There was another cage on the left as you entered from the stairway, and this one was often noticed first, and it was certainly a far more splendid structure than that rusty tin-floored affair that Emma had crawled into to remind her husband of his obligations. This latest cage was also a present from Charles. It was strong enough to hold a polar bear, but its ironwork was beautiful. There were pink Venetian blinds, a little day bed, and a fluffy rug on the floor. Originally, too, there had been bottles of Coty and Max Factor on a glass shelf, but Emma could not be induced to move.
Neither, of course, would she live in the flat itself – and this is more easily understandable because it was a small and dark and poorly ventilated area on the Pitt Street end of the fourth gallery. Charles slept there. Emma often cooked there. But the family's real home was in and around the cage where its most determined member lived, out on the gallery floor itself. This fourth gallery was more like a storehouse, a warehouse, a garden shed with spiders and old yellowing newspapers, which were dry and unpleasant to touch. It provided a marked contrast to the hygienic emporium below where the shining white-enamelled cages were so regularly wiped clean that, first thing in the morning when the staff arrived, there was a distinct change of air, as if the wind had changed its quarter and was now blowing off the sea, and then the emporium was all awash with bleaches and antiseptics, and although that might be all very comforting for some, Emma preferred the chaos of that big rectangular doughnut of private territory, the fourth gallery, where she lived amidst old mist nets, broken-down refrigerators, children's toys, mouldering laundry, lost sandwiches and those abandoned tricycles which had once raced round and round, but could no longer – Charles had stacked other cages, plainer, smaller, rusty birdcages, in such a manner that they blocked the children's favourite racetrack.
It was a madhouse, so he said.
When he was angry he said that they were all demented, himself included, and that their children would grow up to be insane, capable of theft and suicide. He called her a slattern and a slut and madwoman and then she would go cold as ice and she could do that trick with her eyes so they went blind and hard as steel ball-bearings and it frightened him and he thought she would never love him again. Then he would come to her in the night, begging as if she were a queen in satin and silk, a queen in a cage, and then she would spurn him.
Oh, what a game they had, what a sweet lovely perversion it was. You could feel the rage. You could feel the whole building, the actual building, shimmering with it until it was a violin filled with parrots, fluttering, panicked in their cages, and the fish in terror, swimming round and round in their bubbling tanks and some timid possum, illegally trapped, in the boss's office, lying mute with fear while its heart, no more than half an inch across, drove itself into a red and dangerous frenzy.
It was wrong, of course it was. She did not need to be told. She thought up the most disgusting things, God strike her. She took his big bull's pizzle in her mouth and made him weep and moan and once she dreamed she had decorated it with lipstick and rouge and smoothed depilatory cream on his hairy sac. She read the women's magazines but it seemed that they would not address themselves to what a woman's life might really be.
And dear Jesus, how he had tried to get her out of that cage. He thought he wanted her to be like "normal" people, but he did not really. Who would want to be normal after this? They would die of boredom, and besides, she had grown to love the cage when it was quiet and calm, and she would lie in there on the long sweet sunny afternoons and listen to the goanna drag its handbag belly across the dark wooden boards and lie beneath its ultraviolet light and when the late afternoon began to turn to early evening it would come right to her door, like a cat at feeding time, and she would open the box the staff brought to her and feed it "pinkies", those baby rats they bought for the reptiles.
Hissao would help her sometimes. Henry and George were not at home with pinkies or goannas. They would hide themselves away at the far end amongst the wire netting and make themselves tunnels and cages and hide in case – they never told her but she knew – in case a schoolfriend came and saw them. But Hissao was never ashamed. He was different from the beginning. They both liked it in the cage. Leah Goldstein said it was not good for Hissao to see his mother in the cage all the time. She did not say it sternly, but gently, as a womanly friend, while she brushed her hair. So Emma tried, she really did, to play outside with him for a certain portion of the day, but he also liked the cage.
It was the inner sanctum in which they were both, mother and son, loved and cared for, protected from the world, and they felt themselves to be circled by so many loving defences, walls, moats and drawbridges that it was a shock, sometimes, to look up and see the skylight was thin, so brittle, so fragile a barrier between their comfort and the cold of a storm.
So when uninvited guests found her and became angry with her for being in a cage, Emma truly believed that they were jealous.
Indeed, in just eight hours' time from my hesitation on the stairway, she was to offer me, as a mark of special favour, a cage of my own. This, I am pleased to say, was already taken by Mr Lo, and I must, in all politeness, ask you to bear with me, juddering, shell-shocked in the doorway, give me time to take a breather while I tell you a little about Mr Lo and how he found himself in such an odd accommodation.
37
One day, and not too many days before my own arrival – more than a month but less than a year – Leah Goldstein returned from shopping, her string bag heavy with potatoes with which she planned to make a lovely cake, and found a gentleman sitting in the cage with the pink Venetian blinds. He was twenty-two years old, a professional man, and was very nicely turned out in a grey double-breasted suit. He had a golden heart-shaped face and dark, sunken, unhappy eyes. He was Mr Henry Lo, marine architect, illegal immigrant.
Leah turned left as she came, puffing slightly, through the door, and there he was. Mr Lo smiled. Leah smiled. Mr Lo held out his business card. Leah placed the heavy string bag on the floor, very carefully and slowly in case a potato should tumble out and roll with the natural fall of the floor, and drop four storeys by which time it would be a lethal weapon falling at 200 miles per hour and capable of breaking the cranium and lodging itself, pulped and soggy behind the eyes – Charles had told her this, even shown her the mathematics of the fall, kindly provided by a staff member – and so, even though Leah was interested to read the new arrival's card, she was particularly careful with the potatoes, washed King Edwards from Dorrigo, picked early from loose red soil, and so round and easily rolled.
When she had the potatoes as stable as was likely, she placed her feet on either side of them, smiled apologetically at the young man in the cage, and read the card carefully.
Emma was wearing her pearls and her New Look suit. She was out of the cage and playing dutifully with her youngest son over on the southern gallery, racing a heavy lead motor car up and down and fighting for possession of it without taking the slightest trouble to protect her expensive nylons.
Leah offered Mr Lo his card back, but he insisted – he held up his soft pale palm to indicate his meaning – that she keep it. Leah and Mr Lo then bobbed at each other and Leah picked up her dangerous potatoes and squeezed her way past the rusty birdcages and made her way round to Emma's side. She squatted, not only because she was tired, but because she wished to speak to her friend in confidence.