The First Day Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Epigraphs

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  Acknowledgements

  Credits

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  First U.S. edition

  Copyright © 2017 by Phil Harrison

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Fleet, an imprint of Little, Brown.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-1-328-84966-3

  Cover design and illustration by Alex Merto

  Author photograph © Tim Millen

  eISBN 978-1-328-84967-0

  v1.1017

  I was born again: I was the owner of my own darkness

  —PABLO NERUDA

  A self is a form of freedom, not a sort of thing

  —JOHN CAPUTO

  Ne pas céder sur son désir

  —JACQUES LACAN

  I

  What do you want?

  The man shook his head, his grip still firmly on the boy’s shirt. The boy looked to Orr, his eyes pleading. Orr smiled, reached out his hand, placed it on top of the man’s. He stared at Orr, five seconds, ten, then shoved the boy hard against the wall and let go. Orr continued holding his hand. The boy moved to run off, but Orr raised his other arm into the air and the boy, perhaps in submission to Orr’s authority or perhaps out of fear, stopped and stood still.

  You have to start somewhere; apocryphal wouldn’t get a look-in. Orr was one of those men around whom stories accumulated, stories rarely troubled by facts. Still, this one rings true. An interventionist with his interventionist God. Like father, like son. He reached out and took the boy’s hand. And he stood there, holding their hands, and he closed his eyes, and he prayed. For love, for forgiveness, for the peace of God which passeth all understanding. Go, and sin no more, he surely didn’t say.

  You’d almost have wanted him to though, I think, if you were either of them, the man or the boy.

  The week before he met her he had preached from the gospel of Mark. For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?

  Anna Stuart was twenty-six years old at the time. Samuel Orr was thirty-eight. Anna was a Beckett scholar. She taught at Queen’s University, in an office perched above the red-brick show buildings. She lectured her groups of avid nihilists while looking at people scurrying far below, like insects. When she talked of Beckett’s image, in Godot, of life as a woman standing astride a grave giving birth, her own legs would open, as though she herself were the woman. Her students watched her, humoured and titillated, as their lives were reduced to dust behind her back.

  Samuel Orr was married, and had three children, all boys. The eldest, Philip, was twelve years old, the same age, his father pointed out, as Christ when he first preached in the temple. It had become an affectionate joke between them: Orr would ask what Philip had been up to that day, and Philip would answer, in mock affront, Wist ye not that I must be about my father’s business? Orr was the pastor of a small mission hall in east Belfast, an indistinct pebbledashed building on a side street off the Beersbridge Road. It sat between an off-license and a piece of wasteland, knee-high weeds and broken glass. Location as metaphor. A large text hung above the door, gold lettering on red-painted wood:

  ACQUAINT NOW THYSELF WITH HIM AND BE AT PEACE. JOB 22:21

  It was the sign under which they met. On a chilly early-autumn evening, light draining slowly from the sky, she stood across the street from the mission hall, taking a photograph. He stepped out of the door just as she clicked the shutter. It was a film camera, an old Holga, so she couldn’t check if he’d ruined the shot or not. He spotted her immediately. He paused and, nonchalant, barely missing a beat, stepped into a pose. The cheek of it, the charm. She smiled. He shouted across to her.

  Shall I go back inside?

  You can stay where you are, she said, raising the camera again. She stood, waiting. He stood, waiting.

  Any cha—

  She clicked, laughing.

  Is this your church? she asked, once he’d locked up and crossed the street.

  No. I’m just the pastor. It’s God’s church.

  She smiled.

  You’re a photographer?

  She shook her head. A hobby, she said.

  And do you just photograph places of worship?

  Is there anything else? she asked him. His eyes lit up, she said later.

  The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.

  She paused, I imagine, before replying. The earth makes a sound as of sighs.

  She tried many times afterwards to name it, the way he looked at her, opened her up. The way a farmer looks at a field he’s about to plough.

  Are you saved? he asked her.

  An old woman walked past them, hand in hand with a toddler. Alright, Samuel, the woman said.

  He nodded. I am, Frances. Alright, wee man.

  They walked on.

  Are you? he asked again.

  What is that unforgettable line? she said. If I do not love you I shall not love.

  It couldn’t have happened quite like this, of course. What kind of answer is that, anyway? And she wasn’t saved. The blood of Christ was foreign to her. Not like Samuel Orr. And yet, and yet.

