Chapter 10

(In which Clementine enjoys Year Two)

Ten days later the women were called together and told that the fight between Alexia and Olga was on again. The venue was to be a place ten miles away and transport would be provided for all the cage women. Clemmy gave her word that she would not try to escape and it did not occur to anyone to doubt her.

Olga won easily and Clementine nursed her friend all the way back to camp. Alexia had put up a brave fight but Olga was a killer. Rashumba had been in the audience and she saw the pain in Clemmy's face as Alexia was knocked out - rather spectacularly.

Next day, a small metal cage was brought into the large communal cage and hung from the mesh ceiling. It was tiny and the girls all wondered what it was for. Would it hold a human being and, if so, whom?

It was there for weeks after that until in mid-November, Clemmy got on the wrong side of one of the more brutal guards. She got three hundred and was told she would never get less than that from now onwards and would get many more for a serious offence. Then they brought her back into the cage. Horror-struck, the other women were forced to the back of the cage and the small cage was lowered and the terrified Clemmy forced into it. It was then raised, too high for any one to touch and the inmates were left to their own devices. Rashumba had got the two lovers separated, without Alexia being released into the prison proper!

They kept her there for six weeks, so confined that she could barely move. The cage was lowered twice a day and Clemmy fed and watered, but without being let out or having the little cage opened. The others learned to keep away from the area under Clemmy. She had only one place to shit and that was downwards. Her predicament cast a shadow of despair over the whole company. If the weather got too much colder, even the hardy Clementine would not survive. Fortunately this second winter was to be relatively mild.

She coped by withdrawing into her own inner world. She recited all the poems she had ever learned time and again and even made up a few of her own. She composed a really lovely one about her Viola and a nice one about Alexia who she could see from up above. It added top her own misery to see that Alexia was beside herself with grief. They had told her when they put her in that tiny space that she must not talk for the duration of this punishment so she ignored all the words of encouragement that the braver ones called up to her. All these kind people were whipped for their generosity and the talking soon stopped. Soon enough, they grew used to seeing her up there, sometimes swaying from side to side as the wind howled and the cage was rocked in it and its occupant sent swaying to and fro. But Alexia never for a second stopped thinking of her up there all alone and confined like an animal.