The First Day Page 5

  His parents called on him on the Tuesday morning. The children had left early, Philip walking his brothers to their school before catching the bus to his own. Philip’s anger had not diminished, but he had, at only twelve years old, already the wit and cruelty to refuse it an outlet. He answered his father’s questions practically and politely, the slow rage inside him just a shadow of what it would become, and Orr was helplessly aware of the boy’s solitude, if not the extent of his growing hatred.

  His parents knew the basic outline, though not from Orr himself. They had heard through friends of his revelation at the mission hall, and moved from anger to anger at the various betrayals—of Sarah, of the boys, of themselves. By the time Orr sat down with them his father’s mind was already made up, and Orr’s telling of his story was of less interest than the pronouncement of his own judgement. Orr soaked it up, and then asked simply if they would continue to help with the boys. His father seemed taken aback, as though he had expected Orr to fight his corner, but his mother nodded and said simply, Of course.

  Orr was not contrite, but he was sufficiently politic to know when to speak and when to remain silent. His meeting with the elders was short, and the result was the revoking of Orr’s leadership—which had already been agreed—and the removal of all financial support from that moment forward. No reference was made to his past salary; Roddy, Orr later learned, was responsible for this. His membership was viewed differently from his leadership, and Roddy emphasised that as far as they were concerned, Orr continued to be a member of the congregation and a child of God, and what he decided to do with that was very much up to him. As he left the meeting Roddy took him aside and, without speaking, pressed a book into his hands. It was a copy of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. When he got home, he opened the book and found four fifty pound notes, bookmarking a highlighted passage: One became great by expecting the possible, another by expecting the eternal; but he who expected the impossible became greatest of all.

  Sarah’s family ignored him. Orr heard through reliable sources that Jackie, her father, had to be talked down from violence. He may have been older, but he wanted to cause Orr pain with his hands. And Orr would have let him, or so he said. But wisdom, or whatever else it could be called, prevailed, and Orr was simply ignored. Their access to their grandchildren was conducted via his parents, a palatable alternative.

  Anna recalled the months that followed as though watched through glass. They were all—herself, Orr, the boys, his parents—struggling for definition, the lines between things blurred and improbable. Within a week of leaving the mission hall, Orr was working in a small mechanic’s yard off a side street near Orangefield. A young man he had worked with before becoming a pastor—a boy at the time, really, who went by Magee, although his real name was Jonny McGaughy—now ran his own business, and gave Orr the job out of a sense of obligation for the old days, when Orr had trained him with patience and humour. It had been years since he had worked on cars in any serious way, but he picked it up again quickly, and Magee was very quickly grateful not only for Orr’s skill as a mechanic but for his way with people, an ease the younger man had never mastered. Orr, for his part, showed no hesitation or despondency at the change, indeed began to enjoy leaving work at three o’clock every day having finished something: replaced a steering column, fixed a gearbox, changed a set of brake pads. Most customers knew nothing of his recent story, of course, and bantered with the casual irreverent cheek so common in Belfast. But a few recognised him, and nudged their way towards the question of his new situation. Orr gave nothing away, and one or two must have left with imaginations already turning over as efficiently as their engines.

  Orr collected the younger boys on his way home. He would make dinner as they did schoolwork or played, and he found another surprising satisfaction in preparing food. Philip would arrive home later, and continued to play the game: a contrived obedience, just the right side of what Orr demanded, but holding enough back to ensure that the disdain was visible. He took to singing absurd phrases around the house (‘Holy, holy, holy Moses’), sufficiently weird to be noticed but not so much as to provoke a response, as though testing the limits of permitted blasphemy. Orr recalled one particular occasion when Philip walked in on him reading the Bible to his youngest son. He stared at them both briefly with, for the first time, undisguised fury, then walked out, the door echoing, a ‘Fuck Jesus’ hanging (possibly? probably?) in the air behind him.

