The Alarming Palsy of James Orr

by Tom Lee

  Two more men arrived with a bouncy castle and, after conferring with James about where it should go, started to blow it up. Three residents who played together in a folk band set up their instruments and a PA system. It felt good to be active, discussing and giving instructions, even working up a sweat under the bright sun, and James forgot his tiredness. It was remarkable, he thought, how normal life could be. The parakeets had migrated from the cherry tree in front of the Orrs’ house and settled in the tallest spruce, and they shrieked and twitched their scarlet beaks urgently, as if presiding over the preparations.

  Around four o’clock the party began in earnest. The warm air had thickened with the smell of the roasting pig and Greg began to hack at it with a long knife he had bought specially for the occasion. Music was pumped through the PA system from someone’s iPod. By five there was a good crowd, perhaps seventy or eighty people, the best they’d ever had, William said. This was down to the good weather, of course, but James felt his organisation could take some credit, too. The adults stood around in groups or sat on the grass and ate and drank and talked, while Kit ran games for the younger children. He had volunteered to do this—only someone without children would be naïve enough to offer, James had thought at the time—but he had organised them with a kind of military discipline and sharp blows of a whistle that the children seemed to respond well to. Around seven, the band began to play. James had never heard them before and, again, he was pleasantly surprised. A few people gathered at the front and danced, including Connie Fuller, wearing a long denim dress that flattered her figure and exposed her back and shoulders.

  Finally, when he was satisfied that the party was running itself and there was nothing more for him to do, James went over to the spit-roast and asked Greg to fill a baguette for him.

  “Is this what we can expect in France?” said James.

  Greg looked at him.

  “When we go away, I mean.”

  “Oh right, absolutely.” Greg brandished his knife and grinned. “Every night!”

  James sat down under a tree to eat. He was now aware of a deep fatigue lurking just behind the adrenalin that had kept him going all day on little sleep and no nap. He looked around. He sensed a sort of settling and loosening in the mood, that small talk, awkwardness and neighbourly formality had given way to something more natural and uninhibited. No doubt many of them were a little drunk. James hadn’t been drinking himself—it hadn’t been agreeing with him since the beginning of the palsy—but he was happy to see everyone else having a good time, and to think that he had something to do with it.

  The pork was extremely good, tender and crumbly, and James realised that it was the first thing he had eaten all day, that he had somehow neglected to have breakfast or lunch. He could hear Greg now, just above the music, telling Kit the same story about slaughtering the pig—“And then I killed the bastard!”—and Kit’s laughter. Throughout the afternoon James had noticed the familiarity between them. In the past, James and Greg had enjoyed disparaging Kit together—the ceaseless DIY, the lack of any obvious employment—and it was faintly disappointing now to see them apparently on such good terms. A few yards away, Sidney, the Fullers’ dog, was wolfing down a plate of food that he had snatched from somewhere. This was a little annoying, too. Dogs were barred from the event, as the Fullers well knew, for exactly this sort of reason. There was a tennis ball lying at James’s feet so he picked it up and threw it at Sidney, but it missed and bounced next to his head. The dog turned indifferently towards James for a moment and then went back to his food.

  Sarah had walked over to James, holding Sammy’s hand.

  “Good party, Mr. Chairman,” she said.

  James nodded, his mouth full.

  “Can you keep an eye while I go to the loo? See if he’ll eat something.”

  Sammy sat down on the grass and began to chew on a piece of the pork that James offered him. He had thick white-blond hair, as James had as a child, which fell in a natural bowl around his head. It had grown long through the spring and needed a cut, but Sarah said she could not bring herself to do it.

  From day one Sammy had been a different personality to Laura. He was affectionate, sweet-natured and eager to please but terribly sensitive. If he felt that his affection was not being returned or that he was being told off, even if this was not the case, he became inconsolable. From time to time, and often on the thinnest pretext—a perceived slight from Laura, perhaps, whose manner could appear sharp or dismissive—he had screaming, red-faced tantrums which went on for minutes at a time and from which he could not be talked down. James wondered if this fragility was just a phase and would wear off over time, or whether it was something more essential to his nature and which he might carry with him through childhood and into adulthood. He hoped for Sammy’s sake that it was the former. At the very least, he would learn to control or conceal these extremes. This, after all, was the whole meaning of growing up.

