III

Orr took a month off from his pastoral duties after the funeral. The boys returned home, and it was now Orr’s responsibility to ensure they were dressed, fed, taken to school. There was some relief for Orr in this, the distraction of routine, but the boys struggled to adjust. Their father had been present and affectionate in their daily lives from the beginning, but this was a new form of intimacy, and neither they nor Orr knew how to move into it. The middle child adapted most quickly. His needs, perhaps, their uncomplicated flatness—an eight-year-old with simple desires and the language to express them—left space that Orr could fill with relative ease, whereas the other two fought much harder to work out what they needed or wanted from him. The youngest had stopped crying, but a dull stoicism took root in its place, a loss that he was old enough to experience but insufficiently able to articulate, and it began to mark a pattern he would never shake. Philip, on the other hand, had been the confidant of his mother, and Orr was never certain how much she had told him before she died, how many words he had stored up inside, many (perhaps) against his father. He offered no hint of this to Orr, and Orr worried that to question the boy might feel like an intrusion on a grief to which he had no right. And so they walled themselves in, and lost each other. Orr, in fairness, had Anna. Philip had no one.

The school holidays arrived in the first week of Orr’s month off, so he had little time to himself. The two older boys went to a sports scheme in a local leisure centre with other children from the area, and Orr and the youngest would spend the day together. At first Orr tried to read or study in the mornings while the child watched television, but when Orr sat down with him on one occasion and experienced the inanity of the shows for himself, he decided they should go out for walks instead. They visited local parks, and occasionally Orr would drive somewhere further, the Waterworks in the north of the city or the Pickie Pool in Bangor where pedalos in the shape of swans could be rented for a few pounds. Twice a week Orr left him with his parents, and travelled across the city to Anna. The immediacy of the passion had diminished, but they were both, Anna felt, finding their way into a new connection, and she was not concerned. The question of what would happen when the child came lay between them unasked; conversation by conversation they circled it, coming ever closer. It was unusual for Orr, Anna was aware, to be so indirect.

It is not hard to imagine the thoughts that surely hovered in Orr’s mind during this time. His life, which had only months before seemed so regimented and purposeful, now lay riotously, terrifyingly open. It was clear that he would have to tell the members of his congregation, though when and how, and how much, remained uncertain.

 

The day before he was to return to the mission hall, to resume his duties and preaching, Orr asked the elders for an extra two weeks off. He promised them that he would not need any further time beyond this fortnight, but that he needed to take a trip, that there were conversations with God he needed to have before he would be ready to continue. The two weeks were granted, and his parents again agreed to take the boys. His father was not convinced. He had begun to poke at the edges of Orr’s moods to see what lay there besides grief. Orr knew how to bear a silence, had learned it, indeed, from his father. He told him he was going back to Elgin, to where he had first been saved.

His father wondered aloud at the wisdom of this. God is not found in a place but in our hearts, he said.

Yes, said Orr, but sometimes he hides.

God never hides, his father said. The blindness must be yours.

Orr nodded. Perhaps it is both.

Orr’s father, Adam, was a complicated man. Raised by a dour Scottish Calvinist who moved to Belfast as a teenager and became a skilled carpenter in the shipyard, not long after the success and tragedy of the Titanic, he had grown up with a curtailed joy at the world, tasting everything bitter. The old man had never really adjusted to Belfast life, his teenage Scottish burr a permanent hindrance he deliberately refused to soften, and Adam inherited not only a hint of the accent, but something of his inability to be satisfied. Born unexpectedly in his father’s forty-first year, he grew up surrounded by a voice constantly seeking grounds for disapproval, and, more often than not, finding them. Adam was an excellent footballer, and for a while it looked like he might make it across the water, to one of the big English clubs. But a bad knee injury in his late teens put paid to that dream, and he ended up stuck in the postal service, delivering mail in south Belfast, never quite able to shake the disappointment of an unlived life. Like his father he was saved, but regarded Orr’s role as a pastor with some suspicion, a combination of pride in his calling and scepticism that such a calling was necessary. He went to a different mission hall, one without a pastor, where the congregation sat around a table with bread and wine at the centre, and anyone—any man—could, at the prompting of the Holy Spirit, stand and speak. When Orr had told him of his decision to become a pastor, giving up his job as a mechanic, Adam had reacted at first with anger. Orr was only twenty-eight himself, with a two-year-old son, and Adam could not hide his frustration, though what the frustration was about, exactly, he would have been hard put to say.

 

Orr left for Elgin, despite his father, and spent his days moving between the mountains and the small seaside towns of Aberdeenshire. He called Anna only once, as he had said he would. He talked to her of the huge sky, of the summer light extending late into the day, turning the mountains incrementally from green to purple, shade by shade, and eventually to black, their forms seeming to grow heavier as darkness fell. He walked and walked, he told her, and laughed as he described finding God through his feet, a phrase that stuck with Anna and that she flirted with some years later, in a series of poems which took her as close as she ever came to an idea of spiritual transcendence in her writing. (It is no coincidence that the phrase itself is so material, so human; Anna flirted only with an earthbound God.)

