Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [39]
August and I would touch all the time. We’d mock-fight each other. And I’d long for him to kiss me but he never did. I kissed him on the arm one evening, on the library steps, with Irva sitting a few steps behind. I gave him a love bite, a big purple island on his salty skin. (That night Irva gave me a love bite too, also on my left arm, even though I never asked for one.)
MORE AND MORE Irva would begin to fall behind. She wanted to stay with us, but we couldn’t bare to have her there all the time, she got in the way, she crowded us, she couldn’t keep up but she was always somewhere, just behind us, lagging away, saying, ‘Can I come too? Can I come? Can I?’ I so loved her, of course I always loved her, but then, in those days, I loved hurting her too. I’d whisper to her with a confident smile, ‘Who are you Irva? Will you please tell me who you are because, to me, it doesn’t seem you’re anyone at all, not really.’ Sometimes walking with August, I’d suddenly stop, turn around on the pavement, march the few steps back to where Irva was and say, ‘Go home, Irva, go home,’ as if it were only a dog and not my sister who was following us. Once we all went to the McDonald’s restaurant on the Paulus Boulevard. I sat her down at a table, and August and I went to buy our food. She wanted to come with us, but I insisted she guard the table, and instead of buying food August and I simply walked out of the back entrance onto Toller Street and we were free, we were running away, laughing at our ingeniousness. Two hours later we happened to be walking down the Paulus Boulevard and we looked through the windows of McDonald’s, and there was Irva, still there, waiting, still seated at the table.
Those days were the great days of my wildness. I started to miss class. August and I would spend school mornings and afternoons wandering from shop to shop, stealing little things that we had no real use for. Sometimes we’d run about the train station together, or squeeze ourselves inside the passport photograph cubicle in the station hall and make grimaces for the camera and afterwards out would plop four photographs of squashed and happy friends, so close together in such a small space. And sometimes on those days as we hurtled through the city we’d catch Irva somewhere behind us, just a few buildings away. And then came the nights when August and I used to buy car paint and spray onto brick walls the messages, ‘FINLAND, LAND OF LAKES’, or, ‘ITALY: CULTURE AND CHIANTI’, or, ‘FIND ADVENTURE IN ALASKA’.
And every night when I got home I’d tell Irva all about my fresh experiences until she cried.
IT WAS ON one of those days of our earliest separation that I went up to the attic to find the city of Alvairvalla in ruins. Irva had smashed it. There were visible imprints of her misery all over the city, misshapen houses lay winded, sprawled now off the pitted streets, imprints of her fists visible in their distorted faces. Some buildings had been pulled out of the city and scraped for long centimetres flat against the walls, or were on the floor covered with the stamp of Irva’s shoes. I could see on the ruined streets great gashes in the plasticine from where Irva’s clawed hands had scratched.
Poor Irva, I thought, how sad.
ONCE AUGUST AND I visited the Civic Bakery, which was the place where August’s father worked, but we didn’t go to visit him, instead we went to visit the great Bakery Clock Tower and to look on Entralla from above, and August from that great height took out his willy and pissed down upon the city and I laughed so much my giggles became cackles. And down below on the ground was Irva. Did she wonder that day why it began to rain a little, even though there were no clouds in the sky?9
Mother, who by then must have returned to work at the Central Post Office, began to be ruled again by her