The Pink Cage

by Derbhile Dromey

  The hotel loomed in front of me, offering shelter. I crashed into the bar, landed on top of a stool. There was a random young guy behind the counter. Least it wasn’t Jurgen, who conveyed disapproval in a syllable.

  “Vodka,” I said.

  A glass slid in front of me. I aimed it at my mouth but missed. Liquid slopped onto the counter. My head became heavy. It rested on the surface, which was as unyielding as Johno’s mouth. Liquid trickled into my hair.

  “Want ‘nother,” I muttered.

  “I think you’ve had enough.”

  The voice again. It was following me.

  “Fuck you, Jazz.”

  My tongue felt thick. Hands pulled me upright, propelled me forward. Then I was being lowered into a soft bed. ‘They lay bets on albino chicks,’ a voice said. It sounded like my voice. Then I heard a strangled, high-pitched laugh. A blanket surrounded me and everything went black.

  Jazz was outside the pink cage again; the dream was now a nightly performance. His reproaches were louder than ever. I jerked awake, my mind endeavouring to banish the images. When I touched my cheeks, they were covered in wet track marks. I didn’t know where they came from.

  Dark Rooms

  I thought Ora and Jazz were going to move in straight away, but instead, the procession of boxes began. Every weekend when they arrived at the house, their arms were full of boxes. The boxes spilled their contents throughout our house. Our bare rooms became filled with clutter, objects which were exotic to my eyes. Colourful ornaments took up residence on tables beside Matthew’s African artefacts. Books of photographs claimed space on our crowded bookshelves. They burst with lush colours; the pages were thick and reflected the light. Scarves began to cover threadbare patches on our couches and chairs.

  The most curious of these new objects was the television. It made its presence felt even before its arrival, when, a man came and climbed onto our roof to attach an aerial. I watched with my mouth open as he balanced himself on a long ladder. Another man went into Jazz’s room with a box of tools; Matthew and I conjugated Latin verbs to the sound of his hammering.

  “Why are all these men coming to the house?” I asked Matthew.

  “It’s for Geoffrey’s television,” he said.

  “I thought you said television was the opiate of the masses.”

  “Well, Ora imagines that Geoffrey can’t do without it, so I felt obliged to accommodate him. I only hope you won’t fall prey to its powers.”

  The procession even made its way to the empty, echoing rooms, rooms I now knew were once my mother’s. Matthew inspected the rooms. I followed him and stood in the corridor, listening to him as he walked up and down. His heavy tread made the floorboards squeak. Even by the standards of our house, they were cold; the wind whistled through cracks in the floorboards. The sun slanted through the windows, exposing the thick layer of dust that covered the bare floorboards.

  Some men delivered furniture in a van and Matthew helped them install it in the rooms. In the bigger room, there was a table with a vase in the centre, a green couch with a matching armchair and a box full of children’s toys. In the smaller room, there was only space for a desk and chair. The rooms no longer echoed.

  Matthew spent a lot of time in the rooms, arranging the furniture. He nailed a piece of dark cloth over the window in the smaller room. As he hammered in the final nail, the room was plunged into darkness.

  “Why did you do that?” I asked him.

  “It will be Ora’s darkroom. She needs darkness to develop her photographs.”

  He stepped down from the ladder he was using to reach the top of the window and turned to face me.

  “It’s good to see life in these rooms again,” he said.

  Ora spent a lot of time in the rooms too, moving items from one place to the other and wondering aloud whether they looked all right. I watched her as she dusted the furniture in the bigger room with a yellow cloth. She sprayed the table with furniture polish. The room looked smaller now that the furniture was in it. The smell of the furniture polish tickled my nose and made me sneeze. Ora looked up when she heard the sound.

  “Oh, there you are. I’m nearly finished this. Then we’ll have some lunch.”

  She straightened up and came over to stand beside me.

  “I hope you don’t mind me taking over like this,” she said.

  “Taking over what?”

  “The rooms, you know.”

  I shrugged. They were just rooms.

  They moved in the weekend after Jazz finished school for the summer. Ora’s car was filled to bursting with boxes; this was the last part of the procession. A removal van followed the car. It was filled with furniture. Ora directed Matthew and the removal men as they carried the furniture in. She found corners for it which I never knew existed. Our hall became a sea of boxes. I retreated to the windowseat and listened to the sounds of scraping and banging as the furniture was placed in its new home. Ora filled the presses with gleaming objects which looked more suited to a spaceship than a kitchen. Our house was splitting open.

  “Why do you have so much paraphernalia?” I asked her.

  She laughed, but didn’t answer my question. I got off the windowseat and went to find Jazz. He was in his room, knee-deep in boxes of his own. The homemade radio was on the windowseat. Matthew came in, holding a silver television. It was the television from the cottage in Wicklow. He grunted as he placed it on the rickety half-moon table at the end of Jazz’s bed. The table buckled under its weight.

  “I trust that will be sufficient for now, Geoffrey,” Matthew said, wiping his forehead.

  “Yeah. That’s okay. Thanks.”

