The First Day Read online

  He still had, by the doctor’s final assessment, around 7 per cent vision in his right eye. It was a number that pleased him: a holy number. His sermons had been fairly flooded with sevens—the seven fat years and seven lean, the seven days of creation (the rest day is counted, he was always pleased to point out to the workaholics), the seven devils who left Mary Magdalene. Every seventh year was a sabbath—forgive debts, he counselled, and took his own counsel—and after seven sevens came fifty, the jubilee, when the land itself was set free, returned. How many times shall I forgive my brother? Seven times? No: multiply.

  And so he saw shapes still, blurred movement, hazy and dark, like old film footage layered on itself, he described it, one body becoming another. It was not enough, though—he could neither cross roads safely nor shop for food without someone to help, and even his own home became a trap, stairs and seats and doorways unidentifiable. His youngest had already emigrated to Australia, and Anna was with Curran, not that that was ever a realistic avenue, I suppose. So he moved in with his remaining son, who lived in a sizeable house just outside Belfast. It was a compromised scenario though, Orr’s loss of independence more difficult for him than he had expected. He was given a room at the rear of the house, next to their two children, both teenagers, and whilst they liked him, and he them, their mother had never had much time for her father-in-law, and was not slow to let him know. She bickered with her children for spending too much time with him instead of studying, and he spent more and more time in his room on his own, listening to radio shows and audiobooks. The older boy tried to teach him braille: I’ll not live long enough to get the benefit, he said. When the family finally proposed a nursing home—Orr had been living with them for almost two years—the collective relief could have lifted the Hindenburg.

  He moved into a fold off the Antrim Road. He was nudging towards his late sixties and, his eyes aside, he was healthy and sharp. He could not get used to it. The rest of the residents—inmates, he called them, when he spoke to me by phone, which was more and more frequently—were older, frail and tired, mostly humourless. Half of them didn’t know who they were. He had, at first, looked forward to the company, but it proved a false hope, and he spent even more time alone, his world closing in on him, getting smaller and smaller. He felt himself reduce; for the first time in his life, it was all too much. He was in the wrong place.

  He had been in the home for six months by the time I visited again. Another few years had passed and still I did not look forward to returning. It always felt to me like a retreat; it would take me weeks afterwards to shake the Belfast shit off myself, to climb back into the thin, clean air of my American life. My mother had been again for a visit, a few months before, this time accompanied by Curran. I had thought about her often, more than I let myself realise. I held it against her. I was embarrassed, I suppose—or perhaps embarrassed is not quite right. She who had always been there, she who knew everything—I could not forgive her that.

  At that stage I was in Gowanus, a pretty shitty one-bed walk-up, the price of my privacy. They stayed in a hotel in midtown, but came across to pick me up one evening, and my mother looked around my apartment as though it were an exhibition in itself. Her ignorance and interest combined to give me something back, a sense of myself as unknown, and I loved her for it. In my childhood her questions had felt like prompts, the narrative predetermined; if there were answers she already had them, and I might hope at best to stumble into some approximation. But I realised, as she scanned my bookshelves, stared with puzzlement at cheap paintings and sculptures I’d bought at degree shows or from friends, that I had begun to find my own corners, my own periphery. My outer reaches. Darkness as character—the unknown not an absence but a space to grow into.

  I watched Curran look at paintings, and could not help but share his joy, his thrilled uncool exuberance. I had been working at the Met for a few years by this stage; still only a guard, but already getting noticed, my own attention to detail and evident love of the art catching the wonderful American meritocratic eye. Curran’s childish pleasure turned out to be an inadvertent generosity; I remember noticing, after they left, a confidence in my choices, my namings, that could only have come from him.

