The Alarming Palsy of James Orr Read online

  James didn’t know how to feel about his appointment with Dr. Moffat. He had been misunderstood, certainly, with regard to the anti-depressants. That was not helpful at all, but there was no point reading too much into it. He knew that it was the modern panacea, a GP’s answer to any problem that evaded easy treatment. But he could not help dwelling on the word she had seemed to stop herself from using to describe his condition—chronic. Chronic meant long term, not temporary. Had he passed into that category now? Was that what she had typed into his notes? How long was long term? Indefinite? It was well into May already and in another two months the children would be on summer holiday and at home all day. Then there was the trip to France with the Fullers to consider, too.

  But it wouldn’t do to get carried away. Dr. Moffat had said it herself, it was early days for something like this. And perhaps she was also right about the significance of the tears, that it was a sign something was happening with the nerves at a fundamental level, even if it was not yet the right things. It did seem plausible.

  Lost in thought, James realised that he was up among the foundations of the old houses. It was not the most direct way home. He knew the paths so well now that he could walk for long distances around the woods without paying conscious attention to where he was going, but this time he had led himself astray. Through the trees, twenty or thirty yards away, he could see the blue tarpaulin and below it the walls of the folly where the man was said to live. And there were clothes—black trousers, a white shirt and what looked like a suit jacket—hanging from the branches of a tree adjacent to it.

  He turned off the path and walked through the undergrowth towards it. The three standing walls, up to around head height, were built of large blocks of grey stone, pockmarked with age and washed green with moss. The fourth, fallen, wall was laid out in a staged tumble of stones in front and James picked his way carefully around them. A moulded arch broke off in space, around three-quarters complete, and formed a partial entrance to the interior of the structure. Close up, as he was now for the first time, he was struck again by the strangeness of the place, a relic of another era’s self-conscious attempt to create a relic, the layers of authentic and faked entropy.

  The shirt and jacket hanging from the tree appeared clean, uncrumpled and in reasonable condition, hardly the outfit you would expect of someone who had been living rough for any amount of time. James stood on the threshold, under the arch, and looked in. It was no more than six feet square with a dirt floor. The light was dim, the tree cover and tarpaulin obscuring the brightness of the day outside. The air was cool, earthy, mildly fungal, not unpleasant. There was not much to see—what looked like a rolled-up sleeping bag tucked into a recess in the wall, a black duffle bag in one corner. A little hollow had been dug out in the centre and in it was the remains of a small fire, ringed by stones. The ground around it looked as if it had been made smooth, perhaps even recently swept.

  It all seemed a little unreal, but it was not without precedent. James remembered something he had read soon after they had moved in, when he had taken a passing interest in the local history. For a period in the late seventeen hundreds, the woods had been home to a hermit known as “Matthews the Hairyman.” A hunchback and herbalist, he had made his home in the hollow of a fallen tree. A much more feasible proposition in those days, James reflected, when the woods covered vast tracts of the land that was now paved over and built on, and not overrun by nature-starved city dwellers every weekend, but still. These days you would assume that someone living like this was homeless or destitute, someone without better options, but perhaps this was too simple. Maybe he had chosen to live there, for who knew what reasons, as presumably Matthews had more than two hundred years before. There was some kind of echo or symmetry there, perhaps.

  Abruptly, the sensation he had felt when passing the camp before, of another human presence nearby, deliberately concealed perhaps, quite possibly watching, descended upon him. It was startling to find himself here, amid someone else’s things, trespassing so flagrantly. He wondered what had possessed him to be so bold, so thoughtless. James stepped quickly out of the hollow and, with the lingering sense of someone’s eyes on his back, hurried home.

  4

  Later that afternoon, when he woke up from his nap, James called his office to let them know he had been signed off for another month.

  In January, Deborah had told him he was on course to join the senior management team at the company within a year or two. She was expecting a promotion herself and wanted him to take over her current role. This was all before the palsy, of course. Now he could not help thinking about how his absence would be affecting these prospects, the project at the law firm that would already have become someone else’s and for which they would get the credit.

  From time to time, in the moments when he was feeling more positive, he thought that the answer would be simply to bite the bullet and go back to work, to force the issue. It would be difficult at first but the shock of it might revive him, instead of all the fretting and inactivity that surely only compounded his general lassitude. After all, it was this powerlessness over his situation that was really intolerable.

  Work had put him under no pressure to return, and this was really a credit to them. At first he had called every Monday morning to update Deborah on his situation, but he had got the sense that this was unnecessarily conscientious. “Just let us know when you are ready,” she had said, more than once. When he asked how things were going with the project she had chided him in a friendly way. “That is not currently your concern,” she said, and then added, “We are all thinking of you, James.” “Really?” James had replied, taken aback. “I mean, of course, thank you.”

  He had got another doctor’s note but no one had asked him for this, or in fact for the first one. Again, he was just being conscientious. Nevertheless, whenever he picked up the phone and heard it ring, he became intensely nervous, and this time, as every other time, he thought carefully about what he was going to say, almost as if he were preparing a lie.

