Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [91]
And in that instant my future life seemed to shrink before me to contain in its cast of characters only a single, nervous August Hirkus. But there would be room enough, there would be so much room in fact, for the memory of twins. I suddenly realised quite how much I missed them.
I SPENT the next two weeks patching together Alva and Irva’s lives. The information could, incredibly, be found in the New Public Library on People Street. In the small but growing archive section. I scrolled through the microfiches of old newspapers. People had written articles about my old friends, many articles. Whilst I had been growing increasingly unspectacular thousands of miles away, Alva and Irva were being written about.
I learnt of the transient fame of their plasticine city. In the old newspapers (newspapers collected only since the earthquake) were so many stories of so many lives, but then I scrolled down little history after little history, and, quite suddenly, there they were. Alva and Irva. I had found them again.
THE FACTS are simple enough. On a particular April morning, Alva Dapps climbed aboard trolley bus 7 with a suitcase. As she travelled from Pult Street, towards the centre of the city, en route to Terminus Road and the train station, there was a brief spasm inside her and her heart ceased to beat. The time of death, the coroner’s report states, was around seven thirty a.m. On that particular morning the trolley bus driver, who was new to his situation, and who was called Andrius Chapin, was not willing to stop the trolley bus despite the fact that he had a dead body inside it. He continued on his normal route, prepared only to make the brief regular stops that the trolley bus company had stipulated, ignoring the protestations of the passengers. This event made, for a very brief time, international news and for a far longer period national news. The reason it appeared in the international news was because some simple Entrallan believed that since Alva was a celebrated person of our city, she would be known throughout the rest of the world, and that therefore all the journalists of the globe would be interested in her demise and so he sent the story off to international news stations. It turned out that foreign newspapers were interested in Alva’s death, but not because of who she was but only because of the manner of her death. Her death, it seems, spoke of the increasingly growing terror people all over the world have of losing their jobs, and what such fear is actually capable of doing to people on a day-to-day level. How frightened we have all become—even in little-known and distant cities such as Entralla.
One local journalist suggested that this final journey of Alva’s on the trolley bus was like the victory laps that athletes like to take after they have run a race. And perhaps, the journalist wondered, if he had been in the trolley bus that day with dead Alva and had looked through the window, he might have seen the buildings in the centre of our city actually bowing to her slumped form, in gratitude for her life. Such stories are, of course, to be dismissed as mere fancy. But every now and then, I have witnessed Entrallans pausing in their days when a trolley bus slips off its overhead lines and the driver has to put on gloves and