Alva and Irva (12 page)

Parts of this new experience were perhaps less new to us than to our classmates. We had practised our first kisses on each other so many years ago, we knew each other under the school uniform so perfectly already. Now with what fascination did we watch each other’s bodies changing. We pressed ourselves against each other in scientific comparisons. How extraordinary was this progression of Irva and me. Our nipples decided to enlarge themselves. Beneath them small inexact copies of Prospect Hill began to grow. Our long, thin forms became a fraction more rounded. We began to collect a few hairs between our legs and then more and more, and under our arms as well. Our voices decided they were immature and altered themselves accordingly (but not in the comical way that happened with the males). The upheavals in our bodies made us doubly awkward, long arms and legs always in the way, as if we had too many of each and we were descended not from Dallia and Linas but from a pair of crane flies.

And then I began to bleed. Mother gave me a cotton bag and a purse (to keep with me throughout the day) in which were kept various feminine items which she instructed me in the use of. Irva was jealous, her whole body stiffened with resentment. She could barely move she was in such discomfort, terrified of being left behind. But only a few days later, she was also the happy recipient of an identical cotton bag and purse.

Now, for the first time, I thought it might be good if Irva and I began to spend some moments of each day apart. I began my first attempt to train her away. She could never understand why, she was appalled at this new independence in me, she couldn’t conquer it. To
begin with it was only for a few isolated minutes that we were separated, then I demanded quarter hours and even half hours. I’d watch her walk away, turning back every few steps to implore me, but I had to be firm, no matter how much I worried, and I did worry then, for both of us—‘It’s just for half an hour,’ I said, ‘only half an hour.’ How she crumbled in those half hours when we were apart, bits seemed to fall off her; each time we were reunited there seemed less of her than before. And though I cried honest tears when we were together again, I began to somehow enjoy it all. Whole half hours of terrifying and wonderful loneliness! Such Irvaless moments! Such daring!

T
HERE WAS
a boy in our class called Piter Soffit whose principal characteristic was that he longed to be liked. More than anything he wanted to be liked. The more people liked him the happier he felt. When he felt he was liked he positively jerked with happiness. I began to single him out, with Irva dragging behind me, ‘Hello Piter, hello Piter.’ And he would coyly respond, ‘Hullo, hullo Alva and hullo Irva.’ ‘Would you like to come to our home?,’ I asked him one afternoon. ‘Really?,’ he said, ‘Yes, I would. Really, really?’ Irva didn’t want Piter in our home, she begged me not to let him come, so I invited him the next day. ‘Very well,’ said Irva, ‘let him come, but don’t show him the city, he doesn’t need to see the city, please don’t let him see it.’ We walked him home in between us (with Mother following behind). I asked him as soon as we were home, ‘Would you like to see our city, our own city which we made ourselves?’ ‘Really?,’ said Piter, ‘Would you show me, really?’ I took him up to the attic. I showed him the city, with Irva pushing him back every now and then, stopping him from getting too close. ‘It’s beautiful,’ he said, ‘and to think you made it all yourselves! But where’s it of?’ he asked. ‘It’s our city,’ said Irva, ‘where Alva and I live, we made it just for us.’ ‘Oh, I see,’ said Piter, ‘it’s not a real place, it doesn’t actually exist.’ I stood next to Piter so that we were touching, after a while I began stroking his hair. Piter didn’t say anything. ‘Do you want to touch me?,’ I asked, ‘Or would you rather touch Irva?’ Piter didn’t say anything. ‘Go on, if you want,’ I said, ‘we don’t mind,
you can touch us. He can touch us, can’t he Irva?’ Piter stayed quiet and didn’t move. Nor did Irva. ‘Are you shy?,’ I asked, ‘Don’t be shy.’ And then I stroked him a bit more, and I could hear Piter’s faster and faster breathing. And then Piter suddenly started crying. He said through his tears, ‘Leave me alone, please, please leave me alone.’

S
O THEN
I forgot about Piter Soffit and began to concentrate my mind elsewhere. ‘We live in Veber Street. We weren’t born there, we were born in Saint Mirgarita of Antioch Street, in the hospital that’s there. Our father’s dead. He died on Napoleon Street. Where do you live?’

