Alva and Irva (17 page)

As I clutched myself after those first hours of pain in our bathroom, I endlessly regarded and prodded the scab upon my chest, a scab exactly indicating the borders of our country. I must not pick at the scab, Pig told me, otherwise it would heal badly. And soon enough the dead blood flaked away and I was left with the map of our country that I had ordered, which selflessly took up only a tiny portion of my skin. And with what happiness did I rush to Arsenal Street, into the half light of Pig Mikel’s parlour, and tugging off my shirt so that the pain could begin again, expounded, ‘You can read the map of Alva!’ Pig said, ‘We can stop now, if you like. Do you really want to continue?’ I said, ‘Give me Europe!’

Some people write telephone numbers on the palms of their hands or upon their wrists, to remind themselves. I had the world inserted into my skin.

A
FTER OUR COUNTRY
was completed, mapped and coloured upon my chest, the rest of the world slowly followed. It made little difference whether it was India or Africa, Luxembourg or Madagascar, Saint Helena or Easter Island that were drawn upon me, blood and ink were shed in the same way, and swept aside by the gloved hands of Pig Mikel, in the same nonchalant fashion. Some days I would be at one with the pain and in a trance-like state calmly let it drill into me, some days it would beat me and I would clench my body and despite the protestations and insults hailed upon me by Pig would be unable to relax and on those days how the pain howled. Of course, there are certain parts of the body, in regard to this art of tattooing, that are more sensitive than others, the underside of the arms, for example, is particularly tender, or anywhere bony, particularly the collar bone, and so on the days when Alaska and Greenland were inserted into me or the central portions of Russia or Mongolia and China, I experienced a particularly keen agony and I left the parlour in a more dishevelled and miserable state than was customary, but I would return the next day just the same, eager for the horrors. I believed that it was only natural that the process should cause pain, how else could I get the grief and splendours, the histories, such histories, of so many different places to enter into me and stay with me always. The world was out there, but it was also, I thought touching my body, touching the ultramarine skin or the patches of me now coloured yellow or green or orange or red (the hypsometric tints of the globe), it was also here.

And all the while I was training myself to leave Irva. With each new country came the proclamation, the vow, the promise each time a little more strongly, each time with growing confidence that refused to be beaten, the sublime truth: Irva, I’m leaving you, every day I’m growing further and further away.

When Mother was asleep I would slip into my sister’s room and removing my nightdress would show her the world as it was appearing. And Irva fretting, tears in her eyes, would touch those pieces of the world spreading over me like a blessing, those parts of me swollen in their newness. She’d moisten her fingers with a little of her spit and begin to scratch vigorously into me. ‘No, Irva,’ I said, moving her hands away, ‘you’ll need a knife to get it off, you’d have to peel me.’ She kept shaking her head as if to say, ‘No more, Alva, please, please, no more.’ And always just before I replaced my nightdress I’d say, ‘Look Irva, look how it’s spreading.’

H
OW WELL
Pig knew my body, all of it, as he drew on me. I shaved myself completely for his tattooing, my arms, my legs, my pubic hair. Hairless for Pig. For so many hours he crouched over me as I lay hurting. But he never cared about the pain, and there was nothing about me that moved him; he admired my body only after he had left his marks on it. When he was tattooing Europe I could see the pores in his nostrils and the pits in his forehead, faces close up look so different. I tried to kiss him one evening but he only told me to put my clothes back on. When my backside had turned Antipodal he slapped it once in approval. And he kept putting the price up after each continent.

Then, finally, one day, Pig Mikel brushed away my blood for the last time. On that day he said, ‘That’s it, Map Girl, now you’ll never get lost.’

S
INCE
I
CARRIED
the entire world with me, what need had I for any further company? I was Africa and Asia, Europe and America, I was the seven seas, I was everywhere and all at once. Looking at me walking down Napoleon Street, wasn’t it possible to tell by my gait just how important I was? Call it from our roof tops, pull all the bell ropes, whisper the news from person to person, ‘The world itself has chosen to walk among our streets, our humble streets!’ But the world was not on display, and so nobody quite registered the significance of this post office worker as she moved onwards, with untrusting looks, about her important business.

The world was hidden beneath my blue shirt (top button fastened), blue jumper, blue jacket and trousers, black scarf, black socks and shoes. The world was travelling incognito. But the weight of it was making me suffer. How could I keep such a huge and terrible secret, wouldn’t I call out one night in my sleep and reveal all, wouldn’t I mutter by mistake some day at the post office the words ‘Pakistan’ or ‘Caspian Sea’ or ‘Canary Isles’? And wouldn’t they immediately begin to ask me questions, such as, ‘What was that you said, Alva?’ An innocent enough beginning you may suppose, but what danger lay underneath it. What strange looks and whispers people would then begin to show me, what faces they would pull whenever I came near. Then their questions would grow brave and they would surely ask one day, ‘Alva, it’s so hot today, why don’t you take off your scarf at least, we can see you’re sweating under there.’ Of course, I was sweating, I knew that. Wouldn’t you be sweating if you were carrying the whole world on your person? But I’d keep my jacket on and my scarf and would hurry from the place. And then perhaps the questions would be put more carefully and cunningly, perhaps even these questions might become so brave that they grew into commands. Perhaps Grandfather would call me into his office one morning to say, ‘Alva, you should be wearing your short-sleeved shirt at this time of the year, and even those short trousers which the Post Office has been so good to supply you with, I suggest you put them on and dispense with that winter clothing, the weather now being so summery.’

