Alva and Irva (7 page)

S
OMETIMES WE
would spend the afternoons with Miss Stott the tailor, who would call us over as we sat all melancholic on the doorstep to our home like novel versions of the stone lions that sometimes adorn the driveways of country estates. From us Miss Stott relearnt her love for the rolls of material on her shelves. We used to stroke them and smell them, sitting for hours with patches of fabric on our laps, our fingers tracing out the many patterns. Our enthusiasm reminded Miss Stott of the period of her amorous adventure with a man named Gebbs, and of a time when they both lived in the Tailoring District in sector five, and of how Gebbs, who was also a tailor, had promised that he would one day marry (though he never actually specified whom he would marry—but then Miss Stott never thought there was any need to specify). She remembered Gebbs had told her how he was able to make an ugly man beautiful, just by providing him with the right suit. He told her how he chose the correct patterns for his clients and transformed them, because of the excellence of their new suits, from shy, awkward beings into successful businessmen. But once Gebbs realised that Miss Stott’s belly was stretching her dresses and that a new tailor was even then beginning to imagine new patterns and suits inside the belly of Miss Stott, he hurriedly abandoned her. Miss Stott, when she discovered that Gebbs was to marry one of the daughters of a distinguished tailor on Saclinn Street, had broken into Gebbs’s shop in the middle of the night and with a pair of sharp tailoring
scissors had carefully cut all his suits in half. She left a note for Gebbs, saying: ‘These suits are called broken promises suits, or half-truths suits.’

Soon afterwards Miss Stott moved to our district and set up her own tailor’s shop and kept her son in a playpen behind the counter, until, after a while, he grew up and grew away from her, he grew up and grew away to such an extent that he went off to live in another city altogether, a city so distant from Entralla that he saw his mother only twice every year. From Miss Stott we learnt the great new words ‘warp’, ‘weft’, ‘worsted’, ‘polyester’, ‘multiple plain weave’, ‘lightweight cotton’ and also the precious word ‘corduroy’, which was the name of a material originally worn by the kings of France. How that one word suggested a world and a time so far away. ‘Corduroy’ I would often whisper to myself as if it were a secret, ‘corduroy, corduroy’. Sometimes we dressed each other up in old dead people’s suits which Miss Stott kept at the back of her shop, reserved for the poorest of her customers. Or Miss Stott would arrange our black hair in the styles of her youth, and sometimes she would let us wear some of her old dresses (or occasionally two new ones), and we would dance to old records made by old dead people, and how we felt alive then. At the end of our joyful afternoons, the pair of us, wearing nothing but voluminous dress shirts, would calm ourselves down in Miss Stott’s sitting room, sipping the orangeade she bought for us. Miss Stott would tell us the complete history of Veber Street, from when it was part of the countryside many, many years ago, right up to the latest news of the week. She was the self-appointed historian of our street. She knew all its characters, all its crimes and sorrows. She told us of the family who used to live in our house and had all gone to live in Melbourne, Australia; she told us that the Plints used to have a son as well as a daughter, but that the son had died in a car accident; she told us that Mr Fiff, the baker, beat his wife; she told us that she’d seen Mr Plint, the butcher, and Mrs Misons, the toy shop owner’s wife, in one of the side streets kissing with tongues, with Mr Plint’s hands on Mrs Misons’ breasts, and that, she supposed, might be the reason that Mrs Misons’ youngest child had blonde hair like Mr
Plint rather than the ginger it ought to have, like Mr Misons. She was a very knowledgeable woman. She’d often sit on the doorstep of the tailor’s shop just watching the street, gathering its little histories. Some people, we would notice over the years, would yell at Miss Stott as she sat there—‘Stop staring at us! Quit your nosing!’ But Miss Stott would go on staring, always fascinated. In those days we wanted nothing more than to listen to the commonplace histories of Veber Street.

But all this time Mother was not happy; she was jealous of the old woman. When we returned home with gifts of old dresses and trinkets from the indulgent Miss Stott, she would hide the trinkets and bleach the dresses. And Grandfather was unhappy too. When he had demanded we make friends, he had meant friends with our contemporaries, he was not happy to have us spend the rest of our days in the company of an introspective old crone (as he described our friend). Soon afterwards came the time when we were walked out from Veber Street every day, always in the company of Grandfather, beyond even Pilias Street, beyond the limits of our imagination, into previously undiscovered possibilities of existence. On that first day of our discovery of new territory, Irva, terrified, vomited on the pavement. But even so, Grandfather insisted we carried on going despite the sick and despite the tears I was shedding for Irva. We walked, on those outings, to a street called Littsen Street. There was a long wall on Littsen Street in the centre of which were some unpleasant-looking cast-iron gates. On those outings we always walked up to the gates, never beyond the gates, never through the gates. Only up to them, and then back home: preparation for a horror yet to come.

And then one day, incredibly, surprisingly, Grandfather ordered us to go and visit our friend Miss Stott. We did not understand then the deception behind Grandfather’s command. Miss Stott had made each of us a set of clothes, each identical to the other, but we thought nothing of this, we had always worn identical clothing. But we did notice that this set was smarter than the other sets, and had a blazer with it.

Other people wanted us now, and Mother would have to let those other people have us promptly at nine every morning. Mercifully though they would allow her to retrieve us at four o’clock every afternoon. If we did not change hands every day at those hours, which was, incidentally, the law, we would be taken away from Mother permanently. ‘It’s all for the good,’ Grandfather told Mother, ‘the law is correct. This law is the best thing that could happen to them. It may be a little hard to begin with, but they cannot stay at home all their lives.’

