The Delinquents (5 page)

‘I feel really and truly happy and really and truly married,’ she confided to Brownie. ‘Do you think everything will be all right?’

Brownie smiled and dropped one arm lazily around her. ‘For sure it will,’ he said.

He believed it too. He was as big as a man and could work like a man, and jobs were not hard to get, and Lola had a wedding-ring, and when she had the baby she could play with it like a doll and he would work for them both. This prospect filled his Scandinavian soul with joy. And they had twenty-five pounds to go on with.

‘Love and freedom,’ sang the wheels of the train. ‘Love and freedom, love and freedom.’

The police put an end to all that nonsense—they caught up with them at Maryborough.

There were two plain-clothes police and a policewoman in uniform. They found Brownie and Lola in the railway refreshment rooms. Brownie was fetching two cups of tea from the counter and Lola sat at a table, her arms full of chocolates, peanuts, potato crisps, popcorn and other foods highly recommended for expectant mothers.

Brownie saw them first and put the tea down and stood with his back to the counter. He knew in that most hideous moment of his life that he was about to lose Lola for a long while, perhaps for ever, and he determined to fight as long as he could. So he fought like a wild animal, but it did not take long, for one policeman bravely kicked him in the groin and as he bent over to shield his agonized body the other clipped him smartly under the jaw, and even as the darkness rose to meet him, his eyes found Lola—she had ceased to struggle with the policewoman. She stood sobbing bitterly with sweets and peanuts strewn around her feet and a broken bag of popcorn shaking in her hands.

When Brownie came to he found he was still in the refreshment rooms. They had put him in a chair and he sat slumped with his head hanging between his knees, and a cane-cutter was being restrained by his more sober friends from coming to his rescue. Slowly he straightened himself and looked at the police. Lola and the policewoman had gone. He knew as surely as if he had been told that at that moment they were getting into the train going up to Bundaberg.

‘Can I watch them go?’

The bigger of the two policemen nodded. He walked out on to the station. It had come on to rain. Lola and the policewoman sat in a carriage almost opposite him and the policewoman was talking to Lola.

Lola looked straight ahead. Her profile looked defiant and amazingly sad, and the rain made tears on the carriage window.

When Mrs. Lovell took Lola down to Brisbane she took her straight to a leading gynaecologist who gave his opinion that Lola would probably miscarry in any case.

‘She’s much too small and too young,’ he said.

‘I can’t afford to take the chance,’ said Mrs. Lovell, and she dragged the terrified child to an abortionist whose address she had procured from a policeman who drank in the hotel where they were staying. The abortionist was a qualified doctor, conscientious and kind according to his lights.

‘She is too far gone,’ he said. ‘I don’t touch anyone over eight weeks.’

Then the waitress at the hotel took pity on them one morning when Lola suddenly vomited her bacon and eggs on to the dining-room floor and her mother fell on her beating her with clenched fists and shrieking:

‘You filthy little bitch, I wish you would die.’

The waitress looked at Lola with complete sympathy and understanding.

‘I know a woman out at New Farm who’s very good,’ she said, ‘and she only charges a tenner.’

Mrs. Lovell’s heart quailed at the mention of this price cutting.

‘I don’t care how much it costs,’ she said. ‘I’d pay £100 for a good doctor if only I could find one.’

‘I’m not here,’ Lola told herself. ‘I’m somewhere else. All this is not happening.’ And she began to experience a feeling that she was soon to know all too well, that she was floating out of herself. That one Lola Lovell was seated on a chair watching the waitress clean up the floor but that she herself—her real self—was floating away. Floating peacefully, looking down at the poor sick girl in the chair. It was a relaxing feeling, but frightening also. From her disembodied haven she heard the waitress say,

‘This woman is good. Honest she’s real good and clean—washes her hands in Dettol and everything.’

Mrs. Lovell shuddered again.

That evening Mrs. Lovell, who had been drinking most of the afternoon with the young policeman, announced that she was going to dinner with him.

‘You stay where you are,’ she told Lola, ‘and don’t go rambling out into the streets picking up men. I’d rather stay in, Heaven knows I’m in no mood for dining out, but Tom says he may be able to put me on to someone else. I’m doing this for you.’

