by Flynn
It obviously wasn't as simple as that. In easy stages I was led to accept the fact that the bigger the difference between us and Mister God, the more Godlike Mister God became. At such a time when the difference was infinite, then would Mister God be absolute.
"What's all this got to do with Sunday school Teacher? She certainly knows about the difference."
"Oh yes," nodded Anna.
"So what's the problem?"
"When I find out things it makes the difference bigger, and Mister God gets bigger."
"So?"
"Sunday school Teacher makes the difference bigger but Mister God stays the same size. She's frightened."
"Hey, hold on a tick. How come she makes the difference bigger and Mister God stays the same size?"
I nearly lost the answer; it was one of those real "giveaway" lines. Tossed off so quietly.
"She just makes the people littler."
Then she went on, "Why do we go to church, Fynn?"
"To understand Mister God more."
"Less."
"Less what?"
"To understand Mister God less."
"Wait a blessed minute. You're flipped!"
"No, I'm not."
"You most certainly are."
"No. You go to church to make Mister God really, really big. When you make Mister God really, really, really big, then you really, really don't understand Mister God—then you do."
She was just a little surprised and disappointed to learn that this was over my head, way over my head, but she explained.
When you're little you understand Mister God. He sits up there on his throne, a golden one of course; he has got whiskers and a crown and everyone is singing hymns like mad to him. God is useful and usable. You can ask him for things; he can strike your enemies deader than a doornail; and he is pretty good at putting hexes on the bully next door, like warts and things. Mister God is so understandable, so useful, and so usable, he is like some object—perhaps the most important object of all—but nevertheless an object and absolutely understandable. Later on you understand him to be a bit different, but you are still able to grasp what he is. Even though you understand him, he doesn't seem to understand you! He doesn't seem to understand that you simply must have a new bike, so your understanding of him changes a bit more. In whatever way or state you understand Mister God, so you diminish his size. He becomes an understandable entity among other understandable entities. So Mister God keeps on shedding bits all the way through your life until the time comes when you admit freely and honestly that you don't understand Mister God at all. At this point you have let Mister God be his proper size—and wham!—there he is, laughing at you.
* * *
seven
Anna got involved with everything and anything; her involvement was on such a deep level that very little ever frightened her. She was ready to meet everything on its own terms. At whatever level the thing existed, Anna would be there to meet it. Occasionally she'd run into a situation for which she had no adequate word. She'd invent one, either a brand-new one or she'd teach an old one to do a new trick—like the night she told me that "the light, it frays."
Of course I should have known that light frayed but I didn't, so I had to go out into the dark street, armed with a torch and a tape measure. With the aid of a nearby dustbin and the railway wall it was demonstrated to me that light really did fray. The torch glass measured four inches across. The torch was placed on the top of the dustbin and the beam directed on to the railway wall. We measured the patch of light; it was just over three feet across. The dustbin and the torch were moved back a few paces and we measured the patch of light again; it was over four feet six inches across. The light did indeed fray.
"Why, Fynn? Why does it do that?"
So we'd go indoors again and out would come the paper and pencil and I'd explain.
"Can't you make it so it don't fray?"
So we'd talk about reflectors and lenses. It got taken in, digested, stored in its proper place and poised against some unknown eventuality.
The mirror book had provided Anna with another technique for wringing out interesting facts, the whole business of turning the thing inside out, or left to right, or upside down. That some of her facts weren't facts but fantasy didn't matter a jot, since by this time Anna knew exactly and precisely what a fact was.
A fact was the hard outer cover of meaning, and meaning was the soft living stuff inside a fact. Fact and meaning were the driving cogs of living. If the gear of fact drove the gear of meaning, then they revolved in opposite directions, but put the gear of fantasy between the two and they both revolved in the same direction. Fantasy was and is important; it leads to heaven knows where, but follow it and see. Sometimes it pays off.
