Mister God, this is Anna

by Flynn

  I lay in bed in some confusion wondering what had hit me. The trains rattled on their way, the fog swirled round the streetlamp. It may have been an hour that I had lain there, possibly two, when I heard the clack, clack of the curtain rings; and there she was standing at the end of my bed, quite visible in the lamplight. For a minute or two I lay there thinking that she was just wanting to reassure herself, when she moved around to the head of my bed.

  I said, "Hi, Tich!"

  "Can I get in?" she said in a whisper. She didn't wait for my "If you want to," but slid in beside me and buried her head in my neck and cried silently, her tears warm and wet on my chest. There was nothing to say, nothing to do but to put my arm around her. I didn't think I would sleep, but I did. I awoke to the sound of stifled giggles, Anna still beside me giggling like a fiend, and Carol, already dressed, standing there giggling, with a morning cup of tea in her hand. All this in less than twelve hours.

  * * *

  two

  During the next few weeks we tried to find out by a bit of cunning questioning where Anna lived. The gentle approach, the sideways approach, the sneaky approach—all proved to be useless. It seemed quite possible that she had just dropped out of heaven. I was ready to believe this to be true, but Stan, being much more practical than me, didn't agree at all. The only certain thing we knew was that she wasn't going to no bleeding cop shop. By this time I was sure that I had initiated this idea. After all, you don't find an orchid and then put it in the cellar. It wasn't that any of us had anything against the cops; far from it. In those days cops were more like official friends, even if they did clip you round the ear with a glove full of dried peas if they caught you up to any funny stuff. No, as I said, you can't lock a sunbeam in the dark. Besides, we all wanted her to stay.

  By this time Anna was a firm favorite down our street. Whenever the kids played team games like four sticks, everyone wanted Anna on their side. She had a natural aptitude for all games: whip tops, skipping, cigarette cards. What she couldn't do with a hoop and a skimmer wasn't worth doing.

  Our street, twenty houses big, was a regular United Nations; the only colors in kids we didn't have were green ones and blue ones, we had nearly every other color. Our street was a nice street. Nobody had any money, but in all the years I lived there, I can never remember anyone's front door being shut in the daytime, or, for that matter, for most of the night either. It was a nice street to live in and all the people were friendly, but after a few weeks of Anna the street and the people in it took on a buttercup glow.

  Even our boss-eyed cat, Bossy, mellowed. Bossy was a righting tabby with lace-edged ears who regarded all humans as inferiors, but under Anna's influence Bossy started to stay at home more often and very soon treated Anna as an equal. I could stand by the back door and yell myself silly for Bossy, but he wouldn't budge for me; but for Anna—well, that was a different thing. One call and he simply materialized with an idiot grin on his face.

  Bossy was about twelve pounds of fighting fury, and I've got the scars to prove it. The cat's meat man used to leave the meat under the knocker, wrapped up in newspaper.- Bossy used to lurk in the dark passageway, or under the stairs, waiting for someone to reach up for the cat's meat, at which moment he would launch himself like a fury, all teeth and claws, using whatever was available to get up to his meal. If a human leg or arm could be used to claw his way up to the meat, Bossy would use it. Anna tamed him in one day. She lectured him with an admonishing finger on the vice of gluttony and the virtues of patience and good manners. In the end, Bossy could make his meal last for about five minutes, with Anna feeding him bit by bit, instead of the usual thirty seconds. As for Patch the dog, he sat for hours practicing beating new rhythms with his tail.

  In the back garden was an odd collection of rabbits, pigeons, fantail doves, frogs, and a couple of grass snakes. The back garden, or The Yard, as it was called, was for the East End a fairly sizable place. A bit of grass and a few flowers and a large tree some forty feet high. All in all, Anna had quite a lot to practice her magic on. But no one fell under her spell more completely or willingly than me. My work, which was in oils, was not more than five minutes' walk away from home, so I was always home for dinner at about twelve-thirty. Up to this time, the answer to Mum's question as to what time I would be home that night as I left for the afternoon's stint had been, Sometime before midnight. Now things were different. I was seen off by Anna from the top of the street, kissed wetly, promising to be back about six in the evening. Knocking-off time usually meant a few pints in the pub on the way home and a few games of darts with Cliff and George; but not now. When the hooter went, I was off home. I didn't run, exactly, but walked very briskly.

