The Delinquents by Criena Rohan

Author:Criena Rohan [Rohan, Criena]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: CLASSIC FICTION
ISBN: 9781925095142
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2014-11-18T16:00:00+00:00

Once in town she realized that she was in big trouble. She had a broken wrist, very little money, and nowhere to go. She thought of her mother, but the Welfare would look for her there; besides, she felt she could not run the risk of finding her mother drunk. Tomorrow she would not be able to go back to her job because she would be looked for there. She was even afraid to leave her suit-case at the railway station—policewomen love railway stations—so finally she hid it in an empty house that was falling to pieces up on Gregory Terrace. Then she went in search of Dawn.

Dawn was not to be found, so Lola spent the night crouching beside her case in the empty house, and in the morning she went out to wander around town, feeling feverish and lightheaded with the pain in her wrist and also, though she did not know it, a stiff dose of pleurisy that gave her a pain like a red-hot knife in her left side. She found Dawn that morning by the painstaking method of tracking her from address to address. Dawn had been at four places in nine months and when Lola found her she was still in bed.

‘Come in, kid, come in,’ she invited, no whit embarrassed by the National Service Trainee customer who still slumbered beside her. He was covered in adolescent acne and smelled to high heaven of port wine. He must have been eighteen to be doing his Nasho’s, but he certainly did not look it.

Dawn was all geniality as she hopped out of bed and Lola saw that she had become immense. She pulled a dressing-gown on over her naked body and Lola was surprised to see that she was glistening with sweat.

‘Is it hot?’ Lola asked, in a voice that sounded to herself to be coming from under layers and layers of cotton wool. ‘Gee, I feel as cold as can be.’

Dawn gave a wrench at the top of the dressing-gown to see if she could prevent it from gaping too widely across the bloated obscenity of her breasts, decided to give it up as a bad job and sat down and poured herself a drink. She looked warily at Lola.

‘Look, kid,’ she said, ‘if you’re in trouble I haven’t got any dough, and I’m not sticking my neck out to get into any trouble with the cops.’

Lola said that she had not been going to ask for money; but she had been going to, and she was considerably disappointed in Dawn, whom she had never seen before in one of her businesslike moods. She did tell as much of her story as she thought necessary, and when it was over Dawn had had two drinks and stopped shaking and was in a more expansive frame of mind.

‘Well, you can’t go to work, that’s for sure,’ she said, ‘you’d be picked up. And you can’t go to hospital to have that wrist set for the same reason, so, what are you going to do? Where’s Brownie?’

‘He’s in the States.

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