That was what I said to the fair-haired boy in the library with the maps and guidebooks, with Irva, anxious Irva, trembling Irva, less and less Irva every day, at my side. The boy looked up at us, very seriously for a few moments, and I began to wonder if he too would demand to be left alone, but then his mouth opened and he spoke, ‘I live on Dismas Street. I was born there. My father’s not dead, but he doesn’t live on Dismas Street, he lives on Cletus Street with his second family. I live with my mother and my sister. They don’t understand me. My brother does understand me though, he’s older, he’s twenty-six, but he lives in Canada now. How about you? Can’t you speak?’ Those last questions were aimed at Irva, who nodded almost imperceptibly but didn’t speak.

His name was August Hirkus and he spent such long hours in the library because he was sure that when he grew up he was going to travel the world. He was solemnly preparing himself for his departure from Entralla which was, he said, ‘the most insignificant, piffling, little zilch of a spot, where nothing happens, where everybody speaks one of the most obscure languages in the world just so that the rest of the world will not understand them. But the life of August Hirkus,’ he said, ‘will not be wasted in such a place. I will be someone, but to be someone,’ he said, ‘I have to be somewhere first. It’s impossible to be someone here,’ he said, ‘everyone here is a complete no one because this place is an utter nowhere. Yes, first I’ll go somewhere, and then, after a while, I’ll be someone. What about you?’

We just stared, too amazed at August Hirkus, at this boy who could see his future so clearly. He looked disappointed. ‘Christ!,’ he said, ‘a couple of Entrallans, that’s what I’ve got here.’ He closed his library books, pushed out his chair, but before he was quite up, and hurriedly, so I wouldn’t lose him, I spoke. ‘I shall travel to Gaalkacyo, Mudug, Somalia, and to Jinan, Shandong, China. I shall walk down the Avenue Brugmann in Brussels, and the Avenue Insurgentes in Mexico City. And Ramses Street in Cairo. And the Zagorodnyy Prospekt in Saint Petersburg. And the Khiaban-e Akbarabad in Tehran. And Waterworks Road in Brisbane.’

I could have gone on. I was only just beginning. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘you can come.’ We went outside to the library steps—Irva came too, even though she wasn’t invited—and we smoked our first cigarette (sharing one of August’s cigarettes between us, coughing and smiling). That was how it started, soon we spent more and more time with August, who we learnt was, or so he told us, a difficult child. He was frequently getting into trouble, frequently arguing with his mother, and almost always ignoring his sister who was not a difficult child, who was in fact a very easy child, who made her mother proud, who was swimming captain at her school, who knew many different chunks of the Bible off by heart, and came top in divinity, who had many friends and a voice that was considered exceptional. August, however, rarely sang and could barely swim, he had no interest in the Bible (except to hide his sister’s), he had no friends at school. He told us how he would be rude to the teachers in the classroom, that he would ask questions that deliberately embarrassed them. He rarely saw his father, except when he wanted money. He frequently skipped class and was on occasions caught shoplifting; once he was seen dropping stones from a bridge onto a train track. He liked to buy canisters of car paint and scrub out street signs and whenever the word
Entralla
appeared on posters or signs throughout the city he would write above it the word
FOR
and beneath it the words
READ NOWHERE.
He asked us if we’d seen his graffitied signs, we nodded even though we’d never seen them. The Entrallan police, August told us, had a file with his name written on it, just about him, a file that, he said, grew thicker almost every day.
I loved him! I’d do anything for him, he was the most astounding person I had ever met. I’d spend hours with August searching through maps and travel guides, sitting so close together, with Irva, a table away, watching us. August and I would have long discussions on the various merits or downfalls of certain famous hotels throughout the world. And it was whilst we were sitting on the marble steps of the Central Library that August said he was able to tell us apart, that it was easy to do so, and in the future whenever we tested him, he always got it right. Irva, he said, was always the one with the anxious expression. And how that seemed to increase the anxiousness upon her face, to burn it there.

August and I would touch all the time. We’d mock-fight each other. And I’d long for him to kiss me but he never did. I kissed him on the arm one evening, on the library steps, with Irva sitting a few steps behind. I gave him a love bite, a big purple island on his salty skin. (That night Irva gave me a love bite too, also on my left arm, even though I never asked for one.)

