The Pink Cage

by Derbhile Dromey

  “God, it’s a big plane, isn’t it?” said one of the grinning cronies.

  “Sure, they have to fit everyone in,” replied the other.

  They felt an obligation to comment on everything, rather like the chorus in a Greek play, but with less finesse and at a considerably higher volume. I took off my jumper and put on my seat belt. Beads of sweat rolled down my neck, making my T-shirt sticky. My eyes closed and I let my body go limp. I felt a tug at my sleeve, heard a mewling voice in my ear.

  “Astrid, isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  I kept my eyes closed.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, it’s just, I think I’m sitting on something.”

  I yanked her seat belt out from under her and clipped it on. Her mumbled thanks were drowned out by the sound of take-off. The steward began his safety drill. Cliona proclaimed, for all the plane to hear, that it was “inaccessible to the vision impaired.”

  “Sure it doesn’t matter,” Johno shouted over to her. “We’re fucked if it goes down anyway.”

  “Guy’s a total Gaylord,” I muttered to myself.

  “What?” said Mia.

  She was gripping the armrests.

  “The steward. A blatant homosexual.”

  Figured it might be useful to befriend the natives, even if I had no plans to become one myself.

  “Oh, I get it. Gaylord. I never heard that one before.”

  Giggles exploded out of her, a succession of pink helium balloons. I sensed that many things were unfamiliar to her. The plane lurched into the sky. Mia tightened her grip; her knuckles turned white.

  “Trying to fly the plane?” I asked her.

  “I always do that. To stop the plane falling over.”

  Such idiocy didn’t merit a response.

  I suppose I wasn’t very nice to Jenny. There was nothing objectionable about her; she wasn’t interesting enough for me to dislike. She was just one of Jazz’s interchangeable nut-brown maidens. Mind you, she lasted longer than most, six months. Jazz even gave her a key.

  It’s just that I hate people watching me DJ. My style is somewhat unorthodox; there are some who misinterpret it as clumsiness. My show for that week was dedicated to classic 80s electro. I was listening for the bird’s-wing beat that acted as my cue to fade in the next track, a delicate manoeuvre. My fingers located the groove in the vinyl and I hunched over the turntable, guiding the stylus towards it. As I inserted it into the groove, the skin on my back prickled, alerting me to a presence. The stylus juddered. I turned around. Jenny was standing in the doorway.

  “Oh it’s you Astrid,” she said. “Sorry, I thought it was Geoff.”

  Her hands dug into her pockets.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Geoff asked did I want to come round for something to eat before you guys go to the club. Do you know where he is?’

  “Gone to get the takeaway.”

  I concentrated on reinserting the needle.

  “Sorry to disturb you. I thought he’d be back by now.”

  The track made a quiet entrance. I increased the volume. Her footsteps moved towards the living area, then I heard the sound of the television. A moment later, Jazz’s key turned in the lock. I heard voices, the rattle of bags. Decided it was safe to emerge.

  “Here’s your chips,” Jazz said, handing me the bag.

  “Hey, I never knew Astrid DJ’d,” Jenny said.

  “Yup. DJ Ice White, that’s me,” I said, shaking the chips onto my plate.

  “How d’you get that name?” she asked, swallowing a mouthful of burger.

  Her voice was eager, searching. She fell into the category of ‘Jazz’s girls who tried to befriend me.’

  “Can’t you guess?”

  “Oh.”

  She blushed. Jazz gave one of his martyred sighs. In spite of all his kickboxing classes, he has never grasped the fundamental rule of battle; attack is the first line of defence. I ate my chips with relish, to the soundtrack of their kung fu film. Savage flames of triumph licked through me.

  At the sound of seat belts being unclipped, I tilted my chair back as much as it would allow and reached for my iPod, preparing to lose myself in electric dreams. But before I surrendered, the trolley came around. My morning coffee fix was by now long overdue. But by the time I helped Mia wrestle with her sandwich and picked her purse off the floor, my coffee was tepid.

