‘Get your frigging hand off me.’
Mrs. Hansen gasped and stepped back. Bert rose from his chair.
‘You’ll respect your mother, boy,’ he said.
‘That’s right,’ cried Brownie, in a terrible parody of Bert’s portentousness. ‘Never mind love, I can do what I like, but I’ll see everyone else respects you.’ He laughed. ‘Good old Bert, seeing that everyone does the right thing by the poor weak woman. It’s just like the pictures.’
Bert’s fist caught him straight in the mouth.
‘That’s right, Bert, belt him,’ said the woman.
When it was over Bert said:
‘Now get up to the wood heap and cut the morning wood.’
And while Brownie was chopping the wood and crying with rage his mother came to him and said:
‘It’s for your own good, Brownie. You’re growing up real bad like your father. A boy needs a man to keep him in order.’
‘Get away from me,’ said Brownie.
‘You wouldn’t love me, Brownie,’ she said, ‘if I let you get away with that. You wouldn’t have no respect for me.’
‘Will you get away from me?’ said Brownie.
‘I’m not going to let you grow up all anyhow, Brownie,’ she persisted. ‘If you won’t do the right thing you’ve got to be made to.’
‘Just get away from me,’ said Brownie.
Mrs. Hansen went back to Bert. Her passion for self-justification and violence was aroused and she was really away.
‘You’ll have to go up to him again, Bert,’ she said. ‘He’s behaving like a mad thing.’
‘We’ll see about that,’ said Bert, and he tightened his belt and took out his false teeth and wended his way to the wood heap.
‘Look here, young Hansen,’ he said. ‘You’re going just the way of your old man, the bloody mongrel, and I’m not going to let you—your mother had to take enough off of him.’
Bert did not see fit to mention that he himself had once taken a beating from him that was still the talk of Cloncurry.
‘Get away,’ said Brownie.
‘I’m going to get an apology from you first.’
Brownie goaded to madness threw the axe at him.
Then the fight raged, watched by Mrs. Hansen from her kitchen window and several neighbours collected in the street.
While he fought Bert realized that his days of flogging Goran Hansen’s son were almost over. This time Brownie was almost too much for him. So he fought as never before and each blow and kick he drove home he savoured to the full.
‘Mark the good-looking bastard for life.’
All Bert’s hatred of the young and beautiful and easy to love went into the blow that broke Brownie’s nose, and at last, when Brownie lay half-conscious on the ground, he knelt over him, crazed with joy, and asked: ‘Will you apologize now?’
Brownie shook his head and Bert raised his fist again. Mrs. Hansen, conscious of murmuring among the watching neighbours, hurried out and caught his hand.
‘He’s had enough, Bert,’ she said.
Brownie sat up and his mother went forward to help him, but he pushed her aside and with the help of a tree trunk dragged himself to his feet. His mother took his arm.
‘Forget about it now, Brownie,’ she said. ‘Shake hands and make up.’
Brownie shrugged his arm free. She turned to the neighbours and said, ‘I don’t know why you can’t all get home and mind your own business.’
She held her head high and spoke intrepidly, but she knew that she had failed the only test she really feared—the awful, the merciless trial by neighbours’ opinion. Brownie staggered into the house. She followed him and said: ‘You’d better let me get you cleaned up, Brownie.’ Her son said nothing. He went into his room and locked the door and all night he lay with the blood caking on his body and every limb and muscle hardening into pain. Several times they knocked on his door and he answered:
‘Get away, just get away from me for ever.’
Lola heard the story the next day. The Ryans lived next door to the Hansens and the little Ryan girls came to school full of it. Bert Prince had battered Brownie unconscious and Mrs. Hansen had stood by and encouraged him. It lost nothing in the telling. Lola waited for Brownie at their usual place on the river bank that evening, but he did not come. She waited till it was quite dark and then she made up her mind what she must do and hurried back to the hotel.
‘Mother,’ she asked, ‘may I go to the pictures with Hazel Ryan?’
Her mother said yes, she always did, and Lola set off back again towards Alton Street and the Ryans’ house. But she did not go into the Ryans’.
She wrigged quickly between the broken pickets that formed the Hansen’s back fence and climbed into the Moreton Bay fig tree that grew higher than the house. She climbed as high as she could and then settled down, hidden by the branches, to watch till all the lights went out. ‘I’ll give them about half an hour after that,’ she thought, ‘and then I’ll get in through Brownie’s window.’
