The Delinquents by Criena Rohan Page B

and Brownie became aware that she had developed a certain head-turning quality—whether it was the long-legged, stilt-heeled walk, or the upthrusting breasts, or the sluttish-looking mop of hair, or a combination of all these, he did not know, but he began to feel great pride in his rakish-looking little love as she sat there drinking her coffee and smoking a cigarette. He reached out across the clutter of cups and plates and took her hand between his:
    ‘Have you got somewhere to take me, honey?’ he asked. She laughed and patted his cheek.
    ‘Naturally, Brownie,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to come courting. We settled all that under the frangipani trees on the banks of the Burnett River, remember?’
    She stood up, put the strap of her bag over her shoulder, turned the collar of her coat up around her face, and put her hands deep in the pockets.
    ‘Follow me, sailor!’ she said.
    Her room was at the top of a house in a terrace in a back street in St. Kilda, and it was the room that Brownie might have expected—small and mean, with damp on the walls and clothes on the floor and the bed unmade. Lola closed the door and leaned against it, facing him, and he saw now that there were tears in her eyes.
    ‘Oh, Brownie,’ she said, ‘I know it’s terrible and I know I look dreadful, but I’ve been so sick, and maybe I haven’t always done the right thing; but, Brownie, I loved you, I loved you all the time.’
    Brownie looked at her, at the thinness of her face and the hollows around her neck, at the streaky blonde hair and the nicotine stains on her fingers.
    ‘God!’ he thought, ‘she looks as though she’s been starving.’
    ‘Brownie, say you still want me. For God’s sake say you still want me.’
    ‘I still want you,’ he said. ‘I want you and love you more than I ever did before in all my life.’
    It was midnight. Lola and Brownie had been down the street to buy hamburgers and coke at the all-night hamburger bar at the Junction and now they were back warm and contented in bed. Lola munched her hamburger, curled up in Brownie’s arm, her head resting on his shoulder.
    ‘Wouldn’t it be good,’ she said, ‘to be a cat and just spend your life eating and sleeping and making love?’
    ‘Some cats find the alleys a bit cold at times,’ said Brownie.
    ‘I believe you, Brownie. Believe me boy, I believe you.’
    ‘Darling, where were you working?’
    ‘Well really I’m not working anywhere just now.’
    ‘What work do you do, darling?’
    ‘Last job I was a waitress. I was in a big place in Collins Street but I got two days notice when the ’flu was coming on me. “You look bad,” the Manageress said. I could see she didn’t want to give me sick pay so she was giving me orders to balls me up all day and then in the end she said I was insolent.’
    ‘Were you?’ he laughed in the darkness and tightened his arms around her body.
    ‘Of course I was.’ She laughed too. ‘So in the end she told me “take two days notice”, and I said “pay me off now, I’ll be too sick to work in your lousy drum by tomorrow”.’
    ‘How long ago was that, love?’
    ‘Two weeks ago—yesterday was the first day I was up and then I only went out for some rolls and butter and that, and I felt so sick I went back to bed again.’
    ‘Who looked after you—got your meals and that?’
    ‘Teddy Langley used to give me tea and toast in the mornings, and sometimes, nearly every night, Kath would bring me a pie, or fish and chips or something, and she’d heat them on Teddy Langley’s gas ring. A few times, though, she went off with some guy or got so rotten she couldn’t come.’ Lola laughed. ‘Once she brought a soldier up here and we had crayfish and beer and all, and the beer sent me to sleep, and when I woke up Kath and the soldier were both in with me, both naked as the day they were born, and the soldier started to go the grope on me, so I woke Kath and said “Do your own dirty