by Edward Carey
And then of course there was Kersty Plint in our class, the daughter of the butcher of Veber Street. Stunning and sexy Kersty Plint, as she would become, was not one of those fey girls who giggle and play with dolls, nor was she the sort of girl whose beauty would in time dictate a certain superior aloofness; rather she was tough and lively and healthy and vindictive. With ease and with relish she would bloody the noses of her classmates, male and female alike, and it was with particular enjoyment that she persecuted us. Most of all Kersty despised our shyness, and the word ‘shy’ could be attached to almost everything we did. Sticky, sticky adjective. It is with particular distaste that I remember Kersty and her followers, of which there were many, approaching us in the school breaks and pulling us apart and holding us as we wailed at each other across the vast tarmac distance of the playground, begging to be reunited. But Kersty wouldn’t leave it at that. She began to see that much fun could be gleaned from torturing us, and she began, with her followers, to enact her Togetherness Exercises, which is the name I gave to Kersty’s isolation experiments. She, or one of her followers, would take one of us, Irva or me (she could never tell us one from the other), and hide us somewhere in the school, and then she would have great pleasure in watching the other twin immediately find that location without ever once turning a wrong corner. Or else she would separate us by only a few rooms—keeping one in the classroom, for example, and the other in the lavatory, and she would whisper, out of our hearing, to her followers, that at precisely five minutes past eleven she was going to hit one of us, and it was with profound joy that at five minutes past eleven she would note that both twins started crying simultaneously, even though only one of us had been hit. Sometimes she’d have her followers dip one of our heads down a lavatory bowl and pull the chain, and stamp in joy when she heard the report that at the precise time of lavatory dipping the other twin, out of sight and hearing of the lavatory, suddenly took a deep breath and then a moment or so later shook her head as if it were soaking wet. Sometimes she’d simply gawp at the fact that one of us had grown a bruise on a particular place where the other twin had been hit (she never realised that we would often thump each other so that we had identical bruises). But in the end, even Kersty became bored of her Togetherness Exercises and she left us alone.
AND OF COURSE there was also the business of being tall, which I’ve avoided up till now, perhaps because it was only at this time that we began to realise it. Father, lest we forget him and his stool perched on top of the table in the kitchen, had given us his tallness genes. We were taller than most of the other children our age, and in time we would grow to the exact loftiness of one hundred and eighty-six centimetres,7 totally dwarfing our mother, who stood at a mere one hundred and fifty-nine centimetres, or even Grandfather, who we measured one afternoon and found to be one hundred and seventy-three centimetres. When we were girls we wanted this growing of ours to stop. But on we grew, past the hundred-centimetre mark by the age of five, onwards beyond even the hundred-and-forty-centimetre mark by the age of ten, and still we went up further—storeys upon storeys of the skyscrapers of Alva and Irva, which was unfair Irva used to tell me, since all she ever craved for was to be unnoticed, she never wanted to peak out above a crowd, she wanted us to be lost amongst its throng. We finished our great stretching towards the sun at a little over the one-hundred-and-eighty-six-centimetre mark, around the age of seventeen, and from that height, mostly, we looked down on things.
WHEN WE WERE somewhere between the hundred-and hundred-and-fifty-centimetre mark, the two inky boys in the desk behind us in class often used to comment that they were unable to see the blackboard because our large heads were in the way (and when they received poor results in our class they said that our heads, not their own, were to blame). We used to kneel at our bed before sleeping and pray: ‘Dear Lord in Heaven, please stop us from growing. Amen.’ We tried crouching down, we attempted very studiously to be as small as little Eda, and we believe our marks in class suffered because of the tremendous concentration that this took. But in the end Miss Aynk moved us to a desk right at the back of the school room where we could be more easily invisible, and soon Miss Aynk stopped asking us questions in class.
EDA DAPPS came up to us in the playground one day looking sad. She said, ‘My mother told me that tall people don’t live long, being tall, my mother says, puts too much strain on the heart.’ For a moment Eda held hands tightly with us. And then walked away again.
