Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [9]
MOTHER, STANDING on bathroom scales watching herself grow, was fascinated, though a little fearful, of her new shape: of what her body factory was producing down there, under the skin. Father, who was invited into the bathroom to note Mother’s biological progress through the increasingly large numbers the arrow indicated, was visibly appalled. When the swelling of her figure was first noticeable he pretended that Mother had been overeating, for it was an unassuming sort of swelling then—a swelling that seemed to mind its own business. But when the protuberance began to take on monstrous proportions, and when its every moment called people’s attention to it, and when Mother was forced to adjust the way she walked and sat and moved, then his only desire was to take hold of this immodest extremity and push it back inside Mother until it was out of sight.
Leaving the bathroom Mother and Father entered the largest room of their home—this room was bedroom, kitchen, sitting room, dining room, dressing room, storeroom. This room was not even a particularly large room, yet the collected possessions of Mother and father fitted easily enough within it. This room had two windows, one of which looked across Napoleon Street to various police buildings. Their home, a building divided into many small flats, was called Sirkin House. What a tiny little place their fraction of it must have been. Pokey-home. Poxy-home. How inappropriate it is that their love, so huge a thing as it felt to them, could fit within so paltry a container. A thousand, thousand rooms, a palace the size of Versailles in France would have seemed a little more adequate to house the limitlessness of their adoration. But love, how extraordinary this is, does not generally require large quantities of space.
AS MOTHER GREW, and as her growth seemed larger than any of the other growths to be found emerging from the pregnant women of our city, Father began to suspect that the removal of the growth would cause Mother some considerable pain. The previous year, Father recalled, he had trapped one of his fingers as he was pulling up some floorboards in the attic of an abandoned building on Foundry Lane, and the finger, once freed, had become unpleasantly large. And to relieve his finger of that largeness, for it looked as if it belonged not to puny father but to some improbable giant, he had pricked it with a needle. And had it hurt? Yes, certainly it had hurt. But then after the pain and after the pus rushed out of him, his finger felt a little better. Sore but better, but only after the pain. And this pain was centred only on a tiny part of himself, on a finger, so how would the pain be if the swelling distorted the whole body? Father looked at sleeping mother lying on her back, watching the volcano of her belly hidden underneath the sheets, and he began to weep. He crept away from the bed, anxious not to wake Mother, anxious not to disturb the volcano. He shut himself in the bathroom and between heavy sobs rolled and lit himself a soggy cigarette.
So I consider Father now while it’s still possible, for regretfully it must be reported that there’s little time left for him. There he sits, still enough for examination, on his lavatory seat. As Father smokes his cigarette, there’s time to think a little more of this inhaling and exhaling father of ours