  That walk home was a pleasure; every step was one step nearer. The road I had to travel curved to the left in a gentle arc, and I had to walk just more than half the distance before the top of our turning came into sight. And there she was. Come rain or shine, snow or icy wind, Anna was always there; not once did she miss this meeting, except—but that comes later. I doubt if ever lovers met more joyously. When she saw me coming round the bend of the road, she came to meet me.

  Anna's ability to polish any situation was truly extraordinary. She had some uncanny knack of doing the right thing at the right time to get the most out of an occasion. I've always thought that children ran toward those they loved, but not Anna. When she saw me she started to walk toward me, not too slowly, but not too quickly. My first sight of her was too far away to distinguish her features; she might have been any other child, but she wasn't. Her beautiful copper hair stood out for miles; there was no mistaking her.

  After her first few weeks with us she always wore a deep-green ribbon in her hair for this meeting. Looking back, I feel sure that the walk toward me was deliberate and calculated. She had grasped the meaning of these meetings and seen almost instantly just how much to dramatize them, how long to prolong them in order to wring out their total content. For me, this minute or two of walk toward her had a rounded-off perfection; no more could be added to it, and nothing could be taken away without completely destroying it.

  Whatever it was she projected across that intervening space was almost solid. Her bobbing hair, the twinkle in her eyes, that enormous and impudent grin, flicked like a high-voltage charge across the space that separated us. Sometimes she would, without any words, just touch my hand in greeting. Sometimes the last few steps transformed her; she let everything go with one gigantic explosion, and flung herself at me. So many times she would stop just in front of me and hold out her closed hands. I learned rapidly what to expect on these occasions. It meant that she had found something that had moved her. We would stop and inspect whatever the day's find was—perhaps a beetle, a caterpillar, or a stone. We would look silently, heads bowed over today's treasure. Her eyes were large deep pools of questions. How? Why? What? I'd meet her gaze and nod my head; this was enough, she'd nod in reply.

  The first time this happened, my heart seemed to come off its hook. I struggled to hold on. I wanted to put my arms around her to comfort her. Happily, I managed to do the right thing. I guess some passing angel nudged me at the right moment. Unhappiness is to be comforted, and so perhaps too is fear, but these particular moments with Anna were moments of pure and undiluted wonder. These were her own and very private moments which she chose to share with me, and I was honored to share them with her. I could not comfort her, I would not have dared to trespass. All that I could do was to see as she saw, to be moved as she was moved. That kind of suffering, you must bear alone. As she said so simply, "It's for me and Mister God," and there's no answer to that.

  The evening meal at home was more or less fixed. Mum, being the daughter of an Irish farmer, was given to making stews. A large black iron pot and an equally large black iron kettle were the two most used utensils in the kitchen. Often the only way one could distinguish the stew from the brew was that tea always came in large cups and stew was put on plates. Here the difference ended,
for the brew often had as much solid matter in it as did the stew.

  Mum was a great believer in the saying that nature grows cures for everything. There wasn't a weed or a flower or a leaf that wasn't a specific cure for some ailment or other. Even the outside shed was pressed into use for growing cobwebs. Some people have sacred cows or sacred cats—Mum had sacred spiders. I never quite understood the reasoning concerning spiders' webs, but all cuts and abrasions were plastered with spiders' webs. If spiders' webs were not available there were always cigarette papers under the clock in the kitchen. These were well licked and stuck over the cut. Our house was littered with bottles of juices, dried leaves, and bunches of this, that and the other, hanging from the ceiling. All ailments were treated the same way—rub it, lick it, or if you can't lick it, spit on it, or "Drink this, it'll do you good."

