Mister God, this is Anna

by Flynn

  "Wot's the question then?"

  I thought that I knew what she wanted me to say, but I wasn't going to say it; she could stew. I chewed it over for a few moments and framed the question, "Where is Anna?" On second thought I decided that this particular question was a bit too dangerous, so I said, "Where is Millie?"

  She grinned at me and I felt that at any moment she would pat me on the head and pop a sweetie into my mouth for the good little pupil that I was.

  "And wot's the question to the answer, 'In Mill's middle'?"

  Ha! I'd already worked that one out. A 24-carat, foolproof question-stopper, a real doozie, one that she hadn't bargained on, one that she couldn't wriggle out of. With great care and deliberation I replied, "The answer, 'In Mill's middle' leads back to the question, 'Where is sex?'," and added to myself, "And now, you little perisher, get out of that!"

  She didn't have to get out of it—she never got into it. Without the flicker of an eyelid, without the catch of a breath, she pressed on. Her questions and prod-dings were like the waves breaking on the seashore: as one rolled up the sandy shore, so millions of others were being formed far out at sea. They were rolling in relentlessly and nothing could stop them. So it was with Anna's questions and proddings. In the depths of her being questions were being formulated, boiling up to spill out of her mouth, out of her eyes, out of every action; nothing could stop them—but nothing. It was as if every occasion inside her was destined to meet its companion occasion outside her.

  She started to say, "What is the question to the answer, 'In the middle of sex'?"

  I reached out my hand and silenced her question j with a finger to her lips. "The question is," I said, " 'Where is Mister God?' " i

  She bit my finger—hard—and looked at me. Her j eyes said, "That's for keeping me waiting." Her lips said "yes."

  I lay back again on the deck of the barge and thought about what I had said. The more I thought about it, the more did I come to the conclusion that it really wasn't bad at all—in fact it was pretty good. I liked it. At least it prevented all the fuss and bother of 1 pointing up there and saying that's where God is, or pointing out among the stars and saying that God is there! Yes, indeed, I liked it very much—only—.

  The only didn't get resolved for quite a few days. Even then "teacher" had to lead me gently by the hand and explain in words that this idiot could understand. You see, I had gotten to the point where I could, without any undue hesitation, give the question to the answers, "In the worm's middle," "In my middle," "In your middle." I'd even stopped getting het up about the question to the answer, "In the tramcar's middle." The question was, "Where is Mister God?"

  So far so good. Everything in the garden was lovely, except perhaps for one tiny, irrelevant and unimportant fact. I was ringed about with an unclimbable, impenetrable, couldn't-see-the-top-of range of mountains.

  The names of these towering peaks were: the worms in the ground; I'm here; you're there; the tramcars moving down the street. I had gotten stuck with all these multitudinous and varied things which had middles in which Mister God was! The whole universe it seemed was strewn and littered about with sundry theres and various heres. Instead of some whole and big Mister God sitting around in a heaven of umpteen dimensions, I was now faced with a vast assortment of little Mister Gods inhabiting the middles of everything! Perhaps all these middles contained bits of Mister God which had to be put together like some gigantic jigsaw puzzle.

  After it had all been explained to me, my first thought was for poor old Mohammed. He had to go to the mountains, but not Anna. She neither went to the mountains nor did she fetch the mountain to her—she merely said "Scat." And they scatted. Mind you, although I knew by then that the mountains were not really there, and that I could move about freely and unhampered, there are occasions—not many, I'm glad to say—when I get the distinct feeling that I've been brought up pretty sharpish-like by a clunk on the head. It certainly feels as if I have walked into a mountain, even though I can't see it. Perhaps one day I shall be able to walk about freely, without ducking occasionally.

  As for my problem about the heres and the theres, the explanation went like this: "Where are you?" she had said. "Here, of course," I replied. "Where's me then?" "There!"

  "Where do you know about me?" "Inside myself someplace." "Then you know my middle in your middle."

  "Yes, I suppose so."

  "Then you know Mister God in my middle in your middle, and everything you know, every person you know, you know in your middle. Every person and everything that you know has got Mister God in his middle, and so you have got his Mister God in your middle too. It's easy."