  When I returned to Belfast, then, I could have stayed with my mother, but out of a mixture of curiosity and independence, I suppose, I booked myself into a cheap hotel in the city centre for the five days I was planning to stay. I arrived late on the first night, and walked alone to the Cathedral Quarter. I had kept in touch with no one from home save my parents, so I had no one to call. I could have trawled through Facebook, but in truth, and as usual, the anonymity appealed. I had a drink in a bar I had visited once or twice with my mother when I was still a teenager, her buying me rum-and-Cokes and laughing at my hesitation, my fear of getting caught. I sat on my own, listened to the conversations floating unattached around me, the dropped phrases and thick vowels reminding me of who I was, who I tried not to be. At one stage a woman shuffled up to the bar, money for her round already in her hand. She wore a low-cut dress, breasts barely being held back from their threatened freedom. I tried not to look.

  Alright love, she said. Early thirties, a bit older than me. I nodded, smiled. Not bad, eh?

  I must have raised my eyebrows, because she pushed her chest out a little more, and laughed.

  You’re new here, she said. I can tell.

  Can you?

  That accent. You pick that up halfway across the Atlantic?

  Something like that.

  Are you American?

  No such luck. I felt myself squeeze back into the words, the metre.

  A turncoat, eh? Did you live over there?

  Still do. New York.

  Fuck me. New York. I fucking love New York. She raised her hand to her mouth, eyebrows jumping. Sorry. Are you good living?

  Good enough. But not like that.

  Thank Christ, she said, pleased with her own joke.

  I laughed. I began to relax, felt something happen that I rarely experienced in America. I was being flirted with, which wasn’t new, not exactly, but it was with a woman, which was. They seemed to pick up on it faster there. I was letting go, enjoying the freedom, the disassociation from myself, or part of myself.

  You drinking on your own? she asked me.

  It’s quicker, I said, and she laughed.

  What are you back for?

  Reality encroaching again, the ignorant beast. Oh you know. Obligation. Duty.

  How long will your duties take?

  Ah, it depends. I felt the air sink, flatten. In it flooded: the world, tomorrow, all of it.

  She placed her order, added a pint for me. She introduced herself. We shook hands, and I considered telling her, coming clean. But what harm was there? That dogged drive to honesty, to needless explanation, how well had it served me? I thought of my father again and, not for the first time, envied him that, his unapologetic being, his selfishness. What I wouldn’t give. I smiled, told her my name, said it was a pleasure meeting her and, at her prompting, promised to join her and her friends in a while.

  I didn’t, of course. I finished my drink and stepped out into the late-summer evening, the air still warm, night not yet fallen. I wandered over the Queen’s Bridge, heading towards the new run of bars down at Titanic Quarter. The city had spread, slowly but steadily, out across the Lagan and into the working-class estates to the east, driving house prices up and families out. It used to be all flags out this way, one or the other; now cranes hung above terraces marked for demolition, and new half-finished apartment blocks caught the eye with their slick surfaces and aura of money. It was hard to lament the old, but the new felt overdone, a banker’s Ferrari, an inner turmoil not so easily displaced.

  There were fewer people on the streets here than in the centre, but the bars were still busy. I had one more drink—this time undisturbed—and walked back to my hotel in an unexpected fug of satisfaction, the alcohol thinning my blood just enough, my movem
ents that bit looser, lighter. This place wasn’t as bad as I remembered.

  I slept easily, and woke refreshed. I ate breakfast—more flirting, this time with the young Polish woman who served me coffee; what was it about being in Belfast that made this so easy?—and then caught the bus at the side of the City Hall, heading north. The nursing home was on the Antrim Road, on a sprawling piece of garden nestled into the lower parts of the Cavehill near Ben Madigan. It was one of Belfast’s old wealthy areas, large houses neighbouring one another with a stolid pride, architectural confidence. It was a safe affluence, all the same; I didn’t envy it. I wouldn’t have given up my shitty Bushwick apartment for two of them.

  My father was waiting for me in his room. A carer led me down the hallway, making small-talk. I remember the sudden hesitation clawing at me, as though I had only just realised why I was there. I stopped—the young man leading me stopped too, turning inquisitively—and caught my breath.

