Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [62]
Since I looked after Irva, and since I would not allow anyone else to look after her, Mother continued to work at the post office, and I began to work there only two or three days a week, as a part-time sorter. We had no room for Mother anymore (the city was taking up so much space), and Mother at first tearfully and then calmly began to separate herself from us. I think it could be said that she was falling out of love with us then. We could feel her withdrawing, and as a punishment Irva no longer allowed her to see the city. She didn’t seem to mind, at least, she never complained.
We didn’t notice it at first, but after a time there could be no denying it: our mother, after twenty years, was growing independent and confident. She was letting go. She had her hair cut and dyed. She started dieting. She said to us in the kitchen one day, ‘You mustn’t forget your looks, because you have been caring for baby is not sufficient excuse, your husband won’t appreciate a messy, sloppy wife. You should try letting him baby-sit whilst you spend a relaxing hour at the hairdressers. It will raise your morale a hundred fold and make you feel so good.’
SOMETIMES NOW, as a rest from my efforts, I would visit one of the cafés in Market Square. I usually went to Café Louis because Postman Kurt Laudus was often there, and he would always come over to talk to me. Sometimes I longed to speak to someone other than Irva. I’d sit at a table with a coffee and a croissant or a bagel or a baklava, still yearning a little, still yearning enough sometimes to lock myself in the bathroom to look at my map, and on those occasions, when Irva knocked on the door, I wouldn’t always answer. In Café Louis I would gently chew those foreign morsels, close my eyes and relax. And whenever I visited Louis’s I always felt guilty and in recompense I always brought back Irva’s favourite for her, an Entralla bun.13
ALL OUR PLASTICINE buildings may not have been mathematically accurate, but they were, let there be no doubt about this, emotionally precise. And I should also explain that because Miss Stott once measured us so precisely with her tape measure, I began to understand that buildings could also be measured in this fashion. So often now—with a much longer tape measure than Miss Stott’s, in a little metal box in which the tape coiled around itself—I would measure the widths of buildings and calculate the height by measuring the length of the ground to the first window and then multiplying it, because so often the different storeys of buildings were precise repetitions of each other. But mostly I just guessed, accurate guesses. (The fuss people make when they saw me measuring their homes, even if I didn’t actually touch them. ‘What are you doing?,’ they’d ask. ‘Just measuring,’ I’d say, ‘I’ll be done in a minute.’ ‘Why are you measuring my home?,’ they’d demand to know. ‘Just because,’ I’d say. ‘But it’s my home,’ they’d all say, ‘it’s mine, how dare you!’ ‘Yes,’ I’d say, ‘I know that, but I want to measure it all the same.’ ‘But it isn’t yours,’ they’d say, ‘it’s mine, it’s mine!’ Is it any wonder that I often had to work late at night, when such hystericals were dreaming of thieves in their troubled sleep?) And of course I used our heights as a ruler also, I’d measure exactly how many Alvas or Irvas tall a building was.
Out of plasticine we built the ever growing cemeteries of Entralla, lines and lines of tiny squares, whole districts made up only of the dead, a whole city in itself. I never counted them all. There were simply too many little squares, just too many, too many dead people, too many living people. We couldn’t fit everyone in.
Whilst making plasticine buildings it is important to warm the plasticine up first, to soften it. Before work, plasticine must be packed against the naked skin of hands, slowly warming it. If you are in a hurry it is advisable to roll two balls of plasticine and place one in each of your armpits. But never allow the plasticine to overheat