  When Mr. William of Occam said, "It is vain to do with more what can be done with less," he had invented his famous razor, but it was Anna who sharpened it!

  Trying to keep up with Anna and her ideas could be a very exhausting business, particularly because I had finished with my schooling, or so I thought. Here was I, all nicely stacked up with ideas of what was what, and I was being made to unstack them again; and sometimes it wasn't all that easy. Like the time I was introduced to the idea of sex!

  One of the great advantages of living in the East End was sex. In those days it was spelled with a small s and not with a big S. By "advantage" I mean that nobody spent half their life wondering if they were born in a beehive or a bird's nest. The whole of the birds-and-bees saga was out, but definitely. Nobody was in any doubt as to their origins. One might have been conceived under a gooseberry bush, but born, never. Most of the kids were familiar with the good old-fashioned, four-letter, Anglo-Saxon words before they could even count to four or knew what a letter was. Those were the days when the said Anglo-Saxon words were used as nouns and verbs and not as adjectives; when sex with a little s was as natural in its right place as the air we breathe. It hadn't gotten the self-importance of a capital S, nor for that matter its problems. Perhaps it was because we learned about it so early on in our lives that it rarely got snagged up. Perhaps it's only when you learn about it late in life that you begin to spell it with a capital S. This has nothing to do with sex with a small s or a capital S.

  This has to do with Anna's discovery of SEX, the kind that you spell with all capitals.

  It wasn't that there was anything wrong with the ordinary run-of-the-mill sex stuff, it was all perfectly understandable. After all, babies were babies, whatever else you called them. Kittens are babies, lambs are babies; and what about baby cabbages? One thing they all seemed to have in common was the fact that they were new, brand new; they were, as Anna said, "borned," or in other words, had been brought forth! If this were true, and it certainly appeared to be true, then what about ideas, what about stars, what about mountains, and suchlike? You couldn't argue with the statement that words brought forth new ideas. Could it be that words had something to do with sex? I don't know how long Anna had been mulling over this problem; it may have been for months. One thing was certain: she hadn't sorted anything out, otherwise I would have had the full blast of her discoveries.

  It was a happy coincidence that I happened to be around when she made her breakthrough. It happened one Sunday afternoon after a not-very-successful Sunday school meeting. Danny and I were holding up the lamppost, chatting to Millie. The street was full of kids playing high-jimmy-knacko and skipping games, and four or five of the little ones were playing with a yellow balloon. The balloon game did not last very long as a balloon is not made to withstand the combined weight of five kids lying on it. It burst. Millie charged off to mop up the tears and to give general comfort to one and all. Danny was roped into being the cushion for the next team to be "downsy" in the high-jimmy-knacko game. Anna had stopped the never-ending chant of a ball-bouncing game and had picked up the burst balloon. She drifted over toward me and sat on the curb by the lamppost. In a kind of reverie she was pulling the remains of the balloon into various shapes.

  Suddenly I heard it. It was the sound of Anna's tongue slapping against the back of her t
eeth; it was a sign that her thinking apparatus was working overtime.

  I looked down. Anna had gotten one end of the burst balloon trapped by her foot to the pavement. While she was stretching it with the one hand, she was poking it with her right index finger.

  "That's funny," she murmured. Her unblinking eyes solidified this experiment like some twentieth-century Medusa.

  "Fynn?"

  "What's up?"

  "Will you pull this for me?"

  I got down beside her and was handed the burst balloon.

  "Now pull it for me."

  I stretched the balloon for her and she stuck her finger into it.

  "That's funny."

  "What's funny?" I asked.

  "Wot's it look like?"

  "Looks like you're sticking your finger into a burst balloon."

  "Don't it look like a man's bit?"

  "I suppose it does, kind of."

  "Looks like a lady's on the other side," she said.

  "Oh! Does it? Let's have a look." I looked, and it did in a way.

  "That's funny, that is."

  "Well, what's so funny about it?"

  "If I only do one thing," she poked her finger into the balloon again, "it makes a lady's and a man's. Don't you think that's funny, Fynn? Eh?"

