by Tom Lee
“James!” said Sarah, after what seemed like a long and awkward silence.
“I was only—”
“James is right,” Connie said, cutting in. “It’s disgusting. The dog gets away with murder. Greg, you need to train your animal.”
“Now, Connie. If you remember, it was you that wanted . . .”
The Fullers began to bicker with each other. James saw that they were trying to offer a distraction from his outburst, to save him from embarrassment, and that he should be grateful for that—but, for some reason, he was not. It took him another fifteen minutes to finish his food and when he finally laid down his cutlery he was exhausted. He declined Greg’s offer of ice cream. A few minutes later Sarah said she thought they should get back and, thanking the Fullers, they left.
At home, James left Sarah downstairs paying the babysitter and went straight up to the spare room. Despite his tiredness, it took him a long time to get to sleep.
6
When he woke up the following morning, James felt better. He rang the Fullers to apologise. Connie answered the phone. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Greg was being a dick. I’ve already told him.” Then, in the afternoon, when Laura had gone to a birthday party and Sammy was having his nap, Sarah seduced him.
It was unexpected. There was not much opportunity lately, with the kids around all the time, and especially since James had been sleeping in the spare room. This was supposed to be a temporary arrangement. Sarah had complained that he was restless in the night, snoring loudly and disturbing her, though he had not been aware of it himself. At first it had just been the odd night—she would wake him up and ask him to go into the other room. Then she suggested he go to bed in there to start with, just for a few nights, to save them both the disruption. That had been weeks ago. Now the Bell’s had transformed his face and on top of this he had embarrassed them in front of their friends.
Nevertheless, after lunch he had gone up to the spare room for a nap himself, and ten minutes later, just as he was dozing off, Sarah came in and stood in the doorway. She was silent at first, and unsmiling, and James assumed she was getting ready to have a go at him for his behaviour the night before.
“I’m sorry,” James began, “I was out of order. But, you know . . . the dog.”
Sarah didn’t reply but walked over to the bed and lay down next to him. She propped her head up on one hand, facing towards him. She put her other hand between his legs.
“Do you remember when we used to screw in the afternoons?” she said.
There was no further preamble. The sex was good: urgent and surprisingly long. Sarah was on top of him, as he preferred it—doing all the work, she used to say—her back arched and her breasts raised up. She seemed unusually aroused, James thought, gripping him fiercely, but perhaps he had just forgotten what it was like. They did not kiss, a concession to his half-frozen mouth, he supposed, but, if anything, this restraint only added to the charged mood. After a few minutes Sarah came to a shuddering climax—it was rare that she would finish before him—and then went down on him until he came too. As she did so he heard himself making peculiar little grunts, the effect of his impeded mouth.
They lay in silence for a minute or two, breathing heavily.
“You’re not put off, then?” said James.
Sarah looked at him.
“My face . . .” he said.
“Should I be?”
James could feel his erection returning and he wondered, to his own surprise, whether they might start again. Just as this idea was taking hold in his mind, however, Sarah rolled over and got out of bed.
“I’m late to get Laura,” she said.
Once Sarah had gone, James tried again for his nap, but the moment had passed so after a few minutes he got up and went for a shower.
He did remember when they used to screw in the afternoons. Before the kids, at weekends, or on the rare occasion during the week when neither of them was at work. This was the ultimate decadence, going to bed in the middle of the day for the sole purpose of sex. He remembered the sweet sense of transgression, of knowing that while the rest of the world went about the humdrum and deferred gratification of their daily lives—perhaps sitting on a bus or train or in the car or, more than likely, in a meeting or in front of a computer screen in an office—they were engaged in something essential and elemental. It was a statement, somehow, of pure life. Throughout the first year or two they were together, they had been rampant, took every opportunity and had been proud of it. Even when they had sex right before going to sleep, James used to wake up in the middle of the night with an erection and begin to move against her. Wordlessly and still half-asleep they would do it again. Sometimes, in the mornings, James did not even remember these encounters—The Midnight Rapist, Sarah called them—until she reminded him.
All this seemed a long time ago. Over the years their sex life had suffered in the normal way. From exhaustion, the stresses of work and the kids, and a certain amount of boredom too, James supposed. For a while they had talked about it and said they must try harder, but increasingly it had just become a subject to be avoided out of embarrassment. Before today he couldn’t quite remember the last time it had happened—certainly before his night-time restlessness had exiled him to the spare room.