The mirror book turned things from left to right, so why not turn everything around the other way for a start? Newton had a law; so did Anna. Anna's law was: First turn it inside out, then turn it upside down, then back to front, and then side to side, and then have a jolly good look at it, and . . . "Fynn, do you know that room spelt backward is moor?" Well, a room is a particular space surrounded by walls, and a moor is a particular space not surrounded by walls, so it makes some kind of sense, doesn't it? And while we are on the subject of rooms: "Fynn, if you spell roof backward, it spells foor. Can I put an I in it and make it spell floor?" Well, I don't see why not. "Fynn, is a rood a window, because it's door spelt backward?" "Fynn, do you know that lived backward is devil?" "Do you know that Anna spelt backward is Anna?" All right, so it's all coincidence, it's not relevant. Perhaps not, but It's fun, and sometimes the most surprising things happen.
Words became for Anna living things. She took them apart and put them together again. She learned what made them tick. She made no great etymological discoveries but she learned words and how to use I hem. Anna also painted—not very beautiful pictures, I admit, but then she painted under a severe handicap. She'd paint a picture wearing colored glasses and then laugh at the result. And then, "Fynn, will you make my red glasses blue for me?" and she'd paint another picture. None of Anna's pictures ever hung on the wall; they were never meant to. They were explorations into looking. It was very rash to deny the possibility that a red rose might be able to see. It might, just might, be able to see through its red petals or its green leaves; and you had to find out what the world might look like, hadn't you?
Being a sum doer myself, I was very interested in Anna's approach to mathematics. It was love at first sight. Numbers were beautiful things; numbers were funny things; they were without a doubt "God stuff." As such, you treated them with reverence. God stuff behaved itself. True, God stuff was sometimes very difficult to grab hold of. Mister God had, it seemed, told .the numbers just what they were and just how to behave. Numbers knew exactly where and how they belonged in the scheme of things. Sometimes it suited Mister God to hide his numbers in sums or in mirror books; and mirror books, as you know, could get pretty darned complicated at times.
The love affair with numbers soured a bit and, for a long time, I never knew why. It was Charles who put me on to the track of the explanation. Charles taught at the same school as Miss Haynes, and Miss Haynes taught sums. Anna's attendance at school was reluctant and not too frequent, as I was to discover later. At one of these sums lessons Miss Haynes had focused her attention on Anna.
"If," said Miss Haynes to Anna, "you had twelve flowers in a row and you had twelve rows, how many flowers would you have?" Poor Miss Haynes! If only she had asked Anna what twelve times twelve was she would have got her answer, but no, she had to start messing around with flowers and rows and things. Miss Haynes got an answer, not the one she expected, but an answer.
Anna had sniffed. This particular kind of sniff indicated the utmost disapproval.
"If," replied Anna, "you grewed flowers like that you shouldn't have no bloody flowers."
Miss Haynes was made of stern stuff and the impact of this answer left her unmoved. So she tried again.
"You have seven swee
ties in one hand and nine sweeties in your other hand. How many sweeties have you got altogether?"
"None," said Anna. "I ain't got none in this hand and I ain't got none in this hand, so I ain't got none, and it's wrong to say I have if I ain't."
Brave, brave Miss Haynes tried again.
"I mean pretend, dear, pretend that you have."
Being so instructed, Anna pretended and came out with the triumphant answer, "Fourteen."
"Oh, no, dear," said brave Miss Haynes, "you've got sixteen. You see, seven and nine make sixteen."
"I know that," said Anna, "but you said pretend, so I pretended to eat one and I pretended to give one away, so I've got fourteen."
I've always thought that Anna's next remark was made to ease the look of pain and anguish on Miss Haynes's face.
"I didn't like it, it wasn't nice," she said, as a sort of self-inflicted punishment.
