by Flynn
"Please, please, Mister God, teach me how to ask real questions. Oh please, Mister God, help me to ask real questions."
For a moment of eternity I saw Anna as a flame and shuddered as I grasped the uniqueness of being me. How I managed that moment I shall never know, for my strength was not equal to that moment. In some strange and mysterious way I "saw" for the first time.
Suddenly there was a hand on my face, soft and gentle. A hand wiping away my tears and a voice saying, "Fynn, Fynn." The room began to reassemble again; things were once more.
"Fynn, wot you crying for?" asked Anna. I don't know why, perhaps it was just plain fear, but I began to swear, coldly and efficiently. Every muscle in my body ached and trembled. Anna's lips were on mine, her arm about my neck.
"Don't swear, Fynn, it's all right, it's all right."
I was trying to make some sort of sense out of that awful and beautiful moment, trying to get back to normality again; it was like climbing down an unending ladder.
Anna was talking again. "I'm glad you came, Fynn," she whispered. "I love you, Fynn."
I wanted to say "Me, too," but nothing happened.
In some curious way I seemed to be facing two ways at once. I wanted to be back among the familiar objects that I knew so well, and at the same time I wanted to experience that moment again. From the middle of my fog of confusion I realized that I was being led back to bed, utterly exhausted. I lay there, trying to make some sense of it all, trying to find some starting point from which I could begin to ask questions. But the words didn't seem to fit together in any reasonable pattern. It was a cup of tea in my hand that started I he world turning again.
"Drink it, Fynn, drink it all up."
Anna was sitting on the bed wearing my old blue sweater over her pajamas. She had made the tea, hot and sweet, one for each of us. I heard the scrape of a match on the matchbox and Anna's splutter as she lit a cigarette for me and stuck it between my lips. I j;ot myself up on my elbow.
"What happened, Fynn?" asked Anna.
"God knows," I said. "Were you asleep?"
"Been awake for a long time."
"I thought you were having a nightmare," I muttered.
"No," she smiled, "I was saying my prayers."
"The way you was crying—I thought—"
"That why you cried?"
"I dunno, suppose so. It sort of got kind of empty all of a sudden. It was funny. I thought I was lookin' at myself for a moment. Painful."
She didn't answer for a moment, and then very quietly she said, "Yes, I know."
I was too tired to prop myself up any longer and suddenly I found myself with my head resting on Anna's arm. It didn't seem right, it ought to have been the other way around, but it wasn't and I realized that I liked it, it was what I wanted. We stayed like that for a long time, but there were questions I wanted to ask her.
"Tich," I said, "what were you asking God about real questions for?"
"Oh, it's just sad, that's all."
"What's sad?"
"People is."
"I see. What's sad about people?"
"People ought to get more wise when they grow older. Bossy and Patch do, but people don't."
"Don't you think so?" I asked.
"No. People's boxes get littler and littler."
"Boxes? I don't understand that."
"Questions are in boxes," she explained, "and the answers they get only fit the size of the box."
"That's difficult; go on a bit."
"It's hard to say. It's like—it's like the answers are the same size as the box. It's like them dimensions."
"Oh?"
"If you ask a question in two dimensions, then the answer is in two dimensions too. It's like a box. You can't get out."
"I think I see what you mean."
"The questions get to the edge and then stop. It's like a prison."
"I expect we're all in some sort of prison."
She shook her head. "No, Mister God wouldn't do that."
"I suppose not. What's the answer then?"
"Let Mister God be. He lets us be."
"Don't we?"
"No. We put Mister God into little boxes."
"Surely we don't do that?"
"Yes, all the time. Because we don't really love him. We got to let Mister God be free. That's what love is."
