When she left school she went to live in a hostel, and when one of her fellow inmates decided to go to Australia Mavis decided to go with her. Her mother agreed.
‘You’ll be O.K. with Edie,’ she said. ‘It’s a good idea.’
Actually her mother thought it a heaven-sent idea. She was not a bad woman. She was a good factory hand and fairly satisfactory in bed, and it had never occurred to her that she might have any other duties to perform in all her life. She just did not know what to do with a daughter, and Mavis was beginning to age her considerably. Australia was a very good idea.
Lyle was different. His mother was passionately interested in him and in all her six children. All born into the horror that was Newcastle in the thirties, they were fed and clothed and driven and educated and brought up somehow, amidst poverty and bleakness and soap and water and haddock and hard work. Like his brothers, Lyle went out to earn as soon as he reached school-leaving age, and by the time he was twenty he had decided to go to Australia as an assisted migrant. His mother was a woman of granite, but he owed her a great deal. She herself, at eighteen, had come south from the Highlands on her way to see the world. Marriage had trapped her in Newcastle, but to her youngest son she had bequeathed the spirit that sent the Scots and the Irish to the ends of the earth in the days when the ends of the earth were still places of wonder and mystery.
Lyle sailed, his heart singing and his head ringing with the glorious adventuring music. And as the ship pulled away from the dock, he saw on deck a big blonde girl leaning against the deck railing crying bitterly. She was crying as a child weeps—noisily and unbeautifully, blubbering and shaking, her hands up to her face; and sheer happiness had made him so kind that he went up to this girl he did not know and took her hands down from her face and smiled at her.
‘Don’t cry,’ he said. ‘There’s fine times ahead where we’re going.’ She stopped sobbing and looked at him, and he saw that her mouth was soft and unformed and he wanted to kiss it and stop the bottom lip trembling. They stayed together all the afternoon, and that night he went to the cabin she shared with Edie. Edie, being no square, stayed up on deck, and Lyle gave Mavis the baby that almost killed her later in Australia.
Australia can be a very lonely country. Australians do not like migrants. There is no particular reason why they should. And Queenslanders go one step further—they don’t like other Australians. Most particularly they hate those smarties from Melbourne and Sydney. Then, of course, Northern Queenslanders despise Brisbanites, and so on up to sturdy old chauvinists at the top of Cape York, who, upon occasion, show their contempt for members of more southerly tribes by eating them. This is considered to be going too far—actually it is just fine old Queensland hospitality carried to its logical conclusion.
So Brisbane was not like the tropical islands Mavis had seen on the movies; nor was it the roaring frontier town for which Lyle had hoped. There was no pioneering to do, there were no wonders to see—just the housing shortage; and neighbours who ignored them, and poor pregnant Mavis. No stimulation except the stimulation of disapproval—the locals looking with intolerant amusement at his pegged trousers and duck-tail haircut. Well, at least that was something. He went out and bought a black shirt and a motor bike. The bike was on time payment.
Brownie and Lola had known the radiogram before they knew Lyle and Mavis. It had been about twelve months ago when they were living in West End in a very small flat and Mavis and Lyle were on the other side of the street in a bed and breakfast robbers’ cave, and day and night the strains of
Rock around the Clock
,
St. Louis Blues
,
My Baby rocks me with a Steady Roll
,
My Boy Flat-Top
, etc., interspersed with an occasional bagpipe record came floating across the road. Then, one morning as she was going to work, Lola saw Lyle tear past on his bike, and she told Brownie that evening that at least one other man in Brisbane was a sharp dresser.
‘I pity him then,’ said Brownie, who was feeling rather bitter, having been chatted by the police for twenty minutes only that morning for no other reason, apparently, than that he was wearing the pegged trousers he had bought in Galveston. After that it was only a matter of time before Lola ran into Mavis in Nick Petrides’ corner shop. Mavis had Sharon Faylene, clad only in a damp napkin, on her hip, and both were enjoying a raspberry spider. They both looked hot and sticky and Mavis said she would never have believed that anywhere could be so hot.
‘You’ve got a lot to learn,’ said Nick. ‘Wait till it really gets hot. Wait till Christmas time.’
‘Gawd,’ said Mavis with feeling. ‘Don’t I know. Last year was my first here and I thought I’d die.’
Lola smiled at her. She was privately thinking that poor Sharon Faylene was the most horrifying child she had ever seen. She sat upon her mother’s hip, red-eyed, white-faced, flabby and unsmiling, with a big heavy head she could not hold up straight and a dummy from which she refused to be parted. When she partook of her share of the raspberry spider her mother moved the dummy to one corner of her mouth and placed the straw in the other, then Sharon Faylene made horrid gurglings and a dreadful double suction noise that made the sensitive stomach roll.