  Anna and Orr together were finding a new rhythm, an unspoken pattern. The fuel that had driven their earlier engagement, that blend of raw physical desire and longing, had been replaced with a subtler, slower humour. Where once they had come at the same time, Anna told her mother, typically without candour, they now laughed at the same time, and for now it was enough. Orr was present again, increasingly so as the weeks passed, and together they found, to their slight surprise, that the bringing together of their lives was not so very difficult.

  It was not entirely without incident. Orr brought his youngest boys to her house to meet her (Philip refused to go, and Orr did not push the issue). They were well raised, polite children, their natural boisterousness contained in a discipline that both Orr and Sarah had managed uniformly. Even still, as they stood before Anna for the first time some hesitation seemed to catch in them, and they stared without speaking, until the youngest said simply and without malice, as though in answer to some unasked question, My mummy is dead. She went to heaven.

  As the visits played out week by week, they grew used to Anna, and came, maybe, to love her. She had no desire to mother them, and this space she allowed, this refusal of her own authority, opened up a way to a kind of affection, she felt, in both directions, which might otherwise have been impossible. On occasions they went out together, to visit the museum or see the new Titanic building, and Anna would catch a glimpse of them all in the mirror of an exhibition case and experience a confusion of emotion, an uncertainty as to what exactly she was looking at, as though they themselves, their twisted little family, were on display. She asked Orr about it one night before he left—he always returned home to the boys, never spent the night—and he smiled and said, as though he had been preparing for just this kind of question, There are stranger genealogies than this one.

  Philip was not part of this picture, but his absence was never unmarked. He hovered around Orr; the more he pulled away the more Orr would sense him, as though they were invisibly but physically connected. Philip, Anna sensed, was standing in for Orr’s own guilt. He became the embodiment of his angst, to the extent that Orr began to believe, though he would never say as much, that he must either bring Philip close or get rid of him. Anna did not share her suspicions with Orr, and wondered later what would have happened if she had; perhaps she could have headed something off, defeated fate by naming it in advance.

  At the time, however, Philip and Orr staked out their territory. Philip was not yet a teenager, and Orr a grown man. And yet some people bring a skill to punishment, and Philip moved into it as though it were a calling. In the four years that followed there was virtually no respite. Philip became a master of self-control, of the refusal of his own satisfaction. He felt that were he to enjoy himself it would let Orr off the hook, would allow Orr to feel that the damage he had wrought was within limits; and so he denied himself happiness in order to ensure that his father would not for a moment relax, never even once be able to convince himself that what had occurred had ended. Philip became continuation, the past blurred into the present. It was like the story they told children: if you pull a face and the wind changes direction it stays that way for ever.

  Anna wrote, much later, that we grow like trees rather than animals; that that which distorts and hurts us is not shaken off a day, a week, later, but twists and gnarls, forcing us into further distortions, further convulsions of form. It is language, she said, that performs this dubious service. The other animals remember wordlessly, an instinct primed for fear or desire; they move faster or s
lower, senses heightened, ears pricked, their whole body an impression. But we humans build stories, throw words at our experiences until they harden, and branch after twisted branch, God help us, we grow into the sky and into the ground.

  An illustration. A couple of years later, when Philip was fourteen, he began to have nightmares, dreams of hell, devils and fire and convulsions. His bedroom shrank, or expanded, to the size of Dante’s circles, and night after night he would wake up gasping, the shrill sounds of the mocking demons still ringing in his ears. Orr went in to him, sat on his bed, and Philip slowly calmed down, his soft heart thumping, though his face retained some of the fear of the images so recently forced upon him. He was freezing cold, but would not let Orr touch him. But he did not make him leave the room, and for almost two months the pattern played out, three or four times a week, Orr sitting on his bed, light from the landing falling across his back, and Philip in the darkness, finding himself again. It was not lost on Orr: The Lord is longsuffering, and of great mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression, but by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation. Orr realised for the first time its brutal truth: not as proscription, but observation. He had given his child this gift, and he could not take it back.

