The Pink Cage

by Derbhile Dromey

  On the first proper day of spring, Jazz emerged from his cocoon, lured by pale sunshine. When Matthew and I returned from our swim and walk, we found him sitting at the table at the top of the garden. It was warped; the paint kept peeling off. He wore a T-shirt, exposing bare arms which looked unused to sunlight. They were almost as white as mine. There was a piece of coloured paper in front of him. As we walked over to him, he picked up the paper and tucked it under his jumper, which was beside him on the bench. He began arranging flakes of paint into a neat pile.

  “What have you got there, Geoffrey?” asked Matthew.

  “Nothing, sir. Just stuff for an art project.”

  Matthew held out his hand.

  “May I?”

  Jazz thrust the coloured paper at him. In fact, there was more than one piece of paper; the pieces were stuck together. There were pictures of people on them. Words came out of their mouths in little bubbles. Matthew turned the pages, his gaze intent. Jazz kept his head lowered. The paint pile grew bigger.

  “Hmm. Quite well-drawn,” he said, handing the papers back to Jazz.

  “Thank you, sir,” said Jazz.

  “Aren’t picture books for children?” I asked.

  “Ah, but these are comics, Astrid. Comics are different. More of a boy’s premise. Eh, Geoffrey?”

  Jazz’s mouth opened and shut.

  “I collected comics as a boy,” said Matthew. “They’re in the attic in Dublin. I’ll dig them out for you and you can peruse them the next time you visit. For your art project.”

  After that, Jazz stopped calling Matthew sir. He called him Matthew instead.

  Jazz’s father didn’t live with Ora and Jazz. Ora told me he lived in Paris and had some sort of complicated job which involved money. When she talked about him, her voice became flat and heavy. Jazz didn’t talk about him at all. One day, in the shed, I decided to conduct an investigation.

  “How come your father doesn’t live with you?” I said.

  “Because,” he said in his stormcloud voice.

  He turned up the volume on the radio. I had to shout to be heard over it.

  “That’s not a reason.”

  “Stop asking so many questions. You’re always asking questions.”

  “An enquiring mind is the most useful tool you can have.”

  “Yeah, well save it for something else.”

  Jazz turned up the volume, precluding further conversation. I knew from reading the Miss Marple books that patience was the mark of a true detective, so I let the matter drop. His father remained a shadow, a myth. Like my mother.

  It was only in the shed that Jazz and I came together. The shed was no longer just a rickety wooden structure in the corner of our garden. It was a magical place. Bit by bit, we created a home among the detritus, not caring about the wind that howled through cracks in the walls and filled the shed with moisture laden air. We stayed there for hours on end; time became meaningless.

  After the first weekend, Jazz’s radio took up permanent residence on the two upturned metal buckets. It was the metal that made the music sound tinny; Jazz liked that. We sat on two saggy folding chairs in front of the radio, hemmed in by rusting garden equipment and gas canisters. Our knees kept knocking together, so we slouched deep into the chairs to give the illusion of space. We didn’t talk about anything except the music. As we listened, we breathed in the smells of creosote and damp earth, which mingled with another smell, of citrus mixed with woodsmoke. I couldn’t identify the source of it, but I liked it.

  Jazz navigated me through a world which was both alien and exciting, the world of DJ music. That was what I called it, though he called it all sorts of names: techno, rave, house. I was learning Latin with Matthew, but I was learning the language of music with Jazz, exotic words like breakbeat, megamix, four to the floor. Jazz struggled to remember the premise of the novel he was reading for class and it took him hours to learn the conjugations of French and Irish verbs. But he could recite a litany of DJs and dance groups, their music specialties, the London and New York nightclubs where they played and their top mixes. Some of the names consisted of random letters and numbers. 2 Unlimited, Soul II Soul, Heavy D and the Boyz. Some groups misspelled ordinary words, giving themselves names like Phuture and Sleezy.

