The First Day Page 7

  On a cold, wet morning at the end of January, during a term break at the university, Anna answered the door to Roddy. She had no idea who he was, and he stood uncomfortable on the doorstep, looking around him as though mistaken. Her initial impression was that an old man had lost his way. She waited for him to realise his error, but instead he asked, Are you Anna?

  She brought him inside, and made tea. He sat in her kitchen, in the chair Orr had often sat in, and he seemed aware himself of the substitution, watching her with, as she imagined it, another’s eyes; trying to put himself in Orr’s position, to see what it was Orr saw. Anna was measured, reserved. It had been a month since she had seen Orr. He had come to her house on Christmas Day, and sat with the child on his lap, affectionate and warm. They did not talk much, but as he was leaving Anna asked him what was to happen next.

  I need a few weeks, he had said.

  A few weeks for what?

  He shook his head, walked away. She had not seen him since, and had—as she had throughout the entire affair—continued in her own rhythm, the child’s demands smoothing out the edges of each day, filling it and fattening it, so that the questions that played inevitably were quietened, softened.

  Roddy told her that Orr had returned to the pulpit.

  To the Lord? Anna asked.

  Roddy smiled, wry. You’d need to ask him.

  Which him? She tried to get a rise, but he didn’t bite.

  I’ve been a sceptic myself, he said.

  Anna warmed to him immediately. Why are you here? she asked him. He would have told me himself.

  Roddy nodded. I have no doubt, he said in reply. Still. I know what kind of man he is. I wondered if you’d been left on your own.

  You know what kind of man he is? I imagine her looking at Roddy, squarely, as though assessing a piece of furniture she was considering purchasing. I’m not alone, I have the child.

  Roddy nodded. Can I see him?

  Anna carried Sam from the back room where he’d been sleeping and handed him, tightly bundled, to her visitor. She sat back in her seat and looked at them—Roddy cooing at the child, who reached his hands without fear to Roddy’s lined face—and was overcome by a strange sense that they knew each other already, that in some other place, some hidden world, this infant and this old man were already joined, connected in a way beyond describing; and the impression, or more than impression, the conviction, the certainty, grew to encompass herself, absurd as it was, and for a moment the lines between them, the three of them, seemed entirely arbitrary, her own history accidental and contingent. It was not, she wrote, a transcendence, a movement out of the body; but more like an overfilling, a sense that the boundaries of the body itself were blurred, viscous, insufficient to the task of holding all that was within. It was all materiality, she said, the extraordinary weight of the ordinary.

  It was a moment that passed quickly. But Anna was nourished by it, and it began, by her own account, to work something in her, some sense of herself, of her edges. What was it Beckett said about language? To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it—be it something or nothing—begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today.

  A week after Roddy’s visit, Orr showed up. She opened the door, still in a dressing gown, and stared at him, his face unshaven but gleaming with some mischief. She wondered if he was drunk.

  He came in and sat down. The child was asleep, so they sat alone in the kitchen, drinking tea. He stared out the window, looking at the trees he had once stared at from her bedroom, standing naked above. She wondered if he remembered this at all. She wondered if she should ask him.

  I have not forgotten, he said, as though reading her thoughts.

  What have you not forgotten?

  He sipped from his tea, staring at her over the cup. I can’t come back, he said.

  You can do whatever you want, Anna replied.

  Orr smiled and nodded, as though she had told a lie so blatant there was no need to refute it. Is that what your Beckett would say?

  She considered calling him a coward, telling him he was hiding behind his God, putting words in God’s mouth, denying his own responsibility to do as everyone must do and face the world in front of them, as it is, the blunt facts of solitary existence. She considered pointing out that his refusal to live with her and their child was a betrayal, a simple human betrayal, full of fear, utterly untouched by the divine. She considered staring at him in pity, pity so blunt he could not mistake it, shaking her head slightly from side to side, mocking him. She considered setting a bible in front of him and telling him to point out the bit where this happens, where God’s wisdom floods a tiny Belfast kitchen with indifference, hostility, loneliness. She considered handing him the child, making him look at the boy and speak to him, to explain to him in terms he would one day understand. She did none of these things. Instead she repeated, again, as though he had not heard it the first time, You can do whatever you want.

  Her refusal to confront him with her considered accusations was neither weakness nor fear; rather, she was not convinced that he was wrong. She had fallen in love with Orr in all his complication, all his ridiculous conviction, and it would have been a denial of this, she felt, to force him now to turn his back, to abandon the God he had thus far refused to abandon. It did not matter that she did not believe in this God herself; for her to change Orr would have been an act of sabotage, would have destroyed the very space out of which her love for him emerged. Anna’s love for Orr required giving him up, handing him over to his God, and living with the consequences.