  When Matthew left, Jazz said he had something to show me. I followed him down to the hall. He stopped next to two boxes which bulged even more than the others. When I leaned closer, I spotted a metallic gleam. Jazz picked one up.

  “This is so cool,” he said. “It’s the greatest thing ever.”

  His smile split his face in half. Ora came to the door of the kitchen. Her face was red.

  “Is it all right if we bring these to the DJ Shack, Mum?” he asked her.

  “Oh. Of course it is. There’s not much more you can do here anyway. You’ve been so helpful.”

  She leaned over to kiss him.

  “Here, you can carry the other box,” he said to me. “It’s not as heavy as it looks.”

  I picked up the box and followed him out the back door, struggling under its weight but feeling important.

  Jazz took his ghetto blaster off the table and began unveiling the metal equipment. First he took out a device which looked a little like his radio, a flat board filled with knobs. He placed it at the centre of the folding table. Then he lifted out two small record players and placed them on either side of the board. His movements were careful, reverent. In the second box, there were two speakers. Jazz placed them on the gas canisters, because there was no room for them on the folding table. He balanced them against the wall. When he finished, he stared at the equipment, his wide smile still in place.

  “What do you think?” he said.

  “I don’t know. What are they supposed to be?”

  “They’re decks. With a mixer and speakers.”

  “Like the ones you told me about.”

  “Yeah. They’re just basic ones, but they’ll do for a start.”

  “Where did you get them?”

  “Mum got them as a surprise. For the move. She got them off an ad in the Buy and Sell.”

  The decks injected life into his voice.

  “Do you know how to make them work?”

  “I think so. Remember I told you Sam let me use his a bit. Come on, we’ve other things to get.”

  We went back to the hall, where Jazz picked up his sports bag. When we returned to the
DJ Shack, he opened it. It was full of records.

  “I’ve been saving these,” he said. “Been buying them with my pocket money every week. Now I’ve something to play them on.”

  “Are they 7-inch or 12-inch?” I asked, proud to display my knowledge.

  “7-inch.”

  He took out one of the records, slid it out of its white paper covering and handed it to me. It felt cool and smooth. I ran my fingers back and forth along the grooves. They started to tingle.

  “Only hold it at the edge,” Jazz said, sounding worried. “It’ll scratch otherwise.”

  My fingers detected a nick in the bottom right-hand corner.

  “I think it might already be.”

  “Where? Where?”

  Jazz was frantic. I decided it was best not to say any more, so I covered the spot with my finger.

  “Oh, phew, that’s okay. That’s the bit where the needle goes in.”

  I looked at the label on the record, but without my monocle, I could make out only a faint scrawl.

  “What tune is this?”

  “It’s Sam’s; he made it himself. Imagine. Here, give that to me and I’ll slip it on.”

  He placed the record on one of the record players and fiddled with buttons and wires. It took him a long time. Squealing noises came out through the speakers. Jazz didn’t say anything. He kept his face bent over the equipment, sometimes muttering under his breath. At last, beats began to pound through the shed.

  “It’s brilliant,” shouted Jazz above the din. “Real pumping beats. Proper acid.”

  Jazz often described the music he played as acid. It was short for acid house. His head went up and down; it always did that when he liked a piece of music. The beats became interspersed with the sounds of breaking glass, saucepan lids banging together. Then there was a cymbal clash, the hammer blow of Thor. I covered my ears, certain that the roof of the shed was going to blow off. Jazz turned it off.

  “Let me pick the next tune,” I said. “I can pick proper music.”

  Jazz slid out another record; the name ‘Jack’ was printed on it in bold red letters.

  “Think you’ll like this one; it’s a bit mellower. It’s called Strings of Life.”

  He was right; it was mellow, almost stately, a linear pattern of beats interspersed with swirling piano notes. We listened, rapt. Jazz pressed his knuckles against his cheeks.

  “I want a go,” I said, when the tune finished.

  “No way. I have to know how to work it before I can show you. We better go back. Mum’s brought soup for lunch.”

  As we reached the back door of the house, I said, “You’re a proper DJ now.”

  “No I’m not.” He blushed. “But at least it’s a start.”

  I pushed open the door.

  “You’ll have to choose a DJ name. Like one of your bands with numbers.”

  “Maybe something with Jazz in it.”

  As we ate our lunch, we kept smiling at each other. When Ora asked us why, we were unable to tell her.

  That night, I found it hard to sleep. Voices murmured in the next room. It took a while to realise there were no people in Jazz’s room; it was just his television. The sound of his breath travelled through the walls. I was used to him being here as a guest, but now it was his room for always. My veins tingled. When sleep came, it was restless; my blankets kept falling to the ground.

  Ora left a trail of smells everywhere: the chemical smell of the fluid she used to develop her photographs, the pungent, itchy smell of flowers, rich cooking odours. She was a constant, hovering presence, apologising, tidying up, enquiring about our welfare. The kitchen hummed to the sound of her stirring, chopping, frying. She poured mixtures into the gleaming pots and pans, pressed buttons which made her space-age contraptions buzz and whirr. Matthew said I wasn’t to worry; she was just feathering her nest. But to me, she was a cuckoo, trying to implant herself in ours. I was used to her going away after field trips. Now she was there every time I turned around.

