The First Day Read online

  Anna continued to write during this period, this first year of her child’s life. She had been given two full semesters off teaching but had promised to turn in a number of papers for a Beckett conference in Barcelona towards the end of the year. Finding time to read had, naturally, become more difficult, and the mundane realities of raising a child, or, more accurately at this early stage, keeping a small creature alive and healthy, consumed her in a way she had not quite been prepared for. And yet she found herself returning to Beckett, when she could, with a renewed wonder, a feeling for the beauty in his blunt physical descriptiveness and obsession with the body, farting and fucking and so on, which, while it had once amused her, now moved her unexpectedly to pathos. She had never been one of those academics who look for clues as though they could unlock a text, render its meaning transparent and useful; but she was struck by the emotional reactions into which she found herself falling, to passages she had read dozens of times already but without the same impact. At first she was uncertain, self-critical, cautious of this access to her own inner world which seemed tangibly closer than it ever had before, as though it could not be compatible with the scholarly rigour to which she faithfully adhered. And yet the insights lingered, and formed a vocabulary of their own, and she began to embrace them as truths and build her new work around them.

  During this first year more poems emerged. Emerged: her word; reluctant initially to own their authorship, she talked of them more like discoveries than creations. This was a self-conscious theme, rooted in her experience of giving birth to a child who she could not quite believe she had made, inside her body, out of pieces of—where are the lines drawn?—surely herself. This collection, eventually published a couple of years later, became a foundation of sorts. Anna found a facility with words, with their careful arrangement and occasional awkwardness, which gave some form to the impossibility of the last few years, the unaccountability of it all. She was not yet thirty, and her life had, it seemed suddenly, taken on a shape, an outline, which though entirely new felt concretely, if inexpressibly, right.

  The ironies of this were not unmarked—she was constantly, ruthlessly aware of occupying a space that was not entirely hers. Sarah continued to inhabit the house, the colours of the walls, the curtains, the saucepans, all loaded with her decisions, her choices. Anna watched herself move between asserting her own presence and backing away from it; she was never more alert to her own desire than in those first months in Orr’s (Sarah’s) house. She bought new bedding, identical in colour and style to what had been there; Orr never remarked on it, and she never knew if he realised or not. She burned the original sheets in her back garden, watched the black smoke trail upward and disappear.

  Orr was always supportive of Anna’s writing. There was no mockery, no giving in to the vanity of seeing everything that is difficult to understand as irrelevant, or pretentious. Anna was tentative in these early creative forays, but gained confidence from the simple, direct encouragement Orr provided, his desire to hear her words slowly climb into sentences, into stanzas, colonising a whole page. She loved the strange, biblical poetry of his own speech, which still coloured his conversation despite his abandonment of the church.

  She looked back later on these first poems as flat, too much compressed, too easily falling into an emotion that should have been restrained. But enough critics loved them, and a number were published in journals with a wide readership, gaining her a sudden if modest popularity. And despite her own harsh assessment, they held for her the rhythms of an astonishing period of her life, the intimations of which, she felt, filled the words, the lines, even the whiteness of the pages.

  The child was healthy. Aside from a short bout of colic early on, during which he cried relentlessly—purposefully, Anna wrote, unfairly—and a few common infections, he grew fast and strong. His appetite was vital; he fed hungrily, with evident satisfaction. He was inquisitive; Anna was struck by his strange tendency to listen to conversations, long before they could possibly make any sense to him. She had the uncanny impression, early on, when she would be talking with Orr while holding the child, that he was somehow taking it in, considering what was being discussed, as though storing it away for future consideration.

  Orr continued to work, and with some success: after six months he was offered a partnership, but he declined. He talked it over with Anna, but it was clear that his mind was already made up. But the decision—the fact that he had to make a decision, to consider in a concrete, deniable way the future—turned something in him. An anxiety crept into his relaxation, arresting the edges of his sleep. He would wake in the night and peer about the room, as though looking for someone who had just addressed him. He smiled at Anna as he came around, softened, easing himself back to consciousness. But his face never quite composed itself fully, fraught now with a sensitivity to something, someone, hovering just out of frame.

  The distance between Orr and Anna, initially narrowed by the presence of the child they had, between them, created, began to be reasserted by this same small, physical presence. Anna’s touch became a site of contest. Orr would watch the baby on her breast, sucking hungrily, both drawn to and made uncertain by the sight. For Anna, the sheer physicality of her son was a startling location of pleasure, an eroticism she had not expected but found herself longing for daily, the strange combination of pain and focused, visceral pleasure as his mouth fastened on her, his rough gums on her nipples, first one then the other. On occasion, lying in bed, the sensation rose, spreading like melted butter, and she would orgasm, coming with a shudder, the child, oblivious, on her breast, still feeding. She wanted to tell Orr about this but felt she could not, that there was something too complicated for the kind of explanation he might require. And so she kept it to herself, in herself; and wondered, later, if this had been one of the tiny, invisible cracks that had formed beneath them, that she had in some silent way communicated this to him, some division, some resistance. If he had realised that with the arrival of the child he had, strangely, less of her than before. The sum was reduced.