This sort of attitude to the Mister God stuff of numbers was almost unforgivable, and it rocked Anna more than somewhat. The final blow came in the street one summer evening. Dink was sitting on the doorstep doing his homework. Dink was about fourteen and going to the Central School. Dink could score goals impossible angles and could knock a sixer over the railway wall with one wallop, but Dink and math were strangers, pretty well.
"Silly bugger," said Dink.
"Wot's up, Dink?"
"This geezer's having a bath."
"Ain't Friday, is it?"
"Wot's Friday got to do with it?"
"Barf night."
"That's got nuffink to do wiv it."
"What's the geezer doing, Dink?"
"He's got both taps turned on and he ain't got the plug in."
"Strewth, some mothers do have 'em—and they live."
"We ain't got no taps on our bath. We keep it in l he yard and fill it up with a bucket outa the copper."
"Wot you gotta do, Dink?"
"Find out how long the bath takes to fill."
"He'll never do it."
"Never?"
"He'll get his deaf a cold standing around in the nood."
"He's a twit."
"Let him barf 'imself. Have a game of footy, .Dink. Dibs on being goalkeeper."
Anna had been listening to this exchange and it confirmed her worst fears. Sums were an invention of the Devil, they turned you away from the real God stuff of numbers and tied you up in a world of idiots.
It was just past knocking-off time and we had got the worst of the muck off our hands. Cliff and George and I were crossing the yard, heading for the gate, and there she was waiting. I broke into a run at seeing her—wondering. She ran to meet me.
"What's wrong, Tich? What's happened?" I asked.
"Oh Fynn," she threw her arms around me, "it's so lovely. I couldn't wait."
"What's lovely? What is it?"
Anna fished about in her pouch and thrust something into my hands: a sheet of graph paper, numbered in each square. It looked straightforward enough to me. The number in the top left-hand corner was 2. The numbers progressed across the paper: 1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. The next line began 8, 9, 10, 11, etc. Six rows of numbers, ending up with 57 in the bottom right-hand corner of the page. It was a simple arrangement of consecutive numbers. Anna searched my face, waiting for it to light up. It didn't. It just registered puzzlement.
"I'll show you, I'll show you," she said excitedly.
We knelt there on the pavement, homeward-going workers making a detour around us with amused smiles on their faces. Anna traced around a large square made up of four smaller squares. The top two squares were numbered 22 and 23, the bottom two 32 and 33.
"Add those two," she commanded, pointing to the diagonal numbers, 22 and 33.
"Fifty-five," I obliged her.
"Now those two." She pointed at the other pair of diagonal numbers, 23 and 32.
"Fifty-five," I grinned.
"The same." She squirmed with delight. "Ain't it wonderful, Fynn?"
Next she traced a larger square made up of sixteen smaller squares. With two quick strokes of her pencil she divided sixteen into four squares each containing four of the smaller squares.
"And that lot and that lot." She pointed to the top left group of four squares and the bottom right group of four squares.
"Now these," she said, indicating the top right group and the bottom left group. The answer was the same.
For the best part of thirty minutes we juggled with groups of squares. It was always the same. The group of numbers on one diagonal was the same as the group of numbers on the other diagonal!
It was obvious when you thought about it. One diagonal was the mirror image of the other diagonal, so it followed naturally that all the numbers on one diagonal were, in some mysterious way, the mirror image of all the numbers on the other diagonal! Good old Mister God! He'd done it again!
Later that evening I was told she had made scores of these arrangements, putting the 0 wherever her fancy led her. Also she had found some very complicated series, and it always worked. Mister God numbers, the real God stuff, was, as you might expect, a never-ending miracle. As for that other stuff, the bath-filling, lark that Old Nick used numbers for—• well—!