Anna remained patient. It is true that Orr had lost his wife, and the attendant grief—and, as Anna alone knew, guilt—demanded of him a certain wrestling, which Anna understood he must do alone. But she was pregnant with his child, over halfway by this stage, and her life was about to change irreparably. Her mother asked her, only once, about this. Anna told her simply that it would be alright. The child in my belly, she said, is a kind of peace. Orr will be Orr, she said. But I am not carrying Orr, I am carrying my child.

 

Orr returned from Scotland with a renewed vigour. The hesitation had gone, and it seemed he had removed his guilt, whatever there was, shed it as a snake sheds its skin. He went to Anna as soon as he returned, straight from the ferry.

We are having a child, he said to her, as though revealing some new information, and when she didn’t reply, he said, We should raise him together.

Him? Anna asked.

Yes, said Orr.

Anna nodded. Okay, she said. Let’s raise him together.

 

 

On the following Sunday, the first in September, Orr stood up in front of the congregation. The two younger boys were not there, but Philip sat at the front. It was a wet, miserable day, the sky dull and grey, the rain audible on the roof of the hall. It was his first time back in the pulpit since the events of the summer, and a hushed, nervous energy passed invisibly from row to row, each scrape of a chair, each cough magnified and obvious. He spoke clearly, his voice sure.

I have been the pastor of this congregation for more than ten years. God has blessed me, and us, in many ways during this time, and together we have wrestled with his presence, and occasionally his absence.

A pause. Orr steadying himself.

I have stopped hearing his voice. Or, perhaps, I have stopped listening. Eight months ago I fell in love with a woman who was not my wife. She is called Anna. In a few months she will have a child. My child. I am no longer going to be your pastor. I have no right to speak to you of what God wants when I no longer know myself. I would like to tell you I am sorry for what I have done, but that would not be the truth.

The rain on the roof seeming heavier, like stones falling.

I told my wife three weeks before she died. If God has intended to punish me, he has succeeded. Though his cruelty seems to have lost its focus.

Orr sat down. The silence gave way to murmurs and confusion. No one knew what to do, where to look. Orr was sitting on a chair behind the pulpit. He looked at his son, sitting ten feet away. Philip stared at his father for ten, fifteen seconds, then simply stood up and walked out. No one else moved; they watched him walk down the centre of the hall. A dog barked in a nearby street, aggressive and pained. Philip opened the door without turning around, stepped outside, and pulled it shut behind him. The sound of the door seemed to act as a trigger. One by one the congregation stood up, some shaking their heads, and moved in silent, solemn procession to the door, following the boy. Orr watched them leave, refusing to hang his head, defiance to the end. Two minutes passed, three, five, until there was only a handful of people left, spread throughout the room.

An old man, Hugh Roddy, was still there; he had been a member of the congregation his whole life, had watched hundreds of people find Jesus, and community, in the same seats that now sat empty around them.

Will you lead us in prayer before you go, pastor? he said simply.

Orr stood up, and waited silently for a moment, enough time for any of those remaining to leave. None did. Our father who art in heaven, Orr began, moving his way unhurried through the Lord’s Prayer. Lead us not into temptation, he said, and paused, and then continued, his voice unbroken.

 

The elders accepted Orr’s resignation, and arranged to meet with him during the week. Orr was, of course, being paid by the congregation, and there was some debate as to how this state of affairs should be handled, not only in terms of the future—which was hardly in question, he would be paid nothing from this point on—but also the past.

On the following evening, the day before the arranged meeting, Roddy knocked on Orr’s front door. Orr welcomed him without fuss. Over a cup of tea, Roddy explained that there were a number of elders who were out for blood, that he must be aware.

What am I supposed to do? asked Orr.

Contrition, said Roddy.

Orr stared at his tea for a moment, and set it down on the table. But I am not contrite, he said. I have stood before God for almost a year, wrestling with a love I have no words for, nor defence against. You feel I should have been stronger.

Roddy interrupted him. Not stronger. Just more honest.

There are different kinds of truth, Orr said.

 

 

Orr told Anna about his admission, his declaration. She said little, believing that this part of Orr’s world, or what had been Orr’s world, was intimately his, and should remain his. There was a dull fear buried somewhere inside her that the removal of Orr from his church would do something irrevocable to him, would destroy him in some subtle, contagious way, and that the very freedom that had opened up the possibility of their being together may yet be a disaster. But she kept it hidden, not only from Orr but from herself; even in her notebooks refusing it the words she would later use with the brutality of hindsight. She was pregnant, she figured; such a feeling could just as easily be the baby shifting, and she gave herself over to this wisdom, this cause.

 

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 slower, 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.

 

 

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 know 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 another. 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.

 

 

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 quickly 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 had 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.

But Orr’s preparedness to take Philip on, to challenge him, had shifted something, and in the last week, the week before the window was smashed, Philip had asked his father when his brother was coming home. Orr had been cautious in reply—Philip’s interest in his bastard sibling had not registered in some time, barely at all since Anna and Sam moved out—but he had read it as a positive development, a sign that despite Philip’s apparent frigidity, some hidden thawing was taking place. However, in the subsequent days Philip had not followed up his initial enquiry, and Orr now wondered if he had not, rather, simply been working out the timescale for a new assault, a widening of targets. Anna asked him why she should be Philip’s victim, especially now, since they had had so few dealings in the previous year. And Orr had no answer, just an instinct: By their fruits ye shall know them, he said.

