‘Oh, they said something about oranges and steak and milk and that, but I never took much notice. Lyle was in remand then, and I was living on cokes and cigarettes.’
Lola nodded.
‘Isn’t it always so? The world’s full of greedy bastards who are ready to charge you fifty quid for an abortion, or flinty-faced old squares who are just busting to see you have the toughest labour going; but there aren’t many in between who want to teach you anything about it.’
Mavis laughed.
‘It wouldn’t do any good telling me,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t keep all that jazz in my head anyway.’
‘But it makes it interesting—it truly does.’
‘Not for me it wouldn’t.’ Mavis was firm. ‘As far as I’m concerned housekeeping and having kids is strictly for the old folks in Squaresville. Look how you hated being with old Westbury. You said yourself it was worse than jail, and she was wonderful at cooking and scrubbing and everything.’
‘Yes, but she really hated it.’
‘I don’t hate it.’ Mavis was trying to work things out. ‘And I love my kid, of course; but I can’t really take an interest. You know what I’d like to be doing now?’
‘No?’
‘I wish I was eighteen again, and slim and light on my feet; and I wish it was Saturday night and I was at a party, and I’d jive all night, and I’d be wearing my—’ She broke off, and gestured helplessly. ‘I don’t know how it happened,’ she said, ‘but suddenly everything like that is over, everything is gone.’
‘It’ll come again. Never mind, Mavis; I’ll baby-sit every now and then and you and Lyle can step out. You’ll be the sharpest young couple in town.’
She looked with pity at the pregnant woman and the baby girl playing with the film magazines. Suddenly she put down the paste-pot and jumped down from the perch.
‘You’ll be all right, kiddo,’ she said. ‘We’ve done enough work for today. How about we leave the stew, it’ll keep till tomorrow, and go down to Dan’s and have a steak for tea? If we get down there early we’ll get the juke box. We can leave a note for the boys to come down and join us. Come on, I want to hear some music and see some people.’
Dan’s was easily the toughest hamburger bar on South Side. The police turned it over on an average of once a night, and Brownie, Lola, Mavis and Lyle ate there about once a week. It was their version of dining out. They liked Dan’s. They liked the smell of frying onions, sizzling meat and terrible coffee. They liked the colour scheme of blue and yellow, the juke box jumping out its rhythmic de-celebration, and they liked the company of their own kind.
When the girls arrived there were only three other customers present: a girl in a tight black dress and shoulder-length diamante earrings, her offsider—a plain poor child in a tight skirt and sweater and an unfortunate attempt at a short widgie haircut, and one adolescent boy who was drinking coke with them, and feeling very sharp to be spending his afternoon in the company of a woman whom the police had ordered out of town that very day. It was the girl in black who had achieved this social distinction. She had arrived from the country six months earlier and had drifted from waitressing to sporadic prostitution. Her knowledge of prophylaxis being but indifferent, she had become diseased, and in due course was picked up by the police. Her people being solid farmers in the Ipswich district, the police were easier with her than they would have been with a genuine waif—they merely ordered her home and put her on a bond. She was to keep out of Brisbane and report to the local Health Officer for treatment. She had been sitting in Dan’s holding court all the afternoon, but now she looked at Lola and knew that her moment was over. Lola, in her spreading skirts and high-heeled scuffs, her breasts half naked, her eyes drowned in mascara and her hair caught back in a pony tail, was a scene-stealer in any bodgie’s book. She came swishing into Dan’s with Mavis and Sharo in tow, and they were also in gala attire. Mavis wore tight velvet slacks with pegged cuffs and a maternity smock made specially to cope with winter chills—scarlet corduroy, finished off at the neck with a huge bow. Mavis’s English face looked very clear-skinned and pretty above that scarlet bow.
Sharo wore her pink brushed bunny wool and her bunny slippers. They were three formidable women, and Brownie, when he looked in twenty minutes later and saw them just about to attack their steak, burst out laughing.
‘Man! There’s a whole lot of female in this booth,’ he said. ‘Hello, honey, that sweater—one deep breath and your norks will be in my soup.’
‘Seventeen, seventeen, cool and solid seventeen,’ sang the juke box.
‘Got any more sixpences?’ said Lola as she kissed him. ‘I’m in the mood for music.’
