The Alarming Palsy of James Orr Read online

  James rushed over. “Are you okay?” he asked.

  The man was already on his feet. He had a ragged-looking scratch—more than that, a gash—on his right cheek and a piece of skin was flapping off. It was bleeding profusely, running down his face and dripping onto his top.

  He was adjusting the headphones in his ears. He seemed unaware of his injury, the blood, or unwilling to acknowledge it. He didn’t look at James.

  “I didn’t see you,” the runner said.

  He looked at his watch, took two steps and was off, running again.

  “You’re hurt!” called out James, but the runner gave no sign of having heard. “I’m sorry,” James shouted, as loudly as his mouth would allow. The man was twenty yards away now, getting smaller. Then the path twisted, and abruptly he was out of sight altogether.

  At home later that evening, when the kids had gone to bed, he described what had happened to Sarah and she had laughed.

  “What’s funny?” asked James.

  “It’s just the thought of you skulking around in the woods and then jumping out at someone.”

  “I wasn’t skulking around.”

  “Well, what were you doing in there?”

  “Oh, just—walking,” James said. Then, “There was quite a lot of blood.”

  “You said. I’m sure he’ll live.”

  “I suppose so,” said James, but when he went to bed he still couldn’t get the sight of the man’s face out of his mind, the gash, the flap of skin and the blood, the surprising amount of it.

  The following day, Saturday, it was bright again, and warm, the warmest day of the year so far. A week before, Sammy, who had been shuffling along on his bottom for months, had stood up and started walking and so now Sarah had taken him to buy his first proper shoes. Laura was out on the grassy verge between the road and the laurel hedge that bordered the wood. She liked to wander up and down, inspecting the ground, looking for the green and yellow feathers of the parakeets. She said she was going to make them into a headdress, like ones she had seen in pictures of Native Americans.

  James sat in the deckchair that they kept on the front porch all year round, reading the newspaper. It was his favourite spot around the house, ten steps above road level, partly shaded by the cherry tree, with a view over the woods and on to the city, the same view that had mirrored his elation the morning of Sammy’s birth.

  After a few minutes his eye became too sore to read and he put the paper down and lay back in the chair. He closed his right eye and placed the palm of his hand over his left. He could hear the buzz of insects, and the woodpeckers again, a satisfying, industrious noise that made him feel paradoxically relaxed, as well as the gentle, indecipherable murmur of Laura chattering to herself as she walked up and down the verge. The sun warmed his face and a drifting, disembodied feeling began to overtake him. Sarah had once told him that ten minutes of the sun on your face a day gave you all the vitamin D you needed and lifted your mood—or something like that. In the same way, it seemed possible that the sun’s benevolent rays might have the power to relax and unfreeze his face, to nourish it back into life.

  “I’ve got something,” Laura called out. “Daddy, I’ve got something. What is it?”

  James opened his eyes and looked over to where she was standing on the verge, a little bit obscured by the knotty, twisting trunk of the cherry tree, something dangling from her left hand.

  “What is it, Daddy?”

  The sun was in his eyes.

  “I can’t see from here, sweetheart.”

  “I’m coming.”

  She turned and started to cross the road. He watched her come, taking careful steps, her face fixed in concentration as if she were carrying a delicate piece of porcelain or china, something precious and easily smashed. She was six now, nearly seven—it was hard to believe. She had grown much taller and thinner in the last few months, revealing long, lean limbs. Sarah had taken her for a new, shorter haircut, with a fringe that she pushed or blew out of her eyes, and this too made her seem older. Her eyes were large, brown, very round and somehow soulful, a quality that was often caught in photos. People often told him how pretty she was and this pleased James more than he thought it really should.

  She was quiet but not shy, a little serious perhaps, and had a kind of serene self-possession that already made people—adults and children—want to be friends with her, and that would later, it seemed to James, make people fall in love with her. When she was small it had been easy. If she was happy, she laughed or smiled. If she cried then she was hungry or tired or needed her nappy changed. Increasingly, however, and particularly since she had started school, she was becoming an enigma to him. She knew and said things that surprised him, had her own unguessable thoughts and moods, things she did and didn’t want to talk about, levels of complexity he could know nothing about. This seemed in some obscure way unreasonable. He had been there the day of her birth and every day since, all the important moments, and yet now his belief that he knew more about her, understood her better, than she did herself was beginning to have to give way. No doubt it was all completely normal and inevitable for Laura to change the way she was, for him to feel the way he did about it. He supposed he had just not expected it to happen so soon.

  She was coming up the steps to the porch now, treading over some of the cherry blossom that had already fallen or been knocked from the tree, and she looked up at him and gave a tentative, almost sly smile. The sun had dipped behind a cloud and the thing she was holding was coming into focus. It was perhaps ten centimetres long, translucent but tinted red, knotted at the top just above where his daughter’s little fist was gripping it, a nipple shaped protuberance at the bottom. Visible inside the nipple was an opaque, not-quite-white fluid, and as Laura climbed the steps the whole thing swung lazily from side to side, describing an unmistakably obscene arc through the blue air.

