Читать книгу Mister God, This is Anna - Papas - Страница 6

‘The diffrense from a person and an angel is easy. Most of an angel is in the inside and most of a person is on the outside.’ These are the words of six-year-old Anna, sometimes called Mouse, Hum or Joy. At five years Anna knew absolutely the purpose of being, knew the meaning of love and was a personal friend and helper of Mister God. At six Anna was a theologian, mathematician, philosopher, poet and gardener. If you asked her a question you would always get an answer – in due course. On some occasions the answer would be delayed for weeks or months; but eventually, in her own good time, the answer would come: direct, simple and much to the point.

She never made eight years, she died by an accident. She died with a grin on her beautiful face. She died saying, ‘I bet Mister God lets me get into heaven for this’, and I bet he did too.

I knew Anna for just about three and a half years. Some people lay claim to fame by being the first person to sail around the world alone, or to stand on the moon, or by some other act of bravery. All the world has heard of such people. Not many people have heard of me, but I, too, have a claim to fame; for I knew Anna. To me this was the high peak of adventure. This was no casual knowing; it required total application. For I knew her on her own terms, the way she demanded to be known: from the inside first. ‘Most of an angel is in the inside’, and this is the way I learned to know her – my first angel. Since then I have learnt to know two other angels, but that’s another story.

My name is Fynn. Well that’s not quite true; my real name doesn’t matter all that much since my friends all called me Fynn and it stuck. If you know your Irish mythology you will know that Fynn was pretty big; me too. Standing about six foot two, weighing some sixteen stone odd, close to being a fanatic on physical culture, the son of an Irish mother and a Welsh father, with a passion for hot saveloys and chocolate raisins – not together, I may add. My great delight was to roam about dockland in the night-time, particularly if it was foggy.

My life with Anna began on such a night. I was sixteen at the time, prowling the streets and alleys with my usual supply of hot dogs, the street lights with the foggy haloes showing dark formless shapes moving out from the darkness of the fog and disappearing again. Down the street a little way a baker’s shop-window softened and warmed the raw night with its gas-lamps. Sitting on the grating under the window was a little girl. In those days children wandering the streets at night were no uncommon sight. I had seen such things before, but on this occasion it was different. How or why it was different has long since been forgotten except that I am sure it was different. I sat down beside her on the grating, my back against the shop-front. We stayed there about three hours. Looking back over thirty years, I can now cope with those three hours; but at the time I was on the verge of being destroyed. That November night was pure hell; my guts tied themselves into all manner of complicated knots.

Perhaps even then something of her angelic nature caught hold of me; I’m quite prepared to believe that I had been bewitched from the beginning. I sat down with ‘Shove up a bit, Tich.’ She shoved up a bit but made no comment.

‘Have a hot dog’, I said.

She shook her head and answered, ‘It’s yours.’

‘I got plenty. Besides, I’m full up’, I said.

She made no sign so I put the bag on the grating between us. The light from the shop-window wasn’t very strong and the kid was sitting in the shadows so I couldn’t see what she looked like except that she was very dirty. I could see that she clutched under one arm a rag-doll and on her lap a battered old paintbox.

We sat there for thirty minutes or so in complete silence; during that time I thought there had been a movement of her hand towards the hot-dog bag but I didn’t want to look or comment in case I put her off. Even now I can feel the immense pleasure I had when I heard the sound of that hot-dog skin popping under the bite of her teeth. A minute or two later she took a second and then a third. I reached into my pocket and brought out a packet of Woodbines.

‘Do you mind if I smoke while you’re eating, Tich?’ I asked.

‘What?’ She sounded a little alarmed.

‘Can I have a fag while you’re eating?’

She rolled over and got to her knees and looked me in the face.

‘Why?’ she said.

‘My Mum’s a stickler for politeness. Besides, you don’t blow smoke in a lady’s face when she’s eating’, I said.