  For these reasons, he supposed—though he felt guilty even admitting it to himself—he felt a tenderness towards his son, a kind of melancholy, sometimes quite painful, that he did not towards Laura, whose increasing self-sufficiency and apparent robustness put her slightly out of reach. Perhaps it was also to do with the simple fact of his being a boy, that he inescapably reminded James of himself. Sometimes, just to look at Sammy, as he did now, chewing tentatively on the piece of pork, his shining hair flopped over his eyes, caused a tightening in James’s chest.

  The band had finished. Kit blew the whistle he had been wearing around his neck all afternoon and announced that it was time for the football match.

  The match was a tradition at the summer party, over-18s versus under-18s. It had become a sort of centrepiece to the day and, as James had discovered when he played the year before, it was surprisingly competitive. He had not planned to play this time around because of his organisational responsibilities and because of the palsy, but as it turned out, the over-18s, captained by Greg, were a man short. Without being asked, and rather to his own surprise, James put down his half-finished baguette, stood up and called out, “I’m in.”

  A member of the committee had been out the previous afternoon and mown a large rectangle in the longer grass, over towards the woods, to serve as a pitch. Someone else had provided plastic goals. There were eight of them in each team, ranging in age from Ben Fuller, Greg and Connie’s eleven-year-old, through to William, somewhere in his sixties. The adults had changed their shoes and put on tracksuit bottoms or shorts. Several of the under-18s were in a complete team strip. Other residents had begun to gather along the edge of the pitch to watch. Kit stood in the centre, holding the ball.

  “Twenty minutes each way, friends,” he said. “Let’s keep it clean.”

  James was tired. He had eaten a total of half a baguette all day. He was wearing jeans and sandals and had a patch over one eye. He had, aside from his walks in the woods, been largely inactive for over a month. And yet, when Kit blew the whistle and Greg launched the ball towards where he was standing over on the right wing, James collected it neatly and began to run with it at his feet. Someone came sliding in towards him and he knocked the ball forward and skipped past the challenge. He weaved past another player and found himself suddenly—it was a small pitch—a few yards in front of the goal, with no one between him and the keeper, a lanky teenager he vaguely recognised from around the estate. Greg had run in on the other side and was shouting at James to cross the ball for a tap in, but, after only a moment’s hesitation, James shifted his weight, dug his sandalled foot under the ball and chipped it over the goalkeeper’s shoulder and into the net. Shouts went up from the spectators on the touchline.

  It went on like this. James was everywhere on the pitch, sprinting the length and breadth of it to make a tackle, block a shot, receive a pass or jump for a header. He slotted the ball through other players’ legs or slalomed past them with delicate touches. He called
for the ball, shouted instructions to his teammates and exhorted them to work harder. As he ran, he felt the tiredness, not just of today, but of the enervated last few weeks, slough off him, like layers of packed earth. It was as if all the energy, all the vitality that had been drained from him over the past weeks had only been stored up somewhere else, and was now being released in a torrent. His body felt good, more than good: quick, agile, full of potential.

  But it was not just energy. Even when he was younger and played regularly, he was of mediocre ability, and he had not so much as kicked a ball since the party the previous year. Now, though, everything went for him. He could pick the ball out of the air and bring it instantly under his control. He could play a long pass and deliver it exactly to a teammate’s feet. When he dribbled it around the opposition the ball seemed magnetised to his feet. The other team were young, of course, but the sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds were big enough, and fast, too. Ben Fuller, the youngest on the field, with his name printed on the back of his replica shirt, could certainly play. The year before they had made James look flat-footed and old, and it was not unsatisfying to be showing them something different now.

  His mind, it seemed, his one seeing eye and his body were unified, a single organism thrumming with alertness, and working at lightning speed, faster than anyone else on the pitch. The effect, from James’s point of view, though, was to make his opponents, the whole game in fact, appear to move in a subtle slow motion, while he continued to act at normal speed, seeing the way the ball would run, the passes and tackles to be made, acting and reacting in a luxury of time. He had heard elite athletes describe something similar, this heightened state that could be achieved occasionally when they were at the very top of their game. He scored two more goals, one with his weaker left foot and one with his head. He thought of his family somewhere among the watching crowd, and was glad.

