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By Root 837 0

of the table in the kitchen, had given us his tallness genes. We were taller than most of the other children our age, and in time we would grow to the exact loftiness of one hundred and eighty-six centimetres,7 totally dwarfing our mother, who stood at a mere one hundred and fifty-nine centimetres, or even Grandfather, who we measured one afternoon and found to be one hundred and seventy-three centimetres. When we were girls we wanted this growing of ours to stop. But on we grew, past the hundred-centimetre mark by the age of five, onwards beyond even the hundred-and-forty-centimetre mark by the age of ten, and still we went up further—storeys upon storeys of the skyscrapers of Alva and Irva, which was unfair Irva used to tell me, since all she ever craved for was to be unnoticed, she never wanted to peak out above a crowd, she wanted us to be lost amongst its throng. We finished our great stretching towards the sun at a little over the one-hundred-and-eighty-six-centimetre mark, around the age of seventeen, and from that height, mostly, we looked down on things.

WHEN WE WERE somewhere between the hundred-and hundred-and-fifty-centimetre mark, the two inky boys in the desk behind us in class often used to comment that they were unable to see the blackboard because our large heads were in the way (and when they received poor results in our class they said that our heads, not their own, were to blame). We used to kneel at our bed before sleeping and pray: ‘Dear Lord in Heaven, please stop us from growing. Amen.’ We tried crouching down, we attempted very studiously to be as small as little Eda, and we believe our marks in class suffered because of the tremendous concentration that this took. But in the end Miss Aynk moved us to a desk right at the back of the school room where we could be more easily invisible, and soon Miss Aynk stopped asking us questions in class.

EDA DAPPS came up to us in the playground one day looking sad. She said, ‘My mother told me that tall people don’t live long, being tall, my mother says, puts too much strain on the heart.’ For a moment Eda held hands tightly with us. And then walked away again.

I NEVER WANTED to be left alone by our schoolmates. In compensation, I forced Irva to fight me, and so began the days of our historical pugilism. These were attention-seeking fights in which we would hit out at each other just so people would notice us again. At first these fights were just small skirmishes in which only one or two children would notice us but in time they grew into great battles which would only be ended by the arrival of teachers. At first we’d just pull each other’s hair a little or slap one another, and only a few children would watch us then. So I decided that we had to be more daring with our fights. Then we’d really punch and bite each other and scrabble about in the gravel and get cuts and bruises. And we were so evenly matched that it was often difficult to tell who had won, and often our fights would be ended by the school bell because otherwise we might have gone on fighting each other, punching and punching until we both collapsed bloody and broken in mutual defeat and mutual victory. These fights of ours, these frantic connections, so amazed people that more and more they began to talk of us. It was joyful for them to watch us, ever amazed as we pulled and spat and beat each other in our agony. People would form circles around us to see us hurting each other, and in that hurt how we became popular! How we were noticed! How they came running as they whispered amongst each other, in classrooms, in lavatories throughout the whole territory of the school: ‘Alva and Irva are fighting again, come quickly!’ They said to each other, ‘They’ll kill each other one day, just wait and see they’ll really kill each other.’ We screamed at each other: ‘I’ll spill you all over the ground,’ or, ‘You’ll be bald any minute by the time I’ve finished yanking your hair out,’ and, ‘I’ll stamp your head in,’ ‘I’ll burst your eyes,’ ‘I’ll make ear rings of your ears,’ ‘Your guts: my scarf,’ ‘Your