  They came to an arrangement. Orr would see the child once a week, and contribute financially. But no official division of access was required: as far as Orr was concerned, Anna could raise him. Orr kissed the child, rubbed his soft blond hair, curling at the ends, and walked away. He moved to kiss Anna also, dipping forward towards her cheek, but she stepped back and stared at him, refusing either him or herself, or both, whatever satisfaction there may yet have been. He let himself out, and she stared at the space he had vacated, his absence, and finally—for the first time—she cried. There had been no surprise, nothing had been revealed that she had not already seen, but the completeness of it, the mathematical nature of the agreement they had come to, was suddenly so ugly, so crude, that the child, staring at her from the floor, himself seemed transformed, as though tainted with malice. Her tears made the child’s face blur, distort beyond recognition, and she had a brief moment when she saw only a stranger, a creature, and wished him harm. But she wiped her eyes, and his face again appeared, pale and attentive, his beautiful mouth always a little open, and she smiled at him, and it passed.

  Spring ended, fell into summer. The year thickened, found a new pace. Anna realised she was living not in the expectation but the aftermath of love. The knowledge was not startling—nothing, she began to suspect, would ever startle her again after the feeling of Orr’s hands between her thighs, and their removal—but it settled in her with a precision, starting as a simple, unarticulated thought but quickly colonising her entire self, her expectations, her desire. She was young still, barely twenty-eight, and attractive. But her attention roamed little further than her child and her work, and she was struck herself by the lack of hunger for another man to replace Orr.

  She decided to take Sam away for a month. The talk she had given at Barcelona at the end of the previous year had gone well—she was amused by the complicated satisfaction that Orr had left his mark on her speaking style also, as she became more laconic, more confident in pausing, reading the audience, finding a rhythm, a humour—and, when it was discovered she was writing her own poetry, she had been invited to return to Spain for a month-long residency, in order to devote some time to finishing her first collection of poems. Her mother offered to look after Sam, but she decided to take him with her.

  She worked intently, daily, with a kind of hunger. She would get up early, before Sam woke, and write, and the poems quic
kly found a rhythm and shape she suspected they would not have fallen into in Ireland. After breakfast they would explore the city, and new poems surfaced from their wanderings, Anna finding herself looking through Sam’s eyes, the everyday made once again strange, people and cars and windows and chairs compressed, or elevated, into colour and form and movement. When the collection was published more than one reviewer noted the fault line running through it: on one side, the force and excess and annulling of a love affair, and on the other, the remaking of a world in its aftermath, through the eyes of the resulting child.

  One poem in the book seemed to stand alone. In a back street in the Gothic Quarter, Anna and Sam had witnessed the police drag a group of Africans out of a shop. One of them was carrying a child, not much older than Sam, and as he was manhandled towards the open doors of a van, he thrust the child into Anna’s arms. She reached out for him immediately, instinctively, and stood frozen, staring at this small, black boy in her arms, his eyes fearless and trusting. A policeman sharply snatched the child from her and walked quickly away, beyond the van. She moved to follow him but was pushed back by another policeman, his finger raised in warning, ready for violence. She stood silently, watching them go, until the street was again empty, as though nothing had happened.

  She returned again and again to the scene, her notebooks bent on unravelling something she could not, at first, put her finger on. The aftermath felt like a betrayal, the empty street a lie. She was aware of her assumption of the men’s crime: that the men being dragged out had done something wrong, and were therefore receiving punishment. What was taking place was a correction. It did not take her long to reassess this; even as she had held the child this had changed, the policemen within seconds passing from an impersonal force of justice into something sinister and disturbing. But her initial sense, in its immediacy, before the evaluation of what was actually before her, had assumed a guilt, and she was troubled afterwards at the ease with which this impulse came to her. She felt that she had not given herself to it, but that it had somehow claimed her; and that her action was not in believing in the guilt, but in refusing the belief, and that therefore her passive state, her underlying disposition, was embedded in a kind of hidden authoritarianism she had not been aware of. The question of race, and of otherness—the men being hauled away were black men—did not escape her.

  The more troubling sense, however, to which she could not stop herself returning was the simple, dark thrill of being present when something had happened. That the violence, in all its brutality and despite her absolute refusal of it, and her unquestionable sympathy with the men and the child, had been energising, enlivening. For the briefest of moments, life had been condensed to a series of staccato bursts, vital, electric. The brutality quickly tainted the excitement, but some aftertaste remained, which filled her in spite of herself.

  They returned to Belfast in the early summer. Anna walked into her house to find the back window smashed in, a half-brick lying on the floor. Fragments of glass lay on the worktop, on the tiles, glinting in the sunlight. The surfaces around the window were wet, presumably from rain, though it was not now raining. She picked up Sam suddenly and ran back to the car, locking him inside. She returned to the house, picking up the shaft of a brush that was sitting against the side wall.

  As she stepped inside she recognised the foolishness of what she was doing, but went forward anyway, drawn towards whatever she would find, craving, to her own surprise, a confrontation. This appetite was new in her; there was a rawness of desire for some violence, a taste of blood in her mouth. She stepped into one room, then another, then climbed the stairs. By the time she reached the landing she knew there was no one there. She felt it. Nothing was out of place, everything was as it should be, the house composed and untouched, broken only at its skin. She checked the bedrooms, then walked to the window overlooking the garden at the back. It was early evening; the sun hung low in a pale sky. She stared out, and collected herself, and shuddered suddenly to think that the anonymous brick was a message, not simply an intrusion. Had she surprised a burglar, or found something missing, it would merely be a crime; she would merely be someone who had something worth taking. But there was no theft, no break-in. It did not feel random.