  Orr became distracted around Samuel, the uncomplicated attention he had given since the beginning dissolved in an uncharacteristic hesitancy. When minding him Orr had always resisted the garish ease of the television. But increasingly he would prop Samuel up on fat cushions in front of the screen and Anna would come home to find Orr in a different room, staring out the window. One miserable, wet day she returned to find Orr in the garden, drenched to the skin; the child had disappeared. They found him under the sofa, silent, content.

  Anna knew something was approaching but she didn’t know what it was. Orr pushed. Their intimacy grew more physical; she knew that the new pressure of his hands on her body, his rough tongue on her skin, held some unsaid, inarticulable truth. The pleasure of her coming, she knew as her limbs shuddered and contracted, held within it a truth that Orr was moving towards, or through, but as yet could not, or would not, bring himself to say. There were not many possibilities. They had never talked of marriage. She wondered briefly if he was wrestling with the question of whether or how to ask, but she dismissed the thought quickly, believing—rightly—that Orr would not have found this so demanding. When this realisation struck it was with a dull, breaking thud, and she knew what was coming with all the certainty of sin.

  Anna was always so vigorous with her self-analysis, pitiless even. Still, who can avoid occasionally reading backward, events becoming signs becoming symbols, the inevitable unravelling of one thing before another, until the nod, the glance, the misplaced keys become augurs; history distilled to a hand raised at the wrong moment. Lowered at the wrong moment. One night, the child almost a year old, sleeping peacefully in the next room, Orr stood in the light from the bathroom and told her she must leave. Her and the child. Both of them. They must leave.

  She did not leave. Not, at any rate, right away. I know you, she told him, and you do not mean this. Who are you to rid yourself of your child?

  How can you k
now me if I don’t know myself? was all he said, but he did not push the matter. They slept, untouching, for one night, and another.

  Talk to me, she said. Tell me why. Show me what I have done.

  But he wouldn’t. He refused, simply, to touch her, until her body began to burn with the absence. The cruelty of his withdrawal, the impossibility of it, was brutal.

  Still, she refused him the satisfaction. The boys watched them circle one another, trying to—as Anna wrote it—hurt one another enough to resurrect love.

  You don’t love me, she said.

  I do, he said.

  Is it because you feel guilty? That I am here, in this space? This space that isn’t mine?

  No, he said.

  This is madness, she said finally, exasperated.

  Yes, he said.

  She packed her things in the middle of the day, in front of him. He watched her walk around the house, placing parts of her life into bags.

  You need to be sure of this, she said.

  He didn’t reply.

  The boys arrived home from school to see her car packed. Philip walked into the house like an animal after a kill, a poised, quiet stalking. He asked what was happening. Orr told him Anna was leaving. At first he assumed he’d won some sort of victory, his patience rewarded; but soon realised that this was his father’s doing, complicating his satisfaction and blunting his brief joy. Samuel cried as she carried him out, as though aware that something significant was happening, some rending. The neighbours opposite, an older couple, stared shamelessly, faces distorted behind unwashed glass. Orr sent his boys inside.

  Ask me to stay, she said.

  Orr stared at her, silently.

  She lifted Samuel into the car, the final piece of luggage.

  Alright then, she said.

  She stood in her kitchen, staring into the back garden. It was winter; the trees bare and diminished. It was hard to be certain that anything had really changed. She always returned to her own house a couple of times a week, slept there regularly; this was not a new geography. But she knew that something had broken, an unseen balance tipped. Her bags lay on the floor around her like dead animals. Sam had stopped crying, and was staring at her, reading her face, silent. She became aware of the light falling through the window and hitting the floor, and the small, humming mechanical noises, the everyday breathing of the house. She became aware of her own heart beating, could almost see in her mind the blood being pushed through her thin veins, the relentless trundling of it. It was all, suddenly, violent; forced. Nothing existed in itself, everything coerced, shoved around. There was nowhere to hide.

  It is hard to know, even now, why Orr did it. He said once that he experienced God as a breath on his neck. And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world: an impressive threat. He did not see God in dreams, or hear a voice in his head and attribute it to heaven; he was fully aware that all the voices were his own, dripping with his own history. But it was in his body, and those of his children, even in the movement of an engine under his hands. For Orr God was everywhere and thudding, animate and warm, and his love as simple and repetitive as the silent hammer of the pulse under the skin, invisible and vital. It was not, I don’t believe, that God told him to change his life; nor even a slow, steady accretion of layered guilt that finally overwhelmed him. But as Anna moved in his caresses, under his hands, he began to sense there an absence, a removal, and the deeper he went into it the further it receded.

  Much later Anna wrote a poem, a long prose-poem of erasure, in which the words slowly disappeared, removed themselves from the page, until by the end of the book there was simply blankness, emptiness. And yet the emptiness was loaded, not empty at all, in fact, but heavy with absence, with implication. There is no nothing, there is never nothing; there are thousands and thousands and thousands of absences, myriad, a cacophony, relentless.

