Alva and Irva (16 page)

But sometimes I would go and see her, sometimes I’d creep into her room at night. She always looked so pleased. I’d take hold of one of her hands, one of her bony and clammy hands, and press something into it, close the hand up again and leave. What did I press into her hands? Pieces of maps, shards of other lands. A torn section of Lurkistan in Iran, a ripped fraction of Flevoland from the Netherlands, a little paper gash of Beni from Bolivia. As a reminder that there were other places in the world, as a reminder that I would be leaving her. Sometimes I would open her mouth and place these crumbs of maps upon her tongue as if they were the body of Christ, and then close up her jaw and seal her nostrils and keep them sealed until she was forced to swallow. Sometimes I’d make her eat the whole of a continent in a single night. And since she never called
out, since she didn’t speak, I was quite safe. Sometimes I’d insist that she drank up an ocean, that she chewed, for example, the entire Pacific, popping it into her, nautical mile after nautical mile. ‘Open up,’ I’d say, ‘open wide.’ For months this went on, and that dumb doll that was my sister never complained. Perhaps, when it was all over, Irva had succeeded in digesting the world several times over.

I
RVA’S SKIN
seemed to me in those days thick with dust, and perhaps not just her skin, but all of her. A sister made of dust, dust face and skull, dust arms and legs, dust heart and lungs. If you blew on her then she would scatter into a thousand fragments. And she wanted to spread that dust onto me. And I wouldn’t let her.

Every extra minute spent away from Veber Street seemed a kind of triumph to me. I longed to get out of the house and into the world. I would bicycle about the streets of the city, screaming out the names of other streets in contradiction, ‘Regent Street, Broadway, Boulevard Saint Germain.’ I’d revisit the library on People Street, coughing as I tore out the various pages that I could not bear to leave behind, pages which I might later force Irva to swallow, but after a time I was certain that the other readers in the library and the librarians were always watching me and I lost my nerve. Then I would spend my afternoons in travel agencies, leafing through brochures, marvelling at how wide the world was, imagining myself inside hotels, in front of castles, hiking through mountains. But the staff of those travel agencies quickly tired of me and, accusing me of dirtying and creasing their multi-coloured destinations, would send me back out onto the street, barring me from the world. So then I began to revisit the Central Train Station, looking nostalgically up at the ceiling, seeing the trains as they arrived and departed, trains that had travelled beyond the borders of our country into other lands where different people lived different lives. I would watch those passengers arrive and depart with a silent envy. I would press my hands against train carriages, trying to learn from their touch the feeling of freedom. I would pick up train timetables and pin these to my bedroom walls also. I even once bought a train ticket and even stepped on a train, but the moment I sat down I began to
sweat and tremble and had to clamber outside again, breathless and terrified. And what a look of resentment Irva gave me when I returned home that day. I wasn’t able to leave. Not then. Not yet. I couldn’t.

T
HE PADLOCK
on my bedroom door refused Mother sleep. It disturbed her. Now as she journeyed to the post office every morning, she could see locks everywhere, locks to people’s homes, locks to garages, locks to business premises. In the post office she regarded the numbered rows of boxes of those people that had their post delivered not to their home address but instead ordered it to wait for them in the post office hall itself. There’s so much secrecy in the city, Mother thought, everybody’s hiding something. Why can’t it be like it is in the country, she thought, where she’d heard that locks don’t exist, where people are accustomed to the far more sociable latch. The city was locking Mother out and she would not allow it. So one day she bought a hacksaw and went up the stairs to my bedroom. That evening, I came home to find Mother sitting outside our home on the entrance step. Miss Stott, I noticed, sat on her entrance step across the street, watching eagerly. ‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ Mother said. With tears in her eyes and matches in her hand, shaking the box in a very different way than Grandfather shook his matchstick boxes, she set light to my collection of photographs, some from books, some from newspapers and to my numerous train timetables, and to several tourist brochures and to sheaths of maps and whole countries from various atlases. And then our mother, burning the rubber soles of her slippers, did a little jig in the ashes. ‘No one is going anywhere,’ she said, ‘families must stick together.’ Mother rid the world of its maps, sending it in her efforts back to times before navigation—indeed, she would rather if Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama and James Cook had never been born, and if America, India and Australia had never been discovered; if they must exist, very well, let them exist, but not in her home. She would not have them there. It must be understood that in our Veber Street home the world beyond our city became as dark and unmapped as those many potential worlds beyond our galaxy.

