The Alarming Palsy of James Orr Read online

  It was hard to believe, James and Sarah often remarked to each other, but they had been at New Glades for nearly two years. The kids were growing up there, they could not foresee a time when they would want to move, and, in James’s mind at least, the house had taken on the sanctified status of a family home. He tried not to be sentimental, but he knew that when he and Sarah looked back on their lives, this would be one of the most significant places. Sammy had, in fact, been born there, in their bedroom, when Sarah had gone into labour so rapidly in the evening that there was no time to get to the hospital. Early the next morning, after a long night helping the midwives with the birth, with his son upstairs for the very first time, asleep on his wife’s chest, James had stepped outside the front door and seen the most glorious dawn breaking behind the trees, the world seemingly re-made, and had felt full of life’s infinite possibility.

  And now, driving back into the estate—or being driven, with Sarah more or less observing the ten-mile-an-hour speed limit—on a crisp, bright, pale blue March day, the dark green of the laurel hedges flecked with the lime-green leaves of new growth, it was hard not to recapture some of that feeling from the first day of his son’s life and—this was a little embarrassing—feel himself spontaneously and irresistibly well up.

  Once they got back through the door, Sarah gathered up her things for work.

  “Enjoy your day off,” she said.

  “It’s not exactly a day off,” said James.

  Sarah looked over at him from where she was standing by the door and he saw that he had not spoken clearly enough.

  “It’s not exactly a day off,” he repeated, more slowly.

  “Well, okay,” she said. “Anyway, I’ll probably think of some things you can do. I’ll be in touch.”

  When she had gone, James sat back down on the sofa and turned on the television. He flicked through the channels and then turned it off. He opened the laptop and stared for several minutes at the screen. He considered running a bath. After a while he went to the kitchen and put some bread in the toaster. When it was done he stood by the back window looking out, chewing it gingerly in the right-hand side of his mouth.

  4

  James fell asleep on the sofa in the living room. He had not intended to. He never slept during the day. Apart from anything else, he never had the opportunity. He had eaten the toast, sat down to think about what to do next, and that was it. When he woke up it was nearly one o’clock. He felt groggy, out of sorts. It was still hours before Sarah arrived back with the kids, so he decided to go for a walk to clear his head.

  As soon as he had crossed the road and gone into the woods through the gate in the laurel hedge, he felt better. He turned right off the main path and began to follow the track that ran around the perimeter of the estate and then pressed on up the hill. The crispness of the morning had resolved into a beautiful, almost warm day. Even in the woods James could feel it, and the light fell in hazy stripes and pools through the canopy. He took off his jacket and tied it around his waist. Every few seconds, from different directions and very clear, there was the staccato drumming of woodpeckers, a sound that, to James, always seemed full of an extraordinary hopefulness.

  He cut left down a bank, skidding a little in the winter mud that had not yet dried up. There he picked up the route of a disused railway line along an embankment marked on either side by a procession of huge, gnarled oaks. In places the twisted metal of the old tracks emerged from the ground, and here and there, in the shade of the oaks, were patches of crocuses. Half a mile further on the track disappeared into a boarded-up train tunnel now colonised by thousands of bats. Local myth had it that behind the boardings, deep inside the tunnel and the bowels of the hill, was a train, abandoned there when the line was decommissioned a hundred years before.

  James took the steep path to the right of the tunnel, climbed up around it and then doubled back over the top. He was not far from the western edge of the woods, its highest point, and he could hear the cars on the busy road that formed its border on that side. Here, among pine and fir trees, there were traces of huge Victorian mansions built by wealthy families up on the hill to escape the city smog. After the First World War they had become too expensive to run and were knocked down, their foundations ultimately reclaimed by the wood. There were sections of crumbling, moss-covered wall, enormous severed ceramic pipes, flights and half-flights of stone steps and, in one place, an unnaturally flat rectangle of space that was said to have been a tennis court.

  Laura loved it up there and James had often taken her and her friends to scramble and jump and climb around the site. James liked it too, this evidence of earlier eras and ways of life accruing like geological strata, like the ruined terraces of some Mayan or Aztec temple system. He thought, among the rubble and the undergrowth and the bent and buried metal, about the trains steaming through, about these grand houses and their inhabitants, perhaps in their tennis whites or drinking gin on their verandas overlooking the city, the temporariness of these civilizations. It gave you a perspective, something transcendent, like looking out over an ocean or up at the stars and feeling your own smallness. The parakeets that roosted in the Orrs’ cherry tree were said to be the descendants of a pair that had escaped from the aviary of one of the big houses when it was abandoned.

  Some distance beyond the last set of foundations, ten metres or so off the main path and largely hidden in the trees and undergrowth, James could see the old folly. This was a Victorian oddity, originally at the far end of one of the gardens, a kind of small stone fort built in Gothic style as a ruin, three half-fallen-down walls, a broken arch and no roof, presumably for the entertainment of the children of the house. Laura and her friends were intrigued by it too, but whenever they went up there James always steered them away because, for as long as they had been at New Glades, there had been a man living there.

