Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [55]
HOW WELL Pig knew my body, all of it, as he drew on me. I shaved myself completely for his tattooing, my arms, my legs, my pubic hair. Hairless for Pig. For so many hours he crouched over me as I lay hurting. But he never cared about the pain, and there was nothing about me that moved him; he admired my body only after he had left his marks on it. When he was tattooing Europe I could see the pores in his nostrils and the pits in his forehead, faces close up look so different. I tried to kiss him one evening but he only told me to put my clothes back on. When my backside had turned Antipodal he slapped it once in approval. And he kept putting the price up after each continent.
Then, finally, one day, Pig Mikel brushed away my blood for the last time. On that day he said, ‘That’s it, Map Girl, now you’ll never get lost.’
SINCE I CARRIED the entire world with me, what need had I for any further company? I was Africa and Asia, Europe and America, I was the seven seas, I was everywhere and all at once. Looking at me walking down Napoleon Street, wasn’t it possible to tell by my gait just how important I was? Call it from our roof tops, pull all the bell ropes, whisper the news from person to person, ‘The world itself has chosen to walk among our streets, our humble streets!’ But the world was not on display, and so nobody quite registered the significance of this post office worker as she moved onwards, with untrusting looks, about her important business.
The world was hidden beneath my blue shirt (top button fastened), blue jumper, blue jacket and trousers, black scarf, black socks and shoes. The world was travelling incognito. But the weight of it was making me suffer. How could I keep such a huge and terrible secret, wouldn’t I call out one night in my sleep and reveal all, wouldn’t I mutter by mistake some day at the post office the words ‘Pakistan’ or ‘Caspian Sea’ or ‘Canary Isles’? And wouldn’t they immediately begin to ask me questions, such as, ‘What was that you said, Alva?’ An innocent enough beginning you may suppose, but what danger lay underneath it. What strange looks and whispers people would then begin to show me, what faces they would pull whenever I came near. Then their questions would grow brave and they would surely ask one day, ‘Alva, it’s so hot today, why don’t you take off your scarf at least, we can see you’re sweating under there.’ Of course, I was sweating, I knew that. Wouldn’t you be sweating if you were carrying the whole world on your person? But I’d keep my jacket on and my scarf and would hurry from the place. And then perhaps the questions would be put more carefully and cunningly, perhaps even these questions might become so brave that they grew into commands. Perhaps Grandfather would call me into his office one morning to say, ‘Alva, you should be wearing your short-sleeved shirt at this time of the year, and even those short trousers which the Post Office has been so good to supply you with, I suggest you put them on and dispense with that winter clothing, the weather now being so summery.’
But how should I know which clothes to wear since I imagined certain parts of my body felt hot whilst others were cold? How could I possibly control my temperature when I imagined myself well below freezing at the northern end of my geomagnetic field (roughly 79° 13′ North, 71° 16′ West) commonly termed the North Pole, just below the nape of my neck, and I thought of myself as fading in the heat over an expanse of approximately 8,600,000 square kilometres of much of Northern Africa (let us name the space the Sahara desert), reduced cunningly, to half of the front portion of my left and my entire right thigh. So is it any wonder then that I, rather than wearing my winter clothing on the top half of my body and go almost naked on my lower half, chose to cover my entire self up, so that no one may know quite what limits of the scale created by that famous Swedish astronomer, Anders Celsius, I was pretending to reach beneath the