Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [86]
THEY LET THE people of Entralla come and see the plasticine city. There were large queues around the warehouse, but they weren’t allowed to come too close, they weren’t allowed to touch. They put ropes around the city, and only we were allowed to go under those ropes. They fixed red velvet curtains all around the edge of the model. Often when all the people came to see the city we would be underneath the massive tables, hidden from sight by the velvet curtains, listening to all those many people talking about plasticine Entralla (talking about themselves, the geography of their lives). We whispered to each other, trying not to cackle too loudly, occasionally peeping out through the curtain to see all the different types of the shoes of the people of Entralla. We remember once someone from a place called Wibb Street complained because Wibb Street hadn’t been built with plasticine; it was as if his home didn’t exist. But it did exist, we hadn’t reached it, it was too far out, that was all. On that day there was also an art critic from one of the newspapers, and he said: ‘Such is the way with all art. All art, my dear fellow from Wibb Street, can never be totally completed, only, in the end, abandoned unfinished.’
And that was how we passed our days mostly, under the table of our city. And when the people had gone we’d creep out of our hiding place and look all over the city and see where we thought the plasticine needed repairing. And sometimes Jonas would come and stay with us. But the truth could not be hidden from us. Slowly the city was drying out, losing the sharpness of its colours, we kept putting fresh plasticine over the cracks but the cracks kept coming back, whole squares would have to be replaced, and we couldn’t get to the centre of Entralla without dismantling the table which the entire city was standing on, and they wouldn’t let us do that, and we saw how grey with dust Lubatkin’s Fortress had become. And as the city declined, as it shrivelled and creased, so, it seemed to me, Irva declined, she shrivelled and creased too. The worse the city’s state became the less Irva was interested in repairing it, she was content to watch me looking after it but unwilling to help. She looked at the cracks, at the gathering dust, at the faded colours, at the dehydrated suburbs, with increasingly detached looks, and she preferred to sleep now when people came to visit the warehouse. She no longer cared about their footwear.
And as the city’s illness increased, as it wrinkled in its old age, it seemed to me from under our table that there were fewer and fewer shoes to watch. Slowly the number of people visiting the city was declining, until in the end there were only ten or so people a day. And the other people who worked in the warehouse said it didn’t seem worth opening it to the public anymore, because the public in those days had lost their passion for plasticine.
Our brief and local fame was over.
AFTERWARDS, WHEN the warehouse was closed to visitors, I would leave Irva sleeping under the table, and walk about the city and see that the large advertising posters of us were hardly anywhere anymore and when I did see them often they would have been graffitied over. Our teeth had been blackened out or naked breasts had been drawn over us and once I even saw drawings of men’s penises right next to our faces. I defaced one poster myself, I tiptoed up in the train station,