The New Cage [Mental Breakdown Remix]

by Amy Vought Barker

When I lived in the first house, I used to lie there and listen, like a pot boiling over. Each time I would arch my ear, hoping for silence. Sometimes I got it, and slept. More often than not I would be kept awake by voices. Voices muffled so you couldn’t hear what they were saying. You could only hear they were angry.

My eventual and inevitable break was painful - embryonic, foetal, writhing, forcing, screaming, crying. Rebirth of sorts.

The worst of it was over years ago and I can only remember the whole time as some kind of surreal road accident. A lot of speeding, swerving and then suddenly wandering off the side of a highway covered in blood and shock, wondering just what the hell happened. My father drunk and my mother coming back frantically to pick us up and care for our wounds.

I used to open the cage door and fly about the house. People said I was mad. I was. My extreme sort of mad state, I didn’t like much. My hatred made it slightly easier when the swinging lead boot of the gaol keeper kicked. Kicked away. I didn’t think at the time, I didn’t realise, that it would take longer than the rest of life to get back, to migrate.

The neighbour in those early years told me recently the version my little brother had told him: his favourite had left; that worked out, worked out fine until the break.

It almost seems comical now in a black humour sort of way, but it wasn’t at the time. One and one on their own.

It was almost a year before I would let the cage outside, as I was approaching my own feathery existence, to let me fly about a bit.

Being a teenager I spent my weekends getting stoned or stealing my parents’ grog.

I was carefree for a while.

Then one night I woke up in the dark in my bedroom, hands inside my underpants. I sat up, pushed my face hard into the pillow. Lasted maybe 20 seconds, or 20 years - depending on which way you look at it.

Alone hasn’t been quite the same since.

The next day I got crazy - near enough to. Apparently terrorised. Would eventually shit on the kitchen floor, hating. As upset as I wanted to be. Still in shock. My parents hadn’t woken at 4:30 in the morning. It was a bad dream. A bad dream that had left the door open. I preferred to believe it had never really happened and told myself a dream was all it was.

Two weeks later I came again. This time next door. The neighbours’ twelve year old boy. Fucked him in the park down the road. I still think about what would have happened if I hadn’t that night. I ended up telling mum. She had too much work to do to really fix anything but she let me sleep with the light on. Too many predators, she said.

I had to wait until I moved out of home to get my new boyfriend, the boyfriend always sensitive - I was concerned the only thing he was good at. Within days I found that he smoked a lot of dope. Many people wouldn’t tolerate living in space seven nights a week. It was my first; I did.

In the end I drank a lot. Perhaps it was because of the night, I drank a lot. Put my hands inside knickers. I drank a lot. And then interrupted sex. Empty. Swollen.

Didn’t last long. Not nearly as long, I hoped, as the lingering does for a sensitive.

The eventual death was nobody’s fault. Picture this. Sit with us. Back. Twenty-fifth first time we were together. The same. Were serious at some stage. Would tolerate each others presence then.

Exact atmosphere: this day put aside for a couple of hours, peacefully. All very enjoyable, until the air cracked. My desperate lunge only a push. The exploded air disappeared. Over. Form a search party.

We searched fervently for someone to blame. Eventually we gave up. Futile birdcalls. Instead, became hungry. Or perhaps, manage to starve to death instead.

I never knew what happened to him. He disappeared. I just knew he wasn’t coming back. Unable to find someone to blame for each other, we each disappeared.

Quite a few years passed before my fourth, when I moved into a flat of my own. Alive and happy, a little nutty, I. We all get like that. Feisty, he knows how to work his beak. Getting near him means pain. In a couple of years there will be nothing left. It hurts, but I always open the cage for him. To fly around. But it’s a privilege he seems indifferent to. He leaves now and then. Unleash a flurried blizzard of tiny feathers as he makes a bolt. But he never stays out long.

Flying is like… what you might call fairly content. But I’ve always felt guilty. So on my birthday, a new one, the new cage: black, three times as tall and twice as wide. To a human, less a sense of being jail-like.