So every day, in sombre preparation, as the date came ever closer, we walked up to the gates with Grandfather, nervously, with terror on our faces. And then one morning Mother scrunched up her pudgy hands into little fists, rubbed her leaking eyes and bade goodbye to her twin loves, who arrived on Littsen Street to find the gates were open and to see that there were noisy and rough children everywhere. On that day a woman we had never seen before came up to Grandfather and said, ‘Alva and Irva Dapps?’ And Grandfather nodded, and the woman said, ‘Thank you, you may leave them now, goodbye postmaster.’ And Grandfather, looking somewhat anxious, on this terrible day when we learnt that even his great authority had limits, left Irva and me all alone with this woman we had never seen before.

The Littsen Street Educational Establishment

I
N THE PLAYGROUND
the teacher instructed us all to follow her into our form, into that room which would become so familiar. When we saw the desks we felt a little relieved. ‘Two people to a desk!,’ we whispered to each other, ‘Alva and Irva: desk-mates!’ And then the teacher began to instruct each child where to sit. Just after she had called out Alva Dapps, the first shock came. The name of the person to be sitting next to me was not Irva Dapps, but a small girl with long brown hair impeccably plaited, who was called Eda Dapps.

But to be separated! And so soon! The pain stopped us from thinking, stopped us from moving, and stopped all of us from working, except for our eyes, which immediately summoned tears. There we stood in front of the classroom with all the other children around us (except for those with names that came before ours alphabetically and except for Eda—whose name had come between us—who had obediently taken her place): lachrymose pillars, rigid in our disobedience, holding hands which we were determined would never come unfastened. The teacher asked which of us was called Alva, but neither of us responded. She smiled then, asked us again in a kind voice, but we wouldn’t look at her face, nor answer her. When she asked us once more, the voice was still kind, but we could detect a note of harshness underneath it. There was nastiness in this woman; she smelt of pencil shavings, and that was not an encouraging smell, speaking as it did of sharp points. She asked us again which was Alva, and to add to the possibilities, as if the situation was not confusing and distressing enough, which was Irva. But really we were both Alva and we were both Irva then. We remained
jaw locked in our misery and rather than looking at her face we regarded her hair, which was tied up into the tightest little bun on the top of her head, like a mean version of a halo on a statue of an almost-saint. But our considerations of Miss Aynk—for such was that piece of authority’s name (and it was a name that would never leave her, but would stick to her like a tattoo, refusing her marriage)—were interrupted by her bony hands which leapt forwards now and took hold of the wrists of those hands of ours which were joined.

She actually touched us! The horror of a teacher touching a pupil. They should learn to keep their distance. Just as there are signs ‘Keep off the Grass’, there should be signs ‘Do Not Touch the Pupils’. And there was such strictness, such firmness, such domination in that unwelcome touch. And such cold hands too, hands that had never been warmed by love. Hands that had spent far too long sharpening pencils. And then, she severed us!

And we began to shake, our whole formerly twinned but now bisected bodies grimly twitched, a dance to this cruelty, and the tears flooded out now, and everything was shifting out of focus. We were going to die, this was it, we were going to die. And we waited for the darkness to come. But then, oh bless her beautiful plaits, Eda stood up and said, ‘Please, Miss Aynk, I think they want to sit together.’ ‘Do you?,’ Miss Aynk asked. And then we found we could nod. Aynk said, ‘I am a tolerant woman. Would Eda Dapps mind sitting next to Stepan Dinkin?’ ‘No, miss.’ But would Stepan Dinkin mind sitting next to Eda Dapps? And then Stepan Dinkin emerged from the mass behind us to expose himself as a healthy-looking boy with curly mousy hair and even, how extraordinary this was, with his left ear pierced, and this ear-pierced seven-year-old responded negatively to Miss Aynk’s question, which is to say he responded very positively in our favour. And it was because of us, because we upset the alphabet, that Stepan Dinkin and Eda Dapps began to get to know each other, and, in due course, Stepan and Eda married.

Alva and Irva: matchmakers!

And that is the little story of how we upset the alphabet and at the same time upset our form teacher, Miss Aynk—who was very
fond of order, alphabetical or otherwise. In fact, I wonder if she would have preferred never to speak at all and therefore to have left all the words in the dictionary in their correct places.

I
N CLASS
we quickly became academic underachievers, keeping quiet always, huddled close to each other, holding hands under the desk. But sometimes I would be desperate to take part and would raise my free hand even though I didn’t know the answer, and when the teacher asked me to speak, and I said nothing, how the class giggled and whooped. In breaks, we would remain at our desk, quietly whispering, and if we were forced into the playground by Miss Aynk or some other unsympathetic teacher, we would shuffle out and quickly find a corner and, pretending to be invisible, long for the class bell to sound. But our fascinated classmates would see us there and would often, at least at first, come over to us. Most of all what fascinated them about us, and what they could never understand, was why we never did things differently, why we always had identical marks in class, why we walked in step, why we scratched our noses, or curled our index fingers around our hair in exactly the same way. They couldn’t understand why we were always joined together at the hands, walking in step, as if we were a thing that had four legs, like a horse or a table. Our schoolmates longed for us to do things differently. But we couldn’t, not then. It was too early for all that.