Anna sighed. Faith without works is dead, eh? was her wry reply, and Orr could not resist a smile.

The hurling of a brick through a window was hardly an insinuation that could be, without any evidence whatsoever, hurled back at the boy, but both Anna and Orr agreed that they could not simply ignore the possibility, and so they agreed that Orr would—for the first time in almost two years—bring his three boys to Anna’s house, for a visit. They could not think of a pretext, but decided that only Philip would demand a pretext anyway; that the two younger children, although they may be surprised, would not complain. In this they were proved partially right: only Philip raised his eyebrows when Orr made the announcement over dinner later that evening, though in fact he said nothing, merely smiled, a hint of satisfaction passing across his face, of recognition. He did not ask why, he did not complain; Orr was unnerved by this, and called Anna to tell her. She dismissed his fears. Maybe he’s not what you have made him out to be, she said. You have a propensity for stories, she said, with some satisfaction.

Anna had left the cardboard in place, putting off the glazier until after the visit of Orr and the boys; she felt manipulative, aware of the dark pleasure she was getting in anticipating Philip’s reaction, of seeing his face, but could not relinquish it. When Anna opened the door only Orr and the younger two were initially visible; Philip lurked behind, detached. But when she stepped back and they made their way inside, Philip moved towards her with a smile, and hugged her as he entered. It was entirely unexpected, and she was uncertain of how to respond to this boy, this man-boy, and briefly hated herself, hated how much her body was still the property of Orr, of how her contraction at Philip’s embrace was because of him. She moved into the embrace but too late, and she knew that Philip had sensed it, had felt the incompleteness of it. She felt shame immediately, her judgement already, against her own will, passed. She looked at Orr with an almost palpable anger as Philip walked away, and was still staring at him when she heard Philip’s voice from the kitchen: What happened to your window?

Orr looked at her, and Anna felt that same contraction, felt something detach inside her, and she knew Orr had been right, and that Philip had thrown the brick, and was so utterly in control that he could walk straight to it, deliberately and fearlessly, to nod at it like a handyman assessing an unfortunate breakage. It was the lack of fear, she said later, that unnerved her. She did not feel herself to be in actual, physical danger; but some immeasurable unease now flickered at the edge of things, some refusal of peace. When you close your eyes you feel everything should go black, but it doesn’t. Some light bleeds through.

When they followed him into the kitchen, Philip was poking at the cardboard, testing it. He turned and smiled at her.

It’ll be fixed tomorrow, she said.

Oh, that’s good, he replied, and took his finger away.

He sat down at the table, in the same seat Orr had been sitting in days previously, and Anna was struck by the likeness. The same fineness of line along his cheek, the intensity of look; though Orr’s kindness, his almost physical approachability which she had long tried to assess (was it in the hold of his shoulders, the line of his mouth?), was perfectly absent from his son. It was astonishing to behold. She detested herself for thinking it, but it came without her permission, this wave of hatred, as though he had drawn it out of her. He was a crucible, the thought came, unbidden, for the opposite of everything she had loved in Orr. Christ and antichrist. All of this flooding her, almost wordless, as Philip stared, the half-smile, an almost imperceptible nod. Yes, he was saying, yes. It is what you think. And even more. Yes.

 

 

Anna’s book was published at the end of the summer. The title was taken—stolen, wrote one reviewer, which amused Anna greatly—from Beckett. If I Do Not Love You I Shall Not Love. Poetry rarely created a stir, and this publication did nothing to change that. Still, Anna, at almost thirty years old, moved from academic anonymity into a small but revered space of creative community. She began to receive invites to events of all sorts: gallery openings, book launches, even political gatherings, and every few months would be persuaded to give a talk. At first she turned most of these invitations down, but shortly found herself—this is how she thought of it, as though it were something happening to her, rather than an action of her choosing—attending more and more, and making friendships with others on the fringes of the small Belfast scene, usually other solitaries, writers and artists, similarly sceptical of public profile but tied to the game through their careers, if that is the right word for an often unrewarded artistic commitment. One of these was an older man, in his mid-fifties, a painter called Patrick Curran. Curran taught occasionally at the art college but spent most of his time painting landscapes in a small barn in the Antrim hills, attached like an anchorhold to the side of his cottage. He threw paint on thick, as often with a knife as with a brush, and, like Cézanne had done with the hills around Provence, created a significant and impressive body of work simply by watching the light change in one place; for Curran, Glenariff. The modern world of painting had passed him by, he was aware, but somehow his very lack of fashionability, his naïve commitment to painting in what was still, more or less, an impressionist manner, albeit with considerable skill, allowed him to carve out a career freed from contemporary fascinations, and he was for the most part respected by other artists. He was large, with a face quick to smile, and a quietness in company which belied a sharp wit and a rough, familiar kindness. He was married to Edie, who taught at a small primary school in Cushendall, the nearest sizeable town, less than six miles from their home.