  In the event, he needn’t have worried. The phone rang for some time and was then answered by someone, a man, whose voice he didn’t recognise. Deborah was out of the office and this other man had picked up her phone, as James had done in the past.

  “Can I leave a message?” said James. “Can you say that James called?”

  “Of course,” said the man. “Can I take your surname, James?”

  James could hear the hum of the office in the background, people talking, a printer clicking into action, other phones ringing. He tried again to picture himself there, as one of the people talking in the background perhaps, but the image refused to form.

  “Orr,” said James. “It’s James Orr.”

  “Can you spell that for me?”

  James spelt out his name and then hung up. He opened the laptop and tried to log into his office emails. For weeks he had resisted doing this, on Deborah’s instructions. Now his password seemed to have expired. On a whim he logged into his personal email account and sent a message to himself at work. Immediately an “Out of Office” appeared. When he opened it, there was a message asking for any queries to be redirected to Deborah and giving her contact details.

  It was strange to think of some unknown person logging in to—hacking, you might call it—his email account and setting up this brief, blunt message. They would have to have been given his password, a password that even he no longer knew. Probably it was a job given to some junior person in the office to sort out, perhaps the man he had just spoken to. James picked up the phone to call back, then hesitated and hung up again.

  5

  At night, James was having trouble sleeping. He went to bed tired, but as soon as he switched off the light, he began to feel restless. After an hour or so he would switch the light back on and go online or try to read a book. Sometimes he got up and went downstairs for a glass of water, lingering in the k
itchen or living room while he drank it, always careful not to make any noise that might wake up Sarah or the children, asleep in their own rooms. When he did sleep, he dreamed vividly and incoherently, though in the morning he could never remember the details, just an echoing mood of anxiety or elation.

  All this was a consequence, it seemed clear, of his listless and uneventful days, his unexercised mind and body seeking an outlet or some kind of stimulation. But the less he slept at night, the longer he napped in the middle of the day—when sleep would overtake him almost without warning—and the less he slept the following night, and so on.

  One night, a Friday, when in fact he had fallen asleep easily, James woke up abruptly at around 1 a.m., his mind alert and with the strong sense that he would not be able to get back to sleep. He had been dreaming, and on this occasion he did remember the dream. He was at a residents’ meeting in a house he didn’t recognise, but instead of William, Vanessa, Kit and the other committee members sitting around the table there was Sarah, Greg and Connie Fuller, his manager Deborah, Rebecca Moffat, the runner who had tripped in front of him in the woods, dressed in his Lycra, his face still bleeding, and a bearded man dressed in brown robes whom he understood to be Matthews the Hairyman. James was no longer the chair but was being tried for some sort of act or crime, the details of which were not clear. Rebecca Moffat was smiling and saying the word “chronic” over and over again. Just as the verdict was about to be delivered, Sidney the dog rushed in and dumped a lump of raw meat into James’s lap. At that point he had woken up.

  He lay in bed for a few minutes, turning the dream over in his mind, then got up and, without switching on the light, raised the blind. A car was parked opposite the house, just in front of the entrance to the woods. It was a Japanese make, James thought, black, or nearly black, customised so that it sat very low to the ground, with oversized wheels and spoilers on the front and back, presenting the appearance, at least, of speed and power. He did not recognise it, and although his neighbours sometimes had visitors, they did not usually drive cars like this. He had not noticed it there before he went to bed and he wondered if it was the sound of it pulling up that had woken him.

  James stood at the window watching the car but the interior was dark and nothing happened. After a few minutes he pulled on his trousers and a T-shirt and went downstairs and out the front door. The night was warm and there was a slight breeze that rustled the leaves in the trees and carried the smell of the woods—mulchy, rotten, a little sweet. He approached the car slowly, picking his way carefully across the road in his bare feet. There was no moon and the nearest streetlight was twenty or thirty yards away, so he was very close to the car before his eyes adjusted to the dark and he was able to make anything out. When he did, it was more or less as he had expected.

  They were in the backseat, the boy—it was hard to tell in the light, but James felt sure he was only a boy—facing forwards and the girl straddling him, her knees bent up on the seat. His trousers and pants were pulled down, exposing pale and hairless thighs and knotting his legs together around the knees. She was young too, anywhere between fifteen and eighteen, James thought, and wearing a dress that was now pushed up over her waist and down over her bra. Her thighs, wrapped around his, were pale too, and dimpled, the skin rougher and darker as it disappeared into her groin. The boy’s face was buried in the crook of her right shoulder, concealed from James, but hers, facing forward, was caught in profile and strangely illuminated in the relative darkness, as if lit from some other source.

  There was an urgency, even desperation, to their movements as they shifted their weight around to find a better position, a better fit. The boy’s hands struggled to unfasten her bra. Several times he tried to raise her up, to move her forwards or back, but her head was trapped against the low roof of the car and his legs against the seat in front. Despite this, the girl’s face, from this angle, was expressionless, somehow neutral or unmoved. Her long hair, white-blonde but with a thick blue streak down the middle, was swept over to the other side and James could see a faint down on her cheek and along the line of her jaw.

