Alva and Irva (13 page)
Authors: Edward Carey
That night, when the station was cleared, when the station gates were bolted, August and I arrived holding a pot of white emulsion paint and two brushes. There was a small side gate and then a turnstile, which we climbed over. And then we were inside the train station. And so our work could begin. We climbed way up a metal ladder bolted onto the wall and we sat with our feet dangling on one of the metal girders that supported the ceiling. It was like sitting on the ribs of a huge man, a great skeleton made of iron. We were alone in the station, it felt like alone in the world, only me and August and the pigeons trying to sleep. There was so much mess on those metal rafters, soot and dirt and rust and the pigeons had claimed them as if they were built for them alone;
there were feathers and shit everywhere. We carefully stood up, balancing ourselves with one another, we took our paint brushes and using the photograph of that famous ceiling in New York as our guide we began to paint. The paint went everywhere, dripped all over us, dripped on the pigeons’ shit, dripped on the pigeons, as if it were our own shit and we, much bigger birds, were shitting on them. It dripped all the way down to the station hall too, we heard it fall, sounds that seemed to us like a bum being smacked (a warning, perhaps, of what was to come). August’s coat had great streaks down it, and so did his hair and so did his face. The station ceiling wasn’t easy to paint, it was so filthy up there that the paint had to be laid on thickly or no marks would be made, and the brushes soon became gunked up. Our constellations weren’t accurate. They were too bunched up and all in a tiny part of the station ceiling. But, all the same, we were very proud of our work.
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We were up there for perhaps an hour, possibly more, maybe two, moving carefully between the metal ribbing, positioning white
dots. It would probably have been better if one of us had stayed down below and called out directions, since once back on the hall floor we could see just how inaccurate our daubing was. But I’m glad we were both up there, there was something so good about getting dirty together. When we did finally descend exhausted, we stood in the centre of the hall, looking up at our non-fluorescent stars, visible only because of the lights of the lavatory signs and the Coca Cola machines which were always lit up, and looking down at the mess we’d made on the floor. Such a huge place all for us. And we pulled the drying paint out of each other’s hair. And then we began to pull off our paint-covered clothes. And to kiss each other everywhere, all over.
That night something else moved in the darkness. Someone else was there. But we didn’t hear anything then, we were completely deaf, too busy with ourselves to hear. But as August and I kissed, and as we pressed against each other, then, at that moment, just then, when I felt that August and I were all that existed in the world, yes, just then, just at that moment, there was a scream from the darkness, a wail of such enormous unhappiness, a cry of such absolute misery and hurting, so loud it brought the night-watchman running.
T
HE NIGHT-WATCHMAN,
a man of supreme joylessness, didn’t like what he found in his station hall. Perhaps he might have been more understanding if there hadn’t been paint everywhere. But the combination upset him. There was too great an intimacy on the station floor and too much mess that went with it. He could not allow it to remain there, it was against the rules, there were too many people where he expected and wanted none. He shone his torch into us, rasping obscenities under his breath, he called the police on his radio, he stood by us with his torch until the police came.
The police, tired and angry, muttered and grimaced and ordered us to scrub the paint from the floor. But they never looked upwards, they never looked at the ceiling, never imagined that we’d been up there, August and I, and they never looked around the hall either to see if someone else might be hiding.
When we’d finished cleaning they took us to the police station, silent and guilty now and ashamed, even August was shaken for once, so shy suddenly that it was impossible for us to look at one another, because a shared look then might have shattered our spines.
A
UGUST AND
I
WAITED
on a bench screwed into the ground, we waited for such a long time, not speaking to each other, until finally I was ordered into an office.
A little desk and a little man who looked bored and sad. He gave me a long talk which came with a warning, only a warning for me because I had never done anything wrong before, a warning and a fine. I asked him what they were going to do with August, whether they were going to take him away. He said it didn’t concern me. When I left the office August was no longer there. His position on the bench had been taken by Grandfather.
Grandfather had come to pick me up in one of the post office vans. He didn’t say anything, he just drove, as if it were a package and not a person beside him. Poor grandfather, he must have been thinking about those panties he found one morning on the post office steps years back, he must have been thinking that somehow these two events were connected. Poor grandfather, he was always happier with matchsticks than with people.
Irva had come home hours ago.
F
OR A WEEK
after the Train Station Adventure I was forced in my disgrace to remain home. Grandfather came to Veber Street just to see me, to tell me that August had gone away to live in Canada. ‘Which is all for the best,’ he said, ‘since neither his parents nor his school can control him. He’s gone away to start a new life with his brother. He shan’t be coming back.’ ‘But,’ I protested, ‘that can’t be, it isn’t true. He told me that he’d never go without me. He promised me. He promised.’ ‘Well,’ said Grandfather, ‘he lied then, didn’t he?’
We hadn’t even measured him. How many centimetres made up August?
I stole a map of Canada from the map shop on Donkey Street, I slept at night with that map underneath me. Irva lay next to me
with her eyes open. I said in my sleep, ‘Niagara Falls, Lake Ontario, Quebec, Toronto, Newfoundland.’
‘I’m going away,’ I kept saying to Irva, ‘I’m going away.’
She stopped talking to me and I never went anywhere.
I needed to mark myself from her, I wanted there to be a sign, something to prove that I had experienced other things, something to stop the sameness. I wanted everyone to see that there was such a difference between Irva and me. I wanted everyone to know.
