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The morning is grey, a thick blanket of clouds hanging low over La Cage, not a leaf left on the Reverend Tree. The smell of snow is in the air, though none has fallen yet, and a cold draft is creeping through the hallways, rooms and hidden corners of the old hospital.
Florie wakes up because Donnie stops snoring. Or maybe because Donnie stops snoring because she’s turned onto her side and kneed Florie in the kidneys.
Pale light is falling through the Union Branch office window, small pieces of dust dancing in the glow. Used glasses and empty bottles are scattered across the desk and the floor as well as a couple of the little plastic baggies, a handful of reals and their playing cards in a not-so-neat stack. Remnants of last night’s union branch meeting.
The door to the back room is ajar, enticing, and Florie tries to remember why or how she fell asleep on the couch with Donnie when her bed is right there.
Across the room Dali is draped over one of the arm chairs, fast asleep, a fuzzy leopard-print blanket draped over her in turn. Which means that somebody - either Smiley or Elian - stopped on their way to bed after last night’s meeting to do so. Softies.
Donnie is pleasantly warm next to her and there’s a second blanket draped over the two of them, and Florie considers closing her eyes again and going back to sleep. It’s still early. Too early, anyway.
But now that she’s awake she’s aware of the crick in her neck and the pressure in her bladder and there’s no going back.
With a groan Florie sits up. Her back gives a crack and so does the couch the two of them have been sleeping on. The blanket slips off her shoulder and cold air bites at her skin. She shivers. Somebody should start a new fire. Somebody who’s not her.
Quietly as possible she gets up. Donnie stirs again but doesn’t wake. The floorboards creak under her boots and her feet aren’t happy about having slept in heels but it’s not the first time and it won’t be the last either, and currently it’s too cold to take them off anyways. She picks up her fluffy coat from where it’s fallen on the floor and shrugs it on, then slips out the door.
***
The halls of La Cage are mostly empty at this hour. A couple drunks by the bar, the postie hurrying by. Through the broken windows the sounds of hammers and saws from the workshops drift in, the busker’s melody in the distance.
Elian comes her way, walking with a purpose as always, returning from whatever business he’s got done before 10 am on a Tuesday. He’s wearing a knitted scarf against the cold that’s wrapped around his neck at least five times with one of the ends still hanging down almost to the ground, comically long on anyone else but somehow not lessening his domineering appearance. He points at Florie as he’s approaching her, signalling her to walk with him.
She stops.
“I gotta piss.”
He waves his hand dismissively.
“Meet me in the office after. We’re ‘renegotiating’ membership fees of the workers as decided last night. And don’t forget the teambuilding exercise after.”
He smiles, always like a shark but this one with a surprising warmth in it. Surprising to those who don’t know him.
Florie nods and gets that look in return that he always gives her, like he’d almost like to ruffle her hair but knows better. She’d never go so far as to call him soft, but there is a tenderness beneath that gang boss exterior only his family get to see.
***
The busker’s sitting in his usual spot in the drafty stairwell down, wrapped in a thick coat that may also just be a wool blanket, strumming a familiar song on his ukulele that’s a little out of tune from the cold. As Florie walks by he lifts a gloved hand in greeting and smiles.
By the toilets there’s the usual group of smokers, warming their fingers on glowing cigarette butts and breathing clouds of smoke into the chilly morning air. Florie accepts a cigarette from that party teen in short shorts and neon colored fishnets even in this weather but doesn’t join the ongoing conversation about the annual La Cage holiday party that night.
She takes the long way back, through the main courtyard. Frozen grass crunches under her boots, and though no snow has fallen yet the air is crisp with its smell.
The smell of snow mixed with that of burning plastic. A handful of people who did not get any work today huddle around a small fire in a barrel producing more smoke than warmth.
Shouts come from one of the workshops:
“Faster!” - “Get it together!” - “That’s what you call a bench?”
A crack, a rumble, a strangled sound of pain.
“Get him out and someone else in.”
The group around the barrel jump and rush to the door where the sweatshop owner appears, thick fur coat and sunglasses despite the gloomy winter morning.