Curran took to Anna, her wryness, her quietness of manner, the unforced control she seemed to have at a platform while reading a poem or delivering a short lecture, and he asked her to come to dinner at the cottage. They were at an art opening, a new group show at which Curran had a couple of paintings, and they were discussing Molloy, sharing an appreciation for Beckett’s tongue-in-cheek, boyish humour, his affection for the puerile. They had met on a couple of occasions previously, though they had exchanged only a nod and and a How are you, and she did not really know him when the invitation was first made. He saw the hesitation in her eyes, and recognised immediately, or so he later told her, that she had been hurt by a man before and would not be hurt again. He smiled—that broad, open smile—and assured her that his wife would be there. Anna smiled then too, relaxing, and accepted.

 

Alongside her friendship with Curran, a new relationship had begun, surprisingly, to form with Philip. Following the incident with the window, he at first seemed to retreat into himself. His bravado, his finger on the cardboard, the sheer brazenness with which he owned Anna’s kitchen, seemed to be a high point from which he slowly retreated. He still gave no inch to Orr, but the directness of his attacks changed, subdued, and the front that Anna feared was opening up on herself never materialised. What did happen, eventually, was much more surprising, to both Anna and Orr.

Within a couple of months of her return from Barcelona, Anna’s disquiet had all but disappeared, and the routine had re-established itself without complication, Orr’s attention for Sam continuing to grow and soften. It was a period, Anna began to feel, of genuine peace; a brief season, six months or so, of an almost effortless contentment. Orr himself seemed, for reasons Anna could not determine, to take a step back from his own intensity. The simplicity of the happiness he appeared to have discovered with Sam dismantled, or at least tempered, his zeal, and it struck Anna that he was again, over three years since they had first met, and after a significant retreat into a harsh, solitary wilderness from which she—and Sam—had been ruthlessly excluded, more like the man she had captured on her camera smilingly emerging from his tiny church. She was reluctant to dwell on this, and refused herself, or tried to refuse herself, the idea that a clearing was opening up into which they might once again move, the hurts of the recent years subsiding and love once more possible. Whatever stirred in her, whatever hopes were glowing below, breathing slowly, she made no move towards Orr; but the ease in their interaction created a genuine satisfaction, which had for a long time been missing. Into this ease stepped Philip.

He appeared at Anna’s door at the end of the August. She opened to the rung bell and was taken aback to find him standing there, black T-shirt and jeans, his arms loosely tracing his sides. His hands, though still, appeared to be moving, twitching, though Anna was uncertain if perhaps she was imagining it.

I thought you might need your grass cut, he said.

Anna was briefly struck dumb. She stammered for an answer, nodding. Did your father send you?

He shook his head. No.

She felt she could not refuse him. She led him around the back and unlocked the shed where the mower and shears were kept.

She retreated to the house and waited on an attack, unaware of what it might look like, of what mix of kindness and cruelty it might be formed. Philip went about his business as he had promised. He mowed the lawn and tidied the garden, carrying the grass and hedge cuttings by hand in bags to the skips a quarter-mile away. Anna watched him from Sam’s room, his young body moving into the work with the same strange grace she had seen in his father. The severity of her previous reactions seemed suddenly unfair, untrue even, and more than once she walked away from the window, troubled by a combination of thoughts and yearnings to which she could not give names.

As he left her house that first evening she invited him in. He looked at his feet, and for the first time she had ever seen, appeared uncertain of himself, almost shy. Then he looked up at her and smiled—Orr’s smile—and she found herself catching her breath, exposed, as though she had been caught naked.

Next time, he said, and walked away.

He came again, the following week. There was less to do in the garden, only a week’s growth, and he finished his work much earlier. The sun was dropping just above the houses one street over, the shafts beginning to pierce the gaps between them. The garden was bathed in a warm glow, and Anna, looking from her kitchen window, felt some corresponding warmth inside herself, a peace beating through her, heartbeat by heartbeat. Birds were returning to the trees for the night, their low calls rising in volume. Anna pushed open the window and called to him. Come and have a drink.

They stood in the kitchen, drinking Coke from glasses, saying little. They had never been alone together, like this, and the awareness crept up on Anna suddenly, her mouth dry and awkward. Philip did not seem to notice. He held himself differently, she thought as she watched him, without the aloofness, the distance she was used to. She talked to fill the gaps, though he did not seem to feel unnerved or anxious. She talked about how she loved the time of year, of the changing seasons, of the threat and promise of winter. He didn’t say much, just nodded in a teenage way, smiled occasionally, rattled the ice against the glass when he had finished drinking.

I should go, he said finally, setting his glass in the sink. Thanks for the Coke.

Anna nodded as he opened the back door and stepped outside.

In the week that followed she returned again and again to their conversation, one-sided as it had been, poking at the edges, the corners, trying to uncover something that would reveal him, but there was nothing there. In any other context there would have been nothing to explore; he was just a kid helping with the gardening. But there was so much underlying their relationship that she could not let go of the need for a meaning, or rather a motive. The previous week she had not mentioned to Orr that he had visited. She was not sure why, but she had felt that whatever thawing, whatever engagement was occurring, it was between her and Philip. On the following Saturday, however, when Orr came to collect Sam, she told him. He hesitated before replying; she saw his body contract, saw him search for a rationale the way she herself had done. Before he even spoke she knew he had nothing to say, that he knew no more than she did, and that Philip’s reaching out, if that was what it was, was separate from his father, distinct. She made Orr promise not to mention it to him; if Philip was moving in this direction, if this was the opening he needed to let go of his animosity and fear, then Anna would provide it. Orr was resistant, but Anna held her ground, demanded from him his word, and, shaking his head, he gave it.