She stared at half a sausage for a moment or two, and looking at me fully, she said, ‘Why? Do you like me?’

I nodded.

‘You have a fag then,’ and she smiled at me and popped the rest of the sausage into her mouth.

I took out a Woodbine and lit up and offered her the match to blow out. She blew, and I was sprayed with bits of sausage. This little accident produced such a reaction in her that I felt that I had been stabbed in the guts. I had seen a dog cringe before, but never a child. The look she gave me filled me with horror. She expected a thrashing. She clenched her teeth as she waited for me to strike her.

What my face registered I don’t know, perhaps anger and violence, or shock and confusion. Whatever it was, it produced from her the most piteous whimper. I can’t describe this sound after all these years, no words are fitting. The feeling I can still taste, can still experience. My heart faltered at the sound, and something came undone inside me. My clenched fist hit the pavement beside me, a useless gesture in response to Anna’s fears. Did I think of that image then, that image which I now think of, the only one that fits the occasion? That perfection of violence, that ultimate horror and bewilderment of Christ crucified. That terrible sound that the child made was a sound that I never wish to hear again. It attacked my emotional being and blew a fuse.

After a moment or two I laughed. I suppose that the human mind can only stand so much grief and anguish. After that the fuses blow. It did with me, my fuses blew in a big way. The next few minutes I know very little about – except that I laughed and laughed, then I realized that the kid was laughing too. No shrunken bundle of fear – she was laughing. Kneeling on the pavement and leaning forward with her face close to mine, and laughing – laughing. So very many times in the next three years I heard her laughter – no silver bells or sweet rippling sounds was her laughter, but like a five-year-old’s bellow of delight, a cross between a puppy’s yelp, a motor-bike, and a bicycle pump.

I put my hands on her shoulders and held her off at arm’s length, and then came that look that is entirely Anna’s – mouth wide open, eyes popping out of her head, like a whippet straining at the leash. Every fibre of that little body was vibrating and making a delicious sound. Legs and arms, toes and fingers, the whole of that little body shook and trembled like Mother Earth giving birth to a volcano. And what a volcano was released in that child!

Outside that baker’s shop in dockland on a foggy November night I had the unusual experience of seeing a child born. After the laughter had quietened off a bit, but while her little body was still thrumming like a violin string, she tried to say something, but it wouldn’t come out properly. She managed a ‘You – You – You –.’

After some little time and a great deal of effort she managed ‘You love me, don’t you?’

Even had it not been true, I could not have said ‘No’ to save my life; true or false, right or wrong, there was only one answer. I said ‘Yes’.

She gave a little giggle, and pointing a finger at me, said, ‘You love me,’ and then broke into some primitive gyration around the lamp-post, chanting ‘You love me. You love me. You love me.’

Five minutes of this and she came back and sat down on the grating. ‘It’s nice and warm for your bum, ain’t it?’ she said.

I agreed it was nice for your bum.

A moment later: ‘I ain’t arf firsty.’ So we upped and went along to the pub just down the road. I bought a large bottle of Guinness. She wanted ‘one of them ginger-pops with the marble in the neck’. So she had two ginger-pops and some more saveloys from an all-night coffee stall.

‘Let’s go back and get our bums warm again,’ she grinned at me. Back we went and sat on the grating, a big un and a little un.

I don’t suppose that we drank more than a half of the drinks, for it seemed that the idea of a fizzy drink was to shake it vigorously and then let it shoot up into the air. After a few showers of ginger-pop and a determined effort to do the nose trick, she said, ‘Now do it to yourn.’

I’m sure even then that this was not a request but an order. I shook hard and long and then let fly with the stopper and we both were covered with frothy Guinness.

The next hour was filled with giggles and hot dogs, ginger-pop and chocolate raisins. The occasional passer-by was yelled at: ‘Oi, Mister, he loves me, he do.’ Running up the steps of a nearby building she shouted, ‘Look at me. I’m bigger than you.’

