Read Online The Delinquents by Criena Rohan - Free Book Online Page B

face and pushed her hair under the stocking cap. Sitting in the back of the taxi, trying to look like another deck boy, she drove through the wharf gates.
    Once on the ship Brownie had to light a kerosene lantern to take her forward, for without coal the ship was without electricity. She lay a lifeless thing, cold, her woodwork and bulkheads damp to the touch, but Lola went below joyfully.
    ‘Brownie,’ she said, ‘this is wonderful.’ She looked around the lantern-lit cabin and sat down on the bottom bunk.
    ‘Isn’t it silent,’ she said, ‘right down here? I feel like we are at the bottom of a well, walled away from everything. At last I feel like nothing can harm us.’
    Brownie sat beside her and put his arms around her.
    ‘I’d like to wall you away from everything,’ he said, ‘and love you and love you hard for a hundred years.’
    As events fell out Lola did not have to slip ashore early in the morning, for both she and Brownie overslept and they woke to find the bosun standing over them. He called Brownie outside and said:
    ‘You know what the Union says about women on board. Did you both pass out with the grog or something?’
    Brownie, shivering in his jeans and rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, knew that the bosun was trying to provide him with a loophole, but somehow he could not take it.
    ‘No,’ he said, ‘that’s my girl. The one the police took away from me. I just found her again last night.’
    ‘She looks like she’s come a long way from the old home town,’ said the bosun.
    ‘I suppose so.’
    ‘Where did you pick her up again?’
    ‘What’s it to you?’
    ‘O.K. O.K. Just be careful she doesn’t give you a dose or something.’
    ‘She’s not like that.’
    ‘Of course not,’ the bosun hastened to agree; he could not forbear to add, however, that it was a well-known fact that the worst dose of all was the dose you got from a virgin.
    ‘She’s been very sick with ’flu,’ said Brownie, ‘and she hasn’t any money.’
    ‘No job of course?’
    ‘No job.’
    Outside the Melbourne rain rattled on the deck.
    ‘I wouldn’t put a dog out in this,’ said the bosun. ‘You’d better put her in my cabin; it’s supposed to be locked.’ He handed Brownie the key.
    ‘Mind you, if you’re caught, I know nothing about it at all. Only for a couple of days it is, till you find her somewhere else and she gets a chance to pull round.’
    Lola stayed in the bosun’s cabin a fortnight, for the ’flu, half arrested by insufficient penicillin, and encouraged by cold and sherry and intensive love-making, returned in virulent strength, and for a week she scarcely left her bunk. For the first couple of days she was very feverish: she lay shivering and sneezing while Brownie and the bosun ran her relays of hot tea and Aspros, lemon drinks and hot rum and lemon—this last was a sovereign cure of the bosun’s dear old mother back in Limehouse, and they poured it into Lola till she was in danger of D.T.’s, a side effect of the cure that had never distressed the bosun’s dear old mother.
    ‘You really shouldn’t be sleeping with her,’ he said on the third day when he had taken her temperature with the thermometer burgled from the second mate’s cabin.
    ‘Are you going all moral on us?’ asked Lola.
    She was sitting up clad in a black satin slip and a ship’s blanket, and the general effect was both cheerful and cheeky despite the temperature. ‘Get your lunch into you and give less slack,’ said the bosun.
    He had gone ashore to personally supervise the cutting of the chicken sandwiches she said she wanted, and now he stood watching her eat, his face (and it was a grim old face even as bosuns go) wreathed in a look of imbecile doting.
    Lola reached out and patted his hand.
    ‘Gee, you’re good to me,’ she said.
    ‘Why shouldn’t I sleep with her,’ said Brownie brusquely. He was finding the bosun, in his role of kindly old guide, confidant, philosopher and friend, a