In the future Mother always inspected my uniform and my room for maps everyday, she searched through pockets, she lifted up carpets and mattresses; I was not allowed to enter the house without first being searched. In Mother’s mind my maps were as poisonous to me as father’s foreign stamp collection had been to him.

So then I’d store maps inside my post office locker. I spent more and more time in the locker room. I was not the only one there, some of the postmen liked to play cards in the locker room or to smoke or just to talk, and other postmen I noticed liked to store private things in their lockers too—for example, Postman Pirin kept his magazine of naked women in his locker, and in Postman Olt’s locker I once briefly glimpsed women’s clothing, tights and bras and panties and stuff all folded up. We yearn, we postmen and post-women, we yearn, we yearn.

O
FTEN THEN,
having finished my post office work, I would go to spend my money on food. I would sit down, always on my own, at some restaurant selling foreign cuisine, and, with my eyes closed, would set off on great imaginary journeys inspired by the taste of those strange platefuls. And as I sat in an Indian restaurant,
¹¹
sweating from the dish in front of me, I opened my eyes to see a framed poster of a young girl from that part of the world with henna tattoos upon her. That was it. That was what started it. And then, with discreet enquiries into the tattoo of a carrier pigeon on old Postman Coovin’s right hand, I first heard of Pig Mikel.
¹²

Pig Mikel was responsible for burrowing under the skin and depositing colours there with sharp needles for people who voluntarily subjected themselves to this torture and who even paid him for the privilege. He had illustrated his clients’ bodies with samurai warriors, cherubs, serpents, Celtic bands, popular cartoon characters, wings, claws, motorbikes, naked women, numbers, skulls, Zen signs, swastikas, flowers, thunderbolts, any breed of birds, any breed of animals, a few Greek gods, personal messages of love and hate in five different languages, a thousand different names, fake scars oozing fake blood, and on one occasion a verse from the Bible, to be precise Leviticus 19:28, ‘You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh or tattoo any marks upon you,’ written onto the back of an alcoholic priest, who hooted with laughter throughout the process. Was there a thing in the world that he had not drawn on human skin? And there was scarcely a corner of the outside of a human being which he had not at some time or other been bent over, bothering with his needles. But Pig was not just a tattooist, he was also an expert at body-piercing. In his time I estimate he had punctured several thousand ears—some as many as fifteen times—several hundred noses, a good number of tongues, a fair quantity of nipples, numerous navels, a few lips, a collection of eyebrows, a score of foreskins, half a dozen slits at the tip of the glans penis and a vulva or two. And afterwards he always inserted a ring in these holes, and from those rings people jangled every type of object from the standard crucifix to the shrivelled hand of a chimpanzee—but that was their business, not Pig’s.

Pig’s person too was a great advertisement for his shop. His nose was pierced in the centre and a large silver ring hung down like a bull’s, both his ears were thrice looped with thin bands of gold and his right nipple had a Celtic cross dangling from it, which he liked to fiddle with whilst he was thinking. On the top of his head, always thoroughly shaved, were two sentences in bold capitals flowing around his skull in a circle, so that it looked like the toque of some obscure holy order: the first, in the semi-circle facing the front of his head, said, I AM AN ARTIST; the second, to be read only
when Pig had his back turned to you, unbashfully informed, I LOVE MYSELF. And in the centre of his forehead, in the same place that Rabbi Leow of Prague, Czech Republic, wrote on his famous golem, Pig had had inscribed the word ‘PIG’, which everyone called him because with his little eyes with their thick white eyelashes and his large upturned snout he resembled that beast, and was for some reason proud of the resemblance. I do not know what his real first name was, perhaps he was even christened Pig.

Into this man’s world, one day, I arrived uninvited.

I stared at the decorations around the walls: a thousand photographs of different examples of tattoos. Often the customers entering Pig’s domain would point at one of those designs and Pig would prepare his inks and his needle, take out a new pair of perfectly disinfected latex gloves from the box, the same gloves that surgeons wear, and let the torture begin. Often the client with his new disfigurement would say as the blood dried on his skin, ‘Never again, never again.’ But, or so Pig would have you believe, they often came back, for it was such sweet torture. ‘Everyone likes the hurt,’ he said, ‘everyone needs a little pain, just to remind them that they’re still alive.’ But I had a different idea, I didn’t want any one of those tattoos stuck up on Pig’s walls, tattoos which perhaps several people had, I wanted an original design, and I was bursting to tell the tattooist what it was.

