The Delinquents by Criena Rohan Page B

‘But we’re just not going to think about it any more. I’m a great one for my own sex and I always say “it must have been the boy’s fault” every time.’
    Lola looked at the chocolate cake. Brownie had loved chocolate cake, and she remembered how once they had bought a bag of éclairs and eaten them in the park and fed pieces to the birds. Now she had a vision of him had he been with her now, sitting just across the table from her with a slab of cake in his ugly, gentle hands and the brown curls brushed away from his forehead. How the love and delight in her presence would shine all over his soft honest Scandinavian face. Suddenly she put her head down on the table and burst into a passion of weeping right there amongst Auntie Westbury’s loathsome, bloody cream buns.
    A few weeks later Brownie received the following letter forwarded on to him from the Australian Consulate in San Francisco:
    ‘Dear Brownie,’ it read. ‘Please come home and rescue me I am living at above address. They have paroled me into the hands of a most terrible old woman. I am frightened of her. First time in my life I have ever been really truly frightened. Please excuse pencil and incoherence. I am writing this in the dunny in great haste. It is the only place where I can be sure she isn’t watching me. The Welfare say I must stay here till I’m eighteen. Oh, Brownie, I would not be able to bear it except that I know that you’ll come straightaway. She is a doer of good deeds. Keeps on feeding me up on marmite and wholemeal bread and beautiful food, etc. Says I need building up and I’m not really bad, just need caring for, says to forget everything and I remember you every minute my beautiful, oh my beautiful. She says her own baby girl died and she couldn’t have any more so she decided to devote her life to unwanted girls. I want to scream at her “Brownie wants me, Brownie wants me all the time and I want him”. She’s had a grand old time interfering all these years. Brownie, they took your photo away in the horror chambers and hacked off my hair. She wants to give me a home perm. Says she gives all her girls a home perm and it’s wonderful the difference it makes in your outlook. Remember how long and straight my hair was and how you used to rub your face in it? Says she’ll help me to get a nice job. She’ll help me I can just imagine—nursing or something terrible, I just know. She called in to see Mum the other night. Mum was so pissed she couldn’t scratch herself. “That’s not your fault, dear,” she says. Then she pats me and says, “Poor little thing, I know what it’s been like.” She knows damn all. She keeps on asking awful questions about you. She asked me did I really like having sex (that’s what she calls making love, in an awful smarmy tone of voice), or did I just want to feel that I belonged somewhere. Darling, when I was in the horror chambers I thought of so many things I would write to you when I got the chance, but now all I can think is that I love you and I’m frightened. Please come back straightaway. Lola.’
    Poor Lola. Both she and Brownie, used to the Australian coast, had calculated without any knowledge of the length of time it might take for a seaman to be reached on the American coast. Brownie had been trying to get home for a month before he received that letter, and it was another six weeks before he got a tanker out of Galveston.
    Back in Australia, Lola waited. She took a job in the cosmetics department of a big city store and she quite enjoyed the work. Aunt Westbury had spoken lovingly of wonderful jobs up the country, of girls of hers who had married thriving dairy farmers and country store-keepers, after having gone to somewhere miles beyond the Black Stump to help look after Mrs. So and So’s children, or to milk the cows.
    But Lola was firm. She knew she was not shaping as desired and she had lost none of her initial fear of Mrs. Westbury; but to the country she just