thirty years and well knew the face of a woman sick with anxiety.

‘I’m expecting a letter from abroad, from America,’ she said.

The postie put down his bag.

‘There was a letter from America last week,’ he said. ‘Mrs. Westbury gave it back to me. “No one of that name here,” she said.’

‘Gawd,’ said the success, ‘you look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

Mrs. Westbury had put the tea cups in the sink and Lola, without speaking went across and began to wash them. What was she to do? She had lost. Brownie would think she had gone away without leaving a forwarding address. He would think she did not care. He would not come back. She must go now. She must go to the Shipping Office. What was she doing washing dishes? Like a sleepwalker she drew her hands out of the suds and then she rubbed them on the sides of her skirt.

Now this was a habit of which Auntie had playfully said she would break Lola if it took a million years. Her dear mother, said Auntie, had been a famous trainer of servant girls and every time a girl had been addicted to this serious domestic crime her mother would just say in an admonishing tone ‘Ida’, or ‘Florrie’, or ‘Jane’ or whatever the unfortunate’s name might be, and not a girl but was cured completely and lived to be grateful to Auntie Westbury’s dear mother. Auntie would perform the same kind of office for Lola, which she did to Lola’s unspeakable annoyance. Now she said ‘Lola’ in the famous tone of voice, with a smile on the little pink face, and at that all hell broke loose. By way of a curtain raiser Lola sent three of Auntie Westbury’s best china cups crashing against the wall, and then, with all the fear and anger and hurt and boredom released within her, she was hanging on to the sink and screaming such abuse as can be achieved only by a girl who has been reformed at the taxpayer’s expense.

‘God! How I hate you, how I hate you,’ she was shrieking, ‘and your blasted little house and everything about you. I haven’t words to tell you how I hate you. You sent my letter back, I know about it. The postman told me. Now Brownie will think that I can’t be bothered to leave an address for him to write. You did it on purpose because you hate me. You hate all girls. You just like to muck people’s lives around. Oh I hate the sight, sound and smell of you. God! What it’s been like here in this cosy little hell hole with you smacking your lips over stories about girls in brothels and God knows where, and gloating over the poor bitches that you’ve had locked up here’—she extended a shaking hand towards the heap of smashed china in the corner—‘like the poor God-forsaken bitch that painted that stuff. Holed up here like something in a trap waiting for her baby to be born and painting that while she waited. I’ve thought of her every time I looked at it. I’ve never drunk tea out of it, but I thought I would choke. And then her kid was born and you persuaded her to let her mother take it. God that’s lovely, that is. You may be proud of that one. Getting her to pose as the kid’s eldest sister and now the kid is dead “killed in a car crash—perhaps a blessing.” Well, my mother paid a doctor to murder my first kid. Do you think that’s a blessing? And a great frigging woman cop belted the next one out of me—another blessing I suppose.’ Lola had been screaming all this full voice and now she stopped for breath, leaning over the sink and weeping and gasping like one who has been struck a body blow. Indeed her whole body felt ill with shock, and fear that she might not find Brownie again.

Auntie Westbury had been watching her fascinated. The eyes were sparkling, the cheeks pinker, and Lola, in the midst of all her despair and excitement, saw that Auntie was really enjoying all this. Somewhere at the back of her mind a civilized gene or two was telling her that she would have given less satisfaction all round if she had carried it off with calm dignity. It was at this moment that Mrs. Westbury chose to step forward and put a hand on her shoulder and say:

‘Lola, I was only thinking of your good.’

And then Lola hit her, it was a beauty, fair on the jaw. It did not knock Auntie out because Lola packed very little weight in spite of all Auntie’s famous cooking, and Auntie was a solid little woman. She did, however, sit down very suddenly with a strange gasping little sound.

All the time the success sat there nursing her child. She had been watching with interest. Now she sprang to Auntie’s assistance, but Lola was obviously through with fisticuffs. She stood nursing the wrist she had broken the night of the riot and feeling it for new damage.

‘Relax,’ she told the success, and now she was quite rational and calm. ‘I’ve done in my wrist again, I think. I’ll do no more damage.’

She turned to the woman in the chair.

