The Delinquents by Criena Rohan

‘Please switch off the light’ and ‘Please keep the bathroom clean’ notes to which her profession is so addicted. Last of all was her lover, Snow—a terrible, red-eyed, weedy seventeen-year-old, who was in a chronic state of stomach upset because he could not keep up with her in the drinking. His duties were light (depending how you looked at it), consisting as they did of making a pretence of cleaning up the yard and making love to the landlady regularly every morning between nine and ten.
    ‘I’m never available then, love,’ she told Lola, ‘because that’s when me and Snow have the business.’
    She was twenty years older than Snow and at least four stone heavier, as well as smelling most nose-searingly of gin: it was apparent that Snow found his sexual duties somewhat onerous, for he always emerged at ten o’clock in a raging bad temper, and kicked the landlady’s cat as though he envied it its castration. Then he would take a heavily disinfected bath. Brownie called him the Solyptol kid!
    By the end of October, Brownie was down to his last ten shillings, and the sea was staring him in the face. He said as much to Lief, the dark Norwegian, who was sitting on his bed late one afternoon holding his head in his hands.
    ‘Yes,’ said Lief. ‘Me, I go back to sea too. Is clean there, away from all this shit. No good drinking all the time.’
    He glanced across at Arne, the blond Norwegian, who was lying in a heap in a corner, sleeping with his head on a packet of prawns.
    ‘I don’t like leaving Lola,’ said Brownie.
    Lief began to weep. He said he knew how it was. He left a little girl in Norway. Ah, such a good little girl. Best little girl in Bergen. He was going to get a ship and sail back to her tomorrow. Brownie must not leave Lola. No, no. The Hansens and the Johannsens must stick together. He must insist that Brownie take this fiver and stay a little longer. They would all go down to the ‘Grand’ now and have a drink. Better still they would go and get a supply of schnapps. They would have another party on the spot. Arne must be woken so that he could play the accordion. No sooner said than done. Brownie went off with the fiver and bought the liquor, Lief poured water over Arne’s head till he woke, and by seven o’clock the party was in full swing.
    At about nine o’clock Lola and Brownie volunteered to go and buy some beer (this time the Siamese put up the money). This was the unluckiest thing they did in many a long day, for when the beer had been bought and dispatched in a taxi with Utai, Lola, who was just drunk enough to be capricious, decided that she would like to stay at the ‘Grand’ for a couple of drinks. She wanted to see a couple of girls. The police picked them up at a quarter to ten, and this time they had only 2/6 on them.
    Brownie was fined for drinking while under age and bound over not to see Lola or try to contact her for twelve months: Lola was put into Jacaranda Flats Girls’ Corrective School. Brownie decided to fill in the twelve months by going overseas, and the day Lola went into Jacaranda Flats he sailed for Stockholm on a Swedish tanker.
    By November Lola knew now for certain that she was pregnant, which cheered her considerably, though her mother, who came to see her regularly, obviously thought that this was the worst thing that could have happened.
    ‘It’s not as though, Lola,’ she said, ‘I wouldn’t give consent for you to marry the great hobbledehoy—I’m past caring now; but you saw how his mother behaved about you, coming into court and breathing fire about what a harlot you were. If either of you expect
her
consent you’re just putting yourself in the way of needless humiliation, and, I don’t know about you, but I’ve had all the humiliation I can stand.’
    ‘I feel for you,’ said Lola.
    Then she said: ‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ for she remembered that when she left Brisbane shortly after her sixteenth birthday her mother had wept