  First visit? he said. I nodded. Take your time, he said. He pointed down the corridor. Room 23, when you’re ready. He patted me on the shoulder as he walked away.

  I turned and looked out the window. Belfast Lough lay a mile below, the northern suburbs sprawling easy between, green and lush at the end of summer. A light rain had just started to fall but the sun was still out, and the air flickered, shone. The ferry to Scotland inched along in front of Holywood, and I watched it, and was returned to the few summers my mother had taken me to the Highlands on that very boat, Pitlochry and Aviemore and Fort William. I recalled her telling me—I had been eating ice cream at the time, ten years old—that I may have been conceived there, in a cabin near Elgin, and remembered my horror at the thought that I had been conceived at all, whatever that was.

  I moved down the corridor. I knocked on my father’s door and waited for a voice. Come in, I heard, and pushed it open. My father sat on his bed, his hands resting on either side of him, as though holding him up. He was dressed well enough, and his hair was combed, flattened, but he was haggard, his cheeks falling in on themselves. I could hardly believe it. He looked at me.

  Who is it? he said. Nico, is that you? Is my son here yet?

  I’m your son, I said.

  A smile crept on to his face, recognition.

  There he is, he said. Nice to see you. He laughed, and his face changed, the gaunt hollow replaced with the charm, the cheek that I remembered. Well, come on in then. Welcome to my kingdom.

  I looked around the room, took it in, the flowered curtains, the banal browns and creams. I was faintly relieved my father couldn’t see, God knows what he’d have thought of it if he could. Still, he must have known where he was. He’d visited enough of these places before he went blind.

  As though I had spoken aloud, Orr said, Probably better that I can’t see it. He still held a smile, and I was surprised at finding myself grateful to him for making this less sombre than it might have been.

  You always loved beige, right? I said.

  He tried to push himself up but didn’t have it in his arms. What about a cuppa? he said.

  We sat opposite one another in the common room, at a table beside the window. The view stretched from the lough below around to the northern side, where the zoo used to be. In the distance I could see the war memorial at Knockagh.

  Nice view? Orr said.

  Yeah.

  Describe it for me.

  Sure you remember it, don’t you? I was conscious of being looked at but not seen. I remembered the feeling from the last time I was back, but I had hidden it away in the meantime, and I was surprised that such an unnerving sensation could be so easily displaced in memory.

  Words are my eyes now, he said.

  So we talked. Slowly, gently, one small offering and then another, an exchange first of descriptions, then of kindnesses, then of hurts. This is when he told me about Philip, his desire to lure him out. A routine, an expectation. He spoke also about Anna, a frank ruefulness he had never before expressed. They took shape that day, for me; their solitariness, as I had mostly known it, temporarily overturned by stories, articulated affections, until a picture became present, actual; as Orr spoke I found something release in me, a sort of unanticipated acquittal of myself, enlarged by the capacity they had between them, even if only briefly, created in the world.

  We talked for hours. He was wise enough not to pry too much into the detail of my life, though I had not expected him to remember as much as he did. I found myself stunned by my enjoyment, bitter almost that it should feel so easy.

  As I went to leave he pulled me back down on to the bench.