She had not so long to wait. She was hardly settled before Mrs. Hansen and Bert came out and set off towards town. Lola slid out of the trees and ran. No creeping in through Brownie’s window. She swept straight in through the kitchen door demanding:
‘Brownie, why did you stand me up?’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Looking for you—you great big, ugly old stand-up merchant.’ She sat down on the bed and put her arms around him.
‘I heard all about it, Brownie,’ she said, ‘and Hazel Ryan said you gave him plenty to go on with. So now why did you leave me waiting on that damned old river bank?’
Brownie looked at the floor between his feet.
‘I didn’t want you to see my face,’ he said.
‘Ah, so that’s it. I thought that would be the trouble. That’s why I’m so angry with you. Gee, I’ll give you a flogging when I get my strength up.’
But Brownie did not laugh. He just sat staring at the floor.
‘Oh, come off it, Brownie. If you’re in trouble you’ve got to come to me. We made a bargain.’
‘Look,’ said Brownie, ‘I’ve had to ride around town all day delivering blasted telegrams with everyone peering on my face. I’ve felt like the Phantom of the bloody Opera, I couldn’t bear you to see it. Look, Lola, Mum won’t even let me go to the doctor. She says it’s nothing and I should put hot compresses on it, but she’s only frightened of the Welfare. She doesn’t want a doctor to see it in case he says something. But I met Paddy Murphy, you know the “useful” at your pub, and he had a look at it and he says it’s broken all right. Not the bone but the Septum.’
‘What’s that?’ Lola looked, dubiously, at the poor swollen nose.
‘It’s the flesh at the end of the nose.’
‘Well that’s not as bad as the bone,’ comforted Lola.
‘It’s bad enough. Anyway I wouldn’t expect any girl to stick to me if I had a nose like Paddy Murphy.’
Lola began to laugh.
‘Let’s not lose our sense of humour,’ she said. ‘Paddy’s nose has been broken dozens of times by some of the hardest punchers in the world. Bert isn’t that good.’
‘He gave me a hell of a hiding,’ said Brownie.
Lola stood up and cradled the boy’s battered head against her breast. Her eyes, always slightly tilted, were now narrow slits and elongated with rage but she spoke softly, almost dreamily, and she ran her hands very gently through the brown curls.
‘Your hair is still beautiful as ever,’ she said, and then, as though the prowess of Bert Prince was only worthy of discussion as an afterthought:
‘He’s got a shiner himself, and in a couple of years, Brownie, we’ll meet up with him, and by that time you’ll be full grown, and then nothing will save him; between us we’ll kill him.’ She turned his head up towards her and kissed him hard on the mouth.
‘I don’t care if I hurt you,’ she said, taking his face between her hands. ‘Oh, Brownie, I love you. I wouldn’t care if he’d turned your face right round. I want you because you gave the big bastard a good run for his money, and in a couple of years you’ll be able to eat him.’ And then she was lying on the bed and Brownie was weeping with his head against her breast and then her mouth found his.
Quickly it flowed into her body driving away his hurt. A soft warm wave—the healing and rebirth of love and possession.
And in that moment Lola conceived his son.
She went back to the hotel, told her mother the pictures had been wonderful, went to bed and slept dreamlessly, worn out and happy with the satisfying work of re-creating a man—and then in the morning as she awoke panic hit her in an icy wave, for she and Brownie had been careless. Previously Brownie had always been as careful of her as he knew how. He had gained what knowledge of contraception he had from a school friend, Harry Gwynn, another big, overgrown boy, a little older than Brownie, who had been having a very satisfactory affair for some years with a nymphomaniacal school-teacher who had seduced him when he was thirteen. Brownie had left school the day he was fifteen and was now a telegraph boy, with a certain amount of money to spend as he liked each week; so, under Harry’s direction, he had spent some of it in buying a supply of one of the more old-fashioned soluble pessaries. When supplies and money ran out simultaneously, Harry stole some for him while at night school, as he put it. It is possible that Lola would not have escaped pregnancy very long with only such primitive protection, but they are better than nothing, and on that night neither she nor Brownie had remembered them.
At the end of two weeks of agonised waiting she knew that she was pregnant. Then, suddenly, she did not care any more.