  Anna spent Christmas at her mother’s, with her son. She began to accommodate herself to the necessary contours of the coming days: the emptied-out uncertainty, the clean, repetitive loneliness. And she surprised herself by just how simple it was. The journey home from the university via her mother’s house to pick him up, a meal alone, evenings spent writing, Sam asleep, and occasionally awake, in a cot beside her desk, tranquil, creation itself, glowing in candlelight. The emptiness just another routine to be performed.

  As she considered it it was both comforting and troubling: that life could be so carelessly transformed, upset, and yet it persisted, continued seamlessly, and she did not fall apart. Her life—upset just as radically as Orr’s—remained in some subterranean sense undisturbed. A river had burst its banks and flooded messily into the surrounding countryside, creating new rivers and streams and making old maps obsolete, but Anna’s relation was to the water below, as wide and deep and hidden as it had ever been, unfazed by the newly disordered terrain. There was something steady in Anna, undeterred. A friend of her mother had visited during the holidays, whom Anna had not seen in many years, and remarked that as Anna had got older she had become more beautiful.

  Anna smiled. Like a ruin, she said.

  Orr went back to the mission hall. He had not returned since the morning he had made his confession, if confession is the right word, although Philip had continued to attend every week on his own, a complicated reminder of his father’s absence. There is no nothing. Orr sat in the back row on the first Sunday, nodded when acknowledged by those on the seats around him. Philip had not expected to see him, and, sitting off to one side, stared at him throughout the service, God knows what unnameable emotions coursing through his young body.

  It was Advent, and the text from Matthew’s gospel gained weight, the words suddenly alive: Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.

  Orr did nothing, of course; he did not actively cause the air to spark. But in his presence, the unfolding of the gospel acquired a penetration, an edge. The lines blurred. The infant Jesus was named, but only Orr’s child, Orr’s bastard, was imagined.

  And then came the reading from Psalm 27:

  A Psalm of David. The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The LORD is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? When evildoers assail me, uttering slanders against me, my adversaries and foes, they shall stumble and fall. Though a host encamp against me, my heart shall not fear; though war arise against me, yet I will be confident. One thing have I asked of the LORD, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the LORD, and to inquire in his temple.

  Roddy watched the other congregants, stared at the faces of his fellow elders, and began to sense that what was happening in him, occurring to him, as he listened, was also happening to them. The psalm was talking about Orr: the lack of fear, the shaking off of slanders, the utter confidence, the steady desire (to behold the beauty of the LORD, and to inquire in his temple) was all Orr, was in him, present, alive. It had not gone away. And more: that if it was in Orr, then perhaps Roddy and the rest were the evildoers, the adversaries and foes. If Orr still had God inside him, then who else were the host encamped against him, against whom his heart was not afraid, if not they themselves, the righteous judges? Roddy dismissed the thought as it flooded him, but it would not be so easily removed. Orr seemed to have an ability to make it all about him, to turn the scriptures into biography. And yet he did not actually do anything; he merely refused to change, to be anything other than his flawed, blunt self.

  It is hard to know how Orr felt in all of this, what freedoms or fears he swallowed. Still, he returned, and it was natural, and there was no fanfare, nor—in public at least—recriminations. There were surely those who, in the privacy of their own homes, whispered their discomfort to one anoth
er. There was one family who left to attend another church some miles away, but for the most part the congregation opened to Orr and embraced him, tentatively but with genuine warmth.

  For his part Roddy hesitated, torn between, on the one side, his Christian duty and his natural affection for Orr, and on the other his growing awareness of Philip’s dissatisfaction, his—he would not have called it this at the time—hatred. Roddy was intent on Philip, noticing the concentration, the almost imperceptible shake of his hands when, a few weeks later, his father returned to the pulpit for the first time. Everyone else was watching Orr, watching his mouth form once again around the words of the prophet Isaiah:

  Awake, awake; put on thy strength, O Zion; put on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city: for henceforth there shall no more come into thee the uncircumcised and the unclean. Shake thyself from the dust; arise, and sit down, O Jerusalem: loose thyself from the bands of thy neck, O captive daughter of Zion. For thus saith the Lord, Ye have sold yourselves for nought; and ye shall be redeemed without money.

  Philip flinched, involuntary, as Orr found his rhythm; he leaned forward with shoulders strained, tight, as though against his own will. But he said nothing, made no protest. And he held his silence as week by week his father steadied himself, moved with quiet confidence back into his old pulpit. He had not been replaced in the year he was away, the congregation sharing the pastoral duties among themselves—their ability to do so testament perhaps to Orr’s leadership, his ability to draw out of others what they might not have known was there—and within two months he was preaching again every Sunday. The sermons were not the same as before; they became more confessional and yet remained somehow impersonal, as though it was the text itself that was confessing, carrying a melancholy, a sense of loss which referred not, as it might once have done, to the distance between the listener and the text, but to some gap, some loss, within the text itself. Orr could never have been accused of avoiding the darker, more solitary avenues that faith occasionally takes, but his new persistence, his new pathways through the scriptures held some unnamed weight, force, which like gravity pulled the hearer in. When he preached of the man being let down through the roof to be healed by Jesus, Roddy recalled, you could feel the burn of the ropes in his friends’ hands.