Mister God, this is Anna

by Flynn

  " 'Ere you are, Anna, some chocklit."

  "Thank you," said Anna.

  "Thank you, wot?" 'Arry's voice curled up into a question mark.

  "Thank you, 'Arry." Unwrapping one of the bars, she offered it, saying, "Have a bit, 'Arry."

  'Tanks, Anna, I fink I will."

  A couple of tree trunks stuck out with large hams on the ends. The hams opened and they turned out to be enormous bunches of bananas. He broke off an 'Arry-sized bit of chocolate.

  "You like 'orses, Anna?" queried 'Any.

  Anna admitted to liking horses.

  "You come along and look at my Nobby," invited 'Arry.

  We went around the corner into a little side street and there was Nobby, a positively giant-sized shire horse, festooned with horse brasses, his coat shining almost as brightly as the brasses around his neck. Nobby was feeding from what looked to me like a two-hundredweight coal sack slung around his neck. At 'Arry's approach Nobby snorted into his bag, and we were all covered with showers of chaff and oats. 'Arry opened his mouth and out poured a tornado of laughter and love. Five minutes ago 'Arry had threatened to bash someone's brains in over his sausages, and I reckon he could have managed four or maybe six fully grown men. Now he'd melted into some kind of fairy story giant for a little girl and a horse. Anna was given a handful of sugar lumps for Nobby.

  " 'E won't hurt yer, Anna. 'E wouldn't hurt a fly, 'e wouldn't."

  "Nor would you, 'Arry," I thought, "you big lummox."

  Nobby's lips curled back, exposing a row of what looked like tombstones, then curled themselves over the sugar lumps which disappeared. After a few more minutes of horse talk 'Arry said, " 'Ere, Anna, you sit on Nobby and talk to 'im and I'll unload this lot. Then I'll drive yer to Woolwerf's in proper style."

  Anna took off and landed on Nobby's back, transported by one of 'Arry's bunches of bananas. The princess was mounted on her charger. 'Any unloaded. Crates and sacks were shifted like so many bags of feathers. When 'Arry had finished he lifted Anna on to the driving box and sat beside her, I sat on the tail

  board. Anna was given the reins. With a couple of "gee ups" we were off. I don't suppose that Nobby needed to be told where to go; he knew his route like the back of his hoof. We didn't go through the marketplace since the cart was of the same generous proportions as Nobby and 'Arry, like a battleship with wheels on. We stopped at a corner.

  "Woolwerf's," bellowed 'Arry and leapt down like Pavlova herself. "There y'are, Anna, Woolwerf's," he declared.

  "Thank you, 'Arry," replied Anna.

  "Fank you, Anna," he grinned.

  "See you sometime," he yelled as he and Nobby turned the corner. We often saw Arry and his horse Nobby after that.

  The lady behind the counter at Woolworth's needed a little convincing that we really wanted ten mirrors, but she handed them over to us and aimed in my direction, "You must fancy yourself."

  We hurried home with our prize and cleared the kitchen table. I hinged two mirrors together with glue and pieces of cloth, like the covers of a book. Anna brought out the large piece of cardboard with the thick black line drawn on it and placed it on the table. Our mirror book was opened up and stood on the cardboard, the hinge furthest away from the marked line, the near edges of the mirrors just cutting the line. I peered into the angle of the mirrors and adjusted them. The marked line and the two reflected lines made an equilateral triangle. Anna peered. I closed the angle slightly, the lines adjusted themselves and a square appeared. Anna stared into the mirror book.

  "A bit more," she commanded.

  I closed the angle a little more and she counted, "One, two, three, four, five. It's got five sides."

  After a moment or two, "What's it called?"

  "A pentagon," I answered.

  The book closed a little more and I announced the shapes to be a hexagon, a heptagon, an octagon. I ran out of names after a decagon so we merely counted the sides and called them a "seventeen-agon" or a "thirty-six-agon." Anna thought it was a very strange and wonderful book. The more you closed it, the more complex were the figures; very strange to say the least. What was even stranger was that the book was just a couple of mirrors. But if you had a separate page for every different "agon" you were able to see, why then you were going to need millions of pages, no, squillions of pages. This was truly a magic book. Who'd ever heard of a book with squillions of pictures in it and no pages?

