Alva and Irva (18 page)

I was a girl who lived in a street in a city, tattooed and unhappy. From nowhere in particular. Going nowhere in particular. A young woman who, walking down certain streets of her city for the rest of her life, was certain to cause other people to point her out, ‘There, that’s the girl who has the whole world drawn on her.’ Locally infamous.

G
RANDFATHER SAID,
‘She’s ruined herself.’

Mother wouldn’t look at me unless I was fully clothed.

Irva came to visit.

T
WO NIGHTS
after the tremor, Irva came to my bedroom to find me desperately scratching, feverishly trying to scrape the mocking tattoo from me, naked, but for the world, in agony and upset.

She took hold of me in her bony arms. She held tight. And in that grip, the strength of which shocked me, I could feel our hearts working stronger, beating in recognition. So fast. So strong. And I gave in, I gave in at once, of course I did, I gave in as soon as I felt the engine of Alvairva stirring into life again, I gave in, I gave in, I couldn’t stop myself. And Irva, a faith rising inside her, our reunion putting some little sound back into her, a piece of hope, whispered, barely audibly: ‘My sister, the lonely planet.’

I belong to her, she belongs to me. That’s just how it is, that’s just how it is and there’s nothing to be done about it. As if we were condemning ourselves to each other for ever.

The Plasticine City of Entralla

I
T COULD NEVER
be pretended, even for a moment, despite our reunion, that all was as it had been before the Central Train Station Adventure.

When I had drawn on my forehead, when the map had been written on my body, I’d so hurt Irva that she had sought a hiding place deep within herself. To find that place she had abandoned words and limited movement, until she reached an internal home so void of light, of such dank depression, so compact in its space, that she felt safe again. And now it was my task to carefully draw her out, in delicate stages, and with loving precision, lest she be permanently lost inside herself, lest I lose her and in doing so lose myself. I clung desperately to her, for she was, as I realise now, always and forever, my only company.

So time was all Irva again. Irva days and Irva nights, Irva hours and Irva minutes. I wouldn’t leave her. I was her nurse, her constant nurse. I wouldn’t allow Mother or Grandfather near, I pushed them away. I fed her, I brushed her hair, I washed her. She, in her turn, lubricated my map. We slept together in the same bed, in case she called out in the night.

So there we were, falling in love again.

Children say to each other that somewhere in the world there is someone who exactly resembles you, and if you ever see that person, your double, you’ll fall down dead on the spot. But what happens if you were born with your double. What then? Alternatively, so Irva might say, I should consider how sad it was for all those other people, those countless twinless people, perpetually alone; who’ll never really know what real togetherness is like. We were married, Irva and I. We even had a kind of marriage ceremony.

I measured the scar on my forehead and its exact position there. With a soft pencil I drew the mark in the precise sister location on Irva’s forehead. I took out my school compass. While I held her
heavy head steady, she did the deep scratching: the arrow, the ‘N’ for ‘North’. Such eagerness, such passion in this new task of hers. Poor, tearful mother couldn’t understand. She never could. Some nights I unpicked Irva’s scab for her.

When Irva and I were alone, and mostly we were alone, I would encourage her to trace her fingers across my map of the world. I would whisper to her, ‘One day, Irva, perhaps we’ll walk up Terminus Road into the train station and take the first train and go, just go and never look back.’ ‘But where will we go?’, she whispered—and she only ever whispered. ‘Anywhere,’ I said to her, ‘anywhere, right arm, left leg.’ But we scarcely left the bedroom. Irva seemed to think that since I’d brought the whole world into Entralla, into Veber Street, that there was really no need for us to go anywhere else. Her voice may have returned but she was not yet ready to leave the house, she clung to her timidity.

I began to model for Irva plasticine buildings as gifts. To begin with that was all that she supposed they were, but in time she began to understand my great cunning. These buildings, Lubatkin’s Fortress, the Central Post Office, Grandfather’s house on Pult Street were given to Irva to remind her of what lay beyond 27 Veber Street. I was slowly trying to bring her back. Sometimes I’d even ask her to help me smooth out a wall or carve out windows or shape roofs. I said to Irva, ‘Since you won’t go out into the world, even out into Entralla, I’ll bring it in here to you.’ I’d win her back with plasticine buildings.