I NEVER WANTED to be left alone by our schoolmates. In compensation, I forced Irva to fight me, and so began the days of our historical pugilism. These were attention-seeking fights in which we would hit out at each other just so people would notice us again. At first these fights were just small skirmishes in which only one or two children would notice us but in time they grew into great battles which would only be ended by the arrival of teachers. At first we’d just pull each other’s hair a little or slap one another, and only a few children would watch us then. So I decided that we had to be more daring with our fights. Then we’d really punch and bite each other and scrabble about in the gravel and get cuts and bruises. And we were so evenly matched that it was often difficult to tell who had won, and often our fights would be ended by the school bell because otherwise we might have gone on fighting each other, punching and punching until we both collapsed bloody and broken in mutual defeat and mutual victory. These fights of ours, these frantic connections, so amazed people that more and more they began to talk of us. It was joyful for them to watch us, ever amazed as we pulled and spat and beat each other in our agony. People would form circles around us to see us hurting each other, and in that hurt how we became popular! How we were noticed! How they came running as they whispered amongst each other, in classrooms, in lavatories throughout the whole territory of the school: ‘Alva and Irva are fighting again, come quickly!’ They said to each other, ‘They’ll kill each other one day, just wait and see they’ll really kill each other.’ We screamed at each other: ‘I’ll spill you all over the ground,’ or, ‘You’ll be bald any minute by the time I’ve finished yanking your hair out,’ and, ‘I’ll stamp your head in,’ ‘I’ll burst your eyes,’ ‘I’ll make ear rings of your ears,’ ‘Your guts: my scarf,’ ‘Your eyes: my marbles,’ ‘Your head: my football’. Such words! Such bravery! Such attention! And these fights of ours really had to become increasingly vicious as they continued, those were the rules, we had to hurt each time a little more or they would tire of us, or they would walk away. The teachers separated us, pulled us apart, took little crumbs of gravel from our cuts, and as they bandaged us, ripping up cloths and winding them around bloody knees and elbows, they would ask us why, why did we hurt each other. And we, smiling at each other now, and perhaps even holding hands again, would shrug and demand that we receive the same amount of first aid.
‘Please, please, oh please stop,’ Mother begged us. ‘You must stop this,’ Grandfather ordered. ‘You will stop,’ the teachers announced. They could no longer bear the sight of us in our bandages. Always with a wound here or there. They began to watch us in the playground, it became harder for us to fight, the moment we started, we would be stopped. And then the headmaster threatened us, that if we were caught fighting each other ever again, if only once more, we would be separated for good. We would be put in different classes.
With that threat of disconnection, Irva refused to fight me anymore and I had to understand that she wanted us to be forever omitted from the lives of everyone else.
AFTER THE FIGHTS had been stopped, one Saturday afternoon in Grandfather’s house on Pult Street (by then we had learnt how to navigate ourselves into Grandfather’s district of the city, such explorers we had become), when Grandfather was showing us his matchstick collection yet again, dressed only in his pants and vest and socks and medals, as always, and as he was carving the head off matchsticks with his scalpel, Irva had an exceptionally brilliant idea which I loved her for. And when he gave us a little pocket money (which I al
ways looked after) we went on a journey to the Misons’ toy shop on Pilias Street. Mr Misons was there: bad news. He was red-headed, fat and sweaty and smelt of piss a little, which wasn’t an encouraging smell, and we were slightly afraid of him and his high pitched voice. So when he asked us what we wanted we were unable to get it out of us, no matter how hard we tried. ‘So tall and so shy,’ he muttered, ‘unfortunate combination.’ But then Mrs Misons came in and that was good news, because she had a way with us. Mrs Misons was on the fat side too, but much less sweaty and she always smelt of talcum, which was an encouraging smell. (And whenever we saw Mrs Misons we were always unable to stop remembering Miss Stott’s story of her, we were unable to stop ourselves imagining a pair of male hands upon her breasts, but never were these hands spotted with ginger freckles.) That afternoon Mrs Misons asked us what it was that we wanted, so gently that we wanted to cry with gratitude. (And how guilty we felt afterwards for our thoughts concerning the location of those unfreckled hands.) We pointed at the multicoloured stack of plasticine blocks. Then she whispered to us, ‘Which colour?’ And we both mouthed, simultaneously, ‘Grey.’ And then with Irva holding the block of grey plasticine, and me clutching the change, and our other free hands holding each other, we ran not home but to Littsen Street, even though it was a Saturday afternoon.