And so a tentative, unspecified pattern evolved; for the next couple of months it was still tied to Philip’s work in the garden, but by November, when it was cold outside and the leaves and grass required less attention, a kind of camaraderie had established itself between them, even—Anna hesitated to use the word—a friendship. One week he turned up early, still in his school uniform. He was sitting on her front step, freezing, when she arrived home with Sam. She was struck by how young he looked in his blazer and tie, a kind of false armour, seeming to distance him from the perils of adult life, with which he was already far too familiar. He smiled immediately, and Sam rushed up to him, the affection they had created so early still evident.

I’m sorry, I know I’m not supposed to be here yet, he said, and Anna shook her head and told him it was okay, of course, and brought him inside. She made dinner. He told her he had had a fight with another boy in school, and had won the fight but it was not over, he had simply made more enemies, who would come for him when the time was right.

Are you scared? she asked him.

Scared? No, he answered flatly.

Why are you telling me? she asked.

He shrugged.

 

The following week she handed him a key. He stared at it, then at her.

You can come and go as you please, she said.

He held the key in his flat palm, as though weighing it. She waited for him to say something, and it seemed he was about to, but he remained silent.

Okay? she said, eventually, unnerved by his reticence. His face relaxed, the tautness fell away, and he smiled. Or, more truthfully, Anna felt, he tried to smile. I’ve thought often about this moment, this tiny window of possibility when something was given to Philip and he didn’t know how to react. Can you imagine what went on within him as he stood there, contemplating his small victory, the turning of his enemy into his friend? How fucking Christlike, what a gift he must have had. But did he realise, even for a moment, the price he was paying? Did the reality of his inability to win descend upon him, the utter impossibility of it? Did he feel any dread at all, the sickening sense that he had, in rewriting all the rules to his advantage, rendered the game a joke? All his hatred suddenly a useless skill, like a man who spends years mastering the piano only to lose the feeling in his hands?

Perhaps I am being unfair. I am sorry. God knows I make up my own stories too.

 

As Philip entered her life, so too did Curran. The solitary Anna found herself opening up, connections forming that were as unanticipated as they were joyful. She drove up to Curran’s house often, usually in the late afternoon, and would sit in his gallery as he worked, working herself on poems and articles, or sometimes just watching him paint. His cottage sat high in the glen, on the slope running down from the Lurig ridge. A large window overlooked the land spreading wide and low towards the sea at Waterfoot. A number of canvases stood on easels before the window and around the sides, always, it seemed, half completed, patches of greens and blues and greys echoing the landscape outside. He showed her what he was trying to do, the combination of rough, almost geometric blocks of earth tones interrupted by fine lines of much stronger, visceral colour, reds and yellows and blues, so fine sometimes as to be virtually invisible, but which deftly broke the regimentation, so that the painting seemed both tightly structured and yet free. I began to see nature a little late, he quoted Cézanne’s letter to Zola, and Anna nodded, amused and impressed.

Curran roamed in conversation, a natural essayist, moving from the sublime to the mundane without a comma. How difficult it is to see what is in front of you, he said, and how strangely radical a commitment. He was talking of Cézanne. Curran was disdainful of the contemporary fascination with photorealism, seeing it as a kind of psychological naïvety, the belief that what you see is what there is. Reality, the Impressionists taught over a century ago, is unsteady, broken, elliptical, he said. Excess. There is more truth in one of Manet’s discarded roses than in most galleries in London today, he complained. After a time Anna began to respond, to talk of her poetry, her frustration at finding herself always coming up short, and then her slow embrace of this failure, her growing sense that mastery was not the point, that if she could just aim her words in the right direction she would have succeeded, or perhaps failed in a useful way. Curran smiling. Failed in a useful way, he echoed. Put that on my gravestone.

They ate lamb stew and drank wine. Edie was sometimes there, sometimes not. Occasionally Sam would be left with Anna’s mother, and Anna would stay over, drinking Scotch in front of the open fire, climbing late into the small bed in the spare room.

Everything is changing, Curran told her one night, out of nowhere, as though continuing a conversation he had been having in his head. I’m leaving the university. Do you know they are starting a new course at the art college next year? Gaming. It’s actually War Gaming. The idea is to design simulations which come closer and closer to real-world conflict situations. Do you know who is paying for the course? The British Army. Apparently the Americans have been at it for years. There are forty-five undergraduate courses being offered next year, he told her. Do you know how many are not being part-funded by a commercial sponsor? Two, he said. And they’re both mine. They tried to sell Nineteenth Century to Shell. Oil Painting. They were going to call it, no word of a lie, Oil Painting.