‘What a lovely kid,’ said Lola guiltily. ‘How old is she?’
‘About ten months.’
‘Is she sitting up by herself yet?’
Mavis looked perplexed. Later Lola was to notice that Mavis often looked perplexed when she looked at Sharon Faylene.
‘They’re not supposed to sit up till they start getting teeth are they?’ she asked.
She did not sound very anxious. She just did not sound very interested; but Lola was too kind to say that Sharon Faylene should have quite a few teeth if it came to that. She just dropped the subject.
She was longing to ask if Sharon Faylene were on to vegetables, but, in the circumstances, she thought it would probably be tactless.
Mavis surveyed the shelves.
‘Dunno what to have for my lunch,’ she said plaintively. ‘You can’t cook anything up there. We’re not allowed use of the kitchen in the middle of the day, and in the evening you can’t get near the stove, it’s got so many people round it. I’ll have a small tin of baked beans, I think.’
‘How will you heat your beans?’ asked Lola, who in her wanderings had developed a morbid curiosity regarding the horrors of dwelling in rooms, hotels, flats, boarding-houses, hostels, reformatories and so on. It was always interesting to compare notes. Some bedroom cooks favoured the up-tilted radiators, others the secret spirit stove, but Mavis was a true primitive.
‘Oh I stand the tin in hot water in the bath,’ she explained. ‘I heat her bottle the same way.’
‘Poor bitch,’ thought Lola, with complete sympathy and understanding. Aloud she said, ‘Have you tried getting a flat?’
‘Have I ever?’ said Mavis. ‘But what’s the use? It’s hopeless when you have kids.’
She ordered up another tin of beans, three eggs and some Benger’s food for Sharon Faylene, ticked them up and wandered out disconsolately—child under one arm, groceries under the other.
That was how they became friends. Brownie was glad. He had just shipped aboard the
Kimberley
to go to Fremantle. He would be away a few months and he was happy Lola would not be entirely on her own.
‘They’ll be company for you,’ he said.
So they were, for a couple of months, and then Mavis and Lyle set out for Sydney. In other words, they fled from Brisbane leaving their debts behind them. It was fun while it lasted. Lyle was happier than he had been in months. At dead of night he brought the precious radiogram across to Lola’s flat: ‘It’s only a matter of time before we get everything settled up,’ he explained grandly, ‘and then we’ll come back and collect it. If we leave it behind that old bitch over there will take it for back rent.’ Indeed their landlady had been threatening this course of action for some weeks past, and the hire-purchase company had been threatening to claim the bike, and they owed Nick about eight pounds for groceries. As Lyle said, ‘When you gotta go, you gotta go.’ He was very fond of this phrase and repeated it frequently.
He had thought of Mount Isa, where money was good and jobs were plentiful, but every time he mentioned it Mavis said the heat would kill her and Sharon Faylene; and when he spoke of going alone she would collapse on the bed, such a pitiful sobbing blonde heap as would have made anyone give way out of sheer pity and irritation mixed in about equal parts.
‘For God’s sake, Lyle, let’s stay together whatever happens,’ she would beg. So Lyle evolved this romantic plan of running away to Sydney.
Everyone was very gay the night before they left. Final plans were discussed at Lola’s to avoid all risk of eavesdroppers. Even so, they spoke in dramatic whispers, interrupted with much half-hysterical laughing.
‘Now remember,’ Lyle kept saying to Mavis, ‘you’re supposed to be taking Sharon Faylene into the City Hall for her injections and leave those three napkins on the line to put them off the track.’
Next morning he went off on the bike, ostensibly to work. Actually he had been out of work for almost a fortnight—a fact which had tactfully been kept from their landlady. About a quarter of an hour later Lola went down the street. She was wearing high-heeled scuffs, a wide black skirt spread over the stiffest underskirt in Brisbane and she carried a small wicker case. She looked cheerful, innocent and jaunty—in a word, Lola in her usual attire for doing a little morning shopping. She bought some bananas and a packet of rusks, and, strangely enough, a squashy plastic animal of no known species which smelt of caramel; then she waited on tram stop No. 7 till Mavis appeared with Sharon Faylene in her arms.
‘How is she?’ asked Lola with an anxious glance at Sharon Faylene, who looked positively debauched this bright morning.
‘Grizzling all night with her teeth,’ said Mavis, ‘and she’s had three teething powders already since yesterday evening. I do hope they don’t move her bowels on the bike, I’m sure.’
‘Here’s a tram, thank God,’ said Lola.
‘Everything’s going fine so far.’ Mavis sounded almost cheerful again so Lola forbore to say, ‘We haven’t made home base yet.’ But she felt it, and she must have known something, for when they got off the tram just outside the Palace Hotel they were met by Lyle with the sweat standing on his forehead. He said:
‘This corner’s alive with frigging coppers. One’s had his eyes on me for ten minutes; I thought you’d never come. Listen, I’m getting across the bridge. I’ll meet you there.’