  Orr stood in Cornmarket, a small circle at the centre of five of Belfast’s main thoroughfares. The roads led in different directions, not only geographically but to different times, contrasting expectations. It was 2012, and a tentative peace was slowly beginning to transform the city. The area hived with goths and skateboarders, teenagers trying out identities off the peg, ready to run. Pick one road and the Victoria Square mall loomed large, a cathedral of money, with priests and prophetesses and all the incense and iconry your weak heart could handle; the glass-domed roof drawing the eye to where God used to live. Another route took you towards the sex shops and pound stores and cheap, Asian-made clothes. One direction pointed to the loyalist north, where commerce competed with the flag for men’s affection, and peace walls—irony unintended—kept one out or in, depending on disposition. Belfast: a grubby Cubist maze, beautiful in the way a deformed child is beautiful to its parents.

  Orr stood in Cornmarket, his voice raised above the distant traffic and chatter of passers-by. At his side a small group of compatriots, fellow sinners, gospel tracts in hand. It was a bright day, but Orr’s breath was visible in the cool air. He rubbed his hands together as he spoke. His voice was loud but not belligerent: And there were certain Greeks among them that came up to worship at the feast: The same came therefore to Philip, which was of Bethsaida of Galilee, and desired him, saying, Sir, we would see Jesus. Philip cometh and telleth Andrew: and again Andrew and Philip tell Jesus. And Jesus answered them, saying, The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified. Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.

  Orr was not the only preacher in Belfast. If they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen. But Orr stood out; maybe his youth, maybe the sh
arp eyes, the lilt, the soft gravel in his voice. He himself would have dismissed all these explanations. For him it was the suppression of these, the suppression even of his own words. On the streets he spoke only the scripture, no commentary, no opinion, no interpretation. No pleading.

  If any man serve me, let him follow me, Orr continued, Christ’s words complicated by his own charm. Anna was walking through Cornmarket that afternoon. She said that she heard the voice before she saw him, that it was the voice that drew her before she even realised who it was. She stopped and watched him. She watched his hands move as though levering the words, pumping them up from a well. She watched the hint of a smile form on his mouth from time to time. A self-sufficient smile, she thought, not a smile to convince or enamour, just sheer delight in the phrases themselves as they fell out, rebounded around him. There was a hint of the hedonistic about it. Some of them sucked on God’s words like they were cough drops, but for Orr they were wine and honey.

  Jesus cried and said, He that believeth on me, believeth not on me, but on him that sent me. And he that seeth me seeth him that sent me. I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on me should not abide in darkness. And if any man hear my words, and believe not, I judge him not: for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world.

  He finished and stepped backward, almost tripping over a kid on a skateboard. He held his balance by grabbing on to the boy, who did likewise. They both laughed, still holding on to one another. Anna watched him as he pushed the kid away, his easy familiarity, his fearless preparedness to be in his own body, the sheer physical fact of him. Das Ding, wrote Rilke, for want of a better way of putting it. She walked over to him as his companions dispersed to hand out their tracts. He spotted her as she came towards him. He smiled.

  Anna, he said.

  Samuel.

  What brings you here?

  I was passing. And then I heard the voice of God.

  Anna loved this. The ambiguity, the way she teased him. From the very beginning, he couldn’t ever be certain when she was mocking and when in earnest. Sometimes she wondered if love, for him, was a form of holy obligation, a way of closing the gap between other people and himself. Her excess, her impossibility, that part he could never be sure of, could never manage, created the space into which to move, to love. What would happen if that gap closed, if he began to know her? Would they become one, or would love run out for lack of space? Is it the same thing?

  The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.

  Anna smiled. That’s what I was going to say.

  Being courted with scripture. A flirtation of the gospel. Anna had never experienced anything like it; the rhythms and patterns of the poetry pounded inside her.

  Anna was an only child. Her father was English, and had moved to Belfast to teach—architecture—in the early eighties. He met her mother, also a teacher, though of young children, within a few months of arriving. They married in 1983, only a year after they met. Anna’s grandparents approved of the match, felt that their daughter was taking a step up an imaginary social ladder. They were mildly religious, but neither their daughter nor her new English husband adhered to any beliefs; none, at any rate, they would deem necessary to acknowledge or defend.

  Anna grew up in an environment of relative safety, in so far as anyone grew up those days in Northern Ireland in safety. She was born in 1986, long after the most horrific days: the no-warning bombs, the Shankill butchers, the bar massacres. 1986 was the year of the last mass demonstration in Belfast. Unionists took to the streets in droves, decked in flags and bunting, fevered with Britishness. Paisley rallied the crowd, words like butter. A man who could shout while whispering. A couple of hundred thousand stood listening, watching. And they lapped it up, all of them, the paramilitaries and the churchgoers, common ground. Around a flag and a slogan. Ulster says no. They staged a strike a few months later—a ‘Day of Action’. Neither of Anna’s parents took part.