Sharon Faylene began waving a soup spoon and yelling, ‘Daddio’—an improvement on ‘Dadda’ which she had achieved with much coaching—and there was Lyle coming through the door.
‘This is grand, this is,’ he said, as he bent and kissed his wife and daughter. ‘A man comes home from work and finds the whole family parked around the juke box. What is happening to good old-fashioned family life. Did you order me a steak, doll baby?’
This last question was addressed to Sharon Faylene, and Mavis answered for her.
‘The biggest in the place, darling, that’s what you’re getting.’ And she reached over and patted his hand.
‘I love you, you pregnant pest,’ said Lyle. ‘I love you all the time, and I’m going to make a fortune for you.’
The meal over, Mavis said she felt like a drink.
‘She’s maddened with steak and rock and roll,’ said Lyle. ‘Will you listen to her? Come on then, I’ll buy you some Guinnesses. “A baby in every bottleful”.’
He quoted this last in a sort of sing-song chant, and then explained to a startled lad at the next table:
‘We’ve decided to make it triplets—one at a time gets lonely.’
Mavis was almost weeping with laughter.
‘Who’d ever be bored with a madman like you around,’ she said.
And then they were out on the street again, and making for the Wheatsheaf Hotel, which was just around the corner and had a beer-garden that was sheltered from the wind. It was one of those nights when exhilaration is in the very air, with a North wind that sometimes comes, charged with electricity and whisperings in the air, into Brisbane in winter: a memorable wind that always makes the heart beat a little faster, and the limbs tingle with an added energy, as though with some magic borne down out of the regions that have no winter at all.
And everything seems good. And so it was that night. The almost deserted beer-garden, quiet within its sheltering brick walls while the wind sang on overhead, blowing down towards the South to become a snow-laden demon by the time it arrived in Melbourne: the stars glittering with draught; the geraniums growing in shadowy corners, spicy red bunches around darkened stems; the laughter coming from the bar inside and the hotel cat that stood up on its hind legs and patted Sharon Faylene gently with its paw. And everything was something to laugh about. The way Sharon Faylene insisted on having a sip out of everyone’s glass and finally fell asleep, very red in the face and snoring loudly on her mother’s lap: and the way Mavis kept insisting that she had a craving for stout, and she must have everything she fancied; how she had to keep dashing off to the ladies.
‘Two pints in a one-pint bladder, that’s the trouble,’ said Lyle, which struck them all as very witty indeed. And then Lola got to the stage where she laughed at everything—as sooner or later she always did. She took off her earrings because they were hurting, and while putting them on again she dropped one of them down the front of her jumper, and laughed so much she could not get it out, and Brownie had to fish for it.
Then Mavis said she was hungry again, and Lyle went out and bought salted peanuts and potato crisps, and Brownie, not to be outdone, bought another supply.
‘Old soaks, that’s what we are,’ said Mavis happily. And she ate so much, washed down with more stout, that she seemed to swell visibly, and had to undo another button of the maternity slacks, which made them bag around her hips most alarmingly. And by now a change had come into the atmosphere. They laughed a little less, and Brownie and Lyle drew closer to their women and began to handle them around.
‘Let’s go home,’ said Lola. Brownie’s thigh was pressed hard against hers, and his arm was around her shoulders. ‘Let’s not be the last to go. Thrown out at closing time with the sleeping child clutched in our drunken arms.’
‘Yes, let’s go now,’ agreed Lyle, ‘while the drink’s still only in our heads.’ And he led the way with Sharon Faylene over his shoulder and Mavis hanging on to his arm; and as he went he sang to a little tune of his own composing:
‘Oh pregnant in the winter and barefoot in the summer, that’s the way to keep them if you want to be the boss.’
Lola and Brownie brought up the rear, walking arm in arm, with their faces pressed close together.
‘If I don’t get you home soon,’ said Brownie, ‘I’m going to bust.’
So they went home. Brownie threw himself on the bed and pulled off his jumper and skivvy all in one movement.
He stretched out his hand.
‘Come here.’
‘Wait,’ said Lola.
She moved around the room, the drink warm in her stomach and making her head and limbs feel light and dreamlike. She pulled off her black stole and pulled the black jumper over her head.
‘Hurry up,’ said Brownie.