  The problem was that James’s teammates were not at the same level. The match had just a few minutes to play, it was three all, and despite his own efforts they were in danger of being overrun. The cumulative lack of fitness among the over-18s had begun to tell, as well as, James supposed, the alcohol that most of them had consumed. Greg was moving around the pitch at walking speed, the goalkeeper was sitting down between his posts and William had gone off altogether. In contrast, James felt he could go on forever, and, if anything, he had increased his intensity to compensate for the others. It was easier now to keep the ball himself rather than rely on the contribution of his teammates, and he continued to power his way up and down the field. Kit seemed to be blowing his whistle constantly, awarding fouls and free kicks, usually in the under-18s’ favour, more for the sake of exercising his authority, James felt, than for any legitimate violations.

  Then James made a mistake. It was overconfidence. He was at the halfway line, running with the ball, when he played it slightly too far ahead of himself. Ben Fuller was on it in an instant. He waited for a moment, and as James lunged to retrieve the ball, he knocked it around him, ducked around James the other way, picked up the ball and burst up the pitch towards the over-18s’ goal. James turned and began to run after him. Ben was already several yards away and there were other teammates better placed to make an intervention, but it seemed clear to James that they no longer had the appetite for it.

  James strained to make up the ground. Ben was not a big kid, perhaps a foot and a half shorter than James, but despite the difference in their stride, James wasn’t catching him quickly enough. Ben was bearing down on goal—his bony, juvenile body, his oversized football boots, his shoulder blades jutting through his shirt either side of the large print of his name. The goalkeeper had staggered to his feet and was coming slowly, tentatively out towards him. A goal now, James saw, with barely any time to play, would be conclusive. It was too late to try and get around or ahead of him and so, with a final appeal to whatever resources he had in his system, James leant back, planted his feet an angle and slid in from behind.

  The collision was awful, a tangling and crunching of limbs. Then, abruptly, James was lying on the ground, half on top of and half underneath Ben. The boy was crying forcefully and Greg was crouched over them both. A long, harsh note sounded very close to James’s ears. He looked up and saw Kit above him. He had the whistle in his mouth and was staring down the barrel of it, holding his arm out straight and pointing James off the pitch.

  The ball had rolled harmlessly away. He could see it over in the long grass. He had prevented the goal, but this, it was clear, was rather beside the point. He had hurt Ben, he did not know how badly. But as he got to his feet, the whistle still ringing in his ears, and looked over to the touchline for his family, James realised with a sickness that climbed immediately up into his throat that there was something even worse.

  He had lost Sammy.

  7

  When James stood up to play football he had simply—inexplicably—left Sammy sitting on the ground. He had not given him to Sarah or asked anyone else to watch him. He had not thought of him at all.

  James could see immediately that Sammy was not where he had left him, under the tree near where what remained of the pig was still revolving slowly on its spit. He could see Laura, distinctive in a yellow and orange sundress, standing among a group of her friends, but Sammy wasn’t with her either.

  He scanned the rest of The Field, looking for the mop of hair, a small figure stumbling through the grass. There were a few other children of a similar age but none of them were Sammy.

  “I’ve lost Sammy,” he shouted. “Has anyone seen my son?”

  Somehow, throughout the game, he had imagined that Sammy was there on the touchline with the others, with the rest of his family. Now it was clear that during all that time, more than half an hour, when James had been running around vainly, absurdly—this somehow made it all the more unforgivable—he was unaccounted for.

  Anything could happen in half an hour. Up until a few weeks ago, they had only to worry about where Sammy might get to by shuffling awkwardly along on his bottom, and perhaps this went some way to explaining his complacency, James thought. But now that Sammy was up on his feet, his stumbling, rolling gait was surprisingly efficient. He, too, might not realise his new potential, how far and how fast his legs might take him. He might already have found his way past the houses and out onto the road. He might still be going, getting further away by the moment. Or, more likely, and knowing his son, Sammy would already feel lost and distressed.

  James ran to the top of The Field to get a better view. The light had begun to fade during the game and the spruce trees were casting long shadows over the darkening grass. From here he could see that the party had thinned out a little, and the chatter seemed muted and desultory. The match had finished, or perhaps been abandoned. A cluster of people still stood around at one end of the pitch, the one where James had launched his tackle on Ben Fuller. The air was still and the smell of the spit-roast hung heavy and stale.

  Although he had run only a short distance up the hill, fifty yards or so, from this perspective the scene below him, static and shrunken, had a shimmer of unreality about it. It was as if this were not New Glades itself but some intricate and fragile model of it and that all the things he saw—the trees and houses and people—were