Some nights I’d catch her, tears in her eyes, gently touching those soft buildings, leaving her prints on their walls, or on other occasions looking out through the curtains into the Entrallan night, so close and yet so alien to her. She was trying so hard, her effort was such a painful thing to see, but she could not, she could not yet go outside, the very thought of it set her trembling again, sent her under the covers into her blackness. But she was, there could be no doubt about this, attempting to trick herself into trusting again. And she bravely began to build once more, to consider what it was that lay beyond our home.

I
BOUGHT A CHEAP
camera, I took photographs of Entralla streets so that Irva’s miniatures could be more accurate.

After we had between thirty and forty plasticine buildings dotted around the attic, it all became clear. It was Irva who suggested it. We should build the whole city. I would bring it to her, building by building, street by street, the entire city of Entralla. With each new street safe in our home, how she’d recover, how she’d expand, how she’d slowly be encouraged outside once more. We would make a great detailed census. We would build a great plasticine model of the city of Entralla, not of a little section of it but of all of it, every street, every building. And we would find the nearest plasticine colour to each building, all those greys and browns and blues and whites and reds, all the parks would be of green plasticine, we would make a multicoloured Entralla, all the colours of Entralla! I would collect the information. Irva would build.

‘And when it’s finished,’ Irva whispered, ‘then I’ll go out again, then I’ll be ready, then I’ll know what to expect. And perhaps, but you must be patient with me, perhaps we could even, and only after a time, and only perhaps, perhaps we could travel beyond Entralla, but only if we take Entralla with us, so we shan’t be homesick. Yes, we must always have it with us. Yes, yes, this is it: Entralla in miniature in our trunks and suitcases. Yes. Yes.’

T
HE PLASTICINE CITY
would be divided up into thirty-centimetre-by-thirty-centimetre squares. Each square a manageable size, small enough to fit within boxes or cases. Beneath each plasticine square would be a chipboard platform (thirty centimetres by thirty centimetres); I bought these chipboard squares ready-cut from the hardware store on Pilias Street. We were determined. Upstairs in the attic, the city began to grow, every day we saw it growing.

First of all Irva built Prospect Hill and then she crowned it with the Lubatkin Tower.

At the foot of the hill she began to build the cathedral. And as she built the plasticine replica, she tried to imagine just how it was for those ancient Entrallan builders. Each year they would have seen the cathedral growing higher and higher and perhaps wondered
whether one day Heaven itself would be reached. Pinnacles, gables and flying buttresses. How long it took them, nearly two hundred years! (It took Irva nearly three weeks.) Sometimes as she sculpted the cathedral, in honour of the Holy Spirit, which smells of incense, I would light up a joss stick to help her into the mood. The cathedral is the single largest building in all Entralla, from it we would judge the scale of everything else.

After the cathedral’s completion Irva’s thoughts began to consist only of the old town. She was a Baroque and Renaissance Irva then.

The University of Entralla took up exactly six chipboard squares.

When she reached Terminus Street, she wouldn’t build the Central Train Station, I had to do that.

O
N
S
UNDAYS,
Jonas Lutt used to come, he missed our chats together. He had been away from Entralla during the small quake, and the news of my tattoo, presumably passed on by some garrulous neighbour, seemed only to encourage his visits. He asked me to show him the tattoo, I politely refused. ‘One day,’ he said, ‘one day you’ll show me. Won’t you, Alva?’ I smiled. Irva decided she couldn’t stand Jonas.

Jonas never stayed very long, he’d sit by the progressing city up in the attic and list numbers of motorways. Irva ignored him, she continued working away, those names meant nothing to her. On about the third Sunday, when I remember Jonas was wearing a T-shirt which said ‘
ANNE FRANKHUIS, AMSTERDAM
’, he announced, ‘When visiting friends it is generally understood that you arrive with several bottles of beer or even a single bottle of wine, when visiting girlfriends it is generally understood that you arrive holding a bunch of delicately perfumed flowers, when you visit Alva and Irva Dapps it must be understood that you come bearing plasticine.’ And then he held out a block of red plasticine, which Irva refused to build with.

Jonas never had any problems in telling us one from the other, he joked that I was the twin in colour, and that Irva was the twin in black and white, as if Irva’s withdrawal from the world had included a withdrawal from colour.