ON THE USEFULNESS OF PLASTICINE BUILDINGS 1: THE REDUCTION OF TROUBLES. The Art Museum of Entralla—an essential for all tourists—is a magnificent glass, granite and concrete edifice. Situated on Arsenal Street, it is open from ten o’clock in the morning until six o’clock in the evening. Closed on Mondays and public holidays. Its various highlights include much ancient religious art, especially gold, frescoes and stained glass; an exceptional collection of tapestries, of jewellery and of ceramics from the fifteenth century and numerous oil paintings representing the history of the changing tastes of Entrallans depicted in landscapes, still lives and portraiture. In a guide to world art tourism the author might head various chapters: Michelangelo of Vatican City, Giotto of Assisi, Piero della Francesca of Arezzo, Turner of London, Rodin of Paris, Goya of Madrid, Munch of Christiania (now called Oslo), Klimt of Vienna, Hokusai of Edo (now called Tokyo) and so on and so forth; and if that book were a rigorous and thorough sort of book there would also be one chapter named Chorlin of Entralla. It is this museum, incidentally, and no other, that holds the most comprehensive collection of the works of our celebrated painter Eugin Chorlin, whose canvases most commonly depicted our folk tales and legends, who has been not unfavourably compared to the Flemish (Belgian) painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder. The second floor of this museum, concentrating on more contemporary works, boasts among its treasures four prints by Salvador Dali, a lithograph by Andy Warhol and a napkin signed by Pablo Picasso, and not to be missed are the video installations by the local genius Jorge Bultt (mainly of shots of Entralla and Entrallans, taken at various highly populated locations on a special time-lapse camera, to show us speeded up and rushing about as sun and moon hurriedly trade places). But it is principally Galleries 24 and 25 that I would wish you to pay particular attention to.
The first exhibit in Gallery 24, on the right of the entrance, resting on top of a simple wooden plinth, is a model constructed entirely from grey plasticine of a group of buildings that bear a definite resemblance to the school that used to exist on Littsen Street. This model has reduced the size of the school so that its entirety can fit within the palm of a human hand. Careful examination will reward the viewer with the additional knowledge that the plasticine buildings have been pricked all over the surface with an instrument that possesses a sharp point, a needle perhaps or a school compass. These tiny indentations were never to be found on the real structure on which this model is based. If the model was expanded so that its proportions mirrored exactly those of the school, then these indentations would be revealed to be rather more serious than mere pricks of a pin: they would look in fact more like bullet holes, or even the vile gashes caused by mortar shells. If such an enlargement were to take place, or, and rather more simply, if the visitor to the exhibition were to place between his or her naked eyes and the exhibit a magnifying glass, then he or she would assume that the poor school had been the object of some vicious siege. But no siege ever took place on the modern thoroughfare called Littsen Street (named in 1919).
This model, a small monument to wish-fulfilment, is the first recorded insistence of the hopes of the twins being acted out in plasticine and also the first reliable evidence of the twins’ skills in the miniaturisation of actual buildings.
THERE WERE SO MANY school days it’s difficult to know what to leave in or what to take out. There was the time when we became ill with the chickenpox (ill at exactly the same time) and the enormous trouble Irva had stopping me from scratching my spots because she insisted there should be no markings on us to tell us one from the other. But I don’t want to talk about all that nonsense. So I’ll skip onwards now until Irva and I became great builders of plasticine, until the time when after school (leaving Mother at the school gates, walking her much slower steps, way behind us—such great strides we had after all) we would come to our attic to construct a city in which we would be happy residents, which was not, certainly not, the city of Entralla. Alvairvalla, as Irva named this place, was a very practicable utopia, and was the first city we built out of plasticine. It was not a very large city, having only forty or fifty buildings.