  "Yes. Two for the price of one. That's funny."

  She went off to play with the other kids.

  It must have been about three o'clock in the morning when she stood beside my bed.

  "Fynn, you awake?"

  "No."

  "Good, I thought you were asleep. Can I come?"

  "If you want to."

  She slid into bed.

  "Fynn, is church sex?"

  I was awake, very much so!

  "What do you mean, is church sex?"

  "It puts seeds in your heart and makes new things come."

  "Oh!"

  "That's why it's Mister God and not Missis God."

  "Oh, is it?"

  "Well, it might be. It might be." She went on, "I think lessons is sex too."

  "You'd better not tell Miss Haynes that."

  "Why not? Lessons put things in your head and some new things come."

  "That's not sex, that's learning. Sex is for making babies."

  "Not always, it ain't."

  "How d'you make that out?"

  "Well, if it's on one side, it's a man; if it's on the other side, it's a lady."

  "One side of what?" I asked.

  "I don't know. Yet." She paused for a few moments. "Am I a lady?"

  "Almost, I reckon."

  "I can't have babies though, can I?"

  Fynn

  "Well, not quite yet."

  "But I can have new ideas, can't I?"

  "You sure can!"

  "So it's like having a baby—a bit—ain't it?"

  "Could be."

  The conversation stopped at this point and I lay awake for about thirty minutes or so and then must have fallen asleep. Suddenly I was being shaken and Anna was asking me, "Asleep, Fynn?"

  "Not now, I'm not."

  "If it's coming out, it's a lady, and if it's going in, it's a man."

  "Is it?—What is?"

  "Anything."

  "Oh, that's nice."

  "Yes! Ain't it exciting?"

  "Breathtaking."

  "So you can be a man and a lady at the same time."

  I got the idea that she was trying to put over. All the universe has got a sex-like quality about it. It is seminal and productive at the same time. The seeds of words produce ideas. The seeds of ideas produce goodness knows what. The whole blessed thing is male and female at one and the same time. In fact, the whole thing is pure sex. We've taken one aspect of it and called it sex, or made it self-conscious and called it Sex. But that was our own fault, wasn't it?

  * * *

  five

  The first two years with Anna were for me years of pleasure, years of pride, and of amusement, in the things she had said and done. People often said, "Guess what Anna said today," or "Guess what Anna did this morning," and I'd chuckle at the audacity of the child. The gap of years that separated Anna and me was a good place to laugh from. That laughter was warm and loving. That laughter was, after all, a little higher up the ladder of understanding, and one can afford to be generous from these high places. The ladder was crowded; we were all forging ahead for one reason or another. We had all of us wrestled with our various problems; we had solved them to some extent. Of course we could chuckle, of course we could be generous. We could, from our elevated position, give advice to those struggling below.

  These were the first two years, though they weren't wasted years. Anna cast her pearls about and I picked up a good many, but not all of them. I left too many of them lying about, and the feet of thirty years have trodden them into the ground. I'm told that every second of our life is somehow registered in our brains. I find that a comforting thought, but in what chamber, in what convolution, do these pearls he? I've never found the key to unlock these memories, but sometimes it happens. I find another pearl—some happening or some word—and the memory comes back.

  I shudder to think that for two years I was content to eat the stale bread of learning, when right under my nose Anna was busy baking new and crusty ideas. I suppose I thought that a loaf ought to look like a loaf. To me loaf and bread were synonymous, and at that time I hadn't the sense to see the difference. In some part of my mind I can still detect a feeling of shame, a flicker of anger, and a sense of wasted time, from that moment when I realized that the important word was bread—that bread could be baked into an infinity of shapes. I hadn't the sense to see that the shape of the loaf had nothing to do with the food value of the bread. The shape was nothing but a convenience. But my education had been too much concerned with the shapes. At odd moments I find myself angered when I ask the question, "How much of what I was taught was a matter of convenience?" But I ask nobody. There's nobody there to give me an answer. What a stupid waste of time even to ask such a question. The answer lies ahead of me, not behind me. Anna has left her map of discovery behind, some parts pretty thoroughly explored, some parts only hinted at, but most parts of the map have arrows of direction on them.