So off she went with the rookie cop who wasted a lot of liquor and made a sad mess of himself before he learned that Mrs. Lovell could drink him well under the table before she even thought of becoming amorous; and Lola, who was too shaken and nervy to go down to the dining-room by herself went out and bought a chocolate bar that made her feel slightly sick again, and a magazine which she found she could not read. She tried blankly gazing at pages which she knew her eyes had read and her mind had ignored, and in the end she threw it on the bed and went and stood by the window weeping with her head against the pane.

‘Oh, Brownie,’ she sobbed. ‘Brownie—Oh, Brownie, oh, Brownie.’

She was standing like this when the waitress knocked at the door.

‘I’ve found another name for you, love,’ said the waitress. ‘My girl friend told me. It’s a doctor, too, but you ring the nurse.’

‘I don’t want to,’ sobbed Lola. ‘My mother’s making me.’

‘Mother knows best,’ said the waitress with unconscious humour.

The voice was cheerful, educated and above all businesslike. The first thing it said was: ‘Have you forty-five pounds?’

‘Yes.’

‘Just put them in an envelope, cash you know, not a cheque, with your name on it and bring it with you.’

‘Very well.’

‘Now you’ll need six Modess pads. Wrap them in a clean handkerchief.’

‘Yes.’

‘And a new sanitary belt and a large bottle of Dettol. Are you writing down what I’m saying?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good girl! Now I want you to get some calcium tablets and take three after each meal till Wednesday morning.’

‘Yes, I’ll do that.’

‘Now on Wednesday morning don’t have any breakfast and be waiting by the letter-box on the corner of Albert and Queen Streets at 9.45 a.m. A black Humber will pick you up at 10 a.m. The last three letters of its registration number will be 219. Have you got all that?’

‘Yes.’

‘The car will drop you back at the letter-box at three in the afternoon. Good, well I’ll see you Wednesday morning, dear. Goodbye now.’

‘Goodbye.’

Lola came out of the phone box and leaned against the wall, her legs shaking with fright. These cloak and dagger arrangements terrified her beyond measure. She saw herself, of course, being dropped by the same sinister black Humber not back at the letter-box, safe and sound and living, but into the river in the dead of Wednesday night, a corpse and nobody any the wiser.

‘I
cannot
do it,’ she kept telling herself. ‘No, I just cannot go through with it. Something will happen to stop it, or I’ll run away or something like that.’

Again she had the terrible feeling that she was on some other plane than everyone else. That if she spoke like this they would not hear her, or at least would not know what she was talking about. So she walked about like a figure in a nightmare telling herself over and over again:

‘It won’t happen because I couldn’t live through it. It won’t happen to me.’

But on Wednesday morning there she was with her mother, waiting at the letter-box, and when the nightmare Humber drew up at the kerb it was driven by a young man with so friendly a smile that she was emboldened to ask:

‘May my mother come too?’

‘Certainly, kiddie,’ said the driver. ‘Here, you hop in the front and we’ll pack Mum in the back.’

There were two other girls in the car and the one in the back began to cry.

‘I wish my mother was here,’ she sobbed.

‘Well,’ said the other, ‘I’m bloody glad mine’s not.’

Lola was almost three months gone so they curetted her without anaesthetic. She put her hands in her mouth and tried not to cry out, and the nurse said,

‘Good girl, you behaved well for a first-timer.’

The nurse, though considerably de-humanized by her job, was not a bad nor an unkind woman, and she was glad that Lola fainted with pain and grief and did not see Brownie’s child being carted away to the incinerator in an enamel bucket.

‘Was it a little boy?’ asked Lola when she regained consciousness.

‘Neither,’ lied the abortionist. ‘It’s nothing yet—just like a lump of blood. There’s no life till it moves.’

He went off to wash his hands and then attend to the next patient. The nurse gave Lola a cup of tea and sent out to her mother. Mrs. Lovell was rather drunk, having primed herself with nips from the brandy flask she carried in her bag.

‘You could have saved your money,’ said the nurse, ‘that child is far too small to carry a child past about four months.’

‘I always took good care of her,’ said Mrs. Lovell.

She looked up and saw Lola standing white-faced in the doorway.

‘My baby,’ she said, and held out her arms.

Lola did not move: she stood looking at her mother.

‘It’s all over now, darling,’ said Mrs. Lovell nervously.

‘Yes,’ said Lola, ‘everything’s over. I would like a cigarette.’

The nurse helped her across the room to her mother.

