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By Root 798 0

Australia was visible, until my determined hand forced the nightdress back down me and then perhaps it was time for Portugal to make a hurried appearance as Mother’s thick digits went assessing the magnitude of the damage, or even a second of Canada or a flicker of India. And as the good people of Veber Street saw the whereabouts of these countries momentarily exposed, they began to understand that that tangle of arms and legs and shrieks and flinches was a jumble consisting of a distressed mother and a frightened daughter, and that such a thing was meant really only to be witnessed by the distressed mother and frightened daughter, and so they gradually began, all altruistic tendencies vanished, to descend the stairs of 27 Veber Street and even to collect themselves in a scrum of mutterings on the pavement in front of our house. And last to leave my bedroom was Miss Stott the tailor, who had entered our home empty-handed but was leaving it considerably burdened by yet another tale of Veber Street life which she would later whisper to her evolving suits and dresses.

MOTHER WOULD be permanently ashamed now whenever she stepped out into Veber Street—which she did every day. She would never be able to shrug off that shame because as she walked hunched over down Veber Street it seemed to her that she could see a certain memory working inside the heads of all those neighbours of ours. And I too now avoided our neighbours, even Miss Stott, because I knew that they did not have the ability inside them to comprehend why it was that I had the world drawn into me. They could only see that there was something surely wrong, some deficiency in me which had caused such a thorough piece of self-abuse. And in their quick and fascinated and disapproving looks, and in the stories they afterwards told to those who hadn’t been there, stories which were surely daily distorted, somehow the colours of my tattoo began to dirty; those blues and greens and yellows and oranges and browns seemed somehow soiled now, grimed by their exposure.

I was a girl who lived in a street in a city, tattooed and unhappy. From nowhere in particular. Going nowhere in particular. A young woman who, walking down certain streets of her city for the rest of her life, was certain to cause other people to point her out, ‘There, that’s the girl who has the whole world drawn on her.’ Locally infamous.

GRANDFATHER SAID, ‘She’s ruined herself.’

Mother wouldn’t look at me unless I was fully clothed.

Irva came to visit.

TWO NIGHTS after the tremor, Irva came to my bedroom to find me desperately scratching, feverishly trying to scrape the mocking tattoo from me, naked, but for the world, in agony and upset.

She took hold of me in her bony arms. She held tight. And in that grip, the strength of which shocked me, I could feel our hearts working stronger, beating in recognition. So fast. So strong. And I gave in, I gave in at once, of course I did, I gave in as soon as I felt the engine of Alvairva stirring into life again, I gave in, I gave in, I couldn’t stop myself. And Irva, a faith rising inside her, our reunion putting some little sound back into her, a piece of hope, whispered, barely audibly: ‘My sister, the lonely planet.’

I belong to her, she belongs to me. That’s just how it is, that’s just how it is and there’s nothing to be done about it. As if we were condemning ourselves to each other for ever.

11INCIDENTALLY—Gita’s Indian Raja on Glass Street, tel. 316 32 47, still the only Indian restaurant in Entralla.

12SPECIAL OFFER. Mr Mikel has been pleased to announce that a reduction of 20 per cent will be awarded any foreign customers who appear in his shop carrying Alva & Irva: The Twins Who Saved a City. He has even been so generous to add that the first foreign visitor to enter holding this book, will be given, entirely free of charge, but of course only if wished for, and wherever on the body requested, the following proclamation as a tattoo: ‘I ♥ ENTRALLA’.

THE CITY

IN A HOUSE

The Plasticine City of Entralla

Gallery 25 of the Art Museum of Entralla,