  I have not told you everything, he said. I have not told even Anna. Philip is not dead. At least, he was not dead, he was not dead then. You were still a boy, he said, nine or ten, when he came back. He’d have been twenty-one. I had given up by then, of course. I was preaching, a wee hall in Larne. The service was halfway through, the singing just finished, and I got up behind the pulpit. Raised up a little—you could see everyone. And I started reading from the text—Paul’s letter to the Ephesians: And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins; Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience . . . And I looked up at that point, and I remember the pure shock of it, to see him sitting in the back row, staring at me. His face was stone, flawless. I know this will sound ridiculous, but I thought immediately of how beautiful he was. And I did not know what to do. I went on reading, finished the text. I could barely get through it in places: But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ. I was being mocked. When I had finished reading I prayed, as I do, and when I opened my eyes he was gone. I stared at his empty seat and I could not believe it. And then the sound from outside: a crash, glass shattering. I jumped down into the aisle and ran to the back door. My car was parked right outside the church, on the pavement; a rock through the front windscreen. I couldn’t see him. I walked around the car, into the street, looking for him. A few of the elders had come outside and asked if I was okay. Then they saw the car. I could not believe I had not come down from the pulpit as soon as I saw him. Embraced him. I started shouting his name. I can’t remember what else I shouted. The poor people from the hall had no idea, they didn’t know what to do. One started to call the police and I made him put his phone away. I shouted and shouted for Philip to come out, to talk to me. But he didn’t. He was gone again.

  He stopped speaking and sat still, silent. I sat beside him, empty of responses. Eventually he spoke again.

  That was it. The only time I saw him again. I believe he came to do me violence but couldn’t see it through. Something in him resisted. He did not have the measure of it.

  I looked across the room at him now, a Bushwick timber yard buzzing in the background, and remembered that conversation, remembered my decision to invite him to New York to live with me. I went to see Anna that night, had dinner with her and Curran. I had made no commitment of secrecy to Orr, but in the end I did not tell her what we had spoken about. I thought about it, alone in my hotel room, the young drunks of Belfast loudly crowding the streets below as I stared down. Invented scenarios bled one into another, and eventually I gave up imagining what would happen and gave myself over to the desire, the unexpected enthusiasm. I proposed the idea when I returned to see him on the following morning. I allowed him a couple of days to consider it, but he told me later he had decided immediately. I stayed on for an extra week, making the necessary enquiries, applications. He had a friend who worked in the US Embassy in Dublin, and made the appropriate winks and handshakes to speed up the process. And two months later I took the subway out to JFK and met him off the flight. So you came, I said, and took his bags from the young airline representative who had assisted him from the plane.

  I am come that they might have life, he grinned, and that they might have it more abundantly.

  From
the subway exit to the museum was a quarter of a mile. Six hundred and forty-two steps. I tried to force myself into a calmness, each footstep a statement. He was everywhere, I knew, but I didn’t see him. I smiled to myself as I walked through the staff entrance, climbed the stairs. Balthasar approached me before I left the common room for the galleries.

  How are you feeling?

  I nodded. Ship-shape.

  You must take care of yourself, Sam. As my grandfather used to say, there’s few of us left.

  The morning passed more or less without incident, though one woman in an adjoining gallery had an asthma attack and had to be assisted by a medic, which caused a small scene. It heightened the experience for the other viewers, I again observed; they could never be sure that the unfortunate woman had not been made unwell simply by the art, and it charged their own experience with a potential danger. I had wondered, at times, if we shouldn’t perhaps set up this kind of thing every now and again, an unofficial service to our visitors. Rembrandt while healthy is one thing; but with the subtle threat of illness, even death, in the air, what it becomes. We laughed over lunch as I raised the suggestion. When I returned to the floor for the afternoon, it was with an ease, a lightness; the previous day all but erased.

  It was almost five o’clock when it happened. I turned from the Van Dyck towards the Vermeer, and there he was, standing in the centre of the room, staring at me. I stopped moving, and Philip took it up, reaching out his hand as he crossed the twenty feet between us. A couple of visitors turned to see, then turned away. I let him take my hand, felt it drop again to my side. I heard words but could not attach them to things. How are you doing, long time, God, I heard you were here (you heard I was here?), well, you look well, isn’t it, Vermeer’s light, I know. They moved around me, but I concentrated, focused only on slowing my heart down, refinding the thump thump thump that would settle me. Philip’s face, older but so clearly himself, just added to, an accretion. His scar still fairly shone; he had done a lot less than me to hide it.