But she moved slowly, naked to the waist now, unpinning the long black hair so that it fell around her shoulders, putting perfume on her nipples, swinging her skirts around, undoing them and letting them fall to her feet. Every movement deliberate, provocative, as she went about the business of contraception—turning her body from that of a living woman into a sterile doll. And when she was ready she tinned down the lamp and held out her arms to the half-maddened boy on the bed.
‘Now love me,’ she said. ‘Love me every way you know how.’
Afterwards, when she lay exhausted, already drifting into sleep, her head against his shoulder, Brownie put out his hand and patted her hair.
‘God, you’re beautiful,’ he said.
‘You’re beautiful too.’
‘I wish I never had to go away. Why can’t we be together every night like this?’
‘We’d never last, Brownie. We’d wear ourselves out. No, darling; don’t worry about other nights in the future. Maybe you won’t have to go away. Maybe we’ll win the lottery. And anyhow, whatever happens, this is one wonderful night we’ve had and it is already the past. It cannot be taken away from us. One more good time before the atom bomb blows us all up and no strings attached—no lagging, no vagging and no kids.’
Brownie still stroked her hair. He said:
‘Yes, you’re certainly a lot more careful. Once you didn’t care if you got a kid or not.’
‘Do you want a kid?’
‘I’ve always left that up to you. I was just saying that you’ve changed a bit.’
‘Yes, I’ve changed. I’m not really half such a nice person as I was. I suppose that sounds silly to say, Brownie; but it’s true. I suppose I seem better now. I’m nineteen. It’s fairly normal to have a man at that age. When you’re a little girl of not quite fourteen, people just think you’re a baby nympho. But it wasn’t like that really, you know. I didn’t really want to be made love to. Please don’t be hurt, Brownie. I’ve always loved you. But I was too young and too small, and it hurt my body, and I wasn’t ready for it all. I’m the type to marry young and so are you, and I would have been just as happy to wait till I was sixteen or seventeen; but I couldn’t wait, you see, because I had to be loved, and you were the only person I could turn to for love. No one wanted me except you; and all I thought of was how to pay you back. You could have got me to do anything. And look where that got us.’
‘In the end, honey, it got us right here together.’
‘Only after a lot of trouble, Brownie. A lot of hell I wouldn’t wish to live through again. No, you can say what you like, life’s really pretty crummy, and if you go doing a generous action towards it, like having a baby, then you’re leaving yourself wide open, and life takes the opportunity to kick you right in the face. No, I’m going to be mean from this on and just live for the kicks that are pleasant.’
Brownie laughed drowsily.
‘What’s brought all this on?’ he asked—knowing full well that she would probably be saying the exact opposite at breakfast time. Suddenly the cruel knowledge that she had kept pushed to the back of her mind all evening came rushing back at her, and she could think of nothing else. She wanted to tell him: ‘Mavis, poor old defenceless Mavis is going to die because she had a second baby: and even if she lives will she be any better off? A child is just one more person to agonize over.’ But she said nothing. It was not fair to infect others with your own fear and distress. At any rate, Brownie was asleep, and she put her head against his outspread hand and went to sleep too.
It was about midnight one night late in September that Lola was awakened by movement in the next room, and then a shaky giggle from Mavis. Lola sat bolt upright in bed and shook Brownie.
‘This is it,’ she said.
Brownie muttered something incoherent, but Lola was already out of bed and pulling on clothes. Going into the kitchen she found Mavis and Lyle.
‘Here we go again,’ said Mavis.
‘Well, let’s get going for God’s sake,’ said Lyle.
Mavis laughed.
‘That pain’s gone,’ she said. ‘The next one won’t come for a while. There’s plenty of time. I’m going to have some tea.’
Lola had already blown up the fire still in the stove and put on the kettle. Brownie came out and they drank tea together and made all the usual jokes that people use when they’re frightened, but not too frightened; and every time Mavis flinched with pain Lyle besought her, ‘Don’t drop it here, Mave, whatever you do. I’d go off with the shock.’
He was the picture of a distraught young father as he sat on the traditional suit-case and steadied his teacup in both hands.
‘I hate to leave,’ said Mavis. ‘We’re having such a good time.’
Lola looked round the ring of light that the lamp drew around them all, and at the shadows waiting for them in every corner, and she said like a hostess: