The Delinquents
dropped from sight for most of us, but it keeps resurfacing. A new edition was published in 1986, just as film development was underway, and the following year David Bowie observed that the novel would make a good movie. That film might have pushed Lola and Brownie back into public consciousness in a lasting way, but it wasn’t to be.
It was no failure domestically, grossing $3 million—a figure most current Australian productions can only dream of—but other films came along and we talked about them more, and for longer. Ben Mendelsohn, who would have made a brilliant Brownie, was apparently let go in the hope that an American lead would open up the American market. The role went to Charlie Schlatter, but the film was never released in the US. It’s Lola and Brownie’s story writ large—high hopes, big dreams, battlers against the tide.
Lola and Brownie and their world are too real and too compelling for us to relinquish. Every place and time needs stories of its outsiders, its rule breakers, people the establishment contrives to civilise or crush. It’s the business of novelists to give these people a voice and, in
The Delinquents
, Criena Rohan’s writing does that now as well as it ever did.
The Delinquents
Every character in this book is entirely
fictitious and no reference whatever is
intended to any living person.
One morning when Brownie was sixteen he put a pound (his only pound) in his money belt, kissed his mother goodbye and went off to sea. On the tram into the city he had to crack the pound to pay his fare. He went aboard the
Dalton
at eight o’clock and she sailed straight away. He was disappointed to learn that they were bound for Sydney; he had hoped for Rio de Janeiro, or at least San Francisco, and he was sea-sick as soon as they got outside Moreton Bay. Nevertheless he was happy—he was learning to be a sailor, he had got away from his mother, he was off on his search to find Lola. The sea-sickness would soon pass; the bosun assured him so.
‘Work it off, that’s the best thing,’ he said.
So Brownie spent the day cleaning out the scuppers and thinking about Lola.
‘Perhaps she’ll be in Sydney anyway,’ he told himself.
He had looked for her all over Brisbane, but he had not seen her since the day, twelve months before, when he had stood between two detectives on the Maryborough Station and watched her through the train window. She had stopped crying but there were tears on her cheeks, and she looked straight ahead ignoring the policewoman who sat beside her.
When the detectives had taken him back to Bundaberg his mother wept all over him and said she forgave him. The senior detective had talked to him and said he was a lucky boy to have such a good home and understanding mother. The next morning he had gone around to the hotel where Lola and her mother lived, but he was told they had left town. Only Paddy Murphy, the useful, had taken pity on him.
‘Lola will be all right,’ he said. ‘Her mother’s taking her to Brisbane to get rid of the kid.’
Brownie walked away and a little later found he was leaning against a wall weeping tears of anger and fear—anger because Lola had not wanted to get rid of the baby, fear because he knew nothing of abortion; it was just something deadly dangerous, something to be spoken of with hushed breath. Dozens of women died that way and that was all he knew.
‘We’ll be happy,’ Lola had said. ‘We’ll get a wedding-ring and anyone would take you for old enough to be married, you’re nearly six feet tall.’
That seemed a long time ago. Since the detectives and the policewoman had caught up with them on the Maryborough Station he had not been happy at all. Sometimes it had surprised him that a human being could exist in such bleak and uncompromising misery, and then, suddenly, ancestral memory showed him his means of escape, the refuge of generations of Hansen men—he would go to sea. From then on he became impervious to his mother. He would sit listening to her endless counsel and warnings without a word of argument, his mind busy with some cloudlike future in which he would find Lola and they would be together always. He would be captain of his own ship. That part of the dream never varied. Lola’s role demanded more versatility. Sometimes she was a weeping bride being forced into a wealthy marriage by her mother. He would bear her away from the altar steps. Sometimes she was a rich widow who had never found love in her marriage: ‘I never forgot you, Brownie…’ Sometimes (and this was his favourite dream) she was in direst distress and poverty. He would arrive just in time to prevent some awful tragedy. But when he came back to real-life thinking he knew that he could not wait till he was Captain Hansen. He must find her quickly.
‘Perhaps she’ll be here in Sydney,’ he thought as they sailed past North Head. ‘She always said she wanted to see Sydney.’ But he did not find her.
There is no sadder business than wandering around a strange town looking for a lost love, telling yourself, ‘Perhaps she will be at this corner; perhaps when I turn into that street I’ll find her. Perhaps she will be eating in this café. Perhaps she went past in that taxi.’
Going into shops and telling your pitiful lies.
‘I’m looking for a girl who used to live in this street.’ (For some streets exercised a terrible compulsion on him: ‘She lives here,’ they would cry. ‘Ask for her here or you will never find her again.’) ‘I forget what number she lived at, but her name is Lola Lovell. She has long black hair and a scar on her right wrist.’
Then the shopkeeper shakes her head.
‘No one like that round here, I’m afraid. Of course, I don’t take notice of everyone who comes in. Just know the regulars.’
Sometimes they became suspicious of a boy in a leather jacket and blue jeans, and asked:
‘Why don’t you go to the police?’
The first time Brownie was asked that question he went out into the streets and laughed.
He became moody and had his backside kicked for it several times, for moodiness is not encouraged in deck boys. He bought the leather jacket in Sydney and the jackknife in Melbourne, and always wore them when he went ashore. Big Emil the Norske said he had the makings of a good seaman. He kept so quiet when they spoke of women that his shipmates decided that he must be a virgin, loath to reveal his ignorance. Virginity is fraught with dangers aboard ship, so the first night back in Brisbane they decided to buy him a woman. He remembered drinking in a round of hotels, and in some lounge or other they collected the woman—a real old sailor’s sweetheart dating from the time of Lord Nelson. They put her into a taxi with Brownie and packed them off.
‘Don’t let him get away,’ they said.
He was too drunk to care very much, and once alone with the woman it was a case of
noblesse oblige—
after all his mates had paid her. When he awoke sober and saw her in the daylight he rose and dressed and went back to the ship without waking her. She slept on in the tumbled bed, her face blotchy and obscene against the pillows.
Coming along the dock in the cleanness of the dawn, Brownie prayed: ‘Oh God, if You are there and if You are listening, please let me find her soon, and let her be happy. Wherever she is, let her be happy.’
The following night he went home to see his mother. She greeted him tearfully, for she had read the Shipping News the previous night and knew that the
Dalton
had been in port for more than twenty-four hours. Where had Brownie been the night before?
‘I was gearman,’ said Brownie, falling back on a great old sailor’s standby.
He further covered himself by saying that there was no phone connected to the ship, and he thought he would have to work the next night. ‘I never seem to see much of my children,’ said Mrs. Hansen. ‘I’ve done nothing except stay at home and bawl my eyes out since you went away, Brownie.’
‘I missed you too,’ said Brownie, who was the soul of politeness. Actually he wished he had missed her. It would have seemed more normal. He wished he even cared enough about her to want to hurt her. To want to point out that as soon as she found a man to bear her company she would weep no more for her children. It was with something like pain that he realized that he felt nothing with regard to his mother, except a desire to withdraw from her as much as possible.
‘Of course your sisters should not have gone off to Cairns like that,’ said Mrs. Hansen. ‘I’m deeply hurt. They know my health is not the best.’
Brownie’s sisters, Nita and Kristine, were always leaving home. They were, respectively, seven and six years older than Brownie, and they were good, sensible and kind-hearted girls, well able to take care of themselves. What they thought of their mother Brownie did not know. They never discussed it with him. They would suddenly announce that they could not live their own lives home with their mother—then they would go. The first time it happened was in Bundaberg. Nita and Kristine had come down to Brisbane. That was in the time of Bert Price. Bert Price was the lodger (Mrs. Hansen always had lodgers, never lovers). He was short, squat and semi-illiterate, and wore horn-rimmed glasses and an apparently irremovable felt hat. He was a cockroach exterminator, which is not a romantic trade in the North—and he hated Brownie. The girls were working and old enough to leave. Brownie found the situation unbearable, but he was not quite thirteen, so he stayed at home and took to reading cowboy novels and the
Arabian Nights
. Mrs. Hansen blamed this sudden interest in literature for his increasing stupidity at school. He had been a very clever little child. Now study seemed beyond him.
‘It’s all this damned reading,’ his mother would say again and again. ‘My God, if I’d had your chances to be educated I shouldn’t have wasted them. Look at your cousin Ted in the permanent public service. Do you think he wasted his time reading? No, he improved himself. Now he’ll never be out of a job as long as he lives. Why don’t you do some grammar? Haven’t you got arithmetic to learn? What about geography?’ She would look scornfully at the Fitzgerald translation. ‘What good will that rubbish do you?’
The only alternative to reading seemed to be to get out of the house as much as possible. His mother said he was running wild and would end up like his father, and Bert took it upon himself to perform such fatherly duties as thrashings, etc. Brownie was a big boy. At thirteen he was five feet, and taller than Bert, and he fought him with all the strength of his unset limbs; but thirteen against a heavily muscled forty is not a fair match.
Now every woman who permits her lover to beat her husband’s children sacrifices them to sexual expediency. The children know this, and they never forgive her. The woman knows this also—therefore, because we must all try to live with ourselves when all is said and done, she tries to rationalize. So it was with Mrs. Hansen.
‘He done it for your own good, Brownie,’ she said. ‘You need a father’s discipline.’
Brownie turned away. He did not trust himself to speak. He could have cried with hatred and loneliness. Then one night he met Lola. Bert was away somewhere in the country, ridding some cane-farmer’s house of vermin. Mrs. Hansen was in bed. Brownie climbed out of his bedroom window and went off into the frangipani-scented night. He intended walking down to the river to look at the ships, and when he was passing Harris’s she spoke to him.
‘Hullo, Brownie.’ She was standing under Harris’s oleander tree, pinning one of its flowers into her hair.
‘Hullo,’ he said.
He had seen her before. She went to the Convent on Bourbon Street, and the other children called her the Creamy. She had come from Singapore with her mother early in ’42. That was a long time ago now, but there was still an odd sing-song lilt in her voice.
‘You’re Lola aren’t you?’ he asked, pretending that he knew nothing about her—that he had scarcely noticed her before.
‘Of course I’m Lola.’
‘Does your mother know you’re out?’
‘Does yours?’
‘No,’ he admitted.
‘Neither does mine,’ she climbed over the fence and stood on the pavement, facing him, ‘but gee, Brownie, I get so bored.’
‘So do I.’
Her eyes widened with surprise.
‘Why do you get bored? You’ve got all your own house. We’ve only got a tiny little room at the hotel.’
‘I know,’ Brownie tried to explain, ‘but Mum makes me go to bed early because she believes in getting up early, and if I read in bed she says it’s bad for the eyes and a waste of kerosene.’
‘So you nicked out, eh? O.K., so I nicked out too.’ Brownie laughed.
‘You’re a funny girl,’ he said. ‘Where is your mother?’
Lola made a vague gesture.
‘Gone to a party with some Yankees off the ship down at Port Alma. I don’t know where the party is.’
Brownie nodded. He knew about Yankees. Before Bert Price there had been an airman, and before the airman, the Yank. That was in the days of the war. Brownie began to feel the first glimmerings of the fellow feeling that makes us wondrous kind.
‘I’d better look after you,’ he said. ‘Where were you going?’
‘Down to the river to look at the ships,’ she said. ‘But now I’m out I’m a little frightened. You take me, then I won’t be scared. Don’t you get scared out by yourself at night, Brownie?’
‘Of course not,’ said Brownie.
Afterwards he kept remembering things she had said as they sat on the river bank.
‘Where I come from the stars are bigger than they are here, and so close, Brownie, you feel as though you could touch them with your hand.’ She put up a hand in illustration and he had thought, ‘Her bones are so small and gentle. Her wrists look as though I could break them with one hand,’ and he wanted to put his hands under the heavy mass of her hair and lift it away from the thinness of her neck.
‘My name,’ she said, ‘is really Lotus. My father calls me Lotus because it is the flower of faithfulness in the East. But mother always calls me Lola. She says it is enough to have Eastern blood without an Eastern name. Oh Lord, I shouldn’t have told that. Promise you won’t tell anyone. Mother says that here in Australia no one would ever guess.’ Brownie promised. She leaned towards him so he could smell the sweetness of the oleander flower behind her ear. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘we have a secret.’