Alva and Irva

by Edward Carey

  In the future Mother always inspected my uniform and my room for maps everyday, she searched through pockets, she lifted up carpets and mattresses; I was not allowed to enter the house without first being searched. In Mother’s mind my maps were as poisonous to me as father’s foreign stamp collection had been to him.

  So then I’d store maps inside my post office locker. I spent more and more time in the locker room. I was not the only one there, some of the postmen liked to play cards in the locker room or to smoke or just to talk, and other postmen I noticed liked to store private things in their lockers too—for example, Postman Pirin kept his magazine of naked women in his locker, and in Postman Olt’s locker I once briefly glimpsed women’s clothing, tights and bras and panties and stuff all folded up. We yearn, we postmen and post-women, we yearn, we yearn.

  OFTEN THEN, having finished my post office work, I would go to spend my money on food. I would sit down, always on my own, at some restaurant selling foreign cuisine, and, with my eyes closed, would set off on great imaginary journeys inspired by the taste of those strange platefuls. And as I sat in an Indian restaurant,11 sweating from the dish in front of me, I opened my eyes to see a framed poster of a young girl from that part of the world with henna tattoos upon her. That was it. That was what started it. And then, with discreet enquiries into the tattoo of a carrier pigeon on old Postman Coovin’s right hand, I first heard of Pig Mikel.12

  Pig Mikel was responsible for burrowing under the skin and depositing colours there with sharp needles for people who voluntarily subjected themselves to this torture and who even paid him for the privilege. He had illustrated his clients’ bodies with samurai warriors, cherubs, serpents, Celtic bands, popular cartoon characters, wings, claws, motorbikes, naked women, numbers, skulls, Zen signs, swastikas, flowers, thunderbolts, any breed of birds, any breed of animals, a few Greek gods, personal messages of love and hate in five different languages, a thousand different names, fake scars oozing fake blood, and on one occasion a verse from the Bible, to be precise Leviticus 19:28, ‘You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh or tattoo any marks upon you,’ written onto the back of an alcoholic priest, who hooted with laughter throughout the process. Was there a thing in the world that he had not drawn on human skin? And there was scarcely a corner of the outside of a human being which he had not at some time or other been bent over, bothering with his needles. But Pig was not just a tattooist, he was also an expert at body-piercing. In his time I estimate he had punctured several thousand ears—some as many as fifteen times—several hundred noses, a good number of tongues, a fair quantity of nipples, numerous navels, a few lips, a collection of eyebrows, a score of foreskins, half a dozen slits at the tip of the glans penis and a vulva or two. And afterwards he always inserted a ring in these holes, and from those rings people jangled every type of object from the standard crucifix to the shrivelled hand of a chimpanzee—but that was their business, not Pig’s.

  Pig’s person too was a great advertisement for his shop. His nose was pierced in the centre and a large silver ring hung down like a bull’s, both his ears were thrice looped with thin bands of gold and his right nipple had a Celtic cross dangling from it, which he liked to fiddle with whilst he was thinking. On the top of his head, always thoroughly shaved, were two sentences in bold capitals flowing around his skull in a circle, so that it looked like the toque of some obscure holy order: the first, in the semi-circle facing the front of his head, said, I AM AN ARTIST; the second, to be read only when Pig had his back turned to you, unbashfully informed, I LOVE MYSELF. And in the centre of his forehead, in the same place that Rabbi Leow of Prague, Czech Republic, wrote on his famous golem, Pig had had inscribed the word ‘PIG’, which everyone called him because with his little eyes with their thick white eyelashes and his large upturned snout he resembled that beast, and was for some reason proud of the resemblance. I do not know what his real first name was, perhaps he was even christened Pig.

  Into this man’s world, one day, I arrived uninvited.

  I stared at the decorations around the walls: a thousand photographs of different examples of tattoos. Often the customers entering Pig’s domain would point at one of those designs and Pig would prepare his inks and his needle, take out a new pair of perfectly disinfected latex gloves from the box, the same gloves that surgeons wear, and let the torture begin. Often the client with his new disfigurement would say as the blood dried on his skin, ‘Never again, never again.’ But, or so Pig would have you believe, they often came back, for it was such sweet torture. ‘Everyone likes the hurt,’ he said, ‘everyone needs a little pain, just to remind them that they’re still alive.’ But I had a different idea, I didn’t want any one of those tattoos stuck up on Pig’s walls, tattoos which perhaps several people had, I wanted an original design, and I was bursting to tell the tattooist what it was.