Anna recalled the conversation less for Curran’s revelation than for her own. When he had finished talking about his job, about the uncertainty of his future, she told him about Orr, about their affair, about Sarah’s death, about living now between fragile expectations, love’s inevitable unravelling. She had not intended to pour herself out like this. But Curran’s candour, his lack of poise, drew an intimacy that surprised even herself, and she spoke—for the first time, she realised—with frankness and honesty about the past years, and found in it a relief she had not expected. When she finally went to bed, she lay staring at the ceiling, her head spinning from a combination of the whisky and the feeling of having been seen, a kind of recognition she had rarely before experienced. It was not like Orr, she considered, deliberately; with Orr she felt like she was dissolving, like the edge of her body was blurring into the world, the lines between everything obscured and redundant. With Curran she felt almost the opposite, a mutual acuity, as though she were solidifying, finding and testing the limits of herself and finding that they worked, that they held her together, and the person that moved around inside them was acceptable, knowable.

She awoke the next morning to sunlight streaming through the small window above her bed, throwing a stark brightness on the dresser at the far end of the little room, where there was a number of small moulded figures, animals and people, who appeared ablaze. She lay there watching the light move incrementally along the surface, sliver by sliver, until it dripped off them one by one, moved on to find new objects to alight on, and after twenty minutes they were all in shadow. She chased the image into a poem; the sense of being one of those figures, briefly in the sunlight, glowing, but utterly helpless to move where the light moved. I can still almost feel the light sliding off, the spot on the skin where, just a second before, what had been heat was now darkness.

 

These visits—this visit, even, perhaps—changed Anna. She found with Curran a way to be vulnerable. Her autonomy, her self-sufficiency was contained, softened. Curran, in his mannered love of the creative process, and the warmth and width of his humour, drew Anna out of herself, and she began sending him snippets of poems, phrases and stanzas as yet unmoored. He helped anchor them, helped her tease out a direction, a line around which she could unravel an idea. If the line was strong enough—a metaphor he had built into his own process as a painter—one could throw different images, different weights and measures around it and the poem would gain an energy, a momentum. It would, he said, spin. If there was no line it would just careen off, lurch from verse to verse, all energy and no control. It may have life, but it would totter and sway like a drunk.

In the next few months she worked and worked at the poems, which were eventually published as her second collection. Curran made suggestions, criticisms, threw praise where he felt praise was warranted, and pushed her to reconsider images, to dig further into an earthiness, a materiality of words. Anna grew in confidence, and began to push back against some of his suggestions, and this conviction, the rightness with which she both embraced his judgement and resisted it, gave the poems a personality that they had, she realised, been missing. She found a way to not fear the emotion the poem could create, to commit herself to feeling, despite the proximity to sentimentality that she was desperate to avoid. By the time she was finished with them, these new poems had a boldness that her work had not had before. By then, of course, she had other things on her mind.

 

 

By the end of the year Philip was a regular visitor. In the first few weeks after she gave him a key, he continued to visit weekly, would spend an hour or so in the garden, cleaning and tidying. Winter was already beginning to wreak its steady destruction; he merely had to pick up after it. He would then come inside, eat dinner, play with Sam—now almost three years old, throwing words around with gleeful curiosity—and talk to Anna. His friendship with Sam, the genuine affection they had for one another, continued to erode Anna’s fear, and a closeness soon developed between them which mirrored that growing between her and Curran. In one sense at least Curran cleared the way for Philip; his influence, the openness he had created in her towards her own vulnerability, allowed her a similar openness to Philip.

They began to share their lives. Anna confided in the boy, began to talk to him about her poetry, about her friendship with Curran, about his painting. About the joy of discovering, at thirty years old, that one could still find something new, alive, meaningful. She did not talk about Orr; a line seemed drawn around him as a subject, a barrier erected. But it had faded sufficiently within a few months so as to barely cross her mind, and where once she had been constantly aware of what she was avoiding, by early in the new year they had so much else to talk about, so many other connections, personal to each other, that Orr was largely unconsidered. This freedom cannot have been the same for Philip. He returned home every day to his father, and whilst a truce of sorts had been established between them, his anger and sense of betrayal had not diminished. He was sixteen years old, somewhere between a boy and a man. He sounded like a teenager, the twisted, playful phraseology, the voice still finding its timbre; but something else, a ferocity that he could never push down quite far enough, betrayed him as an adult.

 

Sam turned three in January. Anna held a party for the family, inviting Orr and his sons, and her mother. Just a year before, Anna could not have imagined this gathering taking place. Orr drove the boys across town on the first Saturday of the new year, a few days after Sam’s birthday. It was too cold to play outside, but she had covered a table in food, sweets and crisps, and they ate and joked, and Sam blew out the candles on the cake. Afterwards the boys helped him set up the train set his father had bought him, Philip coaxing laughter from the child by pretending to put the pieces in the wrong order. Anna and Orr and her mother stayed in the kitchen. Anna put on another pot of tea. She watched Orr standing in the doorway, glancing around repeatedly at the scene in the living room.

Why do you keep looking? Anna asked him.

He shook his head. He looked at her mother, as though weighing up whether he could speak.

Spit it out, Anna said. She was surprised at her defensiveness, her need to stand in Philip’s corner; it had sneaked up unannounced. Orr stared at her. Anna remembered the way he used to stare at her, and found it astonishing how much was still left. For a moment she wished her mother were someplace else.

