Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [65]
And the city kept on changing, challenging us to keep up, old houses would be knocked down and new houses would be built on streets we had already completed. And so we would have to study that street again, add the new buildings. The city kept on changing, it wouldn’t keep still.
IN SUMMER the greenflies and the mosquitoes and the house flies would come. They always knew where to find us. Mother would open the front door or leave windows open in the kitchen, and up they’d come. We’d watch them walk over our city, we’d see a hunched mosquito poised on some rooftop, we’d see a fat fly walking blackly, arrogantly down a boulevard. They’d swoop and hum around our ears, we’d long to crush them, we’d yearn to squash them against hard surfaces but we couldn’t, we mustn’t, we had to let them fly about us for fear, in our anger, some building, some precious square or even a humble plasticine pavement might be dented through our vengeance. We longed to kill them but we had to be patient, above all else we must keep patient. Can it be imagined how much patience is required to build a city? I bought fly papers. Our victims screamed and twitched on the sticky strips as we worked on beneath them, stopping occasionally to look up and smile.
But it was not only insects that we grew to fear. One winter came a new terror. When we were carefully checking through all the stacked boxes, as we happened to on irregular intervals, we came across one—of sector five including much of Bernadinn Street—which had a hole in its side. Something had eaten its way into the box, we could see scratch marks, teeth marks even. We placed the box on a table, and, trembling, lifted the lid. The horror of it! Poor Irva had to look away, had to sit down with her head between her legs immediately. The intruder had left its footprints all the way up Bernadinn Street; it had pressed its pestilential way deep into our carefully smoothed plasticine, it had casually pottered pitted footprints upon our work. But there was worse still: it had defecated along the streets, small lozenges of brown shit on our city! And worse of all, worse even than the shit, wrapped up in the corner of Bernadinn and Duvis Streets, at least where the corner had once been, for there was no remnance of it left, was the offending creature itself, curled up in a bed consisting of torn shreds of the persecuted box.
A mouse, if you please.
When woken, it fled through sector five, causing yet more damage, then leapt from the box and into the darkness.
We bought poison, we bought mousetraps. We raised our boxes from the ground using wooden boards and bricks, we carefully inspected them everyday. We cheered when we found a hairy corpse, twisted on the floor. We felt no pity for its pain or for its tininess. Its length after all, including tail, equalled a quarter of many of our smaller streets.
NOW THAT WE had reached the furthest streets of Outer Entralla, Irva began to slow. As soon as I was out of the house she ceased modelling. She’d lie on her bed staring at the curtained window. Before, so much into her stride had she advanced with plasticine fashioning, it would have taken her a mere day to complete a complex building; now, with shaking hands, she hovered over plasticine blocks. She’d spend half a week on the simplest of structures. She knew that we were nearing the end and she was terrified of it. Sometimes, in practice, she’d allow me to place Father’s stool in the hall passageway and she’d sit, looking at the door, sometimes she’d even walk up to it, but never close enough to touch. She’d look at maps of all Entralla and try to estimate precisely how much time she had left. The closer we came to finishing the more desperate she grew. To slow our progress still further she would secretly destroy buildings and blame it on the mice. She’d pick at random some innocent home and obliterate it with a scalpel, attempting with those tiny slicing marks to copy the claws of mice. If she was challenged,