  Cliona and Kim fussed over their food, utensils rattling. I looked over at Johno. Wires protruded from his ears. He was an iPod fan, just like me. I switched on my own and opted for Orbital, Chime. Its beats filled my nostrils with the smell of creosote and sweat. The smell of the DJ Shack. The sound on the iPod was slick, but I still heard the faint crackle of static. A wave of tiredness overcame me. I switched to the Prodigy, hoping their bomb-blast lyrics and beats could stave it off. They achieved the desired effect and lifted me into a psychotropic universe. Intermittent tugs at my sleeve punctuated my dreams, but this time I was able to push them aside.

  Johno’s guitar came towards us, a gaudy Irish flag waving at the neck. As it reached us, I yanked it off and handed it to him.

  “Jaysus, you’re a strong girl,” he said.

  His voice was husky, a mixture of coddle and caramel. I leaned towards him. This sort of conversation was easier in a nightclub, camouflaged by flashing lights and red beaded tops. He opened the case and ran his hands over the guitar’s smooth brown surface, checking for nicks.

  “Good thing it’s only me banger,” he said. “Didn’t want me good one getting wrecked.”

  “This guitar of yours,” I purred into his ear, “does it make you a rock god, in your estimation?”

  “Nah. I’m more a ‘trad lad.’”

  Laughter gurgled from him again. Good thing I wasn’t drawn to him for his sense of humour.

  Blinding sun greeted us as we left the terminal building, necessitating a changing of the guard from glasses to shades. I also donned a soft black hat with a brim wide enough to deflect rogue rays.

  “That’s us,” Kim said.

  A figure stood in front of a taxi-bus, holding a sign with a winking eye and the word Sightskiers printed on it.

  “Oh, so it is,” said Cliona. “At least they’re on time this year.”

  The phalanx crossed the carpark, following the sign. The canes gleamed in the sunlight; the balls at the ends scraped the tarmac. As my shadow and I fell into step beside Cliona, I noticed that her cane was shorter than average.

  “Where’s the rest of your cane?” I asked her.

  “Oh, it’s a symbol cane,” she said, with a flourish.

  A symbol of what?

  The bus loomed ahead. We stumbled towards it. Kim helped the Greek Chorus slide into the back seat. I threw myself onto a windowseat in the middle row, pulling Mia in my wake. Johno submitted to being helped into the seat beside her. The Greek Chorus commented on the seating structure of the bus as they settled themselves in.

  “It’s mad the way it’s all long seats, isn’t it?” they said. “Not little poxy ones like on the buses at home.”

  Their voices were audible above the roar of the engine, as the driver took off. I leaned against the window, my eyes closing. The Greek Chorus changed tack and began reliving the flight, treating it as a passage from The Odyssey. Johno gurgled his approval. His laughter merged with the engine. My phone began emitting random bleeping noises, indicating the arrival of a text. I jerked awake. Jazz?

  “That’s a noisy yoke,” said one of the Greek Chorus.

  The sun bounced off the phone’s silver cover. I flipped it open and turned away from the window, but the sun still slanted across the tiny screen. Creating a shield over the screen with my hand and upper body diffused the sun’s rays. It was my usual trick at times like this. I br
ought the phone to eye level.

  Welcome to Austria. No other messages.

  “They can do marvellous things with phones now,” Cliona’s voice gunned at me from the front row, where she sat beside the driver.

  “Assistive technology has levelled the playing field for people with disabilities. I switched to a Talks phone recently, it makes all the difference.”

  “Don’t they all do that? Talk?”

  Guffaws from the cheap seats.

  “I meant the screen reader software,” said Cliona, with exaggerated patience. “You could get the Zooms version. It magnifies the screen.”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “I’m only trying to help.” Cliona sniffed.

  She began to extol the accessibility of various types of mobile phone. My phone had space for hundreds of mp3 files. That was all I cared about. I tuned her out, went to the message menu and began to type:

  Stk in Cbage Patch Hades.

