Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [64]
WHEN MOTHER came back, only two days later, we pretended we hadn’t missed her. She gave us identical T-shirts saying ‘FRANKFURT AM MAIN’ (Irva never wore hers), but she hadn’t actually seen the city itself, only a depot on the outskirts. She showed me endless photographs of motorways, and foreign people in foreign motorway cafés.
IN ALL THE CIRCLES of Outer Entralla there were so many unremarkable streets, each seeming first cousin to the last, so much similarity that I sometimes found myself confused. And so now for the first time, just to make sure, I began to claim a little piece of every street or square in that place called Outer Entralla, so threatening in its vastness. I began to take a screwdriver with me always and as soon as I’d finished noting down or photographing a street, when no one was looking, I’d do my version of cocking legs to mark territory. I scratched onto the surface of brick or concrete at one end of the street, small autographs. I scraped: ‘A & I’. It seemed only right since the plasticine buildings had Irva’s fingerprints all over them, that I should mark them too.
How Irva missed me when I was away, how she sat at home waiting for my return. A life made up of anxious waiting. Each time I was gone she’d be unable to stop herself from imagining me dead, somewhere far from Veber Street, helpless Alva dead on a pavement.
Every day it took me longer and longer to reach new sites, every day I had to travel so far. But on I’d go, onwards and onwards, so that the city could be built. I was out so far, I hardly knew where I was, but still these distant streets were a part of Entralla, still these people called themselves Entrallans. To think of all those Entrallans I had seen over the years! All those many Entrallans I had passed—the weight of seeing so many people, the endless busy numbers of them. The inertia they cause, how many little fragments of conversations I had heard, how many different shadows of words from behind doors and windows, how many times I had heard other people’s telephones ringing inside other people’s houses, how many times I had heard people fucking at each other (for there are only a limited number of things humans can do together), how many condoms I had seen wrinkled in the streets, how many car alarms I had started as I walked Entralla, how many dirtied syringes with rusting needles I’d passed, how much I’d seen, the weight of collecting everyone, causing me such tiredness, such sadness.
And all the rooms of our home were filling up, from Central Entralla on the trestle tables in the attic to all the other boxes of streets and districts in every room in the house. All those boxes and boxes of Entralla! We were running out of space to put them, where could we fit them all? Where could they all be put? We worried more and more about space. The model had reached so far from Central Entralla that we had finally come upon the endless tall lines of the high-rise homes, cruel space upon cruel space. But where could we house these tower blocks of ours in 27 Veber Street? The spare bedroom, my old room, was completely full (on the bed, under the bed, around the bed), and even Mother’s room was half filled with boxes of Outer Entralla (a whole half of the room cut off now by stacks of boxes) and some of the kitchen too, but we had been careful to leave a corridor between boxes, paths to the cooker, to Father’s stool. And all those boxed were marked, DO NOT TOUCH. DO NOT TOUCH written all about the house. We had no choice, we had to pile them up, these towers, one on top of the other, and store them in their boxes in the cellar,