  As we closed the book more and more, we ran into a snag. The mirror book was only open about an inch and we couldn't get inside to see what was going on inside the book, so we started from the beginning again. When we got to the umpteen-agon again we couldn't get inside. What to do?

  Anna said, "When we get to a squillion-agon it's going to be a circle."

  But how do we get inside? This little puzzle was solved after some thought and a lot of false trails. We scraped off some of the silvering from the back of one of the mirrors and made a circle of clear glass about the size of a penny. A spy hole. We could now look inside. It was true, a squillion-agon was going to be a circle. Already it was difficult to decide that what we saw wasn't a circle.

  Then another snag cropped up: as we closed up the book we ran out of light to see things by. Anna wanted to know what we would see if the mirror book was tightly closed. That was a tricky problem. How to get light into a tightly shut mirror book.

  "Can't we put a light inside the mirror book?" asked Anna.

  We dismissed matches and candles and finally hit upon the torch. The torch was quickly dismantled and reassembled; wires were soldered to the bulb and to the battery. We put the bulb into the book. It was a bit too big, we still couldn't shut the book completely. The solution to this little problem was almost immediate. The two mirrors parallel to each other about a half an inch apart would give us a very good approximation. We set it up and draped a cloth over it so that the light couldn't get in around the edges. Anna looked through the spy hole and gasped. "There's milions of lights," she whispered, and with even more surprise, "Fynn, it's a straight line!"

  It had surprised me ten years ago, so I was ready for this. I reached across her and very gently squeezed the two mirrors together along one side, about a fraction of an inch.

  She leaped back, looked at me and said, "Wot you do?"

  I explained to her how to squeeze one pair of edges together.

  "It makes the biggest circle in the world," she exclaimed.

  As she sat there with her eye fixed on the biggest circle in the world, I squeezed the other two edges together. The biggest circle in the world straightened up and bent the other way.

  The mirror book opened and closed a hundred times a day. A myriad different things were placed in the angle of the mirror. Patterns were formed of unbelievable complexity, enough to startle anyone.

  One afternoon something new happened. Anna wrote large capital letters on pieces of card and placed them in the angle of the mirrors, and got inside.

  "That's funny." Her head swiveled to look into the right-hand mirror, then swiveled to look into the left-hand mirror, back again to the right. "That's very funny," she said to no one. "The next one is the wrong way round, but the next one's the right way round."

  Some of the reflected letters were back-to-front while others were still the right way round. She discarded the back-to-front letters and was left with A, H,I,M,0,T,V,V,W,X,Y.

  I slid into a chair beside her and casually riffled through the discarded letters until I found A. I put the card on the table beside her and bisected the angle of the A with a single mirror. Anna looked and then took the mirror out of my hands and tried it herself. Then she tried the other letters. It absorbed her for about an hour and then she brought it out.

  "Fynn, if the half in the looking glass is the same as the half on the table then the letter don't change. O is the funny one because you can halve it in lots of ways." Anna was coming to grips with the axes of symmetry.

  This was a new game to play; these were new wonders to be s
een. Some things turned inside out or at least left to right, some things didn't. We made a pocket-size mirror book with handbag mirrors donated by Millie and Kate, backed it with wood against possible accidents, and took it into the street. This little book went everywhere with us. We'd flop down in the road on seeing some unexpected structure in a paving stone and out would come the mirror book. Beetles were gently introduced into the mirrors, leaves, seeds, tram tickets. Why, you could spend the whole of your life doing this sort of thing. Colored bulbs were sandwiched in the mirror book and switched on, and we peered through the spy hole. Why, for a couple of bob we could outdo Piccadilly Circus, Blackpool, and Southend all combined. It was all very miraculous; not only miraculous but useful, because we could see both sides of an object at one and the same time—well, more or less. Anna wondered if we could see all around an object, so we made a cube of mirrors. One side was hinged with a spy hole and objects were hung in the center of the cube by a cotton thread. We had to put lights inside, as it was too dark to see and— "Well, I'll be darned!"—we could see all the way around.

