Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [16]
‘Linas Dapps: extinct of a weak heart’, the report states. He simply slumped forwards. A doctor’s note stapled to the report mentioned the words ‘Systole’, ‘Ventricle’ and ‘Atrium’ and concluded with the words ‘Mitral Insufficiency’.
Mother realised that if she were to care properly for us, if she were to keep our baby hearts twitching, then she must find some place where the window offered a different view. So Mother left her home, where she had played briefly the role of wife, and entered a new one where she would perform as Mother. And for that she permitted Grandfather to help. Grandfather rented a house on Veber Street, in sector eight of Entralla, far away from post offices, opera houses, theatres and police rooms.
THERE WAS a time when we knew everyone in Veber Street. There were the Misons, mother, father, son, daughter, who had their toy shop on Pilias Street, who all had red hair, except for the daughter who was blonde. There was Plint the butcher, his meagre wife and their aggressive daughter. There was Miss Stott the tailor who seemed ancient when I first remember her but who continued to be ancient, her ancientness becoming ever more convincing over the following years. There was Fiff the baker who lived with his red-faced wife, whom he was rumoured to have beaten frequently, and their three sons over at number twenty three. And there was Jonas Lutt who lived on his own, but who was very rarely at home, and who had just become a long-distance lorry driver.
For a while Veber Street and those streets that connected to it were all that we needed to know of the world, it was our corner of existence, our village in a city, Entralla in microcosm. Everything that we learnt and saw could be contained within it: Veber Street, Pilias Street, Umper Street, Hill Street, W. Glinksy Street and Eemar Walk. Pilias Street was our Mecca, since it contained the most shops (we supposed then that there was nowhere else so colourful, nowhere so populated), and beyond it lay places and people we scarcely even thought of. But mainly, and certainly to begin with, it was just Veber Street for us.
WE DO NOT recall our arrival on Veber Street, we were too young. But surely one day we did arrive and once inside our new home Mother shut the door behind her and closed all the shutters on the ground floor. When the people of the street came knocking in the hope of introducing themselves, Mother would not answer. When Mother shopped for her provisions she left us at home, safe, she presumed, huddled up together, surrounded by the bars of our shared cot. And as she shopped she would not allow herself to be drawn into conversation.
Our poor mother had become a mother and a widow on the same day at the age of seventeen. Mother’s brain had formed the words ‘recluse’, ‘hermit’, ‘anchorite’ and ‘misanthrope’, and found it liked them very much. Mother had decided never to let anyone come into her home, no. 27 Veber Street, except for the inevitable prying glare from her visiting father. There would be no such thing even as Veber Street for us baby girls, the world would be reduced to no. 27. But ‘27’ was what was written on the outside of the house, and so that too must be lost. All that was important were the rooms and levels of this new home.