‘What do you want?,’ he asked, ‘The Chinese symbol of strength on your ankle, or a daisy on your shoulder or a barcode on your arse?’ ‘I wanted, if it pleases you Mr Mikel, a map of the world.’ ‘Call me Pig,’ he said pointing to his forehead, ‘I think I’ve got a small globe design somewhere, where do you want it, not on your biceps, I suppose?’ I took a deep breath and proclaimed, ‘All over me, all over me. All over me. All over me. All over me. All. Over. Me.’

M
Y INSTRUCTIONS
were neatly written out on post office paper. From the centre of me spreading east and west: Europe. Down my right side: the Americas. Down the left leg and waist: Africa. Curving round my right arm and taking up most of my back: Asia. Australia
must take up much of my right buttock, and a proportion of the left.

Pig, incredulous, burst out laughing. I took out some money and pressed it into his hand. ‘It’ll take time,’ he said, ‘preparation.’ I nodded. ‘But can you stomach it? You’ll feel like I’m tearing you to ribbons, you’ll lose blood, your nerves will yell at you, and you’ll have to be patient, you’ll have to live with that pain day after day.’ I nodded. ‘And the seas,’ he said, ‘we’ll have to squeeze them in here and there, cover all the rest of your skin with them, and what blue shall we make it—ultramarine, like in the Caribbean?’ I nodded and smiled. ‘Everyone,’ he said, ‘will want to swim in you. And your head,’ he said, ‘what’ll that be—Scandinavia?’ But then I said, ‘No, you mustn’t touch it, neither that, nor my arms beyond the wrists, I want to keep all of it hidden beneath my clothes, no one must suspect.’

‘Once it’s done you realise,’ said Pig, ‘it won’t come off, it can’t be undone, unless you want your whole body scarred.’ I nodded. ‘How old are you?’ ‘Nearly eighteen,’ I said. Pig shrugged, sniffed, ‘Payment in advance, shall we say, of each continent?’ I nodded. Pig and I shook hands.

And so, a week later, the pain began.

S
OME PEOPLE
have been known to say that after two or three minutes the pain of tattooing goes and the skin just feels numb. Some people have been known to say that the pain of tattooing is a deep sexual pain that can induce orgasms. Some people have been known to say that the pain of tattooing is unbearable, a kind of blue pain that upsets the entire body, and, coupled with the sight of the tattooist’s gloved hands wiping blood and ink away from the needle’s path, can induce vomiting and severe mental stress. It is generally young people who subscribe to this pain, and those young people are often advised not to have the tattoo placed on a portion of their skin which will become, in time, wrinkled, so that as the beauty of the skin’s elasticity fails, as our surfaces become corrugated and slack, that little piece of painted beauty on an ankle perhaps or a shoulder remains for ever taught, undistorted, immortal. Our teeth
may fall out, our hair may desert us, our eyes may fail us, but our tattoos will go on, loyal even beyond the departure of our minds. So as aged and senile babies we may look at that strange person in the mirror who we are certain we have never seen before and wonder why on earth that person had chosen to have a phoenix drawn upon his chest.

Pig Mikel was a professional at his job, after all there are health risks with tattooing—inadequate hygiene can cause the spread of many types of viral infection. But Pig’s needles were never less than sterile. It was with a certain pleasure that Pig viewed my half-naked nearly eighteen-year-old self, his blank canvas, goose pimples, small twin mounds of breasts and all, and it was with even greater pleasure that he advanced towards me, having made his preliminary sketches like those marks that hospital staff make with iodine, clutching the electronic tattooing implement, made in the United States of America. And so the loud whirring began. And with the whirring came the pain. So this was the pain. A heavy pain, not too sharp, at first seemingly bearable. But the pain didn’t go away—the same pain stayed with me, neither lessening nor deepening; a pain that seemed to be slowly pulling off every millimetre of my skin. How my nerves twitched and sang and vibrated long after Pig’s instruments had been cleaned and put away and I was far from Arsenal Street, back at home, examining myself in the bathroom mirror, behind a locked door.