  I never counted how many mirrors we bought and used; it must have been well over a hundred. All the Platonic figures were made out of mirrors, plus a few shapes that Plato never dreamed of; Ours were just that bit different; we got inside ours and saw things that language would be hard put to describe. We discovered a lot of crazy arithmetics that made sense as long as you were prepared to live with these mirror worlds. Admittedly, on this side of the mirror things got a bit tricky, but as long as you remembered you were doing mirror stuff, that was all that mattered.

  We learned to draw, write, and do our sums on a pad of paper before us. The difficulty lay in the fact that we didn't look at the paper, we looked at the reflection of the paper in a vertical mirror. The tension was at times unbearable, the concentration was absolute, but we mastered it.

  One evening it was suggested that the mirror book was something more: it was a miracle book. Mr. Weekley's dictionary told us that mirror came from the Latin mirari, "to wonder at," and that miracle came from the Latin mirus, "wonderful." We knew that Mister God had made man in his own image, so could it be? Was it possible?

  "He might have made a big mirror, Fynn!"

  "What would he want to do that for?"

  "I don't know, but he might have."

  "Could be."

  "Perhaps we're on the other side."

  "How come the other side?"

  "Perhaps we're the wrong way round."

  "That's a thought, Tich."

  "That's why we get it all wrong."

  "Yeah, that's why we get it all wrong."

  "Like numbers."

  "Like numbers?"

  "Yes, the numbers in the mirror."

  "How's that?"

  "Them numbers in the mirror, them numbers is take-away numbers not 'add' numbers."

  "Don't get you, Tich. What you driving at?"

  Anna took a paper and pencil and wrote 0,1,2,3, 4,5.

  "Them is add numbers," she pronounced. "If you put a looking glass on 0, then the numbers come out 5,4,3,2,1. They're take-away numbers."

  I was following the argument so far. The reflected numbers were take-away numbers.

  She continued, "People are take-away people."

  "Hold it." I put out a hand. "I don't get this 'takeaway' stuff."

  She hopped off the chair and staggered back with an armful of books. Settling herself once again on the chair, she thumped the table once or twice. "That's o," she informed me, "that's o and that is the looking glass."

  "Right, I've got that bit, that's the mirror." I gave the table a thump. "So what's next?"

  She placed a book on the table.

  "That's add one," she explained, looking hard at me. I nodded. She placed a second book on top of the first.

  "That's add two." I nodded some more.

  "That's add three, that's add four." The pile grew higher and higher. When she was satisfied that I had grasped exactly what she was saying, an arm knocked over all the books and she swept them on to the floor.

  "Now."

  We were obviously coming to the difficult bit.

  "Where," she asked, "is a take-away book?" The question was asked with hand on her hip and head tilted.

  "Search me," I answered. "I haven't got it."

  Again she thumped the table a couple of times. "Down there. It's down there."

  "Oh sure," I replied, "it's down there." I had not much idea what there referred to, and said so.

  "A take-away-one book is a hole as big as a book, and a take-away-two books is a hole as big as two books. It's not hard," she said.

  It wasn't, not when you got the hang of things, so I plunged in with, "So a take-away-eight-books number is a hole, eight books big."

  She continued on her tutorial way.

  "If you've got a take-away-ten-books hole and if you've got fifteen add books, how many books you got?"

  I began to tip the fifteen add books down the hole one by one and watched them disappear. I lost ten that way and ended up with five.

  "Five," I announced, "but what's that got to do with take-away people?"

  I shrank about four feet under her sympathetic gaze and just managed to stop myself falling down the takeaway hole.

  "If," she underlined, "people are looking-glass people, then they are take-away people."

