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. 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 are 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.’ ‘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 on “0” – then the numbers come out “-5, -4, -3, -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 take-away” 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 “0”, ‘ she informed me, ‘that’s “0” 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 swept them on 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 ‘take-away’ 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.
Posted on: Tue, 02 Jul 2013 02:15:39 +0000
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