Alva and Irva (19 page)

Sometimes when Jonas came we wouldn’t have time for his magnificent travelling stories, sometimes they’d upset Irva. She was frightened that I might be tempted away. On those occasions, Mother would make him tea or coffee and they’d sit together for hours in the kitchen, Mother patiently listening to Jonas’s international lists.

I
RVA BUILT
the Financial District of Entralla, and the Television Tower, which immediately dominated the plasticine Entrallan skyline. From the top of the Television Tower, where there is a revolving restaurant that allows you to view all three hundred and sixty degrees of Entralla as you eat, and which I visited as I was making notes on the Financial District, I saw how far our model was from completion. I muttered to myself and to all the vastness of the city, ‘It is a truth: Entralla, whether of stone or plasticine, was not built in a day.’ And still Irva seemed so far from ready to leave. She happily modelled buildings but did she really understand that these buildings actually existed just a little distance from where she was working away?

Now as I studied Entralla everyday, as I saw Irva carefully modelling it, I felt I was understanding our city for the first time. The more Irva built the more I understood, the more it became our home. The city was reduced to combinations of spheres, oblongs, squares and cylinders, such limited choices. Irva was endlessly cutting these shapes, the angles of people’s lives. Sometimes as she worked crouched over with her sharp knives and disobedient plasticine she’d prick her finger and a little blood would fall down onto a street.

With the buildings so reduced how much sympathy we had for the people of Entralla now. The smallness sometimes even made us cry: buildings no bigger than a fingernail; lives, then, smaller still. Irva cut out windows in plasticine walls, for without windows how could the people look in or out. She carved out doors too, all the doorways of Entralla. We feared for our city, the slightest jog of the trestle tables would set the buildings trembling, disturbing our hearts. We would often climb the attic stairs during the night to check that
it was safe, we dreamt troubled nights of squashed buildings. We taped over the windows in the attic with black bin liners to stop dust and to keep out the sun which overheated our plasticine. We inspected the attic ceiling weekly, looking for hairline cracks, we added braces to the tables’ legs. Our profoundest instinct in those days: to protect.

S
OMETIMES THE
old yearning would come back to me and with it, impatience. On those days I would cautiously visit the travel agencies again, always, during the city’s lunch breaks, when the agencies were at their busiest. One afternoon I stole something from a display in an agency shop front. It fitted into my uniform pocket easily enough, I felt it belonged there, it seemed happy enough, and then I rushed out of the shop and ran whooping with delight through those so familiar streets. The object that I stole was a green plastic, fifteen-centimetre-tall souvenir of the Statue of Liberty.

And one night shortly afterwards, whilst Irva was sleeping, I climbed up the stairs into the attic, I placed the miniature statue, made in China, upon the plasticine city of Entralla. How wonderful it would have been if it were true, how wonderful to wake the city one morning and to see the expressions upon people’s faces, as they rushed hurriedly to work and suddenly stopped short and with gaping mouths and wide eyes, saw that the Statue of Liberty had taken up home on our very own Cathedral Square.

That night in the attic, I suddenly turned around. There was Irva in tears.

T
WO LARGE
trestle tables held the weight of growing Entralla in the attic. There was a gap between these tables, to represent the River Nir. The Iron Bridge, the Senasis Bridge and the Small Bridge spanned these tables. On the model where the banks of the river ran, Irva attached small chipboard platforms to the trestle tables in imitation of the river’s ancient path. If a plasticine man had inhabited the plasticine city and was in lonely despair, for he would have been the city’s only inhabitant, to have tumbled from any of the bridges down onto the attic floor of 27 Veber Street, the fall would be
greater than that experienced by the drop from the Grand Canyon in Arizona, America, and it is certain that he would be dead before his plasticine body dented out of shape on impact.

The model allowed Central Entralla to be seen with fresh eyes and to be seen clearly, for the first time, so comprehensible was it in its reduction. We could observe it from an impersonal distance now, as foreigners almost. Entralla had become strangely collectable. A thief might pass by and in a second pull out the bell tower from Cathedral Square and place it, lost to us for ever, in his deep pockets. The city belonged, now, in its limited size and dreams, to us, to Alva and Irva Dapps.

