Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [42]
WE HAD REACHED the age of sixteen, it was time for our class to split and, at the end of the school year, for some students to prepare themselves for further learning, and beyond that for university, and for others to set out into that place termed by uninspired adults the Real World. The lower half of the class was dismissed to seek employment. Irva and I were to work in the post office, in positions found for us by Grandfather, not serving customers in the hall of the Central Post Office but instead delivering letters about the city.
On one of our final days at the educational establishment on Littsen Street, during one of the breaks between lessons, I took myself into the lavatory with my school compass. Fifteen minutes later, five minutes into the next lesson, I calmly walked into the classroom and sat down at our desk.
The whole class stared at me, the teacher called for the headmaster, and Irva, my neighbour, moved away. I had drawn on my forehead with the point of my compass, deep into my skin. Tearing into myself with that sharp metal point. My blood, sister blood to her blood, dripped down my face. But that blood did not stop the classroom from reading what I had etched there: a vertical arrow pointing upwards and above that the letter ‘N’, for ‘North’.
N
↑
As if I were a compass.
As if you would never get lost as long as you had me with you.
Now everyone could tell us apart.
8INCIDENTALLY—national expression, English equivalent of ‘Put that in your pipe and smoke it’.
9SITES OF INTEREST. BREAD SQUARE. The centre point of Bread Square is the spot where some of our adolescent children like to pass their expansive and unprofitable time. It is not a bench that they congregate around or a statue or even a war memorial, but an abandoned piece of architecture. See how lovingly they prop their bicycles against the structure’s walls, see how lovingly they clamber over the structure, see how lovingly they clamber over each other whilst inside the structure. It is a place of teenage violence and friendship and love. At night, under this roof, amidst empty bottles of beer, how many boys and girls have experienced their first carnal adventures? They have defaced the walls with their names, with their declarations of love, both inside and outside; they have drawn crude anatomical chalk drawings (principally depicting the male and female sex organs) which writhe and tumble their way across the walls of the tiny room at the highest point of this ruin. But what is this solitary scrap of a building at the centre point of this city square, which has become a home to all the anxiety and muscles and hopes and lies and crushes and betrayals of the vast soap opera of adolescent yearning? It is the skeleton of the bakery clock tower. Bread Square, named since the earthquake—when so many names were changed—was where my father used daily to work. Before there had been no square on this spot, the vast civic bakery had filled it entirely, its warm, yeasty smell had stretched its goodness around the neighbouring streets, comforting them. But the bakery and many of the bakers inside it were destroyed one July 16th. Twisted girders, ruptured machinery, mounds of brickwork were all that remained, but the clock tower at the top of the building, though now standing at a strange dislocated angle, survived virtually intact. When the building was set to be completely demolished, the clock tower out of a whim of the city reconstructors was removed from the top of the crumpled body and—once the exhausted corpse of the bakery had been tugged away, and the ground levelled and made into a square—found its place as a monument to our earthquake. It no longer registered time, the mechanism had failed, cogs had twisted, springs had snapped. The broken time piece was removed, with only the blank clock face remaining.
10SITES OF INTEREST. THE CENTRAL TRAIN STATION CEILING. If you walk towards the right-hand side of the station, towards the ticket office, and look upwards, you might be able to catch