The Pink Cage

by Derbhile Dromey

  I picked up my phone and heard the sonic blur that indicated a message. My heart leapt, hope and fear tore at my chest.

  Hope you’re having fun and keeping safe.Ora.

  With her signature of two ‘X’’s at the end. I deflated, lay back on the pillows, and deleted her text. The emptiness of the screen seeped through me. I filled it with letters, attempting to frame a narrative about my heroics.

  Conqurd slopes 2day. Kikn Cbge Pch Kids asses.

  Type, delete, type, delete. Hard to match the eloquence of The Iliad with 160 characters. This trip could be good for you.

  “Are you texting your boyfriend?”

  Another giggle. How did she know I was texting?

  “No.”

  She said something else, but I turned up the volume and her voice receded.

  We never kiss on the lips; it’s an unwritten rule. Instead, we press against each other. I press my lips into the crook of his neck. It is one of my favourite places. The skin is soft and the tang of sweat lingers on it. I trace a line of kisses along his shoulder. My hands move downwards, over taut flesh, start kneading his buttocks. His excitement pulses through the material of his boxer shorts, but the lid remains closed.

  Predators show phenomenal patience in their search for prey. In order to regain the ground lost on the bus, I upped the ante with my outfit: deep gold shirt, minuscule black lycra skirt, black suede boots which fit me like a second skin, Gucci shades with mellow brown lenses and gold rims. Still not too hardcore, but a declaration of intent.

  This time, some of the guides were sitting at our table. Johno sat between Kevin and his own guide, whose name escaped me. I sat opposite them, with my shadow beside me.

  “You tried the schnitzel yet, Astrid?” Kevin asked. “You’re a real meat girl, reckon you’d love it. It’s pork in breadcrumbs.”

  “Is it palatable?”

  “Johno here’s going for it. If it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for you.”

  I decided to ignore his dirty cackle and gave my order to a hovering young waitress. My tendency to pick the same food as Johno was an important weapon in my arsenal.

  Moments later, the waitress put a plate in front of me. It was colonised by a puddle of sauce the same shade as oxygenated blood. I gave it an experimental poke.

  “I’m not seeing any meat here,” I said to Kevin. “Reckon you’re pulling my leg.”

  “Well, I’m not about to rely on your judgement now, am I?”

  By the time I absorbed the joke, everyone else was roaring. These people displayed a total lack of discrimination. I parted the Red Sea on my plate and unearthed a chop covered in the requisite breadcrumbs. It landed with a plop on my side plate, showering me with drops of sauce.

  “Astrid looks like a murder victim,” said Kevin.

  “Why?” said Johno.

  “She’s got sauce all over her belly.”

  I leaned towards him, again yearning for the impetus created by vodka and beats.

  “Care to lick it off?”

  “Ah no love, you’re grand. I’ve enough to be getting on with here.”

  He forked some of the red gloop into his mouth. His lips smacked together as he ate; the sound made me flinch. I diverted myself with my own meat, which turned out to be quite tasty. The chips that came with it absorbed most of the red sauce. When I finished, I went to the bar for my belt of vodka. I always ordered doubles here; the shots were thimble sized. When I came back, Cliona was engaged in a little post-prandial rhetoric, something to do with inappropriate language and labelling, a botched exercise in semantics. Though her voice was loud, her words grated; they failed to deliver the desired impact. They steamrolled over us, obliterating all hope of normal conversation. A pall hung over the table.

  “Friends, Romans, countrymen,” I muttered.

  Cliona’s hands dug into her cheeks. Just like Jazz’s when he was thinking. Her elbows were spread-eagled across the table. Kim put a hand on her arm, to prevent her from knocking over a glass which was just outside her narrow band of vision.

  “It’s important to take responsibility for how we are seen by others. For instance, I like to refer to myself as a blindy. I think humour is an excellent tool for offsetting the effects of stereotyping.”

  “Tool,” whispered one of the Greek Chorus, sniggering.

  Cliona raised her voice, to stem the incipient laughter.

  “We must all be invested in this issue. None of us are immune from the perils of inappropriate labelling.”

  A sickly, metallic taste was building in my mouth. It was time to shake things up a little. I enjoyed a little dialectic after dinner myself.

  “Learn that from your gimptronics textbook?” I asked her.

  Cliona bristled. Her cheeks puffed.

  “I presume you’re referring to my Disability Studies course. In that case, I must ask you to show a little more respect. You might be more sympathetic if your own barriers were greater. Though I’m sure you must face some.”

  I swirled the liquid in my vodka glass. It made a vortex in the middle.

  “No.”

  None that I wished to discuss with her.

  “Still, you’re bound to have views on this, in light of your condition.”

  “Sounds as if I’m pregnant,” I said.

  Guffaws from the men.

  “Nice one,” Johno whispered to me.

  I smirked, pleased to have a fellow gladiator on side.

  “I’m sure you must have noticed the labels people use to describe those with albinism. How do you refer to yourself?”

  Everyone lays bets on who can get it on with the albino chick.

  “I tend to refer to myself as Astrid. It’s common practise in Western cultures to refer to oneself by one’s name.”