  They began to move more easily now, to find a rhythm, and as James watched she gradually turned her head. Her eyes—made up in black liner that extended them out, cat-like, into points or wings on either side of her face—settled on James, standing no more than an arm’s length away on the other side of the car door, peering in.

  James stopped himself from crying out in surprise.

  He was not mistaken. She was looking at him, without any apparent shock or alarm, as if she had entirely expected it. As James tried to take this in—that it was he and not she who had somehow been caught out—and even as the rest of her body moved and shook around her, her gaze did not shift nor her expression change except for the occasional slow blinking of her eyes. And as the seconds passed, something in its steadiness, its frank and unrelenting intensity, seemed to imply some kind of challenge. But what? To intervene and stop them? To look away? To carry on watching? Something else?

  James could not say how long he had stood there, a few minutes he supposed. He felt the breeze on his neck, the warmth of the road under his feet. An owl hooted in the woods, then another seemed to answer it. He turned, walked across the road and let himself back into the house. A few minutes later, when he was still standing in the kitchen, he heard a car pull away.

  6

  It was the day of the New Glades Estate summer party.

  Soon after 7 a.m. the children began to run around downstairs. As James lay in bed exhausted, the morning sun glowing along the edges of the blind, the events of the night before had already acquired a peculiar quality. The whole thing seemed unlikely. Waking suddenly, going out without his shoes on, standing there in the dark, staring at the girl through the car window while she stared back at him. It was like something from a bad pornographic film. He thought again of his dream about the committee meeting. Had he simply woken from one dream into another? But if he closed his eyes, he could still see her vividly—her eyes, the mole, the penetrating, hard-to-read expression. Regardless, he couldn’t think about it any more now. He had a long, probably difficult day ahead of him, with no opportunity to catch up on lost sleep, and he resolved to put it out of his mind.

  It was James’s first party as chair of the residents’ committee and he wanted it to be a success. At midday he went out of the back-garden gate to the shared land between the bottom terrace of the estate, where his own house was, and the one above, and started to set up. This was where they always held the party, an area known to the residents as The Field. The Field was the largest of the communal spaces on the estate, a kind of meadow rising up the incline of the hill, encircled on three sides by houses and on the fourth by the woods, entirely cut off from the road. The grass was allowed to grow a little longer here, and at this time of year drifts of buttercups, daisies and dandelions appeared almost overnight. Among the huge original old spruce were clusters of hornbeam and larch, knotty blackberry bushes and patches of nettles.

  The Field was another perk of New Glades. The previous year, Laura had started to go out there on her own to be with her friends. She stayed out for hours, climbing in the trees, building dens, making up elaborate games. From inside the house, with the back door open, James could hear her shouts and calls and know she was never too far away from him and Sarah, or from the parents of the other children. It was, he had discovered, one of the great conundrums of parenthood, to give your children freedom without putting them at risk, to protect them without smothering them. At some point, not too long from now he supposed, Laura and her friends would be old enough to roam around the woods themselves, but until then The Field was a near-perfect solution. There was always a certain amount of anxiety when they were out of sight—that they would slip and hurt themselves, cut themselves on a branch or a bush, or even fall out of a tree—but overall, as Sarah had said to James with a wry smile, it seemed like “jus
t the right amount of freedom.”

  On one of those first warm days of the year, just after the appearance of his palsy, James had been standing at an upstairs window when he saw Laura dart out of the back door, across the garden and up to the gate. He watched her as she opened it, looked quickly around and then broke into a run across the grass, her legs and arms swinging wildly, hardly coordinated, and he was overwhelmed by a kind of vicarious joy, even envy, for her, her thoughtless, surging vitality. Now that Sammy was walking, James took him out there too, and held his hand while he stumbled through the grass and picked clumsily at the daisies. In time Sammy would be out there with Laura, running alongside her or perhaps a little behind, trying to keep up, while James watched them both from the window.

  William and Kit arrived in The Field soon after James and together they set up tables for the food and drink and pitched a gazebo for extra shade. After the abrupt ending of the previous committee meeting, James had made the arrangements over email. It was not complicated but did require everyone on the committee to do their bit and he had gone through everything meticulously during the week. The main concern was always the weather, but it had been fine for weeks and the forecast was for another hot day.

  Greg had organised for a whole pig to be spit-roasted at the party. He had visited a farm, selected the animal himself, some kind of rare breed, and then helped slaughter it. He had sent James a detailed email about it earlier in the week, how, as he had prepared to fire the bolt gun between its eyes—the most humane method, apparently, which also preserved the best quality of the meat—the pig had looked up at him from under its long lashes. “It was a profoundly intimate moment,” Greg had written, “as intimate a moment as you can have with another living thing, I think. He knew exactly what was about to happen and I felt that he saw deep into me and me into him. We understood each other and I was very moved. And then I killed the bastard!” They had hung it by its back legs, drained the blood via the neck, skinned it and sawn off the head. James had found all this information too much and had not replied to the email, but when the man from the farm arrived and Greg helped him carry the pig down the hill and set it up over the spit, he had to admit that it would add something to the party.