  Still, the fact that Philip allowed Orr to sit beside him, silently on his bed, began to compensate. He felt, finally, a thawing, a window opening into his son’s life. And it was this that brought the nightmares to an end as abruptly as they had begun. It is testament to Philip’s taste for control that whenever he realised Orr was gaining ground, as he lay at his weakest, exhausted and fearful on his own bed, that even then he found the strength inside him to defeat the demons, to chase them away, and to reinstate the distance from his father he had so carefully nurtured. There were no more sweats, startled shouts, clutching at air. When Orr looked in on him he looked like he was hardly breathing at all, as though the truest peace had suddenly enveloped him. But Anna believed he had simply made a decision. The demons had not gone away at all, his dreams still flooded with hell. But he decided that he belonged there, that he was, in a word, home.

  I am getting ahead of myself.

  On the morning of 4 January, Anna gave birth to a son. They called his name Samuel, like his father, like Beckett. He was almost two weeks overdue; perhaps he knew what was coming. Orr was present at the birth, held Anna’s hand as the child emerged, its lungs already primed, the blood of his mother a sticky, viscous coating. Other animals lick it off; in the hospital they used soft towels, and they wrapped him as he cried and placed him on his exhausted mother’s chest, feeling already for the nipple, ravenous and new. Orr was outwardly calm, but even in her tiredness Anna was aware of some brooding undercurrent, a rip-tide pulling at him, as though the whole event had been a surprise and only now was he realising the magnitude of what was happening. Orr’s mother asked him what it was like, what it felt like, holding his new son for the first time. Like fear, he said, only stronger. Love, I suppose.

  The child stayed in the hospital for a few days. The birth itself had been uncomplicated, though the labour was long and painful, and Anna struggled to sleep even when it was over, the echoing sounds of the hospital drifting into the ward, the blue of the ambulance lights from the streets far below flashing faintly against the windows throughout the night. But the child slept well, and took to the breast with ease and greed. Orr visited for as long as he was allowed on those first days, and even brought his children, Philip excepted, to see their new brother. Half-brother, Philip reminded him.

  On the third day Orr drove Anna home, where her mother was waiting, food prepared for weeks in advance, a small crib for the baby which she had assembled herself. She welcomed them warmly; she had met Orr a number of times already, and had grown to like him, his sober humour a match for her own. Anna moved slowly but with strength growing daily, and they ate a first meal of soup and bread in a silence broken only by the noises of the child, whose presence filled the spaces they may otherwise have felt compelled to fill with words. Anna’s mother had offered to move in for the first few weeks, and Anna had agreed, so Orr stayed for an hour and left. On the way out Anna said to him, We did it. He nodded, smiled, and replied simply, We did. When Anna closed the door it again struck her that perhaps they were not talking about the same thing.

  The movement into motherhood, for Anna, was less like journeying into another country than like discovering in her own home a room she never knew existed, furnished already and comfortable. She noted that her senses changed, physically; her hearing became more acute, attuned to the sounds of her child’s cries and movements. She was not nervous; as though the unlikelihood of how the child had come about was a confirmation that something—which she resisted naming—was on her side. Over the first few weeks as she held him, both part of herself and plainly other, the awareness of an observation began to grow in her, which she had had no anticipation of. As she grew accustomed to looking at him, the faces of others, even Orr himself, grew grotesque, ugly. They were outsized, the child’s face the new measure of everything. She could trace it with her finger: initially the whole face fitting inside the palm of her hand as she held him to her breast, but day by day growing, pushing itself into the surrounding space, until other faces gradually retained their normality. Anna never forgot the sensation, however. Some new scale had been introduced to the world.

