The Delinquents Read Free

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