The First Day Page 2

  And this, Anna said, was the attraction. He was handsome enough. He could stand upright in a room in a way that drew from others both authority and warmth. A not inconsiderable quality. He listened to you when you talked. But it was his connectedness, his sense of being caught up in the unfolding presence of God in the world, that struck her as extraordinary. It wasn’t that he was constantly trying to make everything holy, but that, for him, there was no line between the sacred and the profane. The categories were meaningless. Anna said once that in the early days she could not shake a picture of him as—blasphemy upon blasphemy—the young Krishna being scolded by his foster-mother Yashoda and opening his mouth to reveal the Seven Oceans, the vast expanse of the entire universe in all its glory.

  Those few weeks, as Anna recovered—she had a mild case of tonsillitis, but it took nearly a month to clear up—were, as she remembered them, stark and beautiful. She was weak, tired. Her vanity protested Orr’s presence; she wanted him to see her healthy and alert. But Orr’s attentiveness, his persistent humour, outpaced her reluctance. She found herself longing for his arrival; waking in the morning to realise he wouldn’t be visiting, she felt the weight of the day descend on her, empty and monotonous. They talked, or rather he talked, her throat resisting. And somehow, incrementally, he touched her.

  Incrementally. It was like evolution, she said. No sudden moment, no threshold crossed. Now fish, now primate, now human. No point at which one ended and the other began, and yet they were separate, discrete. Continuity and discontinuity. In the beginning, they did not touch. But now. His hand strokes her arm, pushes hair from her face. He kisses her cheek as he leaves, like a French film. She lies staring at the ceiling, his footsteps on the stairs, the door closing behind him, the engine of his car choking into life. She cannot think, her mind a mess of impressions, longing. What is that unforgettable line? If I do not love you I shall not love.

  Looking back, it struck Anna that she had no memory of the first time they slept together. Or rather, no single memory. Everything became memory, her entire body, not just her mind, a container. He flooded her, she said.

  II

  Orr continued to preach, his fervour undimmed. Some later said they noticed a change, but you have to take such re-readings of history lightly; how tempting to mistake hindsight for wisdom. The year was rushing towards Christmas, as it does in Belfast. The days shorten, darkness takes over. The rain, a steady presence throughout the year, becomes colder, the angles harsher. But then those days come like an unexpected grace: green and yellow and brown leaves littering the pavement, the early dew glinting, flickering in the low sun. Orr took to walking by the Lagan, through cut glens where cows, motionless, chewed their slow way through winter. The banks of the river were sparse and dun, mute birds aware, taking flight as he passed, leaving thin twigs trembling. Sometimes he walked as far as Lambeg, past the old brewery, out into open fields. He went out to find God, he told his wife, to listen to the Spirit. Maybe he did. Or maybe he was trying to walk himself out of love.

  At times he would visit Anna after these walks. His cheeks flushed pink, burrs on his trousers. His hands were freezing, and he put them between her legs to warm them up. Sometimes they just lay there, his hands against her, between her, naked and quiet. He looked at her like he was trying to find something, she said, and every time he left he seemed to have a satisfaction, like he had glimpsed what he was looking for. She felt both exhilarated and unnerved by it; the sense that it wasn’t really her he was after, but something inside her. She asked him once what he was looking at. He was standing naked at her bedroom window, framed against a grey sky, like an art installation. He was watching her, saying nothing. She lay on the bed, propped up on an elbow. This nakedness a gift, something he gave her which everything that followed could never erase: the feeling of being at home in one’s body. He looked at her for a long time before answering. And Moses said unto God, said Orr, Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh, and that I should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt?

  So much of Orr remained impenetrable to Anna. She felt like Marlow, moving deeper and deeper towards Kurtz, staring at the passing riverbanks, still understanding nothing. But the river carried her, and the sense of discovery was palpable, invigorating. She was both hunter and hunted, the thrill of capture alternating with the fear of being captured. She had both too little of him and too much; even in his absence her body felt more alive, her awareness heightened.

  The months that followed were joyous. Anna was visited by Orr as often as he could without raising suspicion. His church and home were in the east of the city, far from the student bars and upmarket boutiques of the Lisburn Road, where Anna lived. Belfast had been ripped apart, ghettoised by the Troubles. Interfaces, walls, twilight zones. Orr’s area was dominated, more or less, by loyalists. The children of the 1986 generation of no-sayers, they were just as militant, though with less to lose. A decade of unimaginative leadership, of reconciliation attempts built around ‘telling your story’, served for the most part merely to trap people in the failed myths they’d grown up with rather than encouraging them to abandon them for bigger, messier ones. Belfast was left with the veneer of a cohesive city, but was deeply fractured below the surface. More ‘peace walls’ were built in the ten years following the IRA ceasefire in 1994 than in the previous twenty.