Central Entralla had been completed, we had reached up to and beyond the old fragments of Lubatkin’s city wall, which, years before, when amateurs at this plasticine art, we first considered as schoolchildren. Irva had built the old town, she had built half of Napoleon Street, and still she was building onwards, onwards. But the trestle tables were full now and so we began to construct Entralla in fractions, chipboard square by chipboard square. When each chipboard square was completed we carefully lowered it into a box, of exactly the right dimensions, and then we placed a lid on that box, and we wrote on the lid exactly which fragment of Entralla was contained within. And the boxes began to stack up. All those boxes, which originally came from the post office, brown cardboard boxes that had once contained envelopes.

Soon it was time to seriously consider the sleeping arrangements of all Entralla, from the pavement to the humble bedsit all the way to the opulent town houses of Arkllitt Avenue. We began to give Entrallans plasticine homes to call their own, plasticine retreats to escape to, little plasticine corners of Entralla, microscopic crumbs of the world which were their microscopic crumbs and no one else’s in which to express themselves, in which to be entirely, absolutely, unreservedly themselves; free from dilution of all other people.

F
ROM
G
RANDFATHER,
who was told so much of Entrallan life as he sat talking to his customers at the post office, we learnt news of three of our old school friends. Kersty Plint was pregnant. Eda
Dapps had married Stepan Dinkin. We never asked for this news, we didn’t want it, it got in the way. Irva stopped letting Grandfather in the attic. When he tried to build some of his matchstick locations in our home, the home of a plasticine city, Irva crushed them.

And then Grandfather stopped coming for a long while. ‘It’s as if they don’t recognise me,’ he said, ‘And they stare at me, just stare, I can’t bare them staring at me. As if they’re growing wild. And Irva never talks to me, if she’s something to say she tells Alva first and then Alva tells me. Something should be done, Dallia, it’s not right.’ ‘Leave them alone,’ Mother would say, ‘they’re fine with their plasticine. They only want to be left alone.’

Since I looked after Irva, and since I would not allow anyone else to look after her, Mother continued to work at the post office, and I began to work there only two or three days a week, as a part-time sorter. We had no room for Mother anymore (the city was taking up so much space), and Mother at first tearfully and then calmly began to separate herself from us. I think it could be said that she was falling out of love with us then. We could feel her withdrawing, and as a punishment Irva no longer allowed her to see the city. She didn’t seem to mind, at least, she never complained.

We didn’t notice it at first, but after a time there could be no denying it: our mother, after twenty years, was growing independent and confident. She was letting go. She had her hair cut and dyed. She started dieting. She said to us in the kitchen one day, ‘You mustn’t forget your looks, because you have been caring for baby is not sufficient excuse, your husband won’t appreciate a messy, sloppy wife. You should try letting him baby-sit whilst you spend a relaxing hour at the hairdressers. It will raise your morale a hundred fold and make you feel so good.’

S
OMETIMES NOW,
as a rest from my efforts, I would visit one of the cafés in Market Square. I usually went to Café Louis because Postman Kurt Laudus was often there, and he would always come over to talk to me. Sometimes I longed to speak to someone other than Irva. I’d sit at a table with a coffee and a croissant or a bagel or a baklava, still yearning a little, still yearning enough sometimes
to lock myself in the bathroom to look at my map, and on those occasions, when Irva knocked on the door, I wouldn’t always answer. In Café Louis I would gently chew those foreign morsels, close my eyes and relax. And whenever I visited Louis’s I always felt guilty and in recompense I always brought back Irva’s favourite for her, an Entralla bun.
¹³