  “Don’t they know how to spell?” I asked Jazz.

  “They don’t care about stupid stuff like that,” he muttered.

  “That isn’t a sufficient reason.”

  “Because it sounds cool. Not that you’d know about that.”

  “Cool,” I repeated, relishing the taste of the unfamiliar word in my mouth.

  Jazz also knew how the music was created. It wasn’t like Bach, who wrote notes on a sheet for orchestras to play. It was a series of sounds mixed together.

  “You know, they take a voice out of one song and a beat out of another song,” said Jazz. “And they use the recording equipment to put them together, so they match.”

  “That’s a very confusing concept.”

  “No it isn’t. Listen to this. Black Box. They took the words out of an old song and put them to a beat.”

  He slipped on a tape and a jaunty beat filled the shed. Then a female voice began to repeat the words, ‘ride on time.’

  There was something compelling about the way she shouted all the words in a rasping voice. Jazz’s face became red and he looked at the floor.

  “Don’t you like it? Why did you play it if you don’t like it?”

  “I do. It’s just the words, you know.”

  Jazz snorted and brought his hands to his mouth. He made snuffling sounds.

  “Have you got a toothache?”

  He shook his head. It took me a moment for me to identify the sounds as laughter.

  “What’s so funny?” I demanded.

  “The words. Ride. Two people... you know, doing it.”

  “Doing what?”

  I was becoming impatient.

  “Like... sex.”

  This word prompted further snorts of laughter. My mouth fell open. I kept listening to the words. Ride on time. The words had meanings that only we knew. Like a code in a detective novel. The thought gave me a secret thrill.

  Most of the music Jazz listened to was harsher than the Massive Attack piece, but it had the same euphoric quality. The beats filled up all the air in the shed and made our limbs twitch. The music was stored on cassette tapes. Some of them were albums with bright swirling colours. Others were tapes Jazz made himself, with his writing on the covers. The writing was too small for me to read, even with the monocle, so Jazz read it for me.

  Sometimes we played music from two tapes at once. When a tune was about to finish, Jazz reached over and started playing the second tape while the first tape was still playing.

  “How do you know when to play the second tune?” I asked him.

  “It’s called mixing. You play two tunes at the same time and make the beats match.”

  I listened. Apart from the clacking of the play button, it was almost impossible to tell when one tune ended and another one began.

  “But this isn’t proper mixing. You need decks for that.”

  “Like on a boat?”

  “No. It’s equipment. You can play two tunes together. You know, vinyl records. All DJs have them.”

  “Like Matthew’s Bach ones.”

  “Yeah, but these ones’re smaller. 7 inches or 12 inches. 12 inches are best for DJing. You can start a song at any place and drop it in.”

  “Drop it? Drop the record? Doesn’t that damage it?”

  Jazz laughed.

  “It’s not like that. You play one song and then you start the next one in the middle of it, so they’re playing together.”

  “Doesn’t it sound strange?”

  “
Not if you do it right.”

  “Do you know how to do the mixing?”

  “A bit. Mum’s friend used to mind me when she was doing her photography course and her son’s a DJ. Sam. He let me play on his decks a bit. He says he’ll be finished with them soon and he’ll sell them to me.”

  Jazz’s tours of the DJ world held me in thrall. I listened to him with my head cocked to one side. It was easier to focus on his words that way.

  “I like the way the music sounds in here,” he said one day.

  “It just sounds like music, doesn’t it?”

  “Well yeah. But it sounds different from how it used to in my bedroom. I don’t know why. Deeper, more echoey, you know.”

  I thought of the echo cave in Ancient Greek mythology.

  “It’s the sound waves,” I said. “They’re bouncing off the walls and there’s nowhere for them to go.”

  “Really?”

  For once, he was interested in my information.

  “I could check with Matthew. But I think that’s the reason.”

  We increased the volume and the beats pounded off the walls.

