Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [59]
Some nights I’d catch her, tears in her eyes, gently touching those soft buildings, leaving her prints on their walls, or on other occasions looking out through the curtains into the Entrallan night, so close and yet so alien to her. She was trying so hard, her effort was such a painful thing to see, but she could not, she could not yet go outside, the very thought of it set her trembling again, sent her under the covers into her blackness. But she was, there could be no doubt about this, attempting to trick herself into trusting again. And she bravely began to build once more, to consider what it was that lay beyond our home.
I BOUGHT A CHEAP camera, I took photographs of Entralla streets so that Irva’s miniatures could be more accurate.
After we had between thirty and forty plasticine buildings dotted around the attic, it all became clear. It was Irva who suggested it. We should build the whole city. I would bring it to her, building by building, street by street, the entire city of Entralla. With each new street safe in our home, how she’d recover, how she’d expand, how she’d slowly be encouraged outside once more. We would make a great detailed census. We would build a great plasticine model of the city of Entralla, not of a little section of it but of all of it, every street, every building. And we would find the nearest plasticine colour to each building, all those greys and browns and blues and whites and reds, all the parks would be of green plasticine, we would make a multicoloured Entralla, all the colours of Entralla! I would collect the information. Irva would build.
‘And when it’s finished,’ Irva whispered, ‘then I’ll go out again, then I’ll be ready, then I’ll know what to expect. And perhaps, but you must be patient with me, perhaps we could even, and only after a time, and only perhaps, perhaps we could travel beyond Entralla, but only if we take Entralla with us, so we shan’t be homesick. Yes, we must always have it with us. Yes, yes, this is it: Entralla in miniature in our trunks and suitcases. Yes. Yes.’
THE PLASTICINE CITY would be divided up into thirty-centimetre-by-thirty-centimetre squares. Each square a manageable size, small enough to fit within boxes or cases. Beneath each plasticine square would be a chipboard platform (thirty centimetres by thirty centimetres); I bought these chipboard squares ready-cut from the hardware store on Pilias Street. We were determined. Upstairs in the attic, the city began to grow, every day we saw it growing.
First of all Irva built Prospect Hill and then she crowned it with the Lubatkin Tower.
At the foot of the hill she began to build the cathedral. And as she built the plasticine replica, she tried to imagine just how it was for those ancient Entrallan builders. Each year they would have seen the cathedral growing higher and higher and perhaps wondered whether one day Heaven itself would be reached. Pinnacles, gables and flying buttresses. How long it took them, nearly two hundred years! (It took Irva nearly three weeks.) Sometimes as she sculpted the cathedral, in honour of the Holy Spirit, which smells of incense, I would light up a joss stick to help her into the mood. The cathedral is the single largest building in all Entralla, from it we would judge the scale of everything else.
After the cathedral’s completion Irva’s thoughts began to consist only of the old town. She was a Baroque and Renaissance Irva then.
The University of Entralla took up exactly six chipboard squares.
When she reached Terminus Street, she wouldn’t build the Central Train Station, I had to do that.
ON SUNDAYS, Jonas Lutt used to come, he missed our chats together. He had been away from Entralla during the small quake, and the news of my tattoo, presumably passed on by some garrulous neighbour, seemed only to encourage his visits. He asked me to show him the tattoo, I politely refused. ‘One day,’ he said, ‘one day you’ll show me. Won’t you, Alva?’ I