  More laughter. Cliona’s cheeks were now stained crimson.

  “It’s regrettable that you should make light of this issue,” she said. “Us blindies have to stick together, you know.”

  “But you’re not, are you?”

  “Not what?”

  We circled each other, waiting to pounce.

  “Blind.”

  “Not as such, but—”

  “Then why say you are.”

  No reply. First blood to me.

  “She has you there,” piped up one of the Greek Chorus.

  Cliona’s cheeks deflated with a sucking sound. Johno stood up, cane at the ready.

  “I’m going to get some gargle. All this intellectual talk has made me thirsty.”

  Cliona leaned into Kim and they began whispering and touching each other, two monkeys engrossed in a grooming ritual.

  I was in a big crowd all of the time. The roar of noise was everywhere. It was a high noise, full of shrieks and giggles that didn’t make any sense. The noise followed me into each room, echoed around the corridors and bounced off the high ceilings and the walls. I woke up in the morning to the sound of feet clattering on bare wooden floorboards. The noise was loudest in the dining room, where I ate at a long table with the other seven girls in my class. We sat at the same table everyday. There was no escape from the noise: clamouring voices, cutlery banging against the table, the legs of the chairs scraping against the ground, water spilling and forming a lake on the table. The girls moaned and wailed about the food, because they didn’t like it. But I did. It had lumps in it, like the food Matthew made. The pink ladies fussed over the girls and told them to eat up, eat up.

  The noise was a big wave that threatened to knock me over. But my Viking book helped me to block it out. While I waited for the other girls to get ready for bed, I drew my legs towards me and balanced the book on my knees. It smelled of home. The iron bars of the bedpost pressed through the thin pillow, but I didn’t care. The noise was gone. I cou
ld read some of the words, but most of them were foreign. So I listened to Mathew instead. Sometimes I just opened the first page and looked at the curly writing, trying to figure out what it meant. I looked at the pictures of the goddesses with their streaming golden hair and tried to guess which one was my mother. If she was in Valhalla, then she knew where I was, because the gods of Valhalla knew about everything that happened on earth. But she didn’t come and find me. Instead, she waited for me in the pages of the Viking book. The pink ladies always had to take the book away from me. When they took it, the noise came back.

  I was the only one who never made any noise. The pink ladies liked that. They asked the other girls why they couldn’t be quiet, like me. But I didn’t want to make any noise. I never talked to anyone unless they talked to me. After a while, the noise went away, like the noise of the waves crashing on the beach at home.

  This time, an extra person featured in my pink cage dream: Jazz. He stood just outside the bars of the cage, too far for me to reach. I pleaded with him to release me, but he said, No. You’re one of them now.

  Two nights in a row. Had to be some kind of record. Keeping my face buried in the pillow, I groped for the bedside lamp and filled the room with light, hoping to drive away the last cobwebbed remnants of the dream.

  Jazz had witnessed one of my pink cage dreams, during an interlude. As I pushed against the bars, my leg kicked out and came in contact with hard matter: Jazz’s leg. I stirred.

  “Bars. Couldn’t get past,” I muttered.

  He planted soft kisses on my shoulder, then along the length of my upper arm. His touch stilled my flailing limbs, obliterated the last shreds of the dream. I was able to let myself drift back to sleep.

  The cool logic of Sherlock Holmes didn’t offer its usual balm. The memory of Jazz’s kisses pierced through me, blurring the words on the page. Jazz wasn’t there to chase the cobwebs away. My limbs twitched, attempting to seek him out.

  I feared my lack of sleep might have erased my new-found skill, but that wasn’t the case. The runs passed without incident. I liked to go fast and feel the wind whistle through my hair. But I made sure to stay within shouting distance of Martin. Whenever I strayed, rogue clumps of snow threatened to topple me. He always managed to stay tuned to my gear changes. Wherever I was, he was there too.

  The lifts were still a source of anxiety, though less so than the day before. The lift runs were accompanied by a further barrage of questioning. I kept my answers brief, but Martin was undeterred; his questions beat down like incessant rain.

  “So this proofreading then,” he said. “How’d you get into that game?”

  “Providence, I guess.”

  “Just in the right place at the right time?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a pause, while he waited for me to elaborate. But I saw no need to. My conversations were confined to intellectual jousts with Matthew, or one-line reviews of beats with Jazz. But in the face of his relentless questioning, I gave in, my resistance weakened by the need to distract myself. I expounded on my favourite research methods, the perils of over-reliance on Google, my despair at the ubiquity of misplaced apostrophes.

  “You must have had to go to college to learn all that.”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Classics.”

  “All that Greek and Roman mythology stuff? I quite like that.”

  “There’s a bit more to it than that.”

  “I’m sure there is. It’s not gimptronics anyway.”

  The rope jerked. I held it tighter and the rough cord bit into my hands.

  He replied, “Yeah, I heard that little crack of yours last night. Doesn’t pay to be a smart arse, you know. You won’t be thanked for it.”

  I shrugged. Proofreading required skill in excising irrelevant information.

  The sun came out just before lunch. Ice crystals formed on the snow and my skis slithered on the slick surface. Only Martin’s arm saved me from an unceremonious spillage on the lift run.