  9

  Half an hour later, James was standing in the shower. He had washed himself twice thoroughly, and shampooed his hair—unnecessarily, he knew—and was now leaning against the tiles, letting the water stream over his face and down his body.

  In retrospect, the moments following his realisation of what Laura had in her hand seemed to occur in melodramatic, almost comical slow motion. The mangled cry of warning from his half-frozen mouth, launching himself out of the deckchair and grabbing his daughter’s wrist so hard that she screamed and began to cry, the sun simultaneously bursting from behind the cloud and bathing them in warmth.

  Laura had dropped the condom and James had half led, half pulled her into the house, where she continued to cry. He hugged her shaking, furious body.

  “You hurt me, Daddy!” she wailed. “You hurt me!”

  “I’m sorry, darling,” he said, aware that he was shaking himself. “It’s just—some things you shouldn’t touch, if you don’t know what they are.”

  He held her for a little longer while her crying subsided. Then he carried her over to the kitchen sink and washed her hands. There was a red mark on her wrist from where his hand had been. He got her a drink and a biscuit and put on the television.

  “You are naughty, Daddy,” she said, but her tone was calm now, matter-of-fact, and she was staring at the TV.

  James went back out to the porch. His blood was still pumping and he sat down on the wall to take some breaths and try and reason with himself. His daughter was right. The scene had been unnecessary. He saw that he had made the incident entirely worse than it had needed to be. He had upset Laura—a child who was not easily upset—and made her feel that she had done something wrong, that something, in some way, was her fault. As unpleasant and unhygienic as it was, she could not come to any harm by touching the condom. It was not a live grenade or a venomous snake she was holding, or even a rusty nail or a piece of glass. As it was, it was he who had ended up, inadvertently, hurting her. Looking at it now, lying flat
and twisted on the paving stone, a wilted piece of garishly coloured, mass-produced latex, bathetic evidence of someone’s fleeting pleasure, he felt extremely foolish.

  However, there was still the question of where to dispose of it. After several minutes he went back inside and got one of the small green bags they used to put Sammy’s soiled nappies in. He knelt down over the condom and, with his hand inside the bag, closed his fingers around it, as he had seen dog owners do when picking up their animals’ excrement. Then he drew the bag up around it and tied a knot with the handles. There was no question of having it in the house, however well wrapped up, so he carried the bag down the steps to the bins in the front garden. Even this did not feel quite sufficient. It was somehow still too close to the house—he would think of it sitting there, and the bins were not due to be collected for nearly a week. For a few moments he toyed with the idea of dropping it in a neighbour’s bin—they wouldn’t know it was there and it wouldn’t trouble them—but, apart from anything else, he might be seen and it would be a hard one to explain. Then, without realising he was about to do it, like a reflex kicking in, James drew back his arm and flung the bag high in the air, over the road, over the laurel bushes and into the woods themselves. He did not hear it land.

  James had replayed all this in his mind as he stood in the shower. The wash had made him feel better, calmer and more clear-headed, but when he finally stepped out onto the shower mat and used a towel to wipe condensation from the bathroom mirror, he received his second shock of the day. This, it seemed, was what had really been waiting for him, hovering just out of view.

  A couple of weeks before, he had stood in front of the same mirror after sex with Sarah, and—quite absurdly, it seemed now—admired what he saw. He had managed then, and in general ever since the first morning in the bathroom, and although he had been in front of the mirror several times every day to shave and clean his teeth—to somehow fail or refuse to see what was in front of him. It was a form of self-preservation, he supposed. But it hit him now, forcefully, all over again, the discord between left and right, the grotesqueness of something familiar pulled violently out of shape. This, of course, was the stricken, agonised face that had loomed out from among the trees and sent the runner careering off the path and into the undergrowth.

  And then, looking closer, there was his left eye, straining in its socket. The pupil was very large, almost engorged, the yellowing cornea red-rimmed and mapped with blood vessels. It stared unblinkingly back at him, as if from some slightly other place. Again, there was the hint of accusation and judgement—now with some justification, James reflected—for having shouted and been rough with his daughter, for having been negligent in letting her pick up the condom in the first place, for something more complicated and less articulable altogether. He had to remind himself that it was his own eye he was looking at and that was looking at him, but this was hardly reassuring.

  Part Two

  1

  Three times a day, when he woke up, after lunch and after dinner, James stood in front of the bathroom mirror and attempted the exercises the consultant had given him: puckering his lips, raising his eyebrows, wrinkling his forehead and his nose. As he was doing them he tried to picture the nerve endings rebuilding, reconnecting, coming alive again, the way Sarah had described it to Laura on the first day, as if this positive visualisation and force of will might somehow help the process. He applied himself conscientiously, but noticed no difference. The left-hand side of his lips, his forehead, his left nostril and his eyebrow remained resolutely frozen. And even these five-minute sessions—this was all the consultant had recommended—left him feeling utterly depleted, as if in the effort to move his face he had been pushing at some great and immovable weight. Sometimes, afterwards, he lay down on the spare-room bed and fell immediately into a doze.