I think it made a difference.

The new cage, unlike the old cage, you could open right up. Even the roof folded outwards in two halves into the air. The front panel of the cage could be unlatched so that it swung completely open, removing all barriers. Big enough for a family, let alone a single. Mirrors, bells, a huge branch of gum leaves, seed and honey. Heaven. At least eventually. To get to a heaven I first had to believe in a god. And that god was me. A god that had just been to a birthday, verging-on-illegally-young. A god that got drunk to the point of life-after-thirty. A god that had broken two bottles, struggled to grab the rest from the fridge. Held bleeding finger hard against earlobe, could hear over the wailing and shouting. That had given up trying to hear anything. I suppose it didn’t help. I tripped over the caged in the dark. Back to my noise. Me sprawling across the floor. My bottle smashing in the corner. More than enough: the alert.

After that, it took me about two hours to realise that the six years I thought I had built up amounted to squat. Apparently I wasn’t even alone, master, let alone god.

I was bloodshot eyes and driedblood ear stuck to a sweaty pale face swaying on a chair. I was endless… I sat cautiously, a little defiantly, at the end.

Tiny white cage.

A cat, a mouse hole - my attitude soon gave way to drunken apathy. I decided to simply reach in. It’s the best thing, I told myself. I had never tried it before, though I suspected that it would be a simple task. I deliberately tried not to use force. Scare shitless. I had grown the ball of feathers over the years and I didn’t want a panic-related heart attack.

I should have been more. Each halfhearted panicked flurry of feathers and shrill scared click of the throat only managed… beautiful tail feathers: the sight of them caught in my own bloody fingers made me stop. After all, the whole idea was to not freak out. I wrapped a strip of my shirt around the bleeding and sat down to think of another less tailfeatherscaughtinbloodyfingers way.

Then it struck me like a dull, throbbing pulse.

I placed the old cage on top of the new one, both with doors open. Then I gradually began removing all landmarks. First, the food and water trays which I put on the floor of the new cage. Then I cut the wires that held three sticks which I then individually dragged out of the cage or snapped as required. Next mirror with its tiny bell. Last of all, I gently reached in and removed the perch. Hopped away as I dragged it slowly through the door, until the end. And simply dropped down to the cage floor. I stand there in the empty cage, among the sand and shit, perhaps out of resignation, or simply out of curiosity. Almost immediately poke little head out of the front door and start climbing to the top cage. Out, I shut the door and the cage, perched on top, in front: new home. Quick as a flash jump inside. Shut door, locked my door, and stumbled to bed.

After much tossing and turning it was the next day. My drawn curtains would have rendered the room dark, except that I had fallen asleep with the TV on again. I still couldn’t get used to sleeping alone in total darkness. Through a flickering haze I awoke to see the sitting perch. Usually by this time would be singing, awake, or at least fluttering around a bit. There was nothing. Just perched there, like I’d stolen the last two weeks. Feeble, pathetic attempts. Used to be able to slide down vertical bars to the below. It isn’t possible with the horizontal ones: step cautiously, weighing up every move for a few seconds before descent. Now and then slip and plunge to the cage floor, chirp in dismay, grace of a threeday old chick. I don’t know if it’s deliberate or not. All I know is that it makes me feel very guilty. Completely ruined, my present. The bigger cage. More room. More playthings. More doors to get in and out. Supposed to love it. Instead, thrown into defiant depression. And so here I am, dancing like a naked muppet to the sounds of the new Tom Waits album, hoping to cheer up. And I’m depression. I’m really hoping people, if they saw me springing around my room naked, they would still say I was mad. But I know they won’t see me or say anything. Because you can’t see through locked doors and drawn curtains.

 

The Mental Breakdown Remix by Amy Vought Barker is licensed under a Creative Commons AttributionNoncommercialShare Alike 2.5 Australia Licence. It is a derivative work of Stefan Laszczuk’s CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia licensed story. The original is available at http://www.remixmylit.com/the-new-cage/ For details on how you can reuse the original and this remix see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/au/.