About ten-thirty that evening, whilst she was sitting between my knees having an earnest conversation with Maggie, her rag-doll, I said, ‘Come on, Tich, it’s about time you were in bed. Where do you live?’

In a flat, matter-of-fact voice she exclaimed, ‘I don’t live nowhere. I have runned away.’

‘What about your Mum and Dad?’ I asked.

She might have said the grass is green and the sky is blue. What she did say was just as factual and effortless. ‘Oh, she’s a cow and he’s a sod. And I ain’t going to no bleeding cop shop. I’m going to live with you.’

This was no request but an order. What could you do? I merely accepted the fact. ‘Right, I agree. You can come home with me and then we will have to see.’

At that point my education began in earnest. I’d got myself a large doll, but not an imitation doll, a real live one and, from what I could make out, a bomb with legs on. Going home that night was like coming home from Hampstead Heath, slightly tiddled, a little dizzy from the merry-go-round I’d been on, and not a little bewildered that the beautiful doll I’d won on the shooting-range had come to life and was walking beside me.

‘What’s your name, Tich?’ I asked her.

‘Anna. What’s yours?’

‘Fynn,’ I said. ‘Where do you come from?’

I didn’t get an answer to this question, and that was the first and last time she didn’t answer a question – I gathered later the reason for this. It was because she was afraid that I might have taken her back.

‘When did you run away?’

‘Oh, three days ago, I think.’

We took the short way home by climbing over the ‘cut’ bridge and crossing over the railway yards. This was always my way in because we lived next to the railway and it was convenient, to say nothing of the fact that it meant I didn’t have to get Mum out of bed to open the front-door.

We got into the scullery by the back-door and then into the kitchen. I lit the gas. For the very first time I saw Anna. God only knows what I expected to see; certainly not what I did see. It wasn’t that she was dirty or that her frock was about ten sizes too big; it was the mixture of ginger-pop, Guinness and her paint-tin. She looked like a little savage, smears of various coloured paints all over her face and arms, the front of her frock a complete riot of colour. She looked so funny and so tiny, and her response to my bellow of laughter so reduced her to her cowering self again, that I hurriedly picked her up to the level of the mirror over the mantelpiece and made her look. Her delicious little giggle was like closing the door on November and stepping out into June. I can’t say that I looked much different that night. I too was covered in paint. ‘A right pair’, as Mum later said.

In the middle of all the giggles there was a thump, thump, thump on the wall. That was Mum’s signal. ‘That you? Your supper’s in the oven and don’t forget to turn the gas off.’

Instead of the usual, ‘OK, Mum, won’t be long’, this night I opened the door and yelled down the passage, ‘Mum, come and see what I’ve got.’

One thing about Mum, she was never fussed about anything, she took everything in her stride. Bossy, the cat I brought home one night, and Patch the dog, eighteen-year-old Carol, who stayed with us for two years, and Danny from Canada, who stayed about three years. Some people collect stamps or beer-mats; Mum collected waifs and strays, cats, dogs, frogs, people and, as she believed, a whole host of ‘little people’. Had she been confronted that night with a lion she’d have made the same comment – ‘The poor thing.’ One look when she came through the door was enough. ‘The poor thing,’ she cried, ‘what have they done to you?’ And then, as an afterthought, to me, ‘You look a right mess. Wash your face.’ With that, Mum flopped on to her knees and put her arms around Anna.

Being embraced by Mum was like tangling with a gorilla. Mum had arms like other people have legs. Mum had a unique anatomical structure which still puzzles me, for she had a fourteen-stone heart in a twelve-stone body. Mum was a real lady and wherever she may be now she’ll still be a lady.

A few minutes of ‘ooh’s’ and ‘aah’s’, then things began to get organized. Mum heaved herself upright, and with a passing shot to me to ‘get those wet clothes off the child’, flung open the kitchen door, yelling, ‘Stan, Carol, come here quick!’ Stan’s my younger brother by two years; Carol was one of the waifs or strays that came and went.