  Anna had everything she needed, and more: foreign holidays and school trips, the banal measures of middle-class success. Without siblings she became solitary. Her parents stayed together until she was eighteen. She moved to Durham to study and received a phone call one day from her mother to say that her father was moving out. Anna could recall of this conversation only a clichéd numbness. She was a virgin at the time, and whilst she was hardly naïve, the destructive joy of sex remained an abstraction. Like most teenagers, she neither loved her parents nor hated them, and so her father’s leaving did not feel like a betrayal, no more than her own leaving had been. Isn’t all growing up a betrayal anyway, she would later say.

  How’s Beckett? Orr asked her.

  Still dead, she answered.

  I looked him up, he said. He could write. It’s almost biblical.

  He was a good Protestant, Anna said.

  It’s more than that, said Orr. It’s knowledge. We are dust. It’s easy to say. But you feel Beckett knew it in his bones.

  You’re a literary critic now?

  Orr smiled. It’s not that difficult.

  Anna pushed him, laughing. It was such a tiny moment, insignificant really. And yet, and yet. Kingdoms are won and lost in moments. It was the way he looked around, so imperceptible and so blunt. He wanted to make sure, she realised, that no one had seen it. The touch. And she realised that he had already thought of her naked, imagined the taste of her skin under his tongue. Jesus.

  Belfast is a city without roots. Roots are nourishing: they drag sustenance out of the ground, suck up water from dark subterranean pathways into the light. In Belfast, everything moves in the opposite direction. Flags, history, tradition, they all take light from the world and bury it. We know this, those of us blessed and cursed to be born here, but we do not know that we know it. Listen to the way we talk: the soft rhythms breaking into moments of harshness that surprise even us. Ulster. The name itself punches at you. How could it not say no?

  But what better place for love to take hold? Love: nothing more derivative and nothing more surprising. They met in a coffee shop, a small room with too many tables. They talked of Christ and Beckett and anything else into which they could channel their desire indirectly, any container to hold the immediacy of their longing without it spilling into view.

  They began to see each other weekly. The first few times they met in the same place. There was a determination in Orr, an attempt to keep it in public, as though if it were visible it would be safe. But God knows we have whole cities inside us, places to hide secrets from ourselves. A month passed. Anna fell ill, and cancelled their meeting. Orr hung up, then called back immediately. He offered to pick up groceries, whatever she needed, and bring them to her. It was the first time he had been in her house. She lived alone in one of the tall terraces off the Lisburn Road, near the university. The rear windows looked out on a small garden, backed up against the rear gardens of the neighbouring street. A couple of old oak trees provided privacy and shade, and housed scores of birds in spring and summer. Anna would waken to a cacophony of birdsong. Between and beyond the trees were the harsh lines of the hospital buildings, and further still the dark mound of Black Mountain and Divis, hunched over the city like silent witnesses.

  Bataille wrote: Reproduction implies the existence of discontinuous beings . . . Each being is distinct from all others. His birth, his death, the events of his life may have an interest for others, but he alone is directly concerned in them. He is born alone. He dies alone. Between one being and another, there is a gulf, a discontinuity . . . But I cannot refer to this gulf which separates us without feeling that this is not the whole truth of the matter.

  We are made through an act of fusion, Bataille says, a brief moment of continuity between two lovers, and yet we are born into discontinuity, the inevitable trappedness of being only oneself. He is born alone. He dies alone. All our lives we long to retu
rn to that continuity from which we were made. But there is only one way to do this: to die. This is too much, of course, so we seek out in life moments of approximation, moments when we lose ourselves, when for brief seconds I no longer exist, being part of something, someone, beyond myself. The mystics, beholding in their starved asceticism the face of God, forgot themselves, cried like wolves or children, lost in awe. Lost, literally. Boundaries dissolved, no reflection, no mediation. They say some glowed so bright you couldn’t look at them for fear of blindness. And the lover, bound together to the beloved, penetration eroding for the briefest of moments the lines between, the discontinuity. Can you imagine, never having seen humans before, stumbling upon a coupling? How could you describe such a creature?

  Orr was suspicious of charismatics. For him, God was bound up in the word, in scripture. So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it. The shakers, the speakers in tongues, the layers-on of hands: Orr kept them at a distance, even in his own imagination. But they crowded inside him, refusing to be silent. He wanted comfort, and to comfort others; but he did not want a comfortable God.

  It wasn’t that he feared the voice. The scriptures could not have been more loved by anyone. But the wind bloweth where it listeth, and Orr was not so foolish as to believe that he could control or pacify it. Words were one thing, wind another. He loved the words as he loved his children: inevitably, obviously, in blood. But he desired God like a woman. Passion, surprise; the unknown pathways of the heart. He knew that the words held life, and hope. But there was something else, something beyond. Orr wanted continuity.