Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [61]
And one night shortly afterwards, whilst Irva was sleeping, I climbed up the stairs into the attic, I placed the miniature statue, made in China, upon the plasticine city of Entralla. How wonderful it would have been if it were true, how wonderful to wake the city one morning and to see the expressions upon people’s faces, as they rushed hurriedly to work and suddenly stopped short and with gaping mouths and wide eyes, saw that the Statue of Liberty had taken up home on our very own Cathedral Square.
That night in the attic, I suddenly turned around. There was Irva in tears.
TWO LARGE trestle tables held the weight of growing Entralla in the attic. There was a gap between these tables, to represent the River Nir. The Iron Bridge, the Senasis Bridge and the Small Bridge spanned these tables. On the model where the banks of the river ran, Irva attached small chipboard platforms to the trestle tables in imitation of the river’s ancient path. If a plasticine man had inhabited the plasticine city and was in lonely despair, for he would have been the city’s only inhabitant, to have tumbled from any of the bridges down onto the attic floor of 27 Veber Street, the fall would be greater than that experienced by the drop from the Grand Canyon in Arizona, America, and it is certain that he would be dead before his plasticine body dented out of shape on impact.
The model allowed Central Entralla to be seen with fresh eyes and to be seen clearly, for the first time, so comprehensible was it in its reduction. We could observe it from an impersonal distance now, as foreigners almost. Entralla had become strangely collectable. A thief might pass by and in a second pull out the bell tower from Cathedral Square and place it, lost to us for ever, in his deep pockets. The city belonged, now, in its limited size and dreams, to us, to Alva and Irva Dapps.
Central Entralla had been completed, we had reached up to and beyond the old fragments of Lubatkin’s city wall, which, years before, when amateurs at this plasticine art, we first considered as schoolchildren. Irva had built the old town, she had built half of Napoleon Street, and still she was building onwards, onwards. But the trestle tables were full now and so we began to construct Entralla in fractions, chipboard square by chipboard square. When each chipboard square was completed we carefully lowered it into a box, of exactly the right dimensions, and then we placed a lid on that box, and we wrote on the lid exactly which fragment of Entralla was contained within. And the boxes began to stack up. All those boxes, which originally came from the post office, brown cardboard boxes that had once contained envelopes.
Soon it was time to seriously consider the sleeping arrangements of all Entralla, from the pavement to the humble bedsit all the way to the opulent town houses of Arkllitt Avenue. We began to give Entrallans plasticine homes to call their own, plasticine retreats to escape to, little plasticine corners of Entralla, microscopic crumbs of the world which were their microscopic crumbs and no one else’s in which to express themselves, in which to be entirely, absolutely, unreservedly themselves; free from dilution of all other people.
FROM GRANDFATHER, who was told so much of Entrallan life as he sat talking to his customers at the post office, we learnt news of three of our old school friends. Kersty Plint was pregnant. Eda Dapps had married Stepan Dinkin. We never asked for this news, we didn’t want it, it got in the way. Irva stopped letting Grandfather in the attic. When he tried to build some of his matchstick locations in our home, the home of a plasticine city, Irva crushed them.
And then Grandfather stopped coming for a long while. ‘It’s as if they don’t recognise me,’ he said, ‘And they stare at me, just stare, I can’t bare them staring at me. As if they’re growing wild. And Irva never talks to me, if she’s something to say she tells Alva first and then Alva tells me. Something should be done, Dallia, it’s not right.’ ‘Leave them alone,’ Mother