  He could see now the ragged blue tarpaulin that was strung between the trees around the folly to provide shelter from the rain. On previous walks, with Sarah and the children, he had also seen clothes hanging from the surrounding branches, but James had never seen the man himself. He had been mentioned at the residents’ committee a number of times when James first joined. William, the neighbourhood watch officer, had been concerned. Different things were said, wildly different—that he was an asylum seeker, Afghan or Iraqi, or a city trader who had lost his job, his family and his house, or some disturbed person who had been dumped out of a psychiatric hospital. The authorities—the council and the trust—knew about him, apparently, but the camp had remained there all year, through the freezing winter, and the one before. It all seemed improbable to James—a kid’s story, the man who lives in the woods, like the train in the boarded-up tunnel—but there were the clothes, and sometimes the tarpaulin seemed to have been re-hung at a different angle. There were no clothes visible today and no other signs of life, either, but James was not tempted to investigate. It gave him an eerie feeling, the possibility of another human presence nearby but concealed, a sense that even in this public place he was trespassing, and he walked on.

  When James emerged from the woods twenty minutes later the sun was blinding and it brought him to a stop. It took several moments for his eyes to adjust, and when they did he spotted a figure up on the roof of one of the houses, straddling the ridge of it, hammering away at something. It was Kit. He wasn’t wearing a shirt and this struck James as an affectation. It was still only March, after all. James was just about to go on up to his house, to take the few steps that would put him behind the cherry tree and out of view, when Kit looked up, saw him, and waved the hammer in the air.

  “Hello James,” he called.

  James hesitated. He could not fail to acknowledge him. It would appear to Kit that James had been standing watching him, though this was not the case at all. On the other hand, he did not wish to be drawn in.

  “Hello,” James called out, but he had forgotten abo
ut his mouth and it came out as a kind of strangled cry. He raised his hand and waved it, though he was not exactly sure if this was an apology for the sound of his voice or an alternative greeting, and then ducked under the cover of the cherry tree. It was annoying, somehow, to have been seen hanging around the woods in the middle of the day, and then to have fluffed the encounter so completely. He climbed quickly up the steps and let himself into the house.

  5

  A few days later, on Friday night, James and Sarah were due at their neighbours, the Fullers, for dinner, an arrangement that had been made the week before.

  “It’s fine if you don’t want to go,” said Sarah. “I’ve let them know the situation, as it were. We can cancel the sitter.”

  “No, no,” James insisted, “life must go on.”

  There had been no change in his face. He had been to the hospital, where they had run various tests and excluded the possibility of anything more serious. He was given a prescription for steroids and shown some exercises that would help rebuild the nerve endings. The first night, when Sarah arrived home with the kids, they had sat Laura down to explain what had happened and to tell her not to be worried about it. She was not worried. She was briefly interested when James showed her some of the faces he could make but started to fidget when Sarah began to talk about paralysis, nerves and regeneration. “I know, I know, Mum,” she said irritably, as she did about anything that bored her, and then wandered off. Sammy, eighteen months old now, gave no sign of noticing any change. James found all this reassuring.

  On the second day, he had phoned his work to update them. Deborah, his manager, had told him to take as long as he needed. “You’re no good to us like that,” she had said, “I can’t have you frightening the clients.” She had laughed in a friendly way and he had laughed with her, or tried to.

  James tried to remain upbeat but life was suddenly more complicated, and the little frustrations did get to him. Eating and drinking were slow, messy and undignified. The same applied to cleaning his teeth and shaving. He put the drops the doctor had given him in his left eye every few hours but it remained sore, a persistent, burning presence. At night he taped his eyelid down as the hospital had suggested but by morning the tape had always peeled off and the eye was raw again. On top of this, he felt unusually tired and flat, as if the animation that had gone out of his face had taken something less tangible with it as well, and he continued to take long naps in the middle of the day.

  “Good grief, James,” said Connie Fuller when she opened her front door. “I thought Sarah was exaggerating.”

  James grinned, his best monster grin.

  “Is it painful? It looks painful.”

  James shook his head.

  “Just the eye,” he said, his mouth contorted in a way that he had found allowed him to best get his words out. “Can’t feel anything else. That’s the problem.”

  “Ah, the afflicted!” Greg Fuller had appeared behind his wife. “My cousin’s husband had Bell’s. Connie, you remember Jeff? They’re divorced now, actually, though I don’t think the two things are related.” He put his hand on James’s shoulder and smiled at Sarah. “Well, Jim, they say we all end up with the face we deserve.”

  “Do they?” said James, but the Fullers had turned and gone back into the house.

  They lived four doors away on the same terrace, the Orrs’ first and best friends on the estate. On the day the Orrs moved in, the Fullers’ enormous wolfhound, Sidney, had run through their open back door and upstairs, scaring the kids. “Apologies,” said Greg, who had rushed after the dog and dragged him back downstairs, “he’s a friendly bastard really.” Greg and Connie had stayed for a cup of tea among the Orrs’ half-unpacked boxes. They had three children, the youngest two the same age as Laura and Sammy, and had moved to New Glades a year earlier for much the same reasons as the Orrs. “I like them,” Sarah had said after the Fullers had gone, “and they like us,” and James had felt grateful to them for confirming his positive intuition about their new home.