The important thing for us to remember as we built it was that it was a city for us only, it was built by us and for us, for no one else. Even Mother would not be allowed to enter Alvairvalla. There was only one law in this city which was a huge ‘Keep Out’ to anyone who wasn’t either Irva or me. In fact Irva wrote ‘KEEP OUT’ on the attic hatch. Mother knocked on the hatch, ‘Can’t you read?,’ Irva said, or, ‘You’re not blind, are you, Mother, all of a sudden?’ Mother was not happy about the city of Alvairvalla and she told us so. She didn’t like us always being up in the attic, quietly whispering to each other, she never wanted us to be such private children. She wanted us to share everything with her, but we couldn’t, it wasn’t natural. We did spend time with Mother when we felt a little sorry for her, sometimes we’d brush her hair for her, sometimes we’d paint her fingernails—though she never went out to see anyone. ‘I’m so alone,’ she’d say again and again, or, ‘Do you love me, Alva? Do you love me, Irva?’ We’d tell her yes, but she’d often say, ‘You don’t, no you don’t, I know you don’t. You don’t have any room for me at all.’ Mother wanted to be a citizen of Alvairvalla, but we couldn’t allow it. She might have been happy just to be a tourist, just to visit this phenomenon of architectural harmony for a few days, to stay perhaps in one of the two large hotels we built, but Alvairvalla required no tourists to keep its economy functioning and the two citizens of Alvairvalla didn’t like people snooping about. In fact, there was another law in the city of Alvairvalla: that should some foreigner ever visit the city, the city would immediately crumble to dust.
Architecturally, Alvairvalla, like Barcelona in Spain, was a city constructed on a grid. It was an ideal city of perfect balance between left and right, north and south, east and west. Each half of the street was a mirror of the other half and each street had an identical street on the other side of the city. There were two of every building—one made by Irva, the other by me. We had two churches, two hotels, two central post offices, and no schools. The residential houses were based upon our home in Veber Street, sometimes being a pair of tall versions of the house, sometimes twinned squat versions.
I realise now that the buildings of the city were very unskilfully made, mostly being just oblongs inexpertly carved, but at the time we considered the work to be of unrivalled genius. We were very happy with our city and we always rushed home to see it. It began to govern us. We built a plasticine wall (ten centimetres thick) around the city for protection. We worried about it constantly.
IN SCIENCE CLASS we were taught about the sexual life of wingless a
phidae (or plant lice), which reproduce asexually (all the baby insects being clones). After that class, during which we noticed that certain of our school fellows had been staring at us, giggling, I pronounced that other people should be allowed to visit the sterile city of Alvairvalla after all. I said the city would die if its two inhabitants never had any children, it would be left empty forever, with perpetually quiet streets, with constantly unoccupied rooms and it would remain in this state, in this void of loneliness because no one except us knew how to find the city, it wasn’t on any of the maps anywhere. Alvairvalla, I instructed, would need a third citizen after all, but not Mother, it would have to be a male.
Irva didn’t talk to me for a week.
After that silent week, she couldn’t bare it any more. She said, ‘Yes’ and ‘All right then.’ And so the Quiet Boy entered our history.
I CALLED HIM the Quiet Boy because he never seemed to speak to anyone. His real name was Girin Lang. He was a year below us at school, and he must have been the most inconspicuous boy in all the world because we didn’t notice him for such a long time and generally when we were in the playground we were constantly watching everyone. I used to enjoy watching friendships in the playground, observing them pensively, wondering what they might feel like. And Irva watched me watching friends, but without happiness.
But somehow the Quiet Boy had eluded our gaze before; this Quiet Boy had somehow achieved inconspicuousness. There he was in another corner of the playground, virtually invisible. I became fascinated by him. We would always leave the classroom now in the breaks, just so that I might watch him in the playground. There was so little that was distinguishable about him, except the fact that he wore glasses, which somehow seemed to make him even more hidden, as if his spectacles were a mask. One day we became a little braver, and we managed to be out in the playground before him and positioned ourselves in his particular corner. He came walking towards it, quietly, inconspicuously as always, changing his course now and then to get out of the way of the more noisy and conspicuous boys, who didn’t seem to notice him at all, and then as he was almost at the corner he finally saw us. What horror in his little face, what panic. He stood still, stunned for a moment, and then turned around quickly and went back inside the school. I saw him closer that time than I had ever seen him before and I noticed then that one of the lenses of his glasses was gummed up. And then I realised there was something conspicuous about him after all, the boy had a severe squint. One of his eyes saw only Irva, the other only me. In comparison to us, of course, his squint was an amateur in the great circus of conspicuousness, it was a shy and modest and retiring thing. We approached him the next day in the playground, I even spoke to him: ‘My sister and I live in Veber Street. We weren’t born there, we were born in Saint Mirgarita of Antioch Street, in the hospital that’s there. Our father’s dead. He died on Napoleon Street. Where do you live?’