  Bit by bit, Jazz revealed his mysteries to me. He stumbled out tales of towels whipping his legs as he stepped out of the dormitory showers, sniggers at missed words and botched answers to questions. Now I knew why he hated school so much.

  “Those people sound like Neanderthals,”

  “What are those?” Jazz said.

  The stormclouds were threatening to return.

  “Primitive men. Like apes.”

  Jazz covered his mouth with his hand, but the laughter escaped and bounced off the walls of the shed, just like the music. I wondered why he always wanted to keep his laughter hidden.

  After a while, Jazz showed me how to do the mixing with the tapes. He put my hand on the play button and told me when to press, which beat to listen out for. As he leaned over, our knees knocked together, but this time they forgot to come apart. And the citrus and woodsmoke smell became stronger. Now I knew the source of it: Jazz.

  Rain bounced off the roof of the shed, a soft but penetrating summer shower which caused damp patches to appear on the splintered wooden floor. The damp accentuated the smells of creosote and earth. Jazz was playing another of his numbered bands, the B-52s. They sang about a love shack being a little love place where they could get together.

  “This place is a shack,” I said.

  “A DJ shack,” Jazz said.

  “Is that like a nightclub?”

  I knew that nightclubs were the places where the DJs played their records. Jazz said he was too young to go to them. They were full of flashing lights and people danced for hours to the music the DJs played.

  “No. They’re these sheds in the middle of nowhere with illegal radio stations in them.”

  “Cool,” I said, shooting forward in my chair.

  The word now formed a regular part of my lexicon, much to Matthew’s disgust.

  The following week, Jazz brought a large, flat parcel with him, which he laid on the kitchen table.

  “Look at what Geoff did,” Ora said. “It was his final project for Technology class.”

  “Show us your handiwork, Geoffrey,” said Matthew.

  Jazz’s fingers fumbled as he pulled off the brown paper and string, to reveal a wooden board with the words DJ Shack carved in jagged letters. Imprints of headphones and vinyl records were carved around the words. Jazz pressed a button and the sign lit up. He bent his head over the wood.

  “That’s amazing, Jazz,” I said. “Why don’t we put it up on the door of the garden shed. For our own DJ Shack.”

  “I won’t have that gaudy thing defacing my property.”

  Matthew’s voice was a thunderclap. Jazz fiddled with the discarded paper.

  “It’s very well made though, isn’t it?” Ora said.

  Matthew picked it up and inspected it.

  “Well, I do admire the craftsmanship,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll find another place for it.”

  I knew where to place the sign, on the folding table near the entrance to the shed. There were bags of seeds on it, but they could be moved. I helped Jazz carry the sign to the shed. We placed the bags of seeds on the floor and balanced the sign on the table, letting it rest against the wall. It was the exact same width as the table, though the wood was a lighter hue. As I leaned closer to examine the imprints more closely, I saw a red squiggle in the corner.

  “Is that an ‘A’?” I asked Jazz.

  “Yeah.”

  “Matthew says an ‘A’ is the best grade to get.”

  “S’pose.”

  The stormclouds weren’t rolling away.

  “Why aren’t you happy? Are you annoyed with Matthew? He liked it really. If he doesn’t like something, he always says so.”

  “The other boys started throwing it around the place like a Frisbee. Doesn’t matter. I was able to fix it.”

  I studied it again, my head cocked.

  “Never mind. When you’re a famous DJ, you can tell them they’re not allowed to come to your nightclub.”

  “You know, all the big DJs have assistants,” said Jazz. “To hold up the next record for them, help them with the mixes and tuning the equipment and stuff. When I get into a nightclub, you can be mine.”

  His face reddened.

  “Cool,” I said.

  I switched the button on and off; in the brown darkness of the shed, the letters glowed red blue, red blue. Like flashing lights in a nightclub.

  Friendly Fire

  When I climbed onto the bus, there was a free seat next to Johno. This was a fortunate development. Mia was on the other side, but that little obstacle could be circumvented.