Just be careful, Orr said, his voice barely audible.

Is that a warning? Anna asked him.

He glanced around again, and Anna looked past him to see Philip watching them, his face unreadable.

And then Philip smiled at her, and looked back at Sam, made a joke, and Orr turned to Anna, and said flatly, Yes. Yes it is.

Something shifted after this, Anna believed. Not in her, but in Orr. She could not work out exactly what it was. She thought that he felt backed into a corner, ganged up on; that he had sensed a danger and come out fighting. Cause and effect are so complicatedly positioned; one so easily becomes the other. Anna afterwards never quite forgave herself for this. In reading Orr this way, she reacted all the more strongly against him, moving further and further into Philip’s camp, distancing herself from Orr, trying to force him to retreat.

What Orr was supposed to have done, of course, was relayed to her largely by Philip himself. His visits became weighed down with accusations, a grammar of violation. He knew Anna by now. Despite her never talking directly about Orr, about their relationship, Philip had an extraordinary skill of carefully unpicking a person’s weakness, of paying attention as much to what they didn’t say as to what they did. He had an ear for the repressed, the skilfully avoided. And he had that rare absence of compassion, a preparedness to use whatever he could get his hands on for his own ends. And so the subtle, pointed comments, the references to Orr’s holiness, his authority, his failure to consider sufficiently the pain of others. He was careful never to accuse Orr of anything in which Anna herself might be implicated. Accuse, in fact, is too strong a word. Anna said later, looking back with regret, that when he left there was never a clear picture in her head of what Orr was alleged to have done, but rather an atmosphere, a kind of barbed, muted anger which had been created and in which she found herself a participant.

Orr drifted further and further, the friendship between him and Anna—for a while so easy again—now slowly, clumsily unwound. They still saw each other twice a week, but rather than an interaction Sam was simply passed between them, like a baton. Sometimes she didn’t get out of the car when she dropped him off. Anna said later she didn’t notice the extent to which the gap between them was widening. There was no deliberation, no decision. It happened under the surface and rose upward; the crack appeared, the chasm, only at the end. Anna’s friendship with Curran, growing in scope and affection, tempered, disguised even, the extent of the other breakages.

 

It was March when everything turned. Or April, I suppose. In March the seeds were sown. Around the middle of the month, on a Thursday night, Philip appeared at the door. It was shortly after ten o’clock. Anna peered through the window first, surprised at being disturbed so late. She gasped to see Philip’s face, bloody and badly bruised, with a gash on his left cheek, still open. He was holding it shut with his T-shirt. His shirt was unbuttoned, his chest also showing wounds, pale patches of violence. Anna brought him inside, her heart racing. Philip himself seemed unperturbed, almost unnaturally calm.

What happened? she asked him.

I told you they would wait for the right time, he replied.

But this, she said. For God’s sake.

He sat at the kitchen table as she attended to the immediate wounds. You have to go to the hospital, she said.

He shook his head. No.

You have to, Philip, she said. Look at you.

You can fix me, he said.

Jesus, no I can’t. He nodded, closed his eyes.

It doesn’t hurt, he said.

Whether it was the shock, or the necessity of the moment, Anna found herself moving mechanically, cleaning the wound on his cheek, applying iodine, gently wiping off the blood on the more minor scratches. His chest was a collection of changing colours, blues and reds. The image came to her of Curran’s paintings.

Does your father know? she asked him.

He shook his head.

Your cheek will scar, she said, after she had finished.

His eyes were still closed. He had barely flinched, even as the stinging fluid burned the bacteria from his cuts. He was indifferent, a teenage Buddhist. Only pain, no suffering.

Whatever, he said.

She made up a bed for him on the sofa. When she left him he thanked her. She lay awake in her bed, picturing his chest, his broken skin. Whatever. She could not separate him, she found to her surprise, from his father. She closed her eyes but the images repeated over and over, first the boy, then the man, Orr’s lips on her body and her hands on the boy’s, and she shuddered awake, sweating.

In the morning she rose early. He was still asleep, on his back, the way his father slept. His breathing was quiet, calm. The plasters on his cheek had stained red, but seemed to have worked to hold the cut closed. She made tea and sat in the kitchen, staring out the window. It was spring, trees returning to bud. Birds sang. The traffic rose slowly, the rumble of the city imperceptibly growing. Philip appeared in the doorway. They looked at each other. She shook her head, and—unable to do anything else—smiled. He sat across from her and she poured him tea.

Now what? she said.

Now what what? He smiled, then winced, raising his hand to his damaged face.

No smiling for you, she said.

She reached across towards him, towards his face. He moved back, instinctively. I’m not going to hurt you, she said. He stared at her, then let her touch him. She appraised the plasters. It’s working. But I still think you should go to the hospital.

He shook his head. I’m not going to the hospital.

She got up, began to tidy the kitchen. I have to go to work. She heard a door open upstairs. Sam’s up.

Can I stay here today? Philip asked.

Don’t you have school? she replied. He looked at her. Yes, okay, you can stay, she said.

You can leave Sam if you like, he nodded, as Sam appeared in the doorway.