  It's all pretty obvious, so obvious that it would take an idiot not to see it! We all know that Mister God made man in his own image and images are found in mirrors. Mirrors turned you back to front or left to right. Images were take-away things. So putting it all together, Mister God was and Mister God is on one side of the mirror, Mister God was on the add side. We were on the other side of the mirror, so we were on the take-away side. We ought to have known that. When Mum puts the toddler down and backs off a few paces she does so in order to encourage the toddler to walk to her. So did Mister God. Mister God puts you down on the take-away side of the mirror and then asks you to find your way to the add side of the mirror. You see he wants you to be like him.

  "Take-away people live in holes."

  "Must do," I admitted. "What sort of holes?"

  "Different holes."

  "Ah well, that accounts for it. How they different?"

  "Some big, some little," she continued, "all with different names."

  "Different names—such as?"

  She walked around the holes, reading off the names as she went, "Greedy, Wicked, Cruel, Liar," etc. etc. On our side of the looking glass the whole place was littered with holes of various depths with people living at the bottom. On Mister God's side were appropriate piles of whatever, ready to fill up the holes if only we'd got the sense to ask for them. The piles also had names like Generosity, Kindness, and Truth. The more you filled up your hole, the nearer to Mister God's side of (he mirror you got. If you managed to fill up your hole and still have something left over, why then you were well and truly on the add side—Mister God's side. You'll understand of course that Mister God looks into his mirror and sees us all, but we can't see Mister God. I mean, after all, a mirror image can't see what's looking at it. As Anna said, "Your face reflection can't see you, can it?" Occasionally Mister God sees fit to do something about somebody's hole, he—well—he sort of fills it up for them. It was what we called a "mirror-cle"!

  Mister God was never far from any conversation, and Mister God was certainly getting more and more amazing. The fact that he could listen to, let alone understand, all the different prayers in all the different languages was something to marvel at, but even this paled into insignificance when compared with the stack upon stack of miracles that Anna was finding. Perhaps the most miraculous of all the miracles was that he had given us the capacity to find out and to understand these miracles. Anna reckoned that Mister God was writing a story about his creation. He had got the plot all worked out and knew exactly just where it was going. True, we couldn't help Mister God with this part of his activities, but w
e could at least turn over the page for him. Anna was turning over the pages.

  One day I was stopped by Sunday school Teacher. Sunday school Teacher asked me, no, told me, to instruct Anna to behave herself in the class. I asked what it was that Anna had done or had not done and was told: one, that Anna interrupted; two, that Anna contradicted; and three, that Anna used bad language. Anna could, I admit, use a pretty good cuss word at times, and I tried to explain to Sunday school Teacher that, although Anna sometimes used language badly, she never, in fact, used the language of badness. My arrow missed the target completely. I could well imagine that Anna had interrupted her and also that she had contradicted her, but she wouldn't tell me the circumstances of this episode. That evening I spoke to Anna on the subject. I told her that I had met Sunday school Teacher and told her what had been said.

  "Not going to no Sunday school no more."

  "Why not?"

  " 'Cos she don't teach you nuffink about Mister God."

  "Perhaps you don't listen properly."

  "I do, and she don't say nuffink."

  "You mean to say you don't learn anything?"

  "Sometimes."

  "Oh, that's good. What do you learn?"

  "Sunday school Teacher is frightened."

  "What makes you say that sort of thing; how do you know that she's frightened?"

  "Well, she won't let Mister God get bigger."

  "How is it that Sunday school Teacher won't let Mister God get bigger?"

  "Mister God is big?"

  "Yeah, Mister God is good and big."

  "And we're little?"

  "Right enough, we're little."

  "And there is a big difference?"

  "Yeah, and then some."

  "If there wasn't no difference, it wouldn't be worth it, would it?"

  This confused me a little. I suppose I must have looked a bit puzzled, so she came again, sideways this time.

  "If'n Mister God and me was the same size, you couldn't tell, could you?"

  "Yes," I said, "I see what you mean. If the difference is very big, then it stands to reason that Mister God is big."

  "Sometimes," she cautioned.