Lola looked at the policeman on point duty and at another by the walls of the hotel, who was manhandling a half-caste prostitute who used the beat outside the South Brisbane station. It was obvious that he was working himself up into a very ugly mood, with great gulps of the glorious drug of brutality, and that within a few more seconds he would become dangerous.
‘Let’s get going,’ said Lola. ‘You’d better take me on the pillion, it doesn’t look as strange as loading on Mavis and the kid and they’ll think you’ve been waiting for me.’
They rode across the bridge and a few minutes later Mavis came puffing up, complaining, of course, of the heat. ‘Shall we go up to the City Hall,’ she suggested desperately. ‘We’ve got to go somewhere.’
‘God no, not there,’ said Lyle with justifiable irritation. ‘It’s a hive of coppers too, and all their pimps drink in the “Albert”.’
Where were they to go? That was the question!
Lola had a sensation, not new to her, that perhaps they should not go anywhere. Perhaps they should just evaporate and save the atom bomb the embarrassment. At last they decided to go to Coronation Drive where it was usually fairly quiet, and Lyle went ahead and the women dragged along—Mavis miserable and Lola angry.
‘If you ask me, all Brisbane’s full of coppers and all of them bastards,’ she said, expressing in one concise sentence the full theory of central government of the sunshine State.
‘Well, if I can’t get somewhere to sit down on Coronation Drive I’ll throw myself into the river,’ threatened Mavis.
The teething powders now took effect a little earlier than the time forecast, and Sharon Faylene had to be taken into the ladies room of a pub and washed and changed. Lola did it and found that she wanted to weep.
‘There you are, Sharo girl, right as rain again,’ she said. ‘I’m surprised at you dropping your guts to a few coppers. I’ll carry her a bit,’ she told Mavis. ‘You’ll be holding her in your arms enough.’ So the little procession went on, and at last caught up with Lyle waiting for them under a jacaranda tree.
Mavis sank gratefully down on the seat under the tree, and then the case was opened and there, packed ready to transfer to the haversack strapped to the seat of the bike, were most of Sharon Faylene’s poor little clothes, and a bottle ready mixed, a spare skirt for Mavis, and Lyle’s black shirt and pegged trousers.
Lola packed the haversack in silence.
‘I’ve got some clean napkins in my bag,’ said Mavis, eager to show that she still had a full grip on the situation.
‘And, Lyle! I remembered to leave those nappies on the line.’
Then they all fell silent, and suddenly Lola began thrusting the bananas and the caramel-smelling animal at Mavis and saying:
‘Well, here’s a few things. Try and persevere with her, Mavis, when she has her banana. I know she slobbers all over the place, but she does love it so; and do you really think all those teething powders are good for her? I think you ought to try a Dover tablet crushed up in orange juice. The orange juice will do her good if nothing else, and here’s a fiver to come and go on, and you’d better get going now.’
Mavis leaned across and kissed her.
‘You’re a good friend,’ she said, ‘the only one I ever had in Australia.’
‘Thanks for everything,’ said Lyle, ‘and goodbye for now.’
‘So long.’
Lola watched the bike till it was out of sight, then turned and started walking back towards the city. It was not yet midday. She had all the time in the world. She was alone again. She felt the familiar feeling of loss and emptiness. She wondered if she would get herself a job, or if she would go to a show, or if she would go into the Grand Central and have a drink and see who was there, or if she would have some lunch in town and do some shopping; and she decided against all these things. She went home and locked herself up in the flat. She pulled down all the blinds and locked all the windows. Then she buried the clock under a pile of cushions so that she could not hear it tick; she turned the tap tightly, for she knew by past experience how a dripping tap could thunder through a muffled flat, and she went into her bedroom, stripped off all her clothes and crawled into bed. She pulled the sheet up over her head and straight away the sleep came swirling round her. She felt she was floating. She felt the soft warmth creep around her body and relax all her limbs, and so she slept away the whole afternoon—all the unendurable time. For she could take no more sudden partings—now they affected her like a sickness, a shock. Too often she had been brave and kept herself busy, gone to a show—now there was only sleep, and when she awoke she was reborn. It was about four o’clock that the noise from the street came filtering through into her wombworld, and she opened her eyes and lay on her back staring at the ceiling and stretching her arms above her head. Then, suddenly, she remembered that Mrs. Abbott (Mavis and Lyle’s landlady) would very probably be over to enquire about Mavis and Lyle—their whereabouts, and, what was more to the point, the whereabouts of their few possessions—and she shot out of bed, tingling with excitement, ready for anything.