Anna recalled the moment with clarity, looking at the two boys, the sunlight in strips blinding Sam as he stared at them both, raising his arm to cover his face. She returned to this particular moment over and over again, as though there were something in it she should have seen, some augur, a sign of what was to come. But there wasn’t, or if there was, she didn’t see it. It was just three people in a kitchen, in the aftermath of an unknown act of violence, looking at each other, the sunlight making them squint, grimace, and rendering each of them, in its harshness, difficult to apprehend.

 

She didn’t leave Sam with Philip that day, but brought him to her mother’s, as usual; still, the offer had been made, and in it she felt an opportunity to ease some of the pressure on her mother, who had continued to be quietly, passively supportive, taking the boy as often as was needed. The following week she asked Philip if he would look after Sam on Friday night. He had visited her most evenings already. His face was healing, though slowly, and she felt he was enjoying her role as his nurse. She had been invited to an opening with Curran. Philip agreed without hesitation. Sam was thrilled, and talked incessantly of what they would do, the games they would play, the fun they would have.

When she returned home, around eleven, Philip was playing on his phone. He glanced up as she walked in, barely removing his attention from the screen.

He’s asleep, he said.

Anna went upstairs, looked in on him, sleeping soundly. She changed out of her evening dress, put on a sweatshirt. She went back downstairs and found Philip in the kitchen, making tea.

Decaf, right? he said.

Thanks, she said, and sat down.

How was it? he asked.

She smiled and took the mug he held out. It was good. How was your night?

Philip smiled. It was good too. He sat down opposite her.

Are you not having a cup?

He shook his head.

You can stay here tonight, she said. He looked at her. If you want. On the couch. I’ll get you blankets.

He nodded. She was a little drunk. She reached across the table, touched his cheek. She moved her thumb over the tiny crust of blood along the wound, where the line held.

It doesn’t hurt, no, he said.

How did you know I was going to ask that? she smiled.

You always want to know that, he said.

She was briefly silent, and then said, You remind me of your father.

She was not sure, retrospectively, whether she was trying to provoke a reaction, or whether her slight intoxication had simply freed her to say something she had been so actively hiding before. She agonised over it at length, wondered at that part of her that must have wanted to punish him. She knew that he would not have liked the comparison. He flinched as she said it, but managed not to draw himself away. Indeed, she thought, she almost felt him move closer, though again she could not be sure whether this was a physical movement or a shift taking place inside her, the alcohol mixed with the giddy thrill of having said the wrong thing and got away with it. The moment lasted, she thought, two, three seconds and then she realised, as though suddenly, where she was, and she pulled her hand back, too fast perhaps, her head spinning.

She did not remember getting Philip the blankets for the sofa, nor going to bed herself. She dreamed that she awoke in the middle of the night and he was standing in her doorway, framed by light from behind, his body lithe, animal.

 

 

And so here we are.

 

Orr called Anna early the following week. They fought on the phone, about Philip again, Orr again warning her that she was walking a dangerous path. There was too much of the Bible in his language for her to listen. She heard only a petty rival, a jealous god. She accused him then, words stored up and sharpened, and hung up the phone alive with the tingle of self-righteousness. She walked around the rest of the day replaying the conversation, augmenting her arguments with further observations, nodding inwardly, her convictions strengthened. She wondered she had not done it sooner. There was a slight tremble in her hands. Her blood seemed to run faster. Too much blood, too little space.

 

Two weeks later Anna again left Sam with Philip. This time she was at a concert, a festival of Spanish music organised by the music department of the university, at which she’d been asked to read some poems from her time in Barcelona. Her second collection was due to be published a couple of months later. She left hurriedly, dishevelled. Philip himself seemed distracted, watching her without speaking. His face was largely healed, save the one large scar on his cheek, which remained, greedily drawing attention from his other features. You know where everything is, she said, leaving, without waiting for his response.

They usually played together, but now Philip switched on the television and they sat in front of it. Anna rarely allowed Sam to watch, so it was still a pleasure, an almost illicit joy. He sat on the floor, staring up, unmoving. After some time, perhaps an hour, he looked around to find that Philip was not in the room. He got up, walked around the house, but could not find him. He climbed the stairs, and heard a noise from his mother’s room.

At first Philip did not see him and Sam stood silently, staring. Philip turned around, suddenly aware he was being watched. The look on his face was of neither surprise nor shame; he glared with impatience.

What are you doing? Sam asked.

Get on to the bed, Sam.

Why?

Just do it.

Are we going to play a game?

Philip paused, nodded. A game, yes.

Sam climbed on to the bed. He was excited, thrilled to be with his brother.

Close your eyes, Philip said.

A hesitation on Sam’s part, but he closes his eyes.

Whatever happens, you keep your eyes closed, right? That’s the game.

Sam squeezes his eyes shut tighter. Okay, he says.

For a moment nothing happens. Outside, the distant drone of a lawnmower. The room itself is silent.

Suddenly, the sharpest pain across his cheek. The door slams. He opens his eyes and tries to look down at where his cheek is but can see nothing, he can only feel, a stinging, hot. Pain spreads across his face. Philip has gone.

I raise my hand to my cheek and take it away. There is blood all over it.

This is my first memory.

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness . . . And the evening and the morning were the first day.

The light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.