A
LL OUR PLASTICINE
buildings may not have been mathematically accurate, but they were, let there be no doubt about this, emotionally precise. And I should also explain that because Miss Stott once measured us so precisely with her tape measure, I began to understand that buildings could also be measured in this fashion. So often now—with a much longer tape measure than Miss Stott’s, in a little metal box in which the tape coiled around itself—I would measure the widths of buildings and calculate the height by measuring the length of the ground to the first window and then multiplying it, because so often the different storeys of buildings were precise repetitions of each other. But mostly I just guessed, accurate guesses. (The fuss people make when they saw me measuring their homes, even if I didn’t actually touch them. ‘What are you doing?,’ they’d ask. ‘Just measuring,’ I’d say, ‘I’ll be done in a minute.’ ‘Why are you measuring my home?,’ they’d demand to know. ‘Just because,’ I’d say. ‘But it’s my home,’ they’d all say, ‘it’s mine, how dare you!’ ‘Yes,’ I’d say, ‘I know that, but I want to measure it all the same.’ ‘But it isn’t yours,’ they’d say, ‘it’s mine, it’s mine!’ Is it any wonder
that I often had to work late at night, when such hystericals were dreaming of thieves in their troubled sleep?) And of course I used our heights as a ruler also, I’d measure exactly how many Alvas or Irvas tall a building was.

Out of plasticine we built the ever growing cemeteries of Entralla, lines and lines of tiny squares, whole districts made up only of the dead, a whole city in itself. I never counted them all. There were simply too many little squares, just too many, too many dead people, too many living people. We couldn’t fit everyone in.

Whilst making plasticine buildings it is important to warm the plasticine up first, to soften it. Before work, plasticine must be packed against the naked skin of hands, slowly warming it. If you are in a hurry it is advisable to roll two balls of plasticine and place one in each of your armpits. But never allow the plasticine to overheat for then it will stick stubbornly to your fingers, it will refuse to leave them, it will disallow any straight lines, it will refuse to be cut, it will mock you—buildings then will slouch and droop. You know that you have almost reached fluency in the pure language of plasticine when you begin to wonder, do I smell of plasticine or does plasticine smell of me?

Sometimes now, looking down on the plasticine city, to encourage Irva with thoughts of outside, I would read to her from the local newspapers. Together we would see, for example, where the robberies or murders had been happening, and if a robbery or murder had not occurred in the old town or in that part of Inner Entralla on the tables in the attic, I’d fetch the box holding the unfortunate street and we would stare suspiciously at the buildings, trying to seek out clues. But when I asked her to come out with me, just for a little while, just up Veber Street, as far as the bakery and back, she refused, she retreated into herself, wouldn’t speak again for hours, and when she did, she yelled at me, ‘You promised, you promised, you promised not until the city was finished. Don’t break that promise now. Not after all this work. So stupid! I’m not ready yet. I’m not ready. I will be, I’m sure I will, I feel closer everyday, but not yet, it’s not time yet, the city’s not finished, is it? Is it? So don’t be cruel. I’ll smash it, I’ll crush it, see if I don’t. We made a promise!’
And so I wouldn’t ask Irva outside again for several weeks. And yet every day she travelled in amongst the deep grooves of Entralla, her thoughts wandering through those many streets. She would set out on long walks, moving from box to box, studying from above the canals of streets, her confidence returning. She’d stroll round and around Entralla for hours every day and when she traced her thoughts back to Veber Street, when she closed the lid on the box of our street, it seemed to me she was a little out of breath.

T
HERE WAS
another reason, besides our forced exclusion, for Mother’s growing independence. Jonas Lutt. All this time Jonas Lutt continued to call on 27 Veber Street. He had long ago stopped bringing plasticine with him and he began instead to come with wine and flowers. If he ever happened to see either of us while he was at home, he always asked, ‘How’s the plasticine?,’ and Mother would say, ‘Oh, they just love their plasticine those two, they couldn’t live without it, they just love it, go on then, you two, back to your work, Jonas and I would like some peace.’ And wordless and appalled we would build on. And then one day Mother knocked on the attic hatch, she told us to come down, that she had something to show us. We almost yawned in anticipation but what she showed us surprised and shocked us. Mother had a passport! Soon Mother was going to go with Jonas Lutt in his Scania lorry all the way to Germany. Jonas had asked her, Mother told us with a smile, and she didn’t feel it would be polite to decline.

W
E HEARD
a great honking noise, we looked out of the window to discover Jonas Lutt there and his evil, stinking Scania lorry, and then Mother came out holding a suitcase, and she climbed into the lorry and Mother, for the first time ever, was going abroad. Mother was leaving us, in that monster of locomotion, disappearing up Veber Street, out into Pilias Street and away, away. And I was running after her until she was out of sight.