Anna's refusal to get involved in this "Devil stuff' in sum books was absolute. There was no power on earth, or for that matter in hell, that could make her. I tried to explain that all this devil stuff was simply a means of demonstrating the laws of what you could and couldn't do with numbers. I needn't have bothered. Anyhow, Mister God stuff told you what you could and couldn't do, too. Do you mean to tell me 111 at you'd go to all the trouble to get two men to dig a hole in two hours and then—what do you do? You don't ask the proper question, "What are you digging I lie hole for?" No, you bring along another five men to dig the same size hole, just to find out how long it lakes. The man in the bath? You can't tell me that you actually know anybody who would turn both the laps on and then deliberately leave the plug out. As for the rows of flowers, well....
Anna never had any difficulty in separating the idea of six, in six apples and applying it to six buses. Six was simply "this amount of that," but even this did not exhaust the content of six. It wasn't until Anna came to grips with shadows that things really got under way. Strange, too, when you consider that a shadow is more or less an absence of something. Anyhow, shadows started a chain reaction, and she took off in every direction at once.
To while away the long winter evenings we had a magic lantern, a fairly large number of funny slides that weren't funny, and about an equal amount of educational slides that weren't educational—unless of course you were interested in the number of square feet of glass in the Crystal Palace or you wanted to know for some reason the number of blocks of stone - used in the construction of the Great Pyramid. What was both funny and educational, although I didn't know it at the time, was a lit-up magic lantern with no slides in it. It was funny because when you put your hand in front of the beam, it cast a shadow on the screen, actually a bed sheet. It was educational because it brought forth three extraordinary ideas. Anna's request, "Please can I have the lantern on?" always prompted me to ask, "What do you want to see?" As likely as not her reply would be, "NufEnk, I just want it on." I was more than a little concerned for she would sit there and stare at the rectangle of light. For a long time she would just sit and stare, un-moving. I was torn between breaking this hypnotic trance she seemed to be in and waiting to see what it was all about.
This looking at the rectangle of light went on for about a week or so. After what seemed to be a lifetime of agony, she spoke, "Fynn, hold a matchbox in the light."
I went forward, matchbox in hand, and held it in the beam of light. The screen filled with the black shadows of hand and matchbox.
After a long and careful scrutiny she exclaimed, "Now a book."
I duly produced a book and held it in the beam. Again this breath-holding look. About a dozen or so various objects were placed in the beam before I was bidden to turn it out.
Sitting on the table with the gaslight fully on, I waited for an explanation, but nothing came. My patience cracked wide open and I asked, in as unconcerned a voice as I could manage, "What you cookin' up, Tich?"
Her face pointed in my direction but her eyes were somewhere else.
"It's funny," she murmured. "It's funny." Sitting there looking at her, I had the queerest feeling that some inner part of her was slowly, so very slowly, turning on its axis. Her eyes were fixed straight .ahead, her head turned with painful slowness to the left. Suddenly her concentration broke and she giggled. I was left with the feeling that I had been reading a whodunnit with the last page missing.
This whole episode was repeated six or seven times in as many days; in all other ways she was still her exciting, fun-loving self. For me it was a nail-biting mid anxious time. It was on the fifth or maybe sixth icpeat that she asked for a sheet of paper and requested that it be pinned onto the screen. This I did. A jug was this day's object and Anna explained that she wanted me to trace around the shadow of the jug with a pencil on the sheet of paper. So there I was, standing with a jug in one hand and a pencil in the other. I couldn't make it; I was about two feet short of the screen. I pointed this fact out to her but she just sat there like some director on a film set, ordering her minions about to achieve the effect she wanted. In response to my plea for help she merely stated, "Stand it on something." I just did what I was told. With the help of a small table and a pile of books I managed to set it up and trace the outline of the jug on to the piece of paper.
"Now cut it out," she commanded.
Feeling that my considerable talents were being wasted on such menial tasks, I told her to do it herself.
"Please," she said, "please, Fynn."
So, with an adequate show of reluctance, I cut it out and handed it to her. With the lantern out and the gaslight on she stared at the cutout, going through the whole rigmarole of screwing her head off in order to —what? Whatever it was seemed to satisfy her, for she nodded, got up, and placed the cutout in the pages of the concordance.