Free The Delinquents by Criena Rohan

bit much.
    ‘Good grief, the girl’s got a temperature of 101, it hasn’t gone down for days.’ The bosun’s voice was one long cadence of righteous indignation. ‘It’s no time for love-making. You could give her pneumonia.’
    ‘Is that all?’ said Lola. ‘I thought you were going to say “you could give her a baby!” ’
    ‘There is that too,’ said the bosun, ‘but that’s his blue. Now I’m going to the galley to get your coffee, and I want to see every bit of your lunch gone when I come back.’
    ‘What a fatherly old soul he turned out to be,’ said Brownie. ‘I’m impressed. “You shouldn’t really be sleeping with her”,’ he mocked the bosun’s tone of concern. ‘AAAAH—he’d be up you like a rat up a drain-pipe, given the chance.’
    Lola laughed and blew him a kiss.
    ‘Don’t blow kisses with your mouth full of chicken sandwich.’
    ‘Come on, Brownie darling, be gruntled.’
    Brownie grinned, but he stuck to his point. He would watch the bosun, he said, and while he was on the subject would Lola please don a jumper or the duffle jacket over the black satin slip next time that she had her temperature taken. ‘That dockside waif act,’ he said, ‘might be very romantic to shore types, but it only meant the one thing where sailors were concerned.’
    The next morning her temperature was almost normal and the bosun decided she could get up for a while, provided she was wrapped up warm.
    A ship docked in Melbourne in winter is not the ideal place for a convalescent, and when, added to the damp and emptiness, there is the fact that there is neither light nor heating for the length and breadth of the ship, it is surprising that Lola did not go down with the pneumonia that the bosun predicted. But she was too happy to be ill. Her day began at about ten in the morning. Before that she was locked securely in the cabin for the mate came down early to give Brownie and the bosun detail for the day. The mate out of the way, she would appear wearing jeans and a couple of Brownie’s jumpers for warmth, full makeup, the gold cartwheel earrings and the hair pulled on the top of the head. Then she would prepare morning smoko. She liked the galley where the primus stove provided to heat Brownie’s food made the atmosphere pleasantly oppressive and warm as the day went on. She would sit there for hours, frying the sausages and tomatoes or heating the fish and chips or sometimes trying a little adventurous cooking. Her masterpiece was caramel, made by boiling a tin of condensed milk till the contents were yellow and syrupy. She and Brownie loved it. The bosun was twenty years older and not so keen. She darned all their socks and read several books in the ship’s library. It puzzled her a little that seamen, with all the wonders of the world just a voyage away, in a manner of speaking, should take such an interest in the impossible marvels of the more lurid type of historical fiction—what Brownie called ‘lusty busties’.
    ‘Wouldn’t you think they would read Joseph Conrad?’ said Lola innocently. She had just discovered Conrad, and had decided he was her favourite author.
    ‘Who’s he?’ asked Brownie.
    Lola explained. Brownie snorted. He said that if Joseph Conrad was a sailor he should have known better than to go writing about the sea—and who wanted to read about the sea anyway.
    ‘I do,’ said Lola.
    ‘You’re an idiot,’ said Brownie with affection.
    Her favourite time was in the evening when the deserted docks were silent and the bosun had gone ashore, and she and Brownie sat with the primus brewing up endless cups of coffee, while they talked about what they were going to do, and how they were never going to be parted again, and all the adventures that would befall them when Brownie was captain of his own trading schooner. Sometimes they were invited by a couple of Brownie’s deck-boy friends, and then he was very proud. These boys had girl friends, but he was the only one