  Still, Orr could travel to Anna’s part of the city easily, and whilst they avoided venturing out in public, he wasn’t in great fear of being discovered visiting her house. There was a routine to their time together. They almost always made love first, no small-talk or awkward uncertainty. After the first month, as their intimacy increasingly matched their desire, Anna would often answer the door naked. At times she would touch herself before he arrived, so that from the first second her nerves would pulse. After the sex were long hours of lying around, afternoons bleeding towards evening, spring revealing itself slowly outside her bedroom window. When Orr wasn’t looking at her he often stood by the window, watching the world taking shape again, recomposing itself after the death of winter. She watched his concentration, followed the lines of his body.

  They spoke of everything but their relationship, the two of them combined. Orr talked of God fearlessly, seemingly unconcerned that he was standing naked in front of a woman not his wife. It’s hard to make sense of this. Orr loved God and his word. And he loved a woman in direct contradiction of this word, even a most liberal interpretation. Neither of these realities is necessarily surprising. Whilst Orr kept it a secret, there was a sense in which he wasn’t hiding. As he stood naked before Anna, he also stood naked before God, and you’d have to think that he was as aware of His eyes as of hers. There was a boldness in Orr’s love, or at least in the exercise of it. He was daring God to prove him wrong. To intervene. In the middle of a rare argument, Anna accused him of being a hypocrite. What would Jesus do? she asked him. Orr was halfway putting his clothes back on. He stopped, looked at her, and said: He would do this. And he removed his clothes again and moved his mouth between her legs and began to kiss her.

  Blasphemy is so close to devotion. The believer knows God, knows him intimately, not through rules and laws and books but in his heart; he feels God move through his body. The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. Orr tied himself to this like an anchor. He did not try to justify himself, but called on God to prove that he would have done otherwise. He was not one of those men constantly second-guessing their infidelity, moving from lust to regret within the hour. Orr committed to his desire, and whatever selfishness that entailed, it was not the selfishness of dragging Anna into his own guilt.

  And so it went. Three, four times a week he called on her and they spent a morning, an afternoon together. Only once did they break the routine. An elderly uncle of Orr’s died in Scotland. Orr could have sent his condolences in a letter, but he decided to go. The funeral was in Elgin, a small town just to the east of Inverness, once a cathedral city. Orr’s ancestors had strong ties
to Moray and Aberdeenshire. His father, although born in Belfast, talked with just a hint of Scottish burr, inherited from his own father, who had grown up in Aberdeen and moved to Belfast in his twenties. As a child Orr spent three or four summers in the hills and mountains of the region, and would always talk warmly of the towns he then visited: Lossiemouth, Buckie, Fraserburgh, Peterhead, Macduff. They sounded, to his young ear, close enough to be familiar but strange enough for the promise of mystery. He told Anna that it was in Peterhead that he got saved. His father took him to a tent mission in a field beside a gospel hall. Orr was ten years old. The preacher was a man named Lousse, white hair streaked with grey and black, like an animal. He was stout, his belly roundly pushing at the buttons of his shirt, his tie never settling, flapping with the movement of his arms as he preached. And his voice was like singing, Orr said, a rich, round brogue that practically sucked you into the kingdom. Orr had heard it all before: ye must be born again, suffer the little children, come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. It was not news, as such. There was a sense in which Orr, even at ten, already believed it; he just hadn’t committed to it. But something was different that day as Lousse spoke, Orr said. It was a different text, a stranger text. Lousse preached from John 12: 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. There was something in Orr that leapt when he heard those words. The attraction of hating one’s life. God knows what battles we fight with ourselves. Ten years old. He committed himself to Christ that day, Orr said, Christ in his brokenness, Christ in his death. And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.

  So Orr went back, and brought Anna with him. Anna travelled on her own, rented a small cottage at the edge of the Cairngorms, and Orr stayed with her. He travelled in and out to Elgin, meeting family members, sharing his grief and consolation. He told people he was staying in a hotel, and more than once had to resist an offer of a spare room. He was very nearly caught out. On one occasion, a cousin called unannounced at the hotel he had named. Orr’s name was nowhere in the register. The cousin asked him on the following day, and he had to quickly come up with an excuse, namely that he had moved somewhere closer to the mountains.

  For the four days and nights of the trip, Orr and Anna were as husband and wife, shut off from the world. Anna looked back often on this time with such fondness it was almost cruel: the unfilled outline of what might have been. For four days and four nights they drank tea, talked, sat in the shape of each other’s bodies on a bench in front of the cottage watching the dusk descend and the mountains fold in on themselves, the colour fading slowly until all was darkness. They woke to the sound of their own breathing. Birds, different birds, sang outside their windows. Once Anna, standing at the window, spotted a deer move across the low slopes of the nearby mountain. It was maybe two hundred yards away, but it turned as though it realised it was being watched, and stared in her direction. Orr was lying in the bed. She opened her mouth to tell him and then stopped, decided to keep it to herself, this moment of grace, this recognition. She turned to look at him. When she looked back towards the mountain, the deer was gone.

  Orr’s uncle had been well known and well loved in the town, and Orr found himself surprised by the connection he began to feel. Every day Anna watched him drive off towards Elgin, thirty miles away. When he returned he would repeat the stories he had heard, stories of faith and humour and kindness, and occasional mishap. His uncle had died well into old age, but not all in the family had been so fortunate, and the recounting of lives cut short seemed to give him a sense of himself that swelled at the edges. He shared these stories with Anna as though they were gifts.