Anna searched for Mister God and her desire was for a better understanding of him. Anna's search for Mister God was serious, but gay; earnest, but light-hearted; reverent, but impudent; and single-minded and multi-tracked. Not that she doubted God's existence for a moment, but it was for some time a sign that he did exist. By the same token, a bus or a flower was also a sign that he existed. How she came by this vision of the pearl of great price I do not know. Certainly it was with her before I met her. It was just my luck that I happened to be with her when she was doing her working out. To listen to her was exhilarating, like flying on one's own; to watch her was to be startled into seeing. Evidence for Mister God? Why, there was nowhere you could look where there wasn't evidence for Mister God; it was everywhere. Everything was evidence of Mister God, and it was at this point that things tended to get out of hand.
The evidence could be arranged in too many ways. People who accepted one sort of arrangement were called by one particular name. Arrange the evidence in a new way and you were called by a different name. Anna reckoned that the number of possible arrangements of the available evidence might easily run into .squillions of names. The problem was further complicated by the fact of synagogues, mosques, temples, churches, and all the other different places of worship, and scientific laboratories were not excluded from the lilt. By any reasonable standards of thinking and behavior nobody could, with their hand on their heart, honestly say that these other people were not worshiping and loving God, even if they did call him by Home other name like Truth. She could not and would Dot say that Ali's God was a lesser kind of God than I In- Mister God that she knew so well, nor was she able to say that her Mister God was greater or more Important than Kathie's God. It didn't make sense to talk about different Gods; that kind of talk inevitably lead to madness. No, for Anna it was all or nothing; there could be only one Mister God. This being so, then the different places of worship, the different kinds of names given to those worshipers could be due to one thing, and to one thing only: the different arrangements of the evidence for Mister God.
Anna solved this problem to her own satisfaction, or better still resolved it, on the piano. I've played the piano for as long as I can remember, but I can't read a note of music. I can listen to music and make a reasonable copy of it by ear, but if I attempt to play the same piece of music by reading the score, I turn it into a dirge. Those little black dots throw me into a flat spin. Whatever I've managed on the piano stems from the popular sheet music of prewar; the little frets with their constellation of dots which showed you how to finger the ukulele—or was it the guitar?—and those cryptic symbols underneath the lines of music such as Am 7 or the chord of A minor seventh. This was the kind of music that I learned, limited perhaps, but it did have one great advantage. Given a suitable handful of notes, you could call it a this chord or a that chord, or perhaps any one of half a dozen names; it all depended on something else.
This, then, was the method I used to teach Anna something about the piano. Soon she was romping through major chords, relative minor chords, minor sevenths, diminished sevenths, and inversions. She knew their names and how to call them. More than that, she knew that the name given to a sprinkling of notes depended on where you were and what you were doing. Of course the question of why a group of notes was called a chord had to be gone into. Mr. Weekley's dictionary was called into service. We were informed that chord and accord were more or less one and the same word. One more flip through the dictionary to find out how the word accord was used and we ended up with the word consent, and there we stopped.
It wasn't many hours later that day when I was confronted with the open
-eyed, open-mouthed look of astonishment on Anna's face. She suddenly stopped playing hopscotch with the rest of the kids and walked slowly toward me.
"Fynn," her voice was a squeak of amazement, "Fynn, we're all playing the same chord."
"I'm not surprised," I said. "What are we talking about?"
"Fynn, it's all them different names for churches."
"So what's that got to do with chords?" I asked.
"We're all playing the same chord to Mister God but with different names."
It was this kind of thing that was so exciting about talking to Anna. She had this capacity for taking a statement of fact in one subject, teasing it until she discovered its pattern, then looking around for a similar pattern in another subject. Anna had a high regard for facts, yet the importance of a fact did not lie in its uniqueness but in its ability to do service in diverse subjects. Had Anna ever been given a convincing argument in favor of atheism, she'd have teased it about until she had got a firm hold of the pattern, viewed it from all sides, and then shown you that the whole argument was a necessary ingredient in the existence of God. The chord of atheism might be a discord, but then discords were in Anna's estimation "thrilly," but definitely, "thrilly."
"Fynn, them names of them chords," she began.
"What about them?" I asked.
