Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [19]
We spent much time in the attic looking out of the window (despite Mother’s protestations) onto Veber Street, wondering about all the life there. And one day I decided, and Irva cautiously agreed, to make a model of the street, not just a quick model that would take us a few hours to build, but a complex work that would take weeks and perhaps even months to finish: a highly detailed miniaturisation of exactly what was seen from our window. It was constructed entirely from red blocks of plasticine which we purchased with Grandfather from the Misons’ toy shop. How difficult it was to learn the buildings of Veber Street. How we struggled to see them properly for the first time. How plasticine helped us to understand.
But our first real plasticine model was unskilled and inaccurate. We lacked the patience at this early stage, and it was abandoned after only five days’ work. But it was historically, crucially, inevitably from those days onwards that our fingers always smelled of plasticine.
THEN CAME Grandfather’s unpleasant and aggressive visits. He demanded we spend our days out in Veber Street, where other children played. Grandfather said we mustn’t spend all day indoors, he even shouted at Mother. He thought that it would have been better if he had never shown us his matchstick masterpieces; that he would have done better to have brought us up on a diet of stamps. Stamps every day. And now what had happened to those stamps he had given us? They remained neglected in our bedroom; he hadn’t seen us studying them for months. Would we ever grow up to be worthy of the post office, which he hoped would one day be father to us fatherless girls? Now, whenever Grandfather came to visit, he would begin by hauling us down from our attic hideout and pushing us, despite Mother’s hysterical fear and protestations, into Veber Street, bellowing at us all the while. He would not be placated, even when Mother desperately rattled a box of kitchen matches in his face.
On Grandfather’s first unpleasant visit (after he had yelled at us—‘Go on then, go and make friends!’), we two, sitting on our front doorstep, with the front door locked behind us, came to an important decision: that Mother had been lying. Because if Mother wasn’t lying we would be dead.
‘If you’re out of my sight or out of your grandfather’s sight, even for a moment, you’ll die.’ That’s what Mother said. It had happened once before, she told us. On the only day that Mother had been unable to be with Father, on the day we were born, Father had suddenly collapsed. And all because Mother couldn’t see him. That’s what Mother said. And so, as we sat on the doorstep together, where neither Mother nor Grandfather could see us, we had to conclude that Mother had been lying. But, we asked each other that day, what would happen if we were to lose sight of each other? We shuddered at the horror. What would happen if we were to be separated, properly separated: yes, what then? This evil was considered by us for many minutes on the doorstep, and we concluded that separation, true separation, would surely be the death of us. It was because of our hearts of course, we decided, which had magnets in them, or cogs, or switches or some such, that worked only if they were close together. Each, we decided together on the doorstep, sent out signals to the other, complicated signals. And those signals, those codes, kept our hearts beating. ‘If we were to be truly separated,’ I said to Irva, ‘then there would be no more Irva.’ ‘Nor,’ said Irva to me, ‘would there be any more Alva.’
SOMETIMES 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