  Anna spent the hours while he was away reading, and occasionally writing. At this stage in her life (still well shy of thirty) she had published only her PhD thesis, an examination of the influence of German romantic painters on Beckett’s later plays. Already there were signs of the writer she would become, her wit tied to stark, blunt expressions. She took those German words that sound too good to be translated—Schadenfreude, Weltanschauung, Gemütlichkeit—and built a style out of their geometry: precise, full in the mouth, melancholic.

  Her first collection of poetry came a few years later, but some of the poems that appeared in it date from this time. Edited and honed for many months afterwards, but born of the curvature and scent of the Cairngorms. On the night before they left, Orr arrived back to find her hunched over the small wooden desk, writing by candlelight.

  Show me what you’re writing, he said. She wouldn’t. He smiled. Are you writing me?

  Would you like me to? she asked.

  A disturbance into words, a pillow of old words, he said.

  She stared at him in surprise. You’re quoting Beckett now?

  He laughed.

  She knew then, she said later. Who could doubt her?

  Two weeks after they returned from Scotland there was an accident in a small row of terraced houses near Orr’s church. An unattended gas fire exploded, ripping apart a living room. An elderly couple, asleep upstairs, just managed to escape. But the fire spread quickly, catching the neighbouring house and racing through the downstairs rooms at speed. The furniture was old and cheap, highly flammable. Upstairs there was a young woman and her baby, four months old. The fire trapped them at the top of the house and the woman yelled from the windows for help. Neighbours rushed into the street but the flames from the blaze kept them well back. In desperation, the woman threw her baby to a man standing as close as he dared. But her throw was poor and the child hit the ground heavy. When the woman realised what had happened she moved back from the window, and disappeared from view, into the blaze.

  Orr presided over the shared funeral. The tragedy was front-page news, and hundreds came to pay respect. Somehow people identified with the woman, or perhaps the child; the overwhelming futility, the powerlessness. It did not require a revolutionary spirit to see the story as one of poverty: gas heaters, cheap furniture, houses rammed close together. Class was never a major rallying point in Belfast: too deep and well exploited were more colourful histories of belief and tradition. And yet, like everywhere else, the experiences of the poor moved quickly through history and religion towards the broader church of cheap food, reality television and unemployment. Anxiety was free currency in the city; unnamed resentments simmered, inarticulable. A blurred, passive violence combined with outrage. No one knew quite where to direct their anger, and yet anger seemed in endless supply.

  It was in this setting that Orr had to put two bodies in the ground. Anna saw an intensity in him she had not witnessed before. He was quiet, focused, his sadness palpable but not indulgent. When he visited her he moved around her house as though it were a boxing ring.

  At the funeral Orr spoke quietly and without sentimentality. The woman had no relatives present, and perhaps this gave him a freedom he would have found difficult to create under the expectations of family members, lovers. He praised the woman, and the child, and the neighbours. He said that platitudes had no place on a day like this. That if comfort were to be found, it should be found in each other, in the physical presence of the people you can reach out and hold, and love. He said, to an audible murmur, that God should be ashamed. And then he read Psalm 137: By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem abov
e my chief joy. Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Raze it, raze it, even to the foundation thereof. O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.

  He omitted the final verse: Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

  Everything changes, but there is nothing new under the sun. As a child, without brothers or sisters, Anna had to constantly invent ways to amuse herself. She created a game in which she would hide items of her mother’s—hairbrushes, necklaces, even shoes—around the house. At first it irritated her mother and she complained. But the hiding places were obvious, a cupboard she would open regularly, where the teabags were kept, or under her coat. Her mother warmed to it, began to appreciate these deliberate surprises, these tiny gifts. Anna did not forget, though she’d been only six or seven years old at the time, seeing her mother change her mind, moving from irritation to joy. And she was struck that the only change was inside her, that her mother was choosing something; that the world existed, in some measure at least, within. She was not, obviously, able to articulate this at the time. But it triggered in her, the memory of it, she said, a mute awareness, a responsiveness, a determination to create the world as she walked through it. By appreciation, by openness. By grace.

  The funeral did something to Orr. His faith up to this point was hardly naïve, but from this point it tightened, hardened. It became leaner. It did not dissipate, fall apart as one sees among liberals, disappointed by their God being less powerful, or less nice, than they think themselves, and therefore dismissible. Orr’s faith was more biblical, more brutal. If God needed fought, Orr would fight him. There was a violence in Orr. He would not lie down and let God walk all over him. An arrogance, perhaps; but isn’t all faith arrogance? A universe stretching out towards eternity in both directions, uncountable creatures scuttling over the face of the earth: yet God loves me. Why not, of course. If you’re going to have a god, you may as well have a decent-sized god, and one that pays attention. Not, for Orr, a cringing deity, full of love for mankind but utterly unable to lift a finger to help. His God may indeed stretch out the heavens like a curtain; but his hands were dirty.