"The home note can't be Mister God because then we couldn't call them different names. They would all be the same name," she said.
"I guess you're right at that. What is the home note then?"
"It's me or you or Ali. Fynn, it's everybody. That's why it's all different names. That's why it's all different churches. That's what it is."
It makes sense, doesn't it? We're all playing the same chord but it seems we don't know it. You call your chord a C major while I call the same notes A minor seventh. I call myself a Christian. What do you call yourself? I reckon Mister God must be pretty good lit music, he knows all the names of the chords. Perhaps he doesn't mind what you call it, as long as you play it.
* * *
nine
Maybe it was the fact that Anna and I had met at night that made the nighttime so magic for us. Perhaps it was because the nighttime could be, and so often was, so surprising. The multitudes of sights and sounds of the daytime got down to manageable size at night. Things and sounds became separate at night; they didn't get muddled up with everything else; and things happened in the dark that couldn't possibly happen in the daylight. It's not impossible to have a conversation with a lamppost at night; do the same thing in the daylight and they would take you off in a padded van.
"The sun is nice," said Anna, "but it lights things up so much that you can't see very far."
I agreed that sometimes the sun was so dazzling (hat on occasions one was quite blinded. That wasn't what she meant.
"Your soul don't go very far in the daylight 'cos it slops where you can see."
"That supposed to make sense?" I asked.
"The nighttime is better. It stretches your soul right out to the stars. And that," she pronounced, "is a very long way. In the nighttime you don't have to stop going out. It's like your ears. In the daytime it's so noisy you can't hear. In the nighttime you can. The nighttime stretches you."
I wasn't going to argue with that one. The nighttime was the time for stretching, and we often stretched ourselves.
Mum never batted an eyelid over our nighttime rambles. Mum knew that stretching was important, and Mum had been a past master at the art of stretching. Given half a chance she'd have been with us. "Have a nice time," she'd say, "and don't get too lost." She didn't mean in the streets of London Town, she meant up among the stars. You didn't have to explain to Mum about getting lost among the stars. Mum reckoned that getting lost and finding your way were just different sides of the same coin. You couldn't have the one without the other.
Mum was something of a genius, certainly she was a mum in a million. "Why don't you go out," she used to say, "it's raining hard," or, "it's blowing a gale." Whatever mischief the weather was up to, Mum suggested that we go out, just for fun, just to see what it was all about. Outside in the streets windows were -being flung open and other mums would be yelling for their various Freds and Berts, Bettys and Sadies to "come in outa that rain! You'll be soaked to the skin." Come storm or tempest, rain or snow, daytime or nighttime, we'd always be encouraged to go out and try it. Mum never protected us from God's works, as she called them. Mum protected us, for a while, from ourselves. She'd light up the big copper so that there was a good supply of hot water when we got home. She did it for years, until she figured we'd got enough sens© to do it for ourselves; then she stopped.
Staying out all night was, for Mum, something not to be missed.
Most nighttime people were pretty wonderful people. Most nighttime people liked to talk. Those who thought we were mad or just plain stupid were in the minority. True, there were those who didn't hesitate (o tell me exactly what they thought of me. "Fancy taking a child out at a time like this; you must be stark laving mad." "You ought to be home and in bed, you wouldn't get up to any mischief there." The assumption on the part of these people was that the night-lime was for mischief, for foul deeds, for getting up to no good. All God-fearing people went to their beds at night. The night was for the "nasties," for "beasties that go bump in the night," and for Old Nick. Perhaps we were lucky; all the times that we roamed the streets at night we never bumped into a nasty or a beasty, or even Old Nick, only nice people. At first we tried to explain that we wanted to be out, that we liked it, but this only confirmed some people in their suspicion that we were mad, so we gave up any attempt at an explanation and simply went out.
Parting from a little group of nighttime people on one of our walks, Anna remarked, "It's funny, Fynn, ain't it? All the nighttime people have got names."