‘I’ll give it another month to make sure,’ she told herself, for she was still young enough and hopeful enough to believe all those old chestnuts about colds, shocks, upsets, etc. ‘And then I’ll tell him.’
Lola and Brownie sat looking at the river.
‘Do you want to get rid of it?’ asked Brownie.
‘Good grief, no,’ Lola cried out in alarm, ‘that would be a terrible mortal sin.’
Brownie said no more. He was very careful of people’s religious susceptibilities, particularly Catholics who seemed to get up in arms over the strangest things—besides, he had not really wanted to get rid of it himself. One thing must be said for our adolescents; they have a good old-fashioned human horror of abortion. In a land where the woman with a large family is considered somewhat of a fool (if not downright indecent), and yet to terminate a pregnancy is so utterly illegal, it is only to be expected that from earliest childhood they have heard whispers of home surgery with details so horrible that they would raise a shudder in the Emperor Nero himself.
So now Brownie said, suddenly feeling master of the situation:
‘O.K., we’ll have to go away.’
‘Have you saved anything?’ asked Lola.
‘Not much, and Mum keeps my bank book, but I can get some off Jimmy Lim.’
Jimmy Lim was an old Chinese who had a market garden on the outskirts of the town. Brownie had spent a lot of time sitting with the fowls in Jimmy’s indescribable kitchen—eating candied ginger and listening to stories that were as good as the Voyages of Marco Polo—and his school mates, out of deference to this eccentricity, refrained from robbing Jimmy’s trees. Jimmy rose to the occasion. He dug up the ground in front of his fireplace and gave Brownie twenty-five pounds. Harry Gwynn also came forward with a little going-away present; the wedding-ring that his teacher love always used when she went down to Brisbane with the bank manager. Harry had removed it from the top drawer of her dressing-table, which he knew his way around, by long practice, as well as he knew his way round Bundaberg. Then he had kissed her good night and gone home. He presented it to Brownie with a flourish next morning.
‘You shouldn’t steal off her,’ said Brownie.
Harry waved his objection aside. ‘Go on, take it,’ he said. ‘She’s only a bag when all is said and done.’
Harry was a bit of a moralist in his own way.
Brownie pocketed the ring with a look of unwilling admiration. ‘You bludger,’ he told his friend.
He and Lola set off the next day. Brownie left a note which merely said:
‘Dear Mum, I’ve gone away. Please do not worry and do not set the police after me. I’ve got money and I’ll be all right. I’ll write soon, Brownie.’
But Lola, romantically read, must go writing in more traditional vein.
‘Dear Mother,’ said her note, ‘I am going to have a baby. I am going anywhere I will not be a humiliation to you. I am well looked after, etc., etc.’ Lola enjoyed writing that note.
‘Someone loves me and wants to look after me.’ She wished she could shout it in the street.
The two mothers arrived at the police station within seconds of each other, and when they met and saw that they were both clutching a note, both notes written on pages torn from the same exercise book, all was made clear as the saying goes, and both ladies fell to—Mrs. Hansen grim and righteous and Mrs. Lovell hysterical. Each blamed the other’s child. Mrs. Hansen called Lola a dirty little half-bred, over-sexed slut, no better than the bloody blacks and cunning as a shit-house rat. Mrs. Lovell said that Brownie was a great big over-sexed Norwegian.
‘My God, how I hate Norwegians,’ she screamed. She did, too. Their guiltless attitude towards sex had always infuriated her. Mrs. Hansen said:
‘Don’t you speak about my boy like that!’
And Mrs. Lovell shrieked:
‘You should care. You’re the talk of Bundaberg. You let your customers beat up your precious boy. I wish they’d killed him,’ she added illogically.
Then was Mrs. Hansen indeed infuriated because she had given Bert his marching orders more than a month ago.
‘Bert,’ she had said, ‘you’ll have to go—people are talking.’
Bert knew that in a small town there is no arguing with this most powerful of all reasons. So he went, and Mrs. Hansen had not taken long to persuade herself that she was the most devoted of mothers who had broken off the romance of a lifetime for the sake of her children—and here was this bitch yelling about customers. It is possible that Mrs. Lovell would, within a few minutes, have had the supreme pleasure of charging Mrs. Hansen with assault had the police not intervened and brought them back to the business of the missing children’s description, etc.
On the train bound for Brisbane Lola kept twirling the ring on her finger.