  Since then, the Orrs and the Fullers had been in and out of each other’s houses on an almost daily basis. The Fullers were easy to be with. The kids all got along and Greg and Connie were warm, generous and disarming. They liked to eat and drink and argue, mostly with each other. When Connie was drunk she liked to say how much she disliked New Glades. “How did I get here?” she said. “Pushing out children and getting fat. I blame my husband.”

  Part of the pleasure in being with them, James knew, was that he had a crush on Connie. She was not getting fat, at least as far as James could tell. She was wiry and athletic, her large, expressive green eyes and freckled cheeks partially concealed behind thick black-rimmed glasses. Her red hair, cut into a short fringe high up on her forehead, was shot through with grey. She was very tactile, sat too close or touched James’s arm or hand when she spoke or was being spoken to, her eye contact absolute, a quality of attention that seemed just part of her natural vitality and vividness, rather than cynical or teasing. The result, of course, was that James often thought about what it would be like to sleep with her. He did not think there was any need to feel bad about this. Connie probably provoked the same feelings in many men. On top of which, Greg flirted shamelessly with Sarah, and she with him. It seemed to James that they were at their best when they were with the Fullers, and though they had never discussed it in this way, he felt that Sarah would agree.

  In the kitchen a large casserole dish was already sitting on the dining table.

  “Shin of beef,” said Greg. “Underrated and therefore very cheap. I’ve been slow cooking it since this morning. Ideally it needs twenty-four hours, but I’m not some kind of maniac.”

  For his birthday, a few months before, Greg’s colleagues had clubbed together to send him on a weekend butchery course. Afterwards, he had described the various techniques in great and gruesome detail. Knowing how it was killed and prepared and its different cuts, he had insisted to James more than once, was a form of respect for the animal.

  “Forgive the meat bore,” said Connie. “I’ve come to the conclusion that this is just part of some embarrassing masculine crisis Greg is having. At least he hasn’t run off with a schoolgirl.”

  “Or one of the neighbours,” said Greg, and slid his hand around Sarah’s waist.

  James and Sarah sat down at the table. Greg carried over the plates and began to serve up the meat. Connie poured wine and added a straw for James. “I bought them especially,” she said, and winked at him.

  At first James was a little elated to be out and among friends, the most normal thing he had done in a difficult week, but the eating and the talking were hard work and gradually he lapsed into silence as the conversation went on around him. Sarah, Connie and Greg were talking about a holiday the two families were planning to take together in the summer. Connie’s parents owned a farmhouse in France and it would be the first time they had all been away together. James did not contribute. He had been looking forward to the trip, but at this moment the idea of being on holiday seemed remote and unreal. He could not imagine himself sitting by the pool drinking small beers, enjoying a long lunch in a restaurant or strolling around French markets.

  He was making slow progress on the dinner. The meat was tender but he was still having trouble chewing it down and when the bits got stuck in his teeth he could not get them out again. He also felt annoyed—he knew unreasonably—that beyond the acknowledgement at the doorstep, and the provision of the straw, there had been no further discussion of his face or concern at how he was coping. He felt it might be a form of pity or condescension not to mention it, rather than simply tact. He knew, equally, that he would have been annoyed if too much had been made of it.

  The others had finished and after a few minutes Greg asked if they should continue with the dessert. James waved them on. Greg had made ice cream and it would be considerably easier to eat than the beef, James tho
ught moodily, but he did not want to admit defeat. Meanwhile, he realised that the straw had allowed him to suck up a deceptively large amount of the wine that Connie had been keeping topped up. He was quite drunk, but not particularly pleasantly—dazed, woozy, tired again.

  Sidney had wandered in and Greg began to pick bits of meat out of the casserole dish and feed them to him. If James could fault the Fullers on one thing, it was Sidney. He had nothing against dogs in general, but Sidney—huge, slobbery and undisciplined—was a menace. There was something a little conceited in having an animal this big, so impractical and expensive to keep, getting in everyone’s way, like having a flashy car. He regularly escaped from the house or leapt the garden fence, ran around terrorising the smaller children and left his giant craps all over the estate. It had even come up at the residents’ meetings and James had been put in the annoying position of having to defend his friends and then, later, ask them to get the animal under control.

  Greg was teasing Sidney with a piece of meat and the dog reared up, put his front paws on the table and snatched it from his hand.

  “Do you fucking mind?” said James.

  He had intended this as a joke, but when he looked around he saw that it had not been taken that way. Sarah, Greg and Connie were staring at him in surprise and, it seemed, in dismay. Perhaps it was the lack of control over his mouth, or the muffling effect of the meat still caught in there, that had made it come out more aggressively than he had meant it to. Or perhaps his facial expression, no longer a reliable guide to his feelings, had given a false impression of his intent. But it was also true that he did mind. He was still eating himself and to have the dog slavering away noisily next to him—well, it was too much.