  “Quite the strong man, aren’t you,” I said.

  “Built like a brick house, that’s me.”

  He flexed his biceps. They were even more well defined than Jazz’s.

  “More like a brick cottage. You’re not quite big enough to qualify as a house.”

  The lift zig-zagged across the path. My stomach lurched. I couldn’t prevent a yelp from escaping.

  “What the hell was that?” I said to Martin.

  “Eh! No cheek out of you. I’m the one controlling the lift.”

  When we disembarked from the lift, I shot forward on my skis without warning, determined to avenge him. Fight fire with fire.

  “Oi girlie, wait for me,” he yelled. “Have to protect you from them Krauts. There’s a bloody great swarm of them ahead of us.”

  After that run, Martin decided it was time to go into the cafe for a refreshing brew. Though I was loath to admit it, I was quite relieved. My legs were beginning to quiver. When we reached the stopping point just above the steps, Mia emerged with Kevin. Martin started talking to Kevin in a low voice. I concentrated on taking off my skis, shutting out Mia’s long monologue about her morning’s skiing. Martin always used his poles to take my skis off. I jabbed at the backs of my skis with my own. Nothing happened. I knew there were little holes on the bindings, but they eluded me. After a while, Martin finished his conversation and came over to me.

  “You’re a determined young lady, aren’t you?”

  He popped the backs of my skis with ease.

  “Just going to fetch your skis, Mia sweetheart,” said Kevin.

  “I see you’re hitting the big time today, Princess Mia,” Martin said to her.

  All the guides called her that. They were seduced by her limpet exterior. She loved it, greeted it with her helium giggle. I was above such epithets. Kevin came back with both their skis slung over his shoulders.

  “Hey Martin, why do you make me schlep my own skis,” I asked.

  “Don’t want to get on the wrong side of a toughie like you.”

  I smirked. Viking warriors carried their weapons on their backs.

  Making Moves

  When summer came, Matthew’s academic rigour relaxed. All I had to do was work through the reading list he set for me every summer. Otherwise, I was free to spend hours on the beach. Jazz didn’t have to go to school, so he and Ora came to our house during the week as well. They spent more time at our house than they did at their house in Wicklow. When I wasn’t at the beach, I was in the DJ Shack, with or without Jazz, riding on waves of euphoria. It was hot and airless, but its appeal remained strong.

  Matthew was due to give one of his lectures in Dublin and display his samples at an exhibition afterwards.

  “The vexing thing is that my attendance is required for the whole day,” he said to Ora at dinner the night before we were due to go up. “But needs must.”

  “What will you do, Astrid?”

  “She’ll stay with me, of course. As she always does. Work through her reading material.”

  “That won’t be much fun for you though, will it, Astrid?” Ora said.

  I shrugged. Accompanying Matthew to work was an unquestioned ritual.

  “Well, there’s no reason why Geoff and I can’t stay here another night,” Ora said, forking up the last of her salad.

  “That won’t be necessary,” said Matthew.

  “It’s no trouble. We’re not doing anything anyway; I just wanted to check that the house was okay, but we can do that the following day. We’ll have a bit of fun here tomorrow instead. Won’t we, Geoff?”

  Jazz stared at his food. He was a chameleon; they always blended into the background so no-one noticed them.

  Matthew left very early the next day, after our swim. His a
bsence nagged at me, like a missing tooth. I decided to distract myself by spending the day in the DJ Shack with Jazz. But as it happened, Ora’s plans for the day were somewhat different.

  “I thought we’d have a bit of a day out,” she announced as we washed the breakfast dishes. “We’ll go shopping and then we’ll go to the amusements. And after that, we can go back into town and see a film. I checked with the cinema and there’s a film called Hot Shots! It’s supposed to be funny.”

  Jazz’s head snapped up. He stopped drying the plate he was holding.

  “I heard it’s good,” he said. “There’s all aeroplanes and battles and stuff.”

  “You don’t think it might be too violent for Astrid, do you?”

  “No, it won’t,” I said, indignant. “I love battles.”

  “All right then. We’ll do that.”

  When we left, it was cloudy, but in town, the sun bounced off the buildings and the pavement. I had to put my shades on. We visited a dizzying array of shops. Ora plied us with clothes: T-shirts, jeans, jumpers. The edges of the jeans were sharp; the material was thick and strong. She exclaimed over the clothes; each item was an undiscovered treasure. The clothes she bought me made me look different, older, more defined. Jazz didn’t like his clothes; his voice became sullen and he looked at the ground. But he thanked Ora for each item she bought him.

  Every time we left a shop, the glare hit me afresh. It was fortunate that Ora was always looking for something in her cavernous handbag, or asking Jazz to help her rearrange the clothes in the bags. It gave me time to adjust.

  My favourite shop wasn’t a clothes shop. It was full of CDs and tapes, like the ones Jazz had. It was Jazz’s favourite shop too; a smile broke his face in half as we went in. Without my monocle, I struggled to read the names on the records. But then I saw letters that looked familiar and tugged Jazz’s sleeve.