But how should I know which clothes to wear since I imagined certain parts of my body felt hot whilst others were cold? How could I possibly control my temperature when I imagined myself well below freezing at the northern end of my geomagnetic field (roughly 79° 13′ North, 71° 16′ West) commonly termed the North Pole, just below the nape of my neck, and I thought of myself as fading in the heat over an expanse of approximately 8,600,000 square kilometres of much of Northern Africa (let us name the space the Sahara desert), reduced cunningly, to half of the front portion of my left and my entire right thigh. So is it any wonder then that I, rather than wearing my winter clothing on the top half of my body and go
almost naked on my lower half, chose to cover my entire self up, so that no one may know quite what limits of the scale created by that famous Swedish astronomer, Anders Celsius, I was pretending to reach beneath the covers whilst outside the temperature remained confoundedly, relatively constant. No, I kept the world to myself and to Irva. I spun myself around and around! And once I had taken all my clothes off it seemed to me, with only my feet below the ankles and my hands below the wrists and my head above the neck still visibly mine, that I was still clothed, only now my clothing was the world. I was unable to undress myself completely ever again. I took great care of the world, lubricating it carefully every evening with moisturising cream, just as Pig Mikel had told me to, though there was a spot around Lake Baikal (the small of my back) that hardly received any lubrication at all, but perhaps that scarcely mattered since the lake is the deepest continental body of water to be found anywhere on the globe. So what did I care about little, fiddly, human relationships when I was the whole world? What did I care? What did I care?

S
OME MONTH
and a half after I was living with the world, shortly after six o’clock one morning, there was another earth tremor. And this time there were casualties. This time a few houses lost more than their chimneys. This time a few walls sagged and groaned, and then buried twelve people. And when those twelve people were pulled out into the light once more only one of them still remembered how to breathe. There were cracks on buildings, not terminal cracks, but warning cracks: step quietly, go to church and pray frequently. People began to walk in the middle of the roads now, viewing those buildings on either side with distrust and with fear. The shares of the scaffolding company of Mirin, Bao and Russell went up. The home insurance company of Collky and Platt feared bankruptcy. Parents let their children sleep in tents in Ventis Park. People played their stereos and hi-fis inside their homes at barely audible volumes. God became popular. The bishop applied to the Vatican to make Grand Duke Lubatkin a saint, so that he might protect the city. Pope John Paul II eventually politely declined.

I
T WAS
the second earth tremor which made me finally understand. For who could argue with the vastness of a whole city shaking? How could a single person, no matter how tall, argue with that? As the city trembled, as buildings many times my size—so solid yesterday but now as frail and unconfident as old men—swayed in the tremor’s wind, yes, as the surface moved, came the deep suspicion, the terrible worry, the suffocating thought that even though I was everywhere I would be going nowhere. The earthquake had made me realise that I was Alva. That I was only Alva. That was all. So there I was again, shrunken to the size of Alva Lina Dapps.

A
ND THESE
are the actions that surrounded my shrinking.

I was in my bedroom when the earthquake struck. Mother wrenched open the door to see if I was safe. I lay on my bed, my nightdress wrinkled up above my knees. Mother saw my tattoo. Mother saw a good portion of South Africa, and in that instant South Africa changed from being South Africa into an insult. And it was then that I shrank, I diminished in front of the slowly comprehending, and ever widening, face of Mother. Mother, mouth stretched, turned herself into a siren. She shrieked and screamed so much that Irva rushed herself into my room; she wailed so much and bellowed so loudly that some good people of Veber Street even came running, fearing some earthquake mischief. They pounded the front door open in their eagerness to enact neighbourly assistance, they clambered up the stairs in a crowd of altruism—the sound of which returned Irva immediately to her room before they had quite ascended—yes, they hurled themselves into my bedroom and it was only then, I suppose, it was only when they had halted, that they understood that the screams of Mother, which they had at first believed to be screams of distress, were in fact screams of vituperation. And they saw Mother, the siren, deafening with alarm, now about her daughter, pulling the nightdress from her, revealing, here and there, more bits and pieces of the world, for a second Australia was visible, until my determined hand forced the nightdress back down me and then perhaps it was time for Portugal to make a hurried
appearance as Mother’s thick digits went assessing the magnitude of the damage, or even a second of Canada or a flicker of India. And as the good people of Veber Street saw the whereabouts of these countries momentarily exposed, they began to understand that that tangle of arms and legs and shrieks and flinches was a jumble consisting of a distressed mother and a frightened daughter, and that such a thing was meant really only to be witnessed by the distressed mother and frightened daughter, and so they gradually began, all altruistic tendencies vanished, to descend the stairs of 27 Veber Street and even to collect themselves in a scrum of mutterings on the pavement in front of our house. And last to leave my bedroom was Miss Stott the tailor, who had entered our home empty-handed but was leaving it considerably burdened by yet another tale of Veber Street life which she would later whisper to her evolving suits and dresses.

M
OTHER WOULD
be permanently ashamed now whenever she stepped out into Veber Street—which she did every day. She would never be able to shrug off that shame because as she walked hunched over down Veber Street it seemed to her that she could see a certain memory working inside the heads of all those neighbours of ours. And I too now avoided our neighbours, even Miss Stott, because I knew that they did not have the ability inside them to comprehend why it was that I had the world drawn into me. They could only see that there was something surely wrong, some deficiency in me which had caused such a thorough piece of self-abuse. And in their quick and fascinated and disapproving looks, and in the stories they afterwards told to those who hadn’t been there, stories which were surely daily distorted, somehow the colours of my tattoo began to dirty; those blues and greens and yellows and oranges and browns seemed somehow soiled now, grimed by their exposure.