Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [92]
On the afternoon of her death, when the police knocked on the door of 42 Pult Street to inform the surviving twin of her loss, no one came to answer. A police car waited in the street for someone to return. When, finally, a lorry drove up that night, the occupant of which possessed keys to the house, the police discovered Irva inside, in her bed. Quite still. Her eyes and mouth open. The coroner’s report estimated that Irva had died between half past seven and eight o’clock that morning.
THE NAME of the lorry driver, used several times in the Entrallan newspapers, a name I had not heard of before, was Jonas Simas Lutt. Mr Lutt, I discovered in the telephone book, still lived in that house on Pult Street (where I too now live—in the attic space at the top of the museum). I telephoned him. He remembered my name. We agreed to meet, but where I wondered. The telephone went silent for a while, then he said Café Louis in Market Square, that was a good spot, though he later confessed that he’d never been there himself, only that one of the twins had occasionally mentioned it.
Jonas Lutt is a big man, with slicked-back hair, usually dressed in commonplace jeans and a T-shirt. I would recognise him, he said, by the T-shirt he was wearing of Rouen Cathedral. Jonas and I have become friends. We often go together to that Market Square café with its sullen proprietor. And it was on one of those occasions that he boasted to me that he, Jonas Lutt, an ordinary-looking man from Entralla, a man so ordinary in his features that he would disappear in any crowd, seen as simply a perfectly plausible, unexceptional urban male, that he, this long-distance lorry driver, had an extraordinary secret. For years this man of small conspicuousness had been making love to two women. Not every night, for sure, only on occasions, but nevertheless it had still occurred. A surprising fact perhaps, given the blandness of the confessor, but hardly revolutionary; such behaviour is certainly not unheard of (even in a Catholic country, perhaps particularly in a Catholic country). But this man, since he first lived in his current address on Pult Street, had been making love to twins, one at a time. One night Alva. The next Irva. How extraordinary Entralla’s version of Casanova is, a tall and tubby lorry driver. No one seeing him walking down a street would suspect this man’s past. He made love to Irva, he made love to Alva (he made love to a map of the world). Until they became too ill. For comfort.
Jonas has told me that when Alva set out with a suitcase that morning he thinks she knew what the outcome would be. He thinks that Alva understood that in separating herself from Irva she would cause their deaths. They had been struggling with living, he said, for so long.
I ASKED Jonas what had happened to the plasticine city. He didn’t know, he hadn’t heard about it for years. Probably, he thought, it was destroyed. We decided to find out. The most obvious place to start of course was the place it had last been seen. We journeyed to the warehouse on the outskirts of Entralla, on Illtud Street. There was a rusting padlock on its entrance doors. We couldn’t undo the padlock, we had no saw with us, and just as Jonas was suggesting he should go to fetch one, I gave a final push at the doors and they both, through old age and rot, collapsed into the warehouse and I went tumbling in after them. And there it was. After all that time. The plasticine Entralla. Defaced by dirt and dust, walked over by spiders, with great webs spanning whole sectors of our city, with dead flies and even a dead bird or two upon the cracked surface. Perhaps it no longer really resembled Entralla, but all the same, here it was, the forgotten city.
AT FIRST we thought we might be the only people interested in the city but as we worked on it, carefully removing the dirt with tweezers and a slightly dampened cloth, filling in the major cracks, we began to wonder whether such a marvellous creation