  Whatever the value of these things, one thing was certain: nobody was ever ill. The only time the doctor entered our house was when something was suspected of being broken, and when Stan was born. No matter that the brew—or to give it its full title, "the darlin' brew"—and the stew looked the same; they tasted wonderful and meals were certainly man-sized.

  Mum and Anna shared many likes and dislikes; perhaps the simplest and the most beautiful sharing was their attitude toward Mister God. Most people I knew used God as an excuse for their failure: "He should have done this," or "Why has God done this to me?" But with Mum and Anna difficulties and adversities were merely occasions for doing something. Ugliness was the chance to make beautiful. Sadness was the chance to make glad. Mister God was always available to them. A stranger would have been excused for believing that Mister God lived with us, but then Mum and Anna believed he did. Very rarely did any conversation exclude Mister God in some way or other.

  After the evening meal was finished and all the bits and pieces put away, Anna and I would settle down to some activity, generally of her choosing. Fairy stories were dismissed as mere pretend stories; living was real and living was interesting, and by and large, fun. Reading the Bible wasn't a great success. She tended to regard it as a primer, strictly for the infants. The message of the Bible was simple and any half-wit could grasp it in thirty minutes flat! Religion was for doing things, not for reading about doing things. Once you had got the message there wasn't much point in going over and over the same old ground. Our local parson was taken aback when he asked her about God. The conversation went as follows:

  "Do you believe in God?"

  "Yes."

  "Do you know what God is?"

  "Yes."

  "What is God then?"

  "He's God!"

  "Do you go to church?"

  "No."

  "Why not?"

  "Because I know it all!"

  "What do you know?"

  "I know to love Mister God and to love people and cats and dogs and spiders and flowers and trees"— and the catalog went on—"with all of me." -

  Carol grinned at me, Stan made a face, and I hurriedly put a cigarette in my mouth and indulged in a bout of coughing. There's nothing much you can do in the face of that kind of accusation, for that's what it amounted to. ("Out of the mouths of babes . . .") Anna had bypassed all the nonessentials and distilled centuries of learning into one sentence: "And God said love me, love them, and love it, and don't forget to love yourself."

  The whole business of adults going to church filled Anna with suspicion. The idea of collective worship went against her sense of private conversations with Mister God. As for going to church to meet Mister God, that was preposterous. After all, if Mister God wasn't everywhere, he wasn't anywhere. For her, churchgoing and "Mister God" talks had no necessary connection. For her, the whole thing was transparently simple. You went to church to get the message when you were very little. Once you had got it, you went out and did something about it. Keeping on going to church was because you hadn't got the message or didn't understand it or it was "just for swank."

  After the evening meal I always read to Anna, books on all manner of subjects from poetry to astronomy. After a year of reading, she ended up with three favorite books. The first was a large picture book with nothing in it but photographs of snowflakes and frost patterns. The second book was Cruden's Complete Concordance, and the third, of all the strange books to choose, was Manning's Geometry of Four Dimensions. Each of these books had a catalytic effect on Anna. She devoured them utterly, and out of their digestion she produced her own philosophy.

  One of her pleasures was my reading to her that part of the concordance given over to the meaning of proper names. Each name was read in strict alphabetical order and the meaning given. After each name had been tasted and thought over she made her decision as to its tightness. Most times she shook her head sadly and disappointedly; it wasn't good enough. Sometimes it was just right; the name, the person, the meaning, all fitted perfectly for her and, with a burst of excitement, she would bounce up and down on my lap and say, "Put it down, put it down." This meant writing the name in large block capitals on a slip of paper, which she would stare at with complete concentration for a minute or two and then place in one of her many boxes. A moment to compose herself, and, "Next one, please." So we would go on. Some names took all of fifteen minutes or more to decide one way or the other. The decision was made in complete silence. On the occasions when I moved to a more comfortable position, or started to speak, I was reprimanded with a tilt of the head, a full-blooded stare, and a small finger placed gently but firmly on my lips. I learned to wait patiently. It took us about four months to work through the section on proper names, moments of high excitement and moments of low disappointment, none of which I understood at that time. Later I was let into the secret.