‘I would advise you,’ she said, ‘to have that nice cup of tea you always prescribe for others in times of grief and strife, because I am now about to go, and you’ll have no one to torture till the Welfare sends someone else, so you’ll just have to content yourself with pulling the wings off flies.’ She ripped the floral skirt from around her waist. ‘Here,’ she said in the voice of one returning a borrowed book, ‘is the abominable little skirt that you and I had such fun running up on your nice electric machine that sews frontwards and backwards and sidewards and all around the town, and buttonholes, and God knows what other shit. You can stick your little skirt. It’s not full enough to be smart and not tight enough to be smart. Of its kind it’s a masterpiece.’

She stepped out of the skirt and stood in her blouse and a pair of black briefs.

‘I am now,’ she announced, ‘going to dress myself in a right skirt, pack a few things and leave.’

‘I forgive you, Lola,’ said Mrs. Westbury, ‘but the Welfare will not allow you to leave here.’

‘I’m not frightened of the bloody old Welfare,’ said Lola, who feared it only a little less than she feared Auntie Westbury, ‘and I’d rather go to jail than stay here.’

Suddenly the success, child on hip, confronted her.

‘You little tripe hound,’ shrieked the success, ‘you’re going on the streets, aren’t you? You ungrateful little bitch, after all that’s been done for you you’re going to go on the streets.’

Lola looked at her and then she grinned and tapped her on the shoulder with the back of her hand.

‘Don’t be envious, mate,’ she said. ‘We can’t all go on the streets as you so quaintly put it, and you’ve got your nice kitchen to make up for it. You know the nice kitchen with the rubber-backed lino and the electric stove with the thermostat and the mixmaster, the thousand-unit fridge, which makes such beaut ice-cream, the Hoover and the washing-machine and the built-in laminex-covered wireless so that you can listen to your serials in the morning and everything.’

*

Once in town she realized that she was in big trouble. She had a broken wrist, very little money, and nowhere to go. She thought of her mother, but the Welfare would look for her there; besides, she felt she could not run the risk of finding her mother drunk. Tomorrow she would not be able to go back to her job because she would be looked for there. She was even afraid to leave her suit-case at the railway station—policewomen love railway stations—so finally she hid it in an empty house that was falling to pieces up on Gregory Terrace. Then she went in search of Dawn.

Dawn was not to be found, so Lola spent the night crouching beside her case in the empty house, and in the morning she went out to wander around town, feeling feverish and lightheaded with the pain in her wrist and also, though she did not know it, a stiff dose of pleurisy that gave her a pain like a red-hot knife in her left side. She found Dawn that morning by the painstaking method of tracking her from address to address. Dawn had been at four places in nine months and when Lola found her she was still in bed.

‘Come in, kid, come in,’ she invited, no whit embarrassed by the National Service Trainee customer who still slumbered beside her. He was covered in adolescent acne and smelled to high heaven of port wine. He must have been eighteen to be doing his Nasho’s, but he certainly did not look it.

Dawn was all geniality as she hopped out of bed and Lola saw that she had become immense. She pulled a dressing-gown on over her naked body and Lola was surprised to see that she was glistening with sweat.

‘Is it hot?’ Lola asked, in a voice that sounded to herself to be coming from under layers and layers of cotton wool. ‘Gee, I feel as cold as can be.’

Dawn gave a wrench at the top of the dressing-gown to see if she could prevent it from gaping too widely across the bloated obscenity of her breasts, decided to give it up as a bad job and sat down and poured herself a drink. She looked warily at Lola.

‘Look, kid,’ she said, ‘if you’re in trouble I haven’t got any dough, and I’m not sticking my neck out to get into any trouble with the cops.’

Lola said that she had not been going to ask for money; but she had been going to, and she was considerably disappointed in Dawn, whom she had never seen before in one of her businesslike moods. She did tell as much of her story as she thought necessary, and when it was over Dawn had had two drinks and stopped shaking and was in a more expansive frame of mind.

‘Well, you can’t go to work, that’s for sure,’ she said, ‘you’d be picked up. And you can’t go to hospital to have that wrist set for the same reason, so, what are you going to do? Where’s Brownie?’

‘He’s in the States.’

‘Yes, sure.’

‘He is, Dawn, no falsing. I’ve only got to hang out till he comes back and that should be soon.’