W
E HAD REACHED
the age of sixteen, it was time for our class to split and, at the end of the school year, for some students to prepare themselves for further learning, and beyond that for university, and for others to set out into that place termed by uninspired adults the Real World. The lower half of the class was dismissed to seek employment. Irva and I were to work in the post office, in positions found for us by Grandfather, not serving customers in the hall of the Central Post Office but instead delivering letters about the city.
On one of our final days at the educational establishment on Littsen Street, during one of the breaks between lessons, I took myself into the lavatory with my school compass. Fifteen minutes later, five minutes into the next lesson, I calmly walked into the classroom and sat down at our desk.
The whole class stared at me, the teacher called for the headmaster, and Irva, my neighbour, moved away. I had drawn on my forehead with the point of my compass, deep into my skin. Tearing into myself with that sharp metal point. My blood, sister blood to her blood, dripped down my face. But that blood did not stop the classroom from reading what I had etched there: a vertical arrow pointing upwards and above that the letter ‘N’, for ‘North’.
N
↑
As if I were a compass.
As if you would never get lost as long as you had me with you.
Now everyone could tell us apart.
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INCIDENTALLY—national expression, English equivalent of ‘Put that in your pipe and smoke it’.
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SITES OF INTEREST. BREAD SQUARE. The centre point of Bread Square is the spot where some of our adolescent children like to pass their expansive and unprofitable time. It is not a bench that they congregate around or a statue or even a war memorial, but an abandoned piece of architecture. See how lovingly they prop their bicycles against the structure’s walls, see how lovingly they clamber over the structure, see how lovingly they clamber over each other whilst inside the structure. It is a place of teenage violence and friendship and love. At night, under this roof, amidst empty bottles of beer, how many boys and girls have experienced their first carnal adventures? They have defaced the walls with their names, with their declarations of love, both inside and outside; they have drawn crude anatomical chalk drawings (principally depicting the male and female sex organs) which writhe and tumble their way across the walls of the tiny room at the highest point of this ruin. But what is this solitary scrap of a building at the centre point of this city square, which has become a home to all the anxiety and muscles and hopes and lies and crushes and betrayals of the vast soap opera of adolescent yearning? It is the skeleton of the bakery clock tower. Bread Square, named since the earthquake—when so many names were changed—was where my father used daily to work. Before there had been no square on this spot, the vast civic bakery had filled it entirely, its warm, yeasty smell had stretched its goodness around the neighbouring streets, comforting them. But the bakery and many of the bakers inside it were destroyed one July 16th. Twisted girders, ruptured machinery, mounds of brickwork were all that remained, but the clock tower at the top of the building, though now standing at a strange dislocated angle, survived virtually intact. When the building was set to be completely demolished, the clock tower out of a whim of the city reconstructors was removed from the top of the crumpled body and—once the exhausted corpse of the bakery had been tugged away, and the ground levelled and made into a square—found its place as a monument to our earthquake. It no longer registered time, the mechanism had failed, cogs had twisted, springs had snapped. The broken time piece was removed, with only the blank clock face remaining.
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SITES OF INTEREST. THE CENTRAL TRAIN STATION CEILING. If you walk towards the right-hand side of the station, towards the ticket office, and look upwards, you might be able to catch a glimpse of what was created one late spring night. I cannot guarantee, however, that you will be able to see our work, for it is many years since we took our position on the great rusty vaulting of the Central Train Station, a dangerous enterprise, and much dirt has rushed up to the ceiling since to hide our inexpertly drawn celestial map. You may though, if you stay there long enough, long enough perhaps to feel your neck painfully aching, you may, if you are patient, and with your eyes squinted in an effort to concentrate their search, you may see a few white, off-white certainly, corrupted white, patches, less dirty than the rest of that section of the ceiling, blotches just a little whiter than their neighbours. You may be able to see a few of those. For those barely discernible smudges are all that remain of our courageous project, and now, far from reading the night’s sky on the ceiling of the hall of our Central Train Station, you will perhaps, and only perhaps, be able to see an uncertain and lonely universe with only one or two fading stars flickering vaguely in the selfish darkness, and even these you cannot really be certain to have seen. But once, believe me, they were there. Once you had only to look up to see a squashed Aries, a surely smashed Plough, and the Gemini cramped close together.
Lunch
The International World Hotel
Paulus Boulevard 16-24. Open 12:00-24:00, tel. 316 22 25.
Within the International World Hotel is the Piccolo Mondo Bistro. This slightly shabby eatery has plenty of decorations to occupy your time whilst waiting for the service, which is exceptionally friendly whilst not always swift. Though the ceiling is crumbling, we have sincere assurances that it is never likely to fall into your plate. The restaurant boasts views onto the much rebuilt side of the Paulus Boulevard. Specialising in our national cuisine, the very imaginative menu can cater to most tastes but be warned: oversized portions. Menus in English. No reservations required if seen holding a copy of Alva and Irva: The Twins Who Saved a City; otherwise recommended.
THE WORLD HOTEL, sometimes referred to tautologically as the International World Hotel, is the largest and most celebrated hotel in our city, though it is not necessarily the most comfortable. Situated on one of our main thoroughfares, the Paulus Boulevard—accessed from trolley buses at all the major city squares—with its great width and tall symmetrical buildings, was part of the Haussmannisation of our city which took place after our most recent earthquake. On the Paulus Boulevard (our version of the Champs-Elysées in Paris, Oxford Street in London, Unter den Linden in Berlin) we have clothes shops, including, for example, a Gap; we have jewellery and watch shops—which sell merchandise from such prestigious companies as Rolex; we have large pharmacies which sell products of such brands as L’Oréal, Christian Dior and Laboratoires Garnier; and also we have that most popular and dependable and truly international of culinary establishments, McDonald’s.
