Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [50]
And I was off, and there was no stopping me, up and down Veber Street, and then out into Pilias Street, and then to the great beyond that was waiting there for me, leaving Irva behind as she looked down onto Veber Street from the attic window. And I could hear Grandfather calling out to me, ‘You’ll do.’
I, ALVA LINA DAPPS, took part in every form of written communication. If I was bad news one day delivering bills, then another day I might deposit a more happy missive, a letter of love perhaps. I kept things moving, I was one of the people who assured that we carried on being, I was all about movement. I posted, with absolute precision, pieces of outside inside. I was part of the great post office cog that helped to drive the vast machine of the city of Entralla.
I BOUGHT A PADLOCK, I locked my bedroom, forbidding everyone entrance. Mother hated that lock; sometimes I would return from work to catch her sitting on Father’s stool in front of my bedroom door, regarding the lock suspiciously, wondering why. And beyond the lock? The walls of my bedroom were decorated with pages pulled from atlases and with coloured photographs of architecture taken from a book titled ‘FAMOUS BUILDINGS OF THE WORLD’ and with other pictures taken from library books or saved from newspapers.
Sometimes I’d feel a sudden jolt of pain inside me as I worked around the city, delivering letters to my allotted portion of Entralla, and I knew that pain was because of Irva, and that pain I thought was the pain of us separating. She was barely my sister then, she had become something else, something that was built perhaps only of pain. When Mother or Grandfather demanded I spend more time with her, I’d leave the house. ‘Go up and see your sister,’ they’d say. When I refused they’d call it the cruellest neglect. I’d scoff, ‘I never asked to have a sister, did I?’
But sometimes I would go and see her, sometimes I’d creep into her room at night. She always looked so pleased. I’d take hold of one of her hands, one of her bony and clammy hands, and press something into it, close the hand up again and leave. What did I press into her hands? Pieces of maps, shards of other lands. A torn section of Lurkistan in Iran, a ripped fraction of Flevoland from the Netherlands, a little paper gash of Beni from Bolivia. As a reminder that there were other places in the world, as a reminder that I would be leaving her. Sometimes I would open her mouth and place these crumbs of maps upon her tongue as if they were the body of Christ, and then close up her jaw and seal her nostrils and keep them sealed until she was forced to swallow. Sometimes I’d make her eat the whole of a continent in a single night. And since she never called out, since she didn’t speak, I was quite safe. Sometimes I’d insist that she drank up an ocean, that she chewed, for example, the entire Pacific, popping it into her, nautical mile after nautical mile. ‘Open up,’ I’d say, ‘open wide.’ For months this went on, and that dumb doll that was my sister never complained. Perhaps, when it was all over, Irva had succeeded in digesting the world several times over.
IRVA’S SKIN seemed to me in those days thick with dust, and perhaps not just her skin, but all of her. A sister made of dust, dust face and skull, dust arms and legs, dust heart and lungs. If you blew on her then she would scatter into a thousand fragments. And she wanted to spread that dust onto me. And I wouldn’t let her.
Every extra minute spent away from Veber Street seemed a kind of triumph to me. I longed to get out of the house and into the world. I would bicycle about the streets of the city, screaming out the names of other streets in contradiction, ‘Regent Street, Broadway, Boulevard Saint Germain.’ I’d revisit the library on People Street, coughing as I tore out the various pages that I could not bear to leave behind, pages which I might later force Irva to swallow, but after a time I was certain that the other readers in the library and