Florie doesn’t stop to watch how it plays out, she’s reached the side door of the hospital and makes her way up the stairs in the direction of the union branch office.
She’s halfway up when she hears it, a surprisingly loud shrill squeak. Rats, of course, nothing new. This rat is small and gray and losing a fight against its significantly bigger brother.
Florie watches for a moment, then the bigger rat has won and scurries off with whatever piece of trash they’d been fighting over. The smaller rat is left behind, just sitting there, lost and hungry and cold. Without even thinking about it Florie bends down and picks it up. The rat doesn’t even try to run, just lets it happen. Its tiny body is shaking and just barely warm to the touch. Florie can feel its bones, fragile under the thin fur. For a split second she’s fighting the impulse to crush it in her hand.
She puts it in her coat pocket instead.
Back at the union branch office she finds Donnie and Dali, both now awake, doing lines off the desk. There’s a fire now in the wood stove in the office corner and a pot of coffee with a liberal splash of spirit to drive out the cold.
Without bothering to explain herself Florie hands Donnie the rat. It earns her a squeal as if her friend was herself a rodent and a quickly aborted declaration of eternal love and gratitude. As if Donnie couldn’t pick up her own rats.
Then Elian, Smiley and that guy who’s the “official”, elected “union president” enter the room and they turn to focus on the ‘renegotiation of union membership fees’, as Elian had so pointedly called it. The guy tries to argue something about “union money” and “strike funds” and as his bones break under her boot Florie thinks of the rat. His bad luck that Donnie doesn’t care to keep him as a pet.
***
“Team building exercise”. Usually these describe a drug fueled bender or a good beating given to someone who might’ve looked at them wrong, like the one earlier. But this time they’ve gathered in La Cage’s communal kitchen and are having a bake off.
It starts easy enough, each of them at their own corner of the big table, making dough for their choice of cookie.
Smiley does nut corners, proving herself the gang grandma once again after having been the one to initiate this whole event in the first place. Donnie starts cutting rats out of gingerbread while Dali makes jam-filled cookies dusted with powdered sugar - or coke; one can never be quite sure with her. Florie herself ditches the baking altogether and just goes for chocolate clusters. And Elian makes the classic sugar cookie and does so efficiently enough that he finds time to decorate them with icing and sprinkles before it all goes south.
Donnie drops the first egg. Dali giggles.
“Klutz.”
She flicks some flour in Donnie’s direction but thereby knocks over the milk with her elbow, which runs off the table and drips onto Florie’s boot.
“You bastard!”
Florie smacks her with the spatula in her hand, Dali ducks and bumps into Elian who had been just carefully piping icing onto his sugar cookies and now curses like his father as the snowman he’s working on gets smeared. Still giggling hysterically Dali ducks away under his elbow, just out of reach of Florie’s spatula.
Donnie throws the second egg.
Things only escalate from there and end with Florie and Smiley - both covered head to toe in flour - holding down a shrieking, giggling Conquistador as Donnie writes “loser” on her forehead in blue icing.
One of the immigrants, a Kim, probably, walks in halfway through and gets knocked out cold by an egg hitting them in the center of the forehead, then is dragged off by their scared friends. Florie laughs so hard she cries.
***
The La Cage Holiday Party is in full swing. Disco music is playing, fairy lights are glittering, everyone is jolly. Florie can’t bear it anymore.
She has to leave. Get out. Out of the club, out of the hospital.
Outside into the courtyard where the icy cold pulls her back into her body, biting her skin through her layers of sparkly clothes.
She’s wearing a new dress. She hasn’t worn a dress in years. Not since the tutu. The feeling of the tights on her legs is bringing back that memory. That pain. She almost crashes to the floor trying to get them off.
The frozen earth against the bare soles of her feet helps, a grounding contrast to the burning hot memory. Isn’t it funny how shame feels like burning alive? Literally. Florie knows.
It’s all too much. The people, the music, the laughter. She’ll always feel that pain. That shame, that fear, that humiliation.