M
ORE AND MORE
Irva would begin to fall behind. She wanted to stay with us, but we couldn’t bare to have her there all the time, she got in the way, she crowded us, she couldn’t keep up but she was always somewhere, just behind us, lagging away, saying, ‘Can I come too? Can I come? Can I?’ I so loved her, of course I always loved her, but then, in those days, I loved hurting her too. I’d whisper to her with a confident smile, ‘Who are you Irva? Will you please tell me who you are because, to me, it doesn’t seem you’re anyone at all, not really.’ Sometimes walking with August, I’d suddenly stop, turn around on the pavement, march the few steps back to where Irva was and say, ‘Go home, Irva, go home,’ as if it were only a dog and not my sister who was following us. Once we all went to the McDonald’s restaurant on the Paulus Boulevard. I sat her down at a table, and August and I went to buy our food. She wanted to come with us, but I insisted she guard the table, and instead of buying food August and I simply walked out of the back entrance onto Toller Street and we were free, we were running away, laughing at our ingeniousness. Two hours later we happened to be walking
down the Paulus Boulevard and we looked through the windows of McDonald’s, and there was Irva, still there, waiting, still seated at the table.

Those days were the great days of my wildness. I started to miss class. August and I would spend school mornings and afternoons wandering from shop to shop, stealing little things that we had no real use for. Sometimes we’d run about the train station together, or squeeze ourselves inside the passport photograph cubicle in the station hall and make grimaces for the camera and afterwards out would plop four photographs of squashed and happy friends, so close together in such a small space. And sometimes on those days as we hurtled through the city we’d catch Irva somewhere behind us, just a few buildings away. And then came the nights when August and I used to buy car paint and spray onto brick walls the messages, ‘FINLAND, LAND OF LAKES’, or, ‘ITALY: CULTURE AND CHIANTI’, or, ‘FIND ADVENTURE IN ALASKA’.

And every night when I got home I’d tell Irva all about my fresh experiences until she cried.

I
T WAS ON
one of those days of our earliest separation that I went up to the attic to find the city of Alvairvalla in ruins. Irva had smashed it. There were visible imprints of her misery all over the city, misshapen houses lay winded, sprawled now off the pitted streets, imprints of her fists visible in their distorted faces. Some buildings had been pulled out of the city and scraped for long centimetres flat against the walls, or were on the floor covered with the stamp of Irva’s shoes. I could see on the ruined streets great gashes in the plasticine from where Irva’s clawed hands had scratched.

Poor Irva, I thought, how sad.

O
NCE
A
UGUST AND
I visited the Civic Bakery, which was the place where August’s father worked, but we didn’t go to visit him, instead we went to visit the great Bakery Clock Tower and to look on Entralla from above, and August from that great height took out his willy and pissed down upon the city and I laughed so much my giggles became cackles. And down below on the ground was Irva.
Did she wonder that day why it began to rain a little, even though there were no clouds in the sky?
⁹

Mother, who by then must have returned to work at the Central Post Office, began to be ruled again by her private terrors. She would still go to the school gates and often she’d be waiting there until the entire school had left Littsen Street and the gates were even
closed up for the night, and still she wouldn’t have seen us because neither I nor Irva would have gone to school all that day. And then more and more often Grandfather would be waiting at home when we finally returned, me first and then Irva always a few minutes behind, always with such a strange expression on her face. Grandfather would try to frighten us with gloomy predictions of our future lives and sometimes we’d be shown letters from school and sometimes a teacher would come and I’d hear Mother saying, ‘I don’t understand them … they barely talk to me anymore … they won’t talk to me.’ But I didn’t care about all those people. They were merely Entrallans. They didn’t count.

O
N THE STATION
steps I showed August the extraordinary piece of paper I had ripped from a library book when no one was looking, just for him. Grand Central Station, New York, more like a palace than a train station. But the cerulean blue ceiling, that was the most beautiful thing, spotted with the celestial globe. The stars, all the signs of the zodiac, but not just the stars, many of which were lit up by tiny bulbs, there were also outlines of the people and the things the stars were named after. Then August had his idea: ‘Why don’t we paint the stars on the ceiling of our train station?’ ‘Do you think we could?,’ I asked. He said, ‘I don’t see why not.’ ‘Wouldn’t they stop us, surely they would.’ ‘Not if they don’t know, not if we paint it at night when the station’s closed and locked up.’