‘Out of sight out of mind, honey, he won’t be back.’

‘Look, Dawn, can I camp in with you for a few days till I get to feeling a bit better?’

Dawn thought about it and then gave permission, very grudgingly.

‘Remember,’ she warned, ‘if the cops spring you here, I know nothing and no charity moll capers with my men.’

‘I’m not a charity moll, and anyway I feel too sick.’

Dawn said that was all right to say, but it was a well-known fact that anyone who had just come out of Jacaranda Flats would be rairing to go. Lola shook her head wearily.

‘I feel too sick,’ she repeated, and seated herself in an armchair—the larger of the two which, standing in a corner beside a globeless standard lamp, apparently put the sitting into Dawn’s bed-sitting-room.

For the next week she spent most of her time crouched in that chair. She even slept huddled in it, sometimes with an army greatcoat thrown across her, sometimes without. She should by rights have hated it, but she was too stunned with misery to notice anything very much, not even pain nor cold nor hunger. One of Dawn’s clients, who claimed to have done two years’ medicine, set her wrist. After that it hurt less but it was impossible to get work with one wrist strapped up, so she hung around in a sort of miasma of unhappiness and managed to touch several of Dawn’s men for small loans.

Whether they gave the money out of kindness, or as a sort of insurance against future sexual deprivation, she never knew, but Dawn thought very poorly of it. Lola, she said, was a bolting, bludging little bastard and Lola could go—cadging money from men she thought she was too good to sleep with, money that could have better been spent on Dawn. Lola could go. So, Lola, who was almost demented with the pain in her lungs, went out and, as a last resort, rang her mother. But it was Saturday afternoon, her mother’s afternoon off—not a propitious time at all to ring Mrs. Lovell.

A foreign voice answered the phone and said:

‘Mrs. Lovell is in bed. Will I waken her?’

‘Oh hell,’ thought Lola. ‘Yes, please, it’s important,’ she said.

The owner of the voice went away and Lola waited, fighting off the spells of cold dizziness that made the walls of the ’phone-box revolve around her. Then the voice was back.

‘Mrs. Lovell seems to be sleeping very heavily. Will I try again, or is it better I take a message and give it to her in the morning?’

Lola had a vision of her mother, paralysed with brandy, lying on her back snoring with the false teeth half out of her mouth, but she was desperate, she decided to try again.

‘This is her daughter speaking,’ and she spoke clearly and slowly to prevent herself from bursting into tears. ‘It is very important. I am in trouble. My mother is probably drunk, very drunk, but please try again, just once.’

‘Well,’ the middle-European voice was beginning to sound a little aggrieved, ‘already I try twice.’

‘Listen, I know I have a damn cheek to ask a Hungarian Countess to do anything, but if you would be so very, very good I would like you to make one more attempt to get my mother awake; or if there is an old Australian around perhaps he would feel honoured to run upstairs for you.’ Here Lola burst into tears which must have had a softening effect on the Hungarian noblewoman, Polish landowner’s wife, Czech doctor or Rumanian ex-millionairess on the other end of the line, for this time she managed to get Mrs. Lovell awake.

Lola was apprised of this when a voice, much slurred but with an overtone of hauteur (damn cheek ringing at this hour) came on to the line and said: ‘Yes,’ just that, a peremptory ‘yes’, and then silence.

Lola knew that her mother was gazing bozz-eyed at the ’phone and wondering how the hell she got there, so she said:

‘Mum, this is Lola here.’

‘Who’s speaking, who’s there, what—’ Mrs. Lovell’s voice trailed off into a series of jugglings with her teeth and Lola, in despair, shouted:

‘Oh please, sober up.’

‘Sober up! What’s wrong with you? I’ll hang up, yes’ (Mrs. Lovell’s voice was filled with satisfaction at the prospect of thus punishing insolence). ‘I’ll hang up.’ And hang up she did, leaving Lola to drag herself back to Dawn’s room to pack her clothes and get out somewhere. But every time she moved the pain in her side caught her so sharply that she had to sit down to get back her breath, and she spent most of the afternoon sitting in her armchair gazing into space and feeling, in a dim unrealizing sort of way, that she was in such a hopeless hell of misery and pain that she need not worry much about anything.