  Since our first meeting God had been given the title Mister God; the Holy Spirit, for some reason only known to her, was given the name Vehrak. I never heard her use the name Jesus. Whenever she referred to Jesus it was as Mister God's boy. One evening we were working our way through the J's and came eventually to Jesus. I had hardly got the name out before I was stopped by a "No!," a wagging finger, and "Next one, please." Who was I to argue? I pressed on. The next name on the list was Jether. I had to pronounce this three times, and then turning to me she said, "Read what it says." So I read:

  "Jether, meaning he that excels or remains, or that examines, searches; or a line or string."

  The effect of this was electric, catastrophic. With a blur of movement she had slipped off my lap, twisted about to face me and stood crouched with hands clenched, the whole of her being shaking with excitement. For one horrifying moment I thought she was ill or having a fit, but that wasn't the explanation. Whatever the explanation was it went deeper than anything I could understand. She was filled with joy. She kept saying, "It's true. I know it. It's true. It's true. I know it." With that she fled out into the yard. I made to go out after her but Mum put out a hand and held me back, saying, "Leave her alone, she's happy. She's got the eye." Half an hour passed before she returned. Without a word she climbed on to my lap, gave me one of her special grins and said, "Please write the name big for me tonight," and then went to sleep. She didn't even wake up when I put her to bed. It was months before the word epilepsy faded from my thoughts.

  Mum always said that she pitied the girl that I married, for she would have to put up with my three mistresses—Mathematics, Physics, and Electrical Gadgetry. I would rather read and practice these subjects than eat or sleep. I never bought myself a wrist-watch or a fountain pen, and very rarely did I buy new clothes, but I never went anywhere without a slide rule. This device fascinated Anna and soon she had to have a slip stick of her own. Having mastered the whole business of counting numbers, she was soon extracting roots with the aid of her slip stick before she could add two numbers together. Users of slip sticks soon fall into a stable method of using this device. It's held in the left hand, leaving the right hand free to hold the pencil; the "cursor" can be moved with the thumb and the sliding scale tapped against the workbench.
One of my particular pleasures was seeing the copper-crowned, diminutive child doing her "workings out," as she called it. Looking down from a height of six foot or more and saying, "How you doing, Tich?" I'd see her head screw round and upward and watch one delicious wiggle start from her toes, pass up her body, to be tossed off the top of her head in a foam of silky copper thread, with a grin of absolute joy.

  Some evenings were given over to piano playing. I play a fairly good honky-tonk piano, a bit of Mozart, a bit of Chopin, and a few pieces like "Anitra's Dance" just for good measure. On the top of the piano were several electronic devices. One device, the oscilloscope, held all the magic of a fairy wand for Anna. We'd sit in this room for hours on end playing single notes, watching the green spot on the 'scope do its glowing dance. The whole exercise of relating sounds that one heard with the ears to the visual shape of those sounds actively seen on the little tube's face was a source of never-ending delight.

  What sounds we captured, Anna and I! A caterpillar chewing a leaf was like a hungry lion, a fly in a jam jar sounded like an airship, a match being struck sounded like an explosion. All these sounds and a thousand more were amplified and made available, both in sound form and visible form. Anna had found a brand-new world to explore. How much meaning it had for her I didn't know, perhaps it was only an elaborate plaything for her, but her squeals of delight were enough for me.

  It was only sometime during the next summer that I began to realize that the concepts of frequency and wave-length were meaningful to her, that she did, in fact, know and understand what she was hearing and looking at. One summer afternoon all the kids were playing in the street when a large bumblebee appeared on the scene.