And it’s fine now, mostly. She’s learned to live with it. She’s grown into it. Around it like a tree through a metal fence. They fear her now.
But it’s moments like this where it inevitably comes back. The laughing, dancing, cheering crowd ready to turn on her and laugh. At her. Again.
She knows they won’t. Things have changed. They wouldn’t dare to now. Yet she can’t shake the feeling. No matter how many shots she takes, how many lines she does, how many pills she pops. It sits there in her chest, dark and nasty, clinging to everything, creeping up into her throat and suffocating her.
She’ll never be one of them. She’s stopped trying long ago, doesn’t even want to anymore. Yet she can’t seem to shake the pain. Not in moments like these.
She laughs, sobs, into the clear midwinter night, up at the stars and breathes air that’s cold enough to burn her lungs, air that’s not filled with black, tarry smoke.
Angry, she digs a cigarette out of her pocket, lights it and takes a deep drag, the smoke filling her lungs spiteful. Fire couldn’t kill her. This won’t either.
The cigarette is starting to burn her fingers when someone steps up next to her.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
Elian follows her gaze up to the night sky.
Florie nods. A glittering tapestry of sparkling lights, far away and cold.
Elian’s standing just close enough that his elbow brushes her shoulder when he reaches into his jacket pocket and then offers her a small jar of body glitter.
“Dali took this off one of the Bacius. Want it?”
Florie stares at the little tub, the screaming of her thoughts surprisingly quiet now.
She meets his eyes.
What he sees in hers is enough for him to turn himself fully towards her and unscrew the lid of the glitter. He dips a finger into it and carefully raises it towards her face. She doesn’t flinch and he gently taps glitter all over the burnt side of her face, his fingers cold against her skin.
Her heartbeat is deafening in her ears.
“There.”
Elian closes the jar of glitter again. Florie doesn’t know whether she’ll kiss or kick him but she doesn’t get around to either because with an excited shout of her name Donnie full body tackles her and sends her stumbling, barely avoiding sending them both crashing to the ground.
“There you are! We’re almost up for karaoke, you guys gotta come inside now!”
Then she notices the glitter on Florie’s face and her eyes light up.
“Oh, I love that!”
She hooks her arm around Florie’s and turns to Elian.
“Now, are you coming? Or do I have to drag you, boss? Smiley said I could if necessary.”
Elian rolls his eyes, hands buried in his jacket pockets.
“I picked the song, didn’t I?”
Florie lets herself be dragged, her tights left behind on the frozen ground.
***
As they walk into the bar where the karaoke stage is set up they catch the tail end of Jacqueline Baciu and Faustin Verhoog performing “Baby it’s cold outside” and collectively make a beeline for the bar for another round of shots.
Donnie waves to Smiley to let her know they’re here and Smiley speaks to the DJ and then quickly retrieves Dali from Billie Verhoog’s arms under the mistle toe.
“Next up we got ‘Big Mean and the Girls’ doing ‘Jingle Bell Rock’ - give it up!”
The Very Cool DJ announces them and they step on stage, the audience cheering.
Florie feels the eyes of half the inhabitants of La Cage on her and for a split second red hot panic floods her veins, the terror rising in her throat like bile.
Smiley beside her takes her hand and squeezes it. The music starts.
Elian begins to sing. Donnie and Dali join him. They start to dance. And Florie can breathe again. The world keeps turning. The horrible feeling subsides just in time for Florie to jump in at her and Smiley’s cue.
They sing. They dance. They do the full choreography to the audience’s hoots and wolf whistles and Elian gives an epic solo on the air guitar.
Florie can feel the lights reflecting off the glitter on her face and it feels like armour. They are invincible.
The song ends and they hug and take a bow to thunderous applause. Florie grins so big it might split her face in two.
It’s only after another round of celebratory drinks and a lot of dancing that she realizes she’s left her boots outside with the tights. They go as a group to retrieve them because it’s the point of the night where a little quest is irresistible and also, it’s the holiday party and holidays are spent with family. When they step out into the courtyard it is snowing.