The Delinquents Read Online Free Page B

there was nothing—just a vacuum devoid of love, truth or happiness.
    ‘I’d be frightened I wouldn’t like a Sheila any more after I’d done that,’ he had once said to a more experienced friend who was boasting. But it had not been like that at all. He was already so far gone in revolt against his mother, and Lola was such a polar type to that loud-voiced, fair-skinned, big-framed woman that Lola could do no wrong. Her every word, action and look was a source of beauty and joy to him. He found he was walking around half dazed with the remembrance of the gentleness of her love-making, the fragility of her bones and the darkness of her eyes in the shadows beneath the trees. There was no room in his heart for any feeling of disgust or disgrace.
    ‘She is beautiful,’ the voice within him cried. ‘She is beautiful and she is good.’
    It happened about the time when Bert Prince was at his most obnoxious that Brownie took Lola riding on his bike one evening. He would put her up on the crosspiece and thus they would go for miles, while her mother thought she was with one of her school friends, being helped with her mathematics homework. Well, on this occasion the night was so warm and still that they stayed out much longer than they had planned. Brownie took the precaution of stopping round the corner from home and letting down the back tyre, but even this was not a good enough excuse for his mother, who had been picturing his body caught in a snag in the river for the last hour or more. She fell upon him as soon as he got in the door and administered two heavy slaps across the head, and Brownie, who always felt his body purified by Lola’s love-making said:
    ‘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