  “A thorn between two roses, eh, Johno,” said Kevin as he closed the sliding door.

  “Ah yeah,” said Johno.

  Cliona lumbered up to the front seat.

  “Want a hand, Cliona?” said Kevin.

  There was no sign of her stooge, but I heard rustling at the back of the bus. He was putting their boots away.

  “Oh no, that’s not necessary. It’s more empowering if I do it myself,” said Cliona.

  No doubt this was a central tenet of the gimptronics philosophy.

  As she lurched onto the bus, she misjudged her step and pitched forward. Kevin’s hand shot out and steadied her. She bent over to rub her foot. Kim hovered over her.

  “At least there’s no damage,” said Cliona.

  “Been on the beer again, Cliona?” asked Kevin.

  Laughter erupted from most of the passengers. Radio silence from Cliona.

  “Well, it is quite dark. Such a pity the area isn’t better lit. Someone should write to the relevant local authority.”

  Kevin started the bus with a jerk, cutting short Cliona’s polemic. Once again, there was steam on the windows.

  “What’s your dirty word this time, Astrid?” Kevin shouted.

  It only took a second for a word to materialise, inspired by the feel of Johno’s thigh pressing into mine.

  “Concupiscence,” I said. “Strong desire for sex.”

  “I could go with that,” said Johno.

  “Sounds like the name of one of them foreign football players,” said one of the Greek Chorus.

  “No, the fella who’s always shooting at the dartboard in Flanagans.”

  “That’s Con Houlihan, you eejit.”

  A wave of laughter spread throughout the bus. I was forced to concede that my audience was lost. The radio spewed out Complan.

  “They play awful shite on the radio here,” said Johno.

  He shared my belief in the aural aesthetic.

  “Volume’s on the lowest setting,” said Kevin. “Y
ou lot must have bionic hearing.”

  “Yeah, the toilet’s flushing in the ski cafe,” said one of the Greek Chorus.

  “That’s if you haven’t blocked it,” said the other.

  A tinkling sound cut through the raucous laughter. It took me a moment to trace it to Mia. She was warbling to the Complan. Kevin turned the volume up and she stopped, inhibited by the fact that she now had an audience. Her face was the same shade of pink as her ski suit.

  “Ah, keep going, that’s deadly,” said Johno.

  “I was just messing really,” Mia said, aiming her words at the floor.

  “That’s a pretty voice you have there, love,” said Kevin. “Give us another tune.”

  Mia began to sing again, raising her voice a notch. A reverent silence fell. At the end, they clapped. Johno supplied an eloquent appraisal of her performance.

  “I can’t stand all that Mariah shite, but you make it less shite,” he said.

  I looked out the window. The letters on my word were now indistinguishable. Rivulets of moisture streamed from them.

  I lay on my bed, wearing only my oversize Prism T-shirt, suspended in that funny, loose-end time between skiing and the evening’s entertainment. The day’s exertions were washed away. I tried to read my Sherlock Holmes book, but my eyes were screwed up after the slopes. Instead, I lost myself in a Sigur Ros soundscape. Mia came back into the room from her shower, gripping her towel in one hand and her cane in the other. I removed one of my headphones.

  “Thank God I’m back in,” she said, giggling. “I thought my towel was going to fall down.”

  She began her evening ritual of lugging her suitcase onto the bed, her tiny, straining wrists a reproach I chose to ignore. As she ran her hands over her clothes, she burbled about some incomprehensible television programme that she was missing on account of being away. It appeared to revolve around a woman who wanted to ball her sexy gardener. I reinserted my headphone and tuned her out. My fingers brushed against the whitewashed wall, tracing the Braille bumps in the plaster. The pinpoint lights on the ceiling were switched off; even they felt too harsh after a day under the constant glare. I preferred the soft orange glow of the lamp by my bed.