  He took the steroids, a little blue pill, with his dinner every night, and used the eye drops. He started wearing a patch, too. Sarah had got it for him at the beginning but he had resisted putting it on, feeling it would make him look a little ridiculous, piratical, more conspicuous rather than less. Now, on balance, he felt it was worth it. It was a little uncomfortable and he kept having to adjust the position, but the eye itself was less sore. This way there was no chance of him catching sight of it in the mirror or reflected in a window or on the computer screen, this unsettling, inflamed presence, and—just as importantly, it seemed—other people were protected from the sight of it, too.

  But it had now been nearly six weeks since the palsy had struck, surely well past the “few weeks” the GP had said it might take to begin the recovery, and he could not help brooding on it. When he was alone in the house, barely occupied, he could not avoid it. It was the context for everything in his narrowed life. How he ate, how he talked, where he could go and what he could do, all thoughts of the day-to-day and the immediate future, nothing could be considered without it. For a few minutes at a time he might lose himself in something else, perhaps when he was reading the newspaper online or listening to the radio, but then something would remind him, the feel of his face when he scratched his nose—strange, alien—or just the realisation of where he was, at home, in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week.

  It had all started to look horribly open-ended. “Almost definitely,” the GP had said when James asked if it would get better. She had meant to reassure him, but now her statement began to stand for the opposite outcome. “Only a small percentage do not return to more or less normal.” That small percentage had to be made up of individuals, individuals like himself, perhaps. And anyway, what did “more or less normal” mean? How normal was that? Was this the best he could hope for?

  Meanwhile, time weighed heavily on him. He had not taken up a musical instrument or started to learn a new language. He could just about manage to read the news but did not have the concentration span for anything longer. The last thing he wanted to do was contact old friends. As she had promised on the first day, Sarah had given him a list of things that needed doing—pictures that needed hanging, paintwork to be touched up, small jobs in the garden—but somehow he had made little headway with these either.

  From time to time James contemplated getting off the estate altogether for a morning or an afternoon. Perhaps an expedition to the outside world was just what he needed—to see normal life going on would do him good, keep him human. But each time he thought about it, the reasons against quickly piled up. He could not drive because of his eye, and anyway Sarah had the car. It was a good walk to a bus stop that could then take him somewhere else. He imagined the struggle he would have to express himself to a bus driver or someone in a shop, the looks he might get, the pity. But more than any of this, he could not really think where to go—to an art gallery, to a café, to sit alone in a cinema in the middle of the day? One morning he walked to the station, taking his old route through the woods, and stood on the platform while three trains came and went.

  One of the things James missed most was being out of the house all day and then coming home again. From time to time, throughout the winter, and the one before, when he approached the house along the road in the evening, he had played a game with himself. He climbed the steps quietly and instead of going straight in, he lingered by the front window and looked through the blinds at Sarah and Laura and Sammy, perhaps watching television or eating dinner. And as he stood there in the dark he liked to imagine that he did not know these people, that he was a stranger staring in on someone else’s life, somewhere warm, brightly lit and comfortable, envying their good luck. Then, when he was lost in this daydream, one of the children would notice him and shout “Daddy’s home!” or wave, and he would smile and take out his keys.

  Now, the situation was reversed. He was at home, waiting for Sarah and the kids. He looked forward to them getting back in the late afternoon, but when they did, the sudden change of pace was difficult, the noise and chaos, and he was often grumpy and short-tempere
d. On the worst days he went up to the spare room for a few minutes to escape them and calm himself down. Sarah did not complain about this or indeed about anything else. She was dropping the kids off and picking them up as usual, doing the shopping, going to work and then coming home and taking care of things there, dealing with the full strain of family life. James, on the other hand, was idle, more or less useless, contributing almost nothing to what had previously been a joint effort. Sarah did not even complain about his failure to do the few small jobs she had given him, and this had the effect of making him feel more guilty rather than less.

  This pragmatism and lack of drama had always been one of the things he had appreciated about Sarah most, but he began to feel, perversely, that he would be happier if she were not coping so well. It made him wonder if she pined for their normal old life the way he did. “It’s amazing what we can get used to,” the doctor had said.

  One Saturday evening, when he had been complaining of his restlessness and frustration, Sarah said, “James, you need a hobby.”

  “A hobby?”

  “Yes. Like Greg and his butchery. Not that, but something like it. Probably all men need a hobby.”

  They were eating dinner, the whole family together around the kitchen table, Sammy in his high chair, and, after a short pause, during which he did not know what he was going to do, James threw down his cutlery and stood up.

  “A fucking hobby!” he shouted, feeling the colour rise in the right-hand side of his face. Laura and Sammy looked up from their food, startled and confused. James turned and stamped his way furiously upstairs.

  There had been no more seductions or sex in the afternoon, or at any other time, but he had not felt able to raise this with Sarah or even to refer to that occasion. He was still in the spare room and this seemed, also without discussion, to have become more than a temporary arrangement. Laura had begun to refer to it as “Daddy’s room” and after a while James stopped correcting her. He got up later in the mornings, after the others had gone, and in the evening Sarah went to bed early.