  Philip resisted the overtures from his father to visit, and so, at two weeks old, he brought the child to him. Philip was sitting on his bed reading, and heard his father and brothers arriving home, but, as usual, ignored them. Orr opened the door to his bedroom, and Philip looked up as Anna brushed past Orr and sat on the edge of the bed, Samuel wrapped tight in her arms. Philip stared at them both, silent. Anna said, This is Samuel. She held the child out to Philip as Orr watched on, struck dumb by a genuine nervousness. Philip paused only for a few seconds and then reached out and lifted the child from Anna, accepted him, and held him close to his face, looking at him intently. The child wriggled in his hands. His eyes, so filled with a forced hatred, seemed to change colour, and he once again became, if only briefly, the child he was. In the position they were in, Samuel’s back was to Anna, so she could not see his expression; but Philip’s face became a mirror, following the child, chasing his smiles and grimaces. Orr’s youngest moved beside Philip, nudging on to the bed, and Orr reached out his arm to steady him, to ensure he did not cause Philip to drop the child. It jarred Philip back to himself, the reminder that Orr was in the room, and he quickly handed Samuel back to Anna, nodding his head as though in answer to a question he had not been asked.

  In the following weeks, and after Anna’s mother had moved back home, a routine was established. Orr was more or less tied to his house, with occasional exceptions thanks to the generosity of his parents in looking after the boys, so Anna would stay with him four nights a week. Anna was hesitant at first. She was aware that she was moving into what had been Sarah’s space, and knew that Orr would be subject to criticism that she may never hear but which would surely hurt him. But he dismissed this concern, moving with his typical disregard for the opinions of others into embracing the one practical option in front of them. He bought duplicates of each of the items the child would need and set up what had been his study as a nursery.

  The boys responded in different ways to the new arrangement. The middle child embraced it wholeheartedly, giving himself over to his new brother as one might to a new toy. It can hardly be called luck, but there was something different about losing one’s mother at eight years old, and not five or twelve. The youngest, although he had initially responded with excitement and affection, soon grew ambivalent, then actively hostile, as though he had belatedly realised that he had been usurped, and had even, somehow—his own kindness, perhaps?—hastened the situation he now resented. He retreated further into himself, and engaged Samuel less and less. On one occasion, in the middle of the night, Orr
awoke to find him standing over Samuel’s cot in the nursery, staring silently at the sleeping child. Orr, no stranger to scepticism about human nature and the potential for violence embedded in even the most average of men, was struck suddenly and for the first time that this tendency was as present, as possible, in the rooms of his own house. It was concrete, a brick in his chest, he told Anna some months later, when the full visceral extent of the realisation had run through him: depravity not as a moral failure, but as a fundamental of childhood, as natural as smiling or lying down, and no less enjoyable. Orr watched his new child, and watched his other children watching his new child, and his mind moved to places he had not been aware of, images conjured seemingly out of nowhere but palpable, fraught violence at their edges.

  He had naturally assumed that the most worrying demonstration of this would have been found in Philip; so much groundwork had he already done, and there was little subtlety to his disgust at his father, nor to the anger at the new life foisted on him. And yet that first interaction with Samuel, the child held in his arms as the others watched, seemed to have worked in some indefinable way, and Orr was fascinated, and wise enough to keep his fascination hidden, with the way Philip began to move into the child’s orbit, began to watch for him and play with him, to see him as—Anna used the word much later, too much later, perhaps—an accomplice. Philip began to treat Samuel differently from everyone else, and, within the context of the family at least, to build his life around the child’s, as though he was the one tolerable part of the whole story. An affection developed between them, which moved in both directions. Philip was able to evoke reactions of wild humour, joy even, in Samuel that could not be replicated by either Orr or Anna, much to Orr’s unease and Anna’s amusement. They fell into a routine: Samuel launching objects across a room, discovering his arms; Philip, laughing, returning them, to coos of gleeful delight. A delight suspended, temporarily, when Orr arrived home from work one day to discover the missile being hurled was his bible.