  Jazz always teased me about the brevity of my texts: “There’s text speak and then there’s Astrid text speak.”

  The text still took me an age to type. The tiny silver buttons on the keypad jostled for space, the letters were faint hieroglyphs on the screen. Still, typing the message gave me a brief feeling of release. I punched in Jazz’s number and his face appeared. It reproached me.

  “Forget it,” I muttered, as I put the phone away.

  For the rest of the trip, I gazed out the window. The roads grew steeper and houses gave way to forests of fir trees with snow coating the ground and branches.

  They brought us out to a bus with words painted in blue on the side. The words were the same as the ones on the gates. When we got to the bus, they said we were going for a swimming lesson. My stomach fizzed. I already felt sand under my feet, heard the whoosh of the waves.

  The van stopped at a grey-white blob of building, just like the school. There was no beach. Instead, the pink ladies brought us into a room that smelt of Mrs O’Brien’s cleaning.

  Hands pulled down my clothes and put on my swimming togs before I had time to think. I didn’t know how they found my swimming togs. Maybe Mrs O’Brien told them. They looked different in here, less blue. I didn’t wear a hat when I swam at home, but they said I had to wear one here. They gave me a hat which stuck to my head.

  We walked through a small stream of water, into the swimming place. The ground was hard and full of tiles that zig zagged. Pools of water gathered on the tiles. I didn’t have to hold on to the pink ladies, like some of the other girls. Instead, I took little steps to stop myself from slipping. The pink ladies asked if I was all right and I said yes. One of the pink ladies gave me rubber bands to wear on my arms. They were a bright orange colour and they pinched my skin.

  The water wasn’t the same as the water on the beach at home. It didn’t stretch forever; it was a bright-blue rectangle, with bits of white in it. The white bits came from the bright lights on the ceiling. There were no waves; it stood still, waiting for us to splash it. I didn’t care that it looked different. It was water. My feet pulled me towards it; it was soft and gentle. The armbands squeaked as I took them off. I stretched my legs and pushed myself out into the centre of the pool, where there was no ground. My legs and arms splashed up and down; I made water shoot into the air. Then I let the water close over my head and blew bubbles. The pink ladies and the other girls vanished. I floated in a silent, blue world.

  A hand pulled my arm, so hard I thought my arm might come away from my body. My head pushed upwards; my body lifted out of the water. The lights seared my eyes as I reached the surface. I yelped and covered them with my hand. One of the pink ladies crouched in front of me.

  “Child, we thought you were drowned,” she said.

  “I was just swimming. I want to go back in.”

  I tried to wriggle away, but my legs made scissors on the wet floor. The pink lady picked me up before I could fall and wrapped me in a towel which was soft, but too tight.

  “We’ll get you dry now, you’ll be grand.”

  I was brought back into the dressing room. Her hands yanked and pulled at my clothes. I told her I could do it myself, but she didn’t hear me. For the rest of the lesson, I sat on a bench at the side of the pool, beside the pink lady. There were little rainbows around all the lights. They weren’t there before. Looking at them made my eyes sore.

  Dusk was falling as we reached the hotel; the sky was the same no-colour as my jumper. The hotel’s rough-hewn walls gleamed with a fresh coat of whitewash. The windows were hidden behind green shutters. Curved red tiles peeped out from under a covering of snow.

  As I stepped out of the bus, cold rippled through me. It was fortunate that my overcoat provided excellent armour. I turned up the collar and pressed my chin into it. My cheeks tingled. I snatched up my rucksack from the back of the bus and started walking towards the hotel, anticipating the warmth within. But my progress was halted by the voice of my shadow.

  “Astrid, can you help me find my bag?”

  I glanced at the pile of bags still remaining in the bus. Her pink monstrosity eluded me. The bags tumbled around in satisfying disarray as I scrabbled through them. Cliona’s click of disapproval as her foot made contact with an escaped casualty was even more satisfying.

  “I’ll help you with those,” said Kim.