It was true too. You'd bump into a group of night-lime people round a fire and before you could say "How's your father?" you'd be introduced all round. "That's Lil, she's a bit funny in the 'ead, but she's all right." "That's Old Flintlighter." His real name was Robert Somebody-or-other but everybody called him "Old Flintlighter."
Perhaps it was because the nighttime people had more time to talk to each other, or perhaps they were not overinvolved in "making it good." Whatever the reason, the nighttime people talked and talked and shared and shared.
II was on one such night that the bottle was d. It went from hand to hand round the circle, i >n each pass, the mouth of the bottle was wiped with ii dirty sleeve before a good swig was taken. It was fey I urn; I did a quick wipe and took a big swig. I wih I hadn't. My inside turned a somersault and everything dried up. Coughing and spluttering, with tears streaming down my eyes, I passed it along to the next man. It tasted like well-seasoned varnish laced with TNT. One mouthful was an experience, two was a punishment, and three was certain slow death.
"That yer first time, cock?" said Old Flintlighter.
"Yes," I gasped, "and me last."
"It gets better as you go on," said Lil.
"What the hell do you call it?" I was getting my breath back.
"That's Red Biddy, that's what it's called," said Old Flintlighter.
"It keeps the cold out when it gets a bit chilly."
"It tastes like petrol to me," I said.
Old Lil cackled. "Ain't that the truth," she said. "Yer gets the taste for it after a bit."
Anna wanted a taste, so I poured a drop on the corner of my handkerchief, half expecting it to burst into flames at any moment. She sucked at the corner of the handkerchief and made a face.
"Ugh," she spat, "it's horrible!"
They all laughed.
It struck me as odd that this ritual of wiping the mouth of the bottle still went on; perhaps it was a leftover from the more palmy days. Certainly no germ could get within a foot of it without curling up.
After that experience we never drank anything else but tea or cocoa. We'd sit on old oil drums or wooden boxes and drink tea from battered old
tin mugs, cooking our sausages on the ends of sticks and talking.
Convict Bill, from down under, told his adventures before the mast. Convict Bill had had so many extraordinary adventures he must have had at least four man-sized adventures per day. What did it matter if they were not true? What did it matter if they were all adventures of the imagination? It was pure genius, pure poetry. It was true. The stars stretched a person out; the stars broke open this prison of a box and let the imagination roam.
Anna, on her oil-drum throne, was always and everywhere the center of attention, her face radiant in the fire's glow as she listened to the adventures of I he nighttime people. Her contributions to these occasions varied—a little dance, a song, or a story.
On one such night Anna began a story. Old Flint-lighter picked her up and stood her on a packing case. There she stood with the eyes of a couple of dozen nighttime people fixed on her. She told the story of a king who was about to have someone's head chopped off but had a sudden change of heart when lie saw the smile of a little child. All the heads nodded in unison and Convict Bill said, "Ah! It's pretty powerful' stuff, a smile is. Why, it reminds me of the lime . . ." and he was launched on some new and fan-lastic adventure.
It was a chilly April night when we first met Old Woody. Old Woody commanded great respect from (he nighttime people; obviously well-educated, well-mannered, and utterly content with his life. Old Woody was tall and as straight as a pole. Hawk-nosed, hoarded, and with eyes that focused somewhere near infinity. His voice was like roasted chestnuts—warm and brown. When Old Woody smiled it just touched I he corners of his mouth. But it wasn't there that you looked for his smile, it was in his eyes. Those eyes just sort of wrapped you up; those eyes were full up with good things; and when he smiled, why, they just poured out all over you.
As we stepped into the light of the fire Old Woody looked up and sized us up for a minute or two. Nobody spoke. His eyes passed from my face to Anna's, and there they stuck. With a smile he held out his hand to Anna and she went across to him and held it. For a long, long moment they stared at each other, showering each other with good things, and smiling lit to bust. They were two of a kind; they didn't need lo use language. The exchange was immediate and complete. Standing Anna in front of him, he looked her over once more.