  Orr came to her house the next day, to collect Sam. He had not seen the child in months, and had called Anna more often in the last week of their trip, evidently missing the boy. Orr’s life had discovered an equilibrium of sorts, returning to the mission hall as pastor, but continuing to work on cars during the week, and the tangible physicality of the work had created a balance he realised he had for a long time been missing. An awkwardness, slight but evident, persisted in Orr’s engagement with Anna, an embedded heaviness that referred, by never referring, to the love they had shared, and everything that had followed. Their interactions circled it but left it untouched; like pen marks scribbled all over a page except for one small, clean space, a palpable emptiness.

  In the kitchen he saw the broken window, a piece of cardboard fixed to the frame. He nodded towards it—Orr’s nods were questions—and Anna told him what she had returned home to find. Orr stared at it in silence, his face suddenly slack; as though, Anna thought, he had just discovered it himself.

  What is it? Anna asked him.

  Orr shook his head.

  Do you know who did this?

  He sat down in a chair at the small table. It might have been Philip, he said.

  Philip had, step by slow step, turned his anger into a solid thing, a weapon. His control was remarkable, the level of restraint he exercised. He had become, at fifteen years old, Orr claimed, a craftsman of hatred, like one of those child chess masters who live the game, who see pieces moving in their sleep, the world a series of black and white squares. Orr unfolded a story to Anna, or a series of stories, one after the other, of the tiny abrogations of love Philip had managed in the previous eighteen months, small intrusions, scarcely perceptible, but building upon one another, like a series of paper cuts, a kind of domesticated cruelty, barely worthy of the word. The effect, nonetheless, was impressive. Philip had the measure of Orr’s moral weakness, the exactitude of his failures, and exploited them with an uncanny calmness. Orr recounted to Anna an old tale in which a metalsmith created a spear with such a fine point that it would pass through a person without them realising. The damage was done, the worst kind of damage, fatal damage, and yet the person carried on, oblivious, until everything inside ruptured, collapsed. Anna was conscious, as Orr played out his metaphor, that he felt it was himself who had received this wound, but she wondered if it wasn’t rather Philip suffering, his hatred the weapon he was using on his father, but the real injury, as with the invisible spear, inflicted on himself.

  The ways in which this hatred manifested, as Orr described them, were alternately subtle and blunt. On one occasion he reported to his school headmaster in tears, having found mocking graffiti in the locker room: PHILIP ORR FATHERS BASTARDS. The phrase made no sense, but the allusion was obvious, and Philip was in such a state that his father was called to the school. The headmaster, at Philip’s insistence, took him to the locker to see the offending scrawl, and Orr saw in his son’s face, hidden from the headmaster, a delight in his father’s discomfort, and realised instantly that Philip had done it himself, had scraped his own locker, and created a sufficiently convincing performance to accompany it, to draw Orr in. And Orr, aware of how ludicrous an accusation would have been had he given voice to his suspicion, was rendered silent. Often the cuts were smaller, less histrionic: portraits of Sarah would move around the house, repositioned by Philip, usually incrementally, as though, said Orr, he was trying to make her follow him around. In all of this Philip made no direct complaint, no clear attack; it was a war of attrition, and Philip seemed utterly prepared to wage it without emotion or rage.

  This calmness was described by Orr more or less exactly, but the internal cost to Philip is much harder to quantify; the paths of life inside himself he h
ad to close down to enact such measured punishment. The surface may have been placid, but underneath Philip was surely molten. The energy he must have expended just keeping it in. His mother was dead, and the one avenue where he still might have received love he blocked off with impassive rigour. Orr had begun, after much prayer and self-examination, to push back. He had believed for such a long time that Philip would eventually relent, that he would run out of energy, or anger, or whatever other resources he was drawing on. But he had not. He had, if anything, grown in strength both internally and physically—as a fifteen-year-old boy he was almost six feet tall, taller already than Orr—and his animosity only seemed to burn with greater fierceness. And so Orr moved to address it. He had sought, he told Anna, biblical wisdom on the matter, but God, it seemed, had left him out in the cold. He picked his way blindly, and at every turn Philip matched him. He was obedient, so Orr could not fault him there, and his manners were impeccable, both in public and at home. One might have expected that some looseness would undo him when no one else was around, some discharge of temper; but his genius—Orr’s word—was in maintaining it, like a method actor who finishes work on a film and forgets to return to his normal life. So Orr ended up driving at Philip’s intent, and, by his own account, coming off petty and weak. Philip denied everything, every awkwardly framed accusation, laughed them off, looking at his father like he had gone mad. Do you know what you are saying, father? he said on one occasion, as though in imitation of a character in a Dickens novel, though even this phraseology, as Orr admitted, was just normal enough to make him uncertain if he was being mocked. Anna assured him: he was.