The kitchen and the scullery suddenly erupted – a bath appeared, kettles of water on gas-rings, towels, soap; the kitchen-range was filled with coal; and there was me trying to undo sundry hooks and eyes on Anna’s clothing. And suddenly there she was, sitting cross-legged on the table as raw as the day she was born. Stan said ‘Bastard!’ Carol said ‘Christ!’ Mum looked a bit grim. For a moment that little kitchen blazed with hatred for someone; that poor little body was bruised and sore. The four older people in the kitchen were ready to bash someone and for a time we were lost in our own anger. But Anna sat and grinned, a huge face-splitting grin. Like some beautiful sprite she sat there, and I believe for the very first time in her life she was entirely and completely happy.

The bath completed, the soup downed and Anna resplendent in Stan’s old shirt, we all sat around the kitchen table and took stock of the situation. Questions were asked but no answers were forthcoming. We eventually decided that the day had had enough questions asked. The answers could wait until tomorrow. While Mum went to work getting Anna’s clothes clean again, Stan and I made up a bed on an old black leather sofa next door to me.

I slept in the front room, a room stuffed full of aspidistras, a tall-boy with the precious pieces of cut glass displayed on the top, one bed, and sundry bits and pieces scattered around. My room was separated off from the next room by a large baize curtain hung on big wooden rings that slid back and forth with their clack, clack, clack. Behind the curtain was Anna’s sofa-bed. Outside my bedroom window was a street lamp and as the window was only covered by lace curtains the bedroom was always well lit. As I said, our house was right next to the railway, with trains passing all day and all night, but you got used to that. In fact after nineteen years the rumble and rush of the passing trains was more of a lullaby than a noise.

When the bed had been made and all the night preparation attended to, I went back into the kitchen again. There was the little imp enthroned in a cane chair, swaddled in blankets, drinking a cup of hot cocoa. Bossy was sitting on her lap giving a fair imitation of Houdini trying to wriggle out of a strait-jacket, and Patch at her feet, beating time with his tail on the floor. The hiss of the gas-lamp, the bright firelight, the little pools of water on the floor, all turned that little kitchen into a Christmas scene. The Welsh dresser, the shining pots and the black-leaded kitchen-range, with its brass fire-irons and guard, seemed to sparkle. In the midst of it all sat the little princess, clean and shining. This little thing had the most splendid, the most beautiful, copper-coloured hair imaginable, and a face to match. No painted cherub on some church ceiling was this child, but a smiling, giggling, squirming, real live child, her face alight with some inner radiance, her eyes like two blue searchlights.

Earlier in the evening I had said ‘Yes’ to her question, ‘You love me, don’t you?’ because I was unable to say ‘No’. Now I was glad that I had been unable to say ‘No’, for the answer was ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’ How could anyone fail to love this little thing?

Mum gave a bit of a grunt and her usual ‘Well, we had better get to bed or we won’t be worth anything tomorrow.’ And so I picked up Anna and took her along to her bed. The bedclothes were already pulled back and I put her down and made as if to tuck her up, but this was all wrong.

‘Ain’t you gonna say your prayers?’ she asked.

‘Well, yes,’ I replied, ‘when I get to bed.’

‘I want to say mine now with you,’ she said. So we both got down on our knees and she talked while I listened.

I’ve been to church many times, and heard many prayers, but none like this. I can’t remember much about her prayer except that it started off with ‘Dear Mister God, this is Anna talking’, and she went on in such a familiar way of talking to Mister God that I had the creepy feeling that if I dared look behind me he would be standing there. I remember her saying, ‘Thank you for letting Fynn love me’, and I remember being kissed goodnight, but how I got to bed I don’t know.

I lay in bed in some confusion wondering what had hit me. The trains rattled on their way, the fog swirled round the street lamp. 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.