Moonchild Learns about Angels

Abstract

In the beginning the Word. So they said. And definitely singular. Was. Word. being the grimy Sunday school where us children were delivered for safekeeping while (so I later deduced) the mummies and daddies - the house to themselves - went at it hammer and tongs to come before it to go and pick up their little Not that I had a daddy - well, only Him, Big Daddy, Old Chief Long Beard up there, peering, prying, and poking about in the damp little orifices of my sinning, tut-tut-tutting and a-shaking of His dreadful locks over me. Oh dear-oh-dearohdear. Take a spoonful of prayer morning and night, Eloisa, and as many of these little guilt pills as you need to make you feel goody-goody. Huh! Big Daddy in the Sky! But Mumsie said I'd have to lump it: He the only one I'd got. But when I said she must be the Virgin Mary then, she gave me such a look. It was, I believe, at this time that she first called me Lunatic. Lunatic? Meaning? (I hopeful: anything involving a tick sounded promising. I didn't get many ticks in my life.) We had the full etymology. Thank you Mumsie. Thank you very much. But she said not to go moody over it. It a joke. A pun. I born on a Monday, from Moon Day. Moon. Luna. Get it? I said I supposed I did. Grimly. No fun, believe you me, being the offspring of a would-be arty, penniless Mum for whom would-be arty penniless men were the center of the creative universe. Creative below, too. It wasn't all just in the mind. They went at it same as anyone else. More, probably. Luv-a-life, one supposes. So I'm here. But, as a quirky, thought-riddled girl-child, I demanded to know was I a Moonchild by conception as well as by birth? It's all very happy, says I, knowing I born on a Monday, but unless my day of begetting also a fair-of-face day, then it didn't mean a thing surely. She said yes: she thought she remembered it being a Monday. Day of the Moon - the Moon with its O-gaping mouth of despair. That's me. Huh! Not a fair of face child at all. More than that she would not answer, so I wondered on about Big Daddy and my daddy and why it there weren't words for everything I wanted to say, even though there were so many ways of saying the same things, so many words, too many words, sometimes, so you longed for the beginning when, so they said, there just the One. I kept on to Mumsie though: who am I? Meaning father-wise. But she took my still waters to be running even deeper than I meant and said, are your own No. More than that. You are the way you tell your own story. Her waters deeper than mine. The Sunday school said different. They said Big Daddy had a kind of secretary called a Recording Angel who wrote your story for you in a Big Book. When you died the Angel would show you the story and point out which bits were good and which bits were bad enough to toss you in the fire like a sweet paper for ever and ever. But they never made it clear whether the story could be changed if you didn't agree with the Angel's version. Being a question-tangled child I upped my hand yet again and demanded if it would be acceptable to take along my own telling of events 'cos my Mummy said you were the way you tell your own They hadn't a clue what I wittering about but said (crooked smile) they thought there'd be no harm in it: might give the Angel a giggle. Never thought of angels giggling. But then my knowledge of them not yet exhaustive. Made a note to investigate more fully the moods of angels. Curiosity killed more than one cat. When I tried to enlighten Mumsie about Big Daddy's secretary, she informed me I leaving Sunday school. It all words, she said, just words. But I couldn't forget the Angel, words or not. Told the story of me, in my head, I did, as I lived it, gathering the past into the bunch of the present, wondering all the time how it compared with what the Recording Angel putting in the Big Book. …