Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [58]
IT COULD NEVER be pretended, even for a moment, despite our reunion, that all was as it had been before the Central Train Station Adventure.
When I had drawn on my forehead, when the map had been written on my body, I’d so hurt Irva that she had sought a hiding place deep within herself. To find that place she had abandoned words and limited movement, until she reached an internal home so void of light, of such dank depression, so compact in its space, that she felt safe again. And now it was my task to carefully draw her out, in delicate stages, and with loving precision, lest she be permanently lost inside herself, lest I lose her and in doing so lose myself. I clung desperately to her, for she was, as I realise now, always and forever, my only company.
So time was all Irva again. Irva days and Irva nights, Irva hours and Irva minutes. I wouldn’t leave her. I was her nurse, her constant nurse. I wouldn’t allow Mother or Grandfather near, I pushed them away. I fed her, I brushed her hair, I washed her. She, in her turn, lubricated my map. We slept together in the same bed, in case she called out in the night.
So there we were, falling in love again.
Children say to each other that somewhere in the world there is someone who exactly resembles you, and if you ever see that person, your double, you’ll fall down dead on the spot. But what happens if you were born with your double. What then? Alternatively, so Irva might say, I should consider how sad it was for all those other people, those countless twinless people, perpetually alone; who’ll never really know what real togetherness is like. We were married, Irva and I. We even had a kind of marriage ceremony.
I measured the scar on my forehead and its exact position there. With a soft pencil I drew the mark in the precise sister location on Irva’s forehead. I took out my school compass. While I held her heavy head steady, she did the deep scratching: the arrow, the ‘N’ for ‘North’. Such eagerness, such passion in this new task of hers. Poor, tearful mother couldn’t understand. She never could. Some nights I unpicked Irva’s scab for her.
When Irva and I were alone, and mostly we were alone, I would encourage her to trace her fingers across my map of the world. I would whisper to her, ‘One day, Irva, perhaps we’ll walk up Terminus Road into the train station and take the first train and go, just go and never look back.’ ‘But where will we go?’, she whispered—and she only ever whispered. ‘Anywhere,’ I said to her, ‘anywhere, right arm, left leg.’ But we scarcely left the bedroom. Irva seemed to think that since I’d brought the whole world into Entralla, into Veber Street, that there was really no need for us to go anywhere else. Her voice may have returned but she was not yet ready to leave the house, she clung to her timidity.
I began to model for Irva plasticine buildings as gifts. To begin with that was all that she supposed they were, but in time she began to understand my great cunning. These buildings, Lubatkin’s Fortress, the Central Post Office, Grandfather’s house on Pult Street were given to Irva to remind her of what lay beyond 27 Veber Street. I was slowly trying to bring her back. Sometimes I’d even ask her to help me smooth out a wall or carve out windows or shape roofs. I said to Irva, ‘Since you won’t