The Delinquents Read Free Page A

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 should 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