  The evening I discovered the nature of my relationship to Anna was the same evening I began to grasp what she was, or at least to see the way she worked.

  It was early winter and dark. We had the kitchen to ourselves, and the shutters were closed. The gas lamp hissed its light into the room, the kitchen range, newly banked up with coal, spluttered its erratic candles of flame through the fire bars. On the kitchen table were a half-finished radio set, boxes of bits and pieces, a methylated spirit lamp, a soldering iron, and a clutter of tools, valves, and what have you. Anna was kneeling on a chair, elbows on the table, her chin resting in her cupped hands. I was at the opposite side of the table, my attention divided, like all Gaul, into three parts: the radio set I was making, Anna, and the shadows on the wall. As the coal in the kitchen grate warmed up, the trapped gases escaped and ignited. The brilliant flame imprinted Anna's shadow on the wall, exhausted itself, and went out; another took its place and cast another shadow.

  The explanation was simple enough, but the effect somehow defied the explanation. The shadow was there by the picture, then it was there by the doorway, then there on the curtains. The shadow pulsated in the flickering flame as if it had a life of its own; it vanished and appeared somewhere else. There was no movement between one position and another. It came and went. It looked—how can I say it?—it looked as if the shadow was playing. My eyes moved from one shadow to another, then to three at the same time, then nothing. A few seconds later two shadows. Something itched deep inside me, but too deep to look at. Anna looked up, saw, and grinned. The merry-go-round inside me twirled, but nothing happened. Whatever had nudged had disappeared, leaving behind a hole in some part of me.

  The radio grew bit by bit in silence, except for the sizzle of the soldering iron as it wa
s plunged into the flux. Tests were made and at last the valves were plugged in and the batteries connected. A last look, and we switched on—nothing! It was just one of those things which happen from time to time. The meter set to the right voltage range, one or two measurements —ah! That's probably the fault. Unsolder this, set the meter to current reading, insert the meter into the circuit, switch on. Of course it was one of those silly mistakes, soon rectified. Anna's hand was on mine, her brow furrowed in thought.

  "What you done with that?" She pointed to the meter.

  "I've just found out what is wrong."

  "Please do it all again," she wasn't looking at me, her eyes were riveted on the meter, "from where you used that just now."

  "D'you mean put the fault back after I've taken all this trouble to find it?"

  She nodded. So I put the fault back.

  "Now what?" I asked.

  "Now do wot you did before, but talk," she commanded.

  "But, sweetie," I cried, "if I talk about what I'm doing, you won't be able to understand a word."

  "Don't want to understand no words. It's somfink different."

  "First I set this meter to read voltage on this range, then I attach the meter across this resistance to measure the voltage at this point." My finger stabbed at the various bits as I spoke their names. "Now we move on down to here and do the same thing all over again, and the meter registers the right voltage."

  Getting to the faulty part, I hooked up the meter and Anna noted that the meter reading was very different.

  "That's where it is," I exclaimed. "Now if I unsolder this bit here and put the meter to read current, we'll just see what happens."

  I unsoldered, saying, "Now we put the meter in the circuit and, Bob's your uncle, no current."

  The hands came forward again and I nodded. She unhooked the leads carefully and slowly hooked them back again. No current. Replacing the faulty part, I switched on again, made a few adjustments, and listened to the music.

  Sometime after two o'clock in the morning I was wakened by the clack, clack of the curtain rings. By the light of the streetlamp I could see Anna standing there. It was strange how the noise of those curtain runners always kicked me wide awake; strange, considering the fact that we almost slept on the railway lines, with express trains running in one ear and out of the other, but the slightest jiggle of those runners and I was wide awake. After two years Bossy and Patch had elected themselves as Anna's bodyguard, a kind of advance guard scouting out possible danger that might harm their little mistress. Boss, the old show-off, always way out in front, had already landed on my chest, while Patch, with lesser courage, excused himself by continually looking back to see if Anna was still coming.