  He located the pink monstrosity, lifted it out and placed Mia’s hand on it. Her cane was in her other hand.

  “Right,” Cliona said. “Drop your bags in your rooms. We’ll be meeting in the bar in 30 minutes.”

  This announcement was greeted with cheers from Johno and the Greek Chorus. Cliona bulldozed through their cheers.

  “The guides will be there and we will hold our welcoming ceremony.”

  I shot forward, propelling myself through the big wooden door. A blast of warmth hit my face. The door opened onto a long, dark hallway with a spiral staircase at the end. Mia inched forward, see-sawing between cane and bag. The wheels of her bag began a crazy dance, as if they were punters at Prism.

  “Give me your bag,” I said.

  “What?”

  She was already panting. I snatched her bag and strode ahead. She tugged the straps of my rucksack. My leg made contact with the first step. Spiral staircases were not my friends, pretty though they were. I tried to heed Matthew’s advice about following the curve of the wall with my shoulder, but with two bags, it was impossible to maintain balance. Expletives poured from my lips in a steady stream, as my shins thunked against each step. Our room was at the top of the stairs. I opened the door and let the bags fall, resting my weight against the door frame. There was a preponderance of wood in the room: wooden furniture, wooden floors, a wooden ceiling which swooped downwards, creating a cave-like effect. Wooden shutters framed the narrow, triangular window. A small ledge underneath it offered meagre seating space. A vast white bed filled most of the room. I stepped forward and stretched out my hand. The bedspread felt rough; its texture reminded me of childhood blankets. As I explored further, I found the join where two beds dovetailed into one. A wardrobe leaned against the wall, a dark, hulking presence which stood guard over the two beds. Two matching lockers stood by the beds, each with their own chest of drawers.

  “Which side should I pick?” Mia said.

  “We’ll be pretty cosy whatever side we choose.”

  I clattered across the polished floor with my rucksack, squeezing through the matchstick-thin space between the wardrobe and the inner bed. Mia stood by the door, gripping her pink monstrosity. I opened the door of the wardrobe to reveal a cavern, with rickety shelves tucked into the left-hand corner. A mirror was fitted into one of the doors; it was dotted with age spots. I yanked my clothes out of the rucksack and placed them on the top shelf, proud of the military precision of my packing. Aside from my ski paraphernalia, my ruc
ksack contained a selection of my most alluring clubbing clobber: hotpants, miniskirts, skinny jeans, slinky tops, sawn-off boots. All designed for strutting. There were eight pairs of shades: one for each night, plus my skiing shades. And then the motherlode. My silver dress; my secret weapon. I already envisaged a use for it.

  There was no time for delay. Johno’s response to the call of the bar was bound to be swift. I arranged my clothes on the shelves, and from the slender pile I plucked out a clingy T-shirt sprayed with a blur of silver swirls and a pair of skinny jeans. Best not to reveal too much on the first day. Besides, it was cold. I compressed my disembowelled rucksack into a corner of the wardrobe and turned around. Mia was still standing at the door.

  “Why haven’t you started unpacking yet?”

  “I don’t know where to put my things.”

  “Why not start with the bed.”

  “I don’t know where it is,” she almost whispered.

  I leaned against the wall, praying for the gods to give me strength. Then I walked over to her, yanked her suitcase out of her hand and hefted it onto the bed nearest the door, straining various ligaments in the process. Her packing style was less circumspect than my own. She inched towards me; her hand brushed against the back of my T-shirt. She found the clasps and tugged at them. The suitcase opened to reveal neat squares of clothes with a strong pink theme. She ran her hands over them.

  “Imagine I’ll be skiing tomorrow,” she said. “I never thought I’d ski.”

  I shared her incredulity.

  “Cliona came into our class, you see. That’s how I found out about the trip. She’s such an inspirational person.”

  She gave a reprise of Cliona’s visit to her class. Then she segued into a monologue about the clothes she planned to wear each evening. My thirst was building. It was time to cut the monologue short.