‘Let her sit in that armchair a minute,’ she said to Mrs. Lovell, ‘and give her a nip of that brandy—that is,’ she added, ‘if there’s any left.’

Mrs. Lovell adopted her best mem sahib manner and bade the nurse not to be insolent and to ring a taxi for her daughter.

Lola had a nip of brandy and began to feel that one day she would be warm again.

‘Goodbye,’ said the nurse. ‘Get her to bed when you get home and if anything goes wrong get her to the General and remember—she fell down the stairs.’

But nothing went wrong. At least nothing that warranted a visit to the General. Lola lay in bed for a couple of days suffering from shock and weeping a great deal in a quiet helpless sort of way. These tears annoyed her mother who kept on saying:

‘It’s all over now.’

And rather more briskly:

‘You want to pull your socks up, my lady. There’s no point in feeling sorry for yourself for the rest of your life, you know.’

Mrs. Lovell herself, now the worst was over, was beginning to relish the situation. She saw herself as a mother who had violated her deepest religious principles to succour an erring daughter. As she put it to the young policeman:

‘I got Lola through it, but at a tremendous sacrifice.’

The lounge of the hotel was filled from about eleven in the morning onwards with ladies who had gone through similar trials—either on their own behalf or that of a friend or daughter. A woman’s lot was hard. It needed sustaining with a great deal of hard liquor. It was all very cosy and friendly there in the lounge, swapping stories of their sufferings at the hands of the common enemy—men. Women had a lot to put up with, men were bastards and kids! My God, kids were a worry. Mrs. Lovell was the heroine of the hour, the real nice woman, deserted by the worthless husband; the woman who’d given the best years of her life to educating her daughter, best of education the kid had been given, and then this had to happen. They sighed into their beer, they shook their heads over their gin—they went home to nag their children and grudgingly sling chops and three vegetables at the clods of husbands who did not realize what treasures they had won.

This was all very well for a couple of days. Then the publican’s wife grew restive. She had had her eye on the husky young policeman herself, for the publican, though he could drink all day without any visible effect, had usually rendered himself impotent by bedtime, and she felt that young policeman could have been better employed than in buying Mrs. Lovell’s drinks and sitting there hanging on every word she uttered in that clipped, phoney English accent. So on Friday evening the publican’s wife said they must go. She pretended to have only just discovered the truth about Lola.

‘I won’t have people resting up here after illegal operations,’ she said. ‘I won’t have that sort of thing in my pub. You’ll have to have her out by ten tomorrow morning.’

Lola, once up on her feet, was faint and shaky—also hemorrhaging badly, if not dangerously. But go she must. The publican’s wife watched her depart without pity. ‘Think yourself lucky I don’t get the police,’ she said.

‘I could get the police too,’ she told her husband that night; and then, with rage that she herself could not understand, ‘The little whore, I hope she bleeds to death.’

Late on the Saturday afternoon Mrs. Lovell took a job as a drink-waitress in a South Side hotel. She and Lola were to share a dark and somewhat airless room up at the back of the third floor.

‘I think I’ll get my daughter to bed right away,’ she told the manager, ‘she’s had a bad attack of flu.’

Later on that same evening Mrs. Hansen paused in the act of pouring tea and said to her son:

‘It’s no good going on like this, refusing to eat. It’s over now, and any rate I think we’ll move. I don’t like taking you away just when you got into the Post Office and all, but I don’t fancy staying here now you’ve given them something to talk about.’

‘I haven’t told anyone,’ protested Brownie.

‘It’ll get around. Things always do in a town this size. That filthy little bitch’s mother was spilling her guts all over the place. That’s one thing you should think of before you play up, Brownie—it’s your people who suffer.’

‘Yes indeed,’ said Brownie.

So Brownie arrived in Brisbane about two months after Lola. He got a job in a rubber factory and moved, with his mother, into a flat in the Valley. Then he started to look for her. He looked for her amongst groups of schoolgirls and in the crowds in picture theatres. He went to parks and up and down the river. Sometimes he thought he saw her ahead of him in the street and then he would run to catch up with her, but when he came abreast he would see it was not Lola at all; some pitiful trick of his hopeful imagination had made him think there was something the same about the carriage of the head or the turn of the neck. Sometimes his heart would come into his mouth when he would think he saw her walking with a man—but it would not be Lola after all. Just a girl, hanging on someone’s arm as Lola had hung on his.