  ‘What do you want?,’ he asked, ‘The Chinese symbol of strength on your ankle, or a daisy on your shoulder or a barcode on your arse?’ ‘I wanted, if it pleases you Mr Mikel, a map of the world.’ ‘Call me Pig,’ he said pointing to his forehead, ‘I think I’ve got a small globe design somewhere, where do you want it, not on your biceps, I suppose?’ I took a deep breath and proclaimed, ‘All over me, all over me. All over me. All over me. All over me. All. Over. Me.’

  MY INSTRUCTIONS were neatly written out on post office paper. From the centre of me spreading east and west: Europe. Down my right side: the Americas. Down the left leg and waist: Africa. Curving round my right arm and taking up most of my back: Asia. Australia must take up much of my right buttock, and a proportion of the left.

  Pig, incredulous, burst out laughing. I took out some money and pressed it into his hand. ‘It’ll take time,’ he said, ‘preparation.’ I nodded. ‘But can you stomach it? You’ll feel like I’m tearing you to ribbons, you’ll lose blood, your nerves will yell at you, and you’ll have to be patient, you’ll have to live with that pain day after day.’ I nodded. ‘And the seas,’ he said, ‘we’ll have to squeeze them in here and there, cover all the rest of your skin with them, and what blue shall we make it—ultramarine, like in the Caribbean?’ I nodded and smiled. ‘Everyone,’ he said, ‘will want to swim in you. And your head,’ he said, ‘what’ll that be—Scandinavia?’ But then I said, ‘No, you mustn’t touch it, neither that, nor my arms beyond the wrists, I want to keep all of it hidden beneath my clothes, no one must suspect.’

  ‘Once it’s done you realise,’ said Pig, ‘it won’t come off, it can’t be undone, unless you want your whole body scarred.’ I nodded. ‘How old are you?’ ‘Nearly eighteen,’ I said. Pig shrugged, sniffed, ‘Payment in advance, shall we say, of each continent?’ I nodded. Pig and I shook hands.

  And so, a week later, the pain began.

  SOME PEOPLE have been known to say that after two or three minutes the pain of tattooing goes and the skin just feels numb. Some people have been known to say that the pain of tattooing is a deep sexual pain that can induce orgasms. Some people have been known to say that the pain of tattooing is unbearable, a kind of blue pain that upsets the entire body, and, coupled with the sight of the tattooist’s gloved hands wiping blood and ink away from the needle’s path, can induce vomiting and severe mental stress. It is generally young people who subscribe to this pain, and those young people are often advised not to have the tattoo placed on a portion of their skin which will become, in time, wrinkled, so that as the beauty of the skin’s elasticity fails, as our surfaces become corrugated and slack, that little piece of painted beauty on an ankle perhaps or a shoulder remains for ever taught, undistorted, immortal. Our teeth may fall out, our hair may desert us, our eyes may fail us, but our tattoos will go on, loyal even beyond the departure of our minds. So as aged and senile babies we may look at that strange person in the mirror who we are certain we have never seen before and wonder why on earth that person had chosen to have a phoenix drawn upon his chest.

  Pig Mikel was a professional at his job, after all there a
re health risks with tattooing—inadequate hygiene can cause the spread of many types of viral infection. But Pig’s needles were never less than sterile. It was with a certain pleasure that Pig viewed my half-naked nearly eighteen-year-old self, his blank canvas, goose pimples, small twin mounds of breasts and all, and it was with even greater pleasure that he advanced towards me, having made his preliminary sketches like those marks that hospital staff make with iodine, clutching the electronic tattooing implement, made in the United States of America. And so the loud whirring began. And with the whirring came the pain. So this was the pain. A heavy pain, not too sharp, at first seemingly bearable. But the pain didn’t go away—the same pain stayed with me, neither lessening nor deepening; a pain that seemed to be slowly pulling off every millimetre of my skin. How my nerves twitched and sang and vibrated long after Pig’s instruments had been cleaned and put away and I was far from Arsenal Street, back at home, examining myself in the bathroom mirror, behind a locked door.

  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.

  AFTER 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.’

  HOW 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.’

  SINCE 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 mysel
f 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?

  SOME 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.