The Delinquents Read Free Page B

called Bob Prentice. It was a small house. A kitchen with a wood stove, two bedrooms and a verandah. Brownie slept on the verandah, and in the night the crying of the curlews terrified him. He started school at Tully. He walked two miles to school and back each day with his sisters; and then one morning he was lifted out of bed in the cold and dark, and his mother dressed him and gave him breakfast.
    ‘We’re going back to Daddy,’ said Nita, as they walked through the bush carrying their suit-cases. Even Brownie had a little bundle to carry. They had to wait a long time by the roadside before the service bus arrived, and when they finally boarded it he felt somehow that people were laughing at them. He thought it was their battered suit-cases that made him feel so outcast.
    ‘When I’m grown up,’ he told himself, ‘I’ll have a leather suit-case with gold letters on, like Grandfather Hansen.’
    So for a while longer they followed father round from one ghastly little town to the other, depending on where the railways sent him, and then suddenly he disappeared altogether, and everyone was glad. He had not come home from work sober for a long time. Mrs. Hansen, who had done incredible things to her inside in the course of several bathroom abortions, went in and out of hospital, and her husband made her an insufficient allowance which set the pattern of rigid economy in the household which Brownie came to loathe. He was not a greedy little boy. He would gladly have gone without later in the week if they could have lived with a little style on Sunday and Monday. He dearly loved things in style. Rigid, sensible carefulness galled him. All his life he hated sweet potatoes, corned beef, home haircuts, golden syrup, powdered milk and flour bags (they reminded him of sheets).
    Then came the war, and the first lodger was called Jack. He departed for overseas, a gallant hero in a slouch hat. He was not very popular, in his absence having entirely omitted to make his landlady an allowance.
    ‘The mongrel,’ she would say, ‘the lousy rotten mongrel. After all I done for him.’
    She cheered up with the advent of the Yank. He was a cheerful good-tempered, middle-aged man, who brought the Hansen children piles of what he called candy. Mrs. Hansen took to going dancing.
    ‘God knows,’ she would say, ‘I never had any life before, stuck out there in the bush without even a wireless, coping with a drunken husband, three kids and a fallen womb.’
    This, of course, was absolutely true.
    The American was moved to Melbourne and then came the big adventure of Mrs. Hansen’s life. Small wonder the ladies will never forget the Yanks. ‘I’m sick of this joint and the evil-minded people in it,’ she told her daughters one morning. ‘I think I’ll go South and see if we might make our home down there.’
    ‘Why don’t you?’ said Nita, who was the second girl and very fond of her father. ‘Please don’t worry about Brownie. We’ll look after him.’ ‘You know, Nita,’ said her mother with seeming irrelevance, ‘you are the image of your Grandmother Hansen. Old bitch that she was.’
    So the Yank treated Mrs. Hansen to a holiday down South, and a wonderful time she had. He took her to the State Theatre which was much admired by the Yanks, and they even went to a night club. They were booked into a fairly good hotel which seemed like the Taj Mahal to Mrs. Hansen, and all the time they played a game the burden of which was that only Mrs. Hansen’s impregnable respectability made divorce impossible. His tone seemed to infer that, if it were not for this, both his wife and Goran Hansen would find divorce papers served on them within the week.
    Mrs. Hansen played the little game, but in many ways she was a realist. She knew that the holiday was for favours received, that the Yank would go happily back to his wife and expected her to go, if not happily, then at least resignedly, back to that God-awful little town in the