He was out of the shower now and standing in front of the full-length mirror in the bedroom. He wasn’t in bad shape, he thought. If anything, he looked better at forty than he had at twenty. The thin, runty, narrow-shouldered, late-to-develop body he had been mildly ashamed of had finally come into its own. Now, most of the other men he knew of his age had got fat or were struggling not to, while he stayed lean and sharp-edged without really exercising or worrying about what he ate. There was also his hair—which others were losing or had lost—of which he had always been secretly, excessively proud. It was dark and thick, with a slight curl that came out when it was longer and which he liked to think, half-seriously, was the expression of some inner vigour or vitality. He was sure women looked at him now in a way they rarely had when he was younger.
The children had given him a strange sort of sexual confidence, too. They were incontrovertible evidence of his virility, his evolutionary advantage. This was pretty absurd, he knew, but he suspected other men felt the same way. It made him remember the surge of confidence he had got in the days after sleeping with someone new—with Sarah and the relatively small number of women before her—when afterwards he would walk down the street and see the world in a different way, feeling that any of these women walking towards him were potential sexual partners.
James was adrift in his thoughts when he heard Sammy starting to stir in his room. He turned away from the mirror and began to get dressed.
7
The consultant at the hospital had said it could take up to three weeks before James’s face began to show any sign of improvement and that, initially, it could even get a little worse. He resolved to cope with this as well as he could in the meantime, to bear it with some kind of dignity.
The most difficult thing was not being at work. It was strange to think how attached to his job he had become. James had fallen into it more or less by accident at the tail end of his twenties and drifted along for several years, wondering what else he might do for the long term. Then, when they found out Sarah was pregnant with Laura, he had, without making any conscious decision, begun to take it more seriously. In doing so he discovered a flair and appreciation for the work that he had previously not suspected. At an appraisal around this time, Deborah, his manager, told him that clients liked working with him. “You win people over, James,” she said, “you know how to read a situation. Not everyone has that.” All this coincided with the firm beginning a rapid expansion and he had, so to speak, ridden the wave. He had been given several quick promotions, the first of which had enabled them to buy the house in New Glades and take on a bigger mortgage.
Just before Christmas, when the school and nursery terms had ended but James was still at work, Sarah had brought the kids to meet him for lunch. Somehow they had never got around to doing this before and he was surprised at how excited—almost jumpy—he was all morning at the prospect, at showing his colleagues to his children and his children to his colleagues. He had made a big fuss of them at reception, surprising Sarah by giving her a hug as well as the children. He had given them a brief tour of the building. They had relocated there recently after taking on more staff, a vast warehouse that had once stored the giant rolls of paper used by newspaper printing presses and now reinvented as a modern office building for a number of companies broadly similar to James’s own. As they went round, James had introduced them elaborately to people he barely knew and had laughed too hard at things that were not really jokes.
In the end, the visit was rather anti-climactic. He took them up to his own office at the top of the building, and his desk by the window. He showed Laura and Sammy how far you could see, the landmarks around the city, the smallness of the cars and people moving around on the street below. He pointed out a dark green smudge in the distance that he told the children was their own woods, though in reality this was unlikely. They were not particularly impressed. Laura was annoyed because she had wanted to spend the day at a friend’s house and Sammy was hungry and needed a nap. A couple of James’s colleagues stopped to say hello but quickly made excuses about how busy they were and hurried on. When James sat Sammy in his office chair and spun it too fast, he began to cry bitterly and after only a few minutes they hurried out of the building to get some food.
When it became clear that he would be off for more than a few days, James briefed Deborah over the phone. She had been relaxed about it, more relaxed than James felt he would be if the situation were reversed. He offered to work from home, answering emails and going over documents, but she had refused. “If you’re sick, you’re sick,” she said. “This isn’t the kind of job you can do at a distance.” This was decent of her, of course, but he had felt himself bristle at her choice of words. He had wanted to correct her, to say, “I’m not sick, it’s just a problem with my face.” In the event, he was glad he did not. The distinction seemed important to James, but it would only have made him sound difficult, pedantic. And anyway, as far as his office was concerned, the result was the same—he was not there. “Concentrate on getting well, James,” Deborah went on. “Let us worry about things here.” She was right. He was a good employee and before this hadn’t had an unscheduled day off in two years. It was frustrating, but work and the project would survive without him for a while and he without it. It was important to have some perspective about that.
James had often thought, over the last six years of parenthood and long hours at the office, about the sorts of things he would do if he had the time—the books he would read, the old friends he would catch up with, the new language or musical instrument he would learn. The ordinary fantasies of a person his age with a demanding job and young children, he knew, but it would be something just to be able to sit with a cup of coffee and a newspaper at the kitchen table in the morning, with nowhere he needed to be and no one waiting for him to do something. Well, here was an opportunity of sorts, an enforced lay-off, the kids out of the house for the better part of the day, if not exactly how he had anticipated it.
Before New Glades, they had lived for nearly ten years in a flat on the ninth floor of a tower block in the inner city, at the corner of two busy roads. Police, ambulance and fire-engine sirens went off continually and because of some trick of the acoustics, the vehicles sounded almost as if they were driving through the middle of their tiny living room. At night, kids or drunks pressed the door buzzer on the street, just for the hell of it, and woke the baby. “Super-urban” was how James often described it after they moved away. Even when you were in the flat alone you had the sense of the city, the concrete, the cars, the people, the bad air pressing in all around you.
New Glades, of course, was different. If he stood at an upstairs window and concentrated he could, just about, pick up the hum of traffic on the main road, muted almost to nothing by the woods that surrounded the estate on three sides. Once a week, on Tuesday afternoons, there was the sound of the communal lawns being mown or the hedges being clipped, and on Thursdays the bin men came. If he heard a car on the road outside, James usually went to the window to look. The phone rang rarely, and if it did it was almost always Sarah. His mobile had no reception in the house—people said the trees blocked the signal—and they had never got round to giving out the landline number.
Gradually, however, as the days went past, James tuned into two other, more or less constant, sounds. The first was of Kit at work on his house, the dull but relentless industry of hammering, sawing, sanding and drilling. The other was the song, if that was the right word, of the parakeets. There were ten or fifteen of them in the flock that flew in and out of the cherry tree, scarlet-beaked, green-bodied, shading to blue and yellow and gold in the wings and tail feathers. They were never far away, patrolling the border where the woods and the estate met. There were other birds too, of course—sparrows, blue tits, blackbirds, robins, crows and magpies—though James did not know which song belonged to which bird. The parakeets’, though, could not be mistaken. It peaked at dawn and again at dusk, a frenzy of atonal shrieking and squawking, and it was hard to believe he had barely been aware of it before. When James looked them up online he discovered that there were flocks of them all over the city, breeding fast, eating everything and pushing out the native species. Nevertheless, when he caught sight of them through the window or when he stepped outside the front door, their non-native colours brash against the brilliant white of the cherry blossoms that had already begun to bloom, as if the tree were heavy with some alien fruit, it was not hard to forgive them for this clamour.
Each morning, once Sarah and the children had gone, James finished his breakfast—it was still taking him much longer than everyone else to eat—cleared up the kitchen and put a load of washing on. Then, at around ten o’clock, he put on his boots and jacket, went down the steps, crossed the road and opened the gate in the laurel hedge. He took arbitrary zigzagging routes through the woods, allowing himself to be led by whim and curiosity. There were always new ways to be found by pushing aside a branch or climbing over a fallen trunk. Some of the massive oaks, James had read, were centuries old, the remainder of a vast forest that had once stretched for miles over what was now the city, a place where aristocrats had come to hunt boar and deer. This was all that was left, perhaps twenty-five acres, bordered on the northern side by a golf course, on the east by allotments, on the west by a busy A-road and on the south by New Glades itself, an oasis and an anomaly amid the encroaching city. It was not much, but it was big enough to get lost in, at least for a while.
It was spring and there were new things every day. The rhododendron flowers in a spray down the front of the train tunnel, pat
ches of hornbeam coming into leaf. The woodpeckers continued their work and occasionally, if he stood patiently and listened, he was able to spot one high up in the trees. From time to time mists of pollen swept across the path in front of him, catching the light. In this way, the walks were restorative, invigorating, and he was often out of the house for as much as an hour. It seemed the ideal way to counteract the lethargy that had crept in during the first week of the palsy and that threatened to overtake him whenever he was in the house. Simple observation of the vivid material world took him out of himself, absorbed him in something else. He often found, when he got back home, that for the duration of his walk he had not thought of his palsy at all.
Then, towards the end of his third week off work, two things happened in quick succession which rather threw him.
8
The first thing happened on a Friday morning.
James had gone out early, before ten, and had been walking for nearly an hour along a route that had taken him up among the ruined houses and then down along the path of a stream to the high spiked metal fence of the golf course. He had traced the path of the fence around the northern perimeter of the woods, listening for the crack of balls being hit, and then cut east by the side of the allotments. It was time to head home, and he pulled back a low branch that hung in front of him and stepped onto the wide, well-trodden track that bisected the woods and went down to the station. A few metres away, coming towards him, was a runner. It was the serious kind: grim-faced, head to toe in fluorescent Lycra, with headband and wraparound sunglasses, headphones in and another gadget, perhaps a heart monitor, strapped to his arm. They were a pretty common sight around the neighbourhood and in the woods themselves.
James’s appearance on the path seemed to surprise him and throw him off his stride. He veered abruptly to the right and tripped on a small tree stump, and his momentum took him heavily and awkwardly into the undergrowth.