  Her furniture battled for position in our house. The overflow of furniture turned familiar walkways into alien territory. I was forever banging my legs off low tables which popped up out of nowhere, or sending tiny ornaments clattering to the ground. It was exasperating. She filled the rooms with colours, a riot of yellows, oranges, reds and purples. Matthew said it was like living in a sunburst. Ora muttered apologies from behind her cloud of hair. In the end, Ora’s furniture won; even our chessboard was forced to surrender during one of her tidying sprees.

  Visitors kept invading the house. They came to have their photographs taken by Ora, in the bigger of her two rooms. Some of them came into the kitchen to drink the strange-smelling tea with her. The telephone rang a lot too, but since most of the calls were for Ora, she always answered it. It was fortunate that Matthew and I were out of the house a lot of the time. That summer, I was given the honour of helping Matthew collect his samples during his field work. We spent hours observing the teeming life in unexpected corners of Wexford’s beaches.

  “You already have a scientist’s thoroughness,” Matthew said to me. “You should be up to it.”

  Jazz stayed behind, to help Ora arrange her furniture and cook meals. When he wasn’t with her, he was in the DJ Shack hunched over his decks, or in his room watching the television.

  The changes in our house scratched at my insides, made me restless. I flitted from room to room, trying to find an anchor. Ora was always reaching towards me, trying to swaddle me in a blanket of affection, but I danced away before she could reach me. It wasn’t deliberate; I was just used to affection that came in sudden fierce bursts rather than in a constant stream. I retreated to the windowseat, one of the few unravaged parts of the house, where I worked through Matthew’s reading list. That summer, I was in thrall to the world of Greek and Roman legend, where battles and love affairs were conducted on an operatic scale. From time to time, the sound of Ora’s cooking cut through the narrative.

  I never realised how often I fell asleep while I read at the windowseat until Ora came to live with us. She was always finding me with my cheek resting on the cool glass, my chin drooping. I shrugged off her entreaties to lie down and rest. It was only my eyes that were tired. Though Ora was an alien presence, she was also a benign one. She was nothing more than a minor irritant, a fly in the background.

  Ora knew a lot about unexpected things, such as hair. I never thought much about my hair, just tied it back from my face with an elastic band when I was looking for samples. One day, she stood behind me as I brushed my hair at the bathroom mirror. I turned around.

  “Oh, look at all the hairs on your brush!” she exclaimed, her voice full of consternation.

  I shrugged and began pulling the hairs out; it was a daily ritual.

  “You’d be much better using a comb, your hair’s so fine,” she said. “Come down to the kitchen and I’ll show you.”

  She took a comb out of one of the drawers and began to run it through my hair, teasing out the strands until they fell around my face. I squirmed at the tugging motion, but was soon seduced by the smooth, deft motion of her fingers. It didn’t hurt as much as the brush and when she finished, there were very few hairs on the comb.

  The next day, Ora had to go into Wexford to collect film. When she came back, she said she had something for me. It was an elastic band covered in soft material. She positioned me in front of the small mirror in the kitchen and started drawing strands of my hair towards her, enough to make a small ponytail. The ponytail hugged the base of my skull; the rest of my hair formed a waterfall beneath it. A grin crept onto my face as I savoured my new, grown-up appearance. Just then, Jazz and Matthew emerged from their separate corners of the house. Ora turned me around to face them.

  “Look at Astrid,” she said. “Doesn’t she look glamorous?”

  “Y
eah,” said Jazz, unsure of what he was supposed to be admiring.

  “What have you done to her?” Matthew asked.

  “I’ve fixed her hair. Don’t you see?”

  “You can’t expect us men to notice something as trivial as that. Isn’t that right, Geoffrey?”

  Jazz went to the sink and started washing his hands.

  “S’pose,” he said, his words muffled by running water.

  I kept sneaking looks at myself in the mirror, marvelling at the alteration in my appearance.

  The small ponytail became a fixture in my hair. Jazz kept creeping up behind me to pull on it when we were in the DJ Shack. I tried to move away but never succeeded; his fingers always found their target.

  “Leave it alone,” I said to him one day. “I like it this way.”

  “So do I,” he muttered to the floor.

  “That isn’t true. You’re always pulling it. It’s tedious.”

  “I do. It’s pretty.”

  He lifted his head.

  “Here, I’ll do it up for you.”

  I submitted to his touch. His hands fumbled, but they were gentle.

  During that strange, scratchy time, Jazz and I found each other in darkrooms of our own. When I wasn’t scouring the beaches with Matthew, I was in the DJ Shack, watching Jazz perfect his act. His hands were surer now; he could fit the songs together and play them without any gaps in between. He also knew a few tricks; with the flick of a button, he made the voices on the tracks sound slow and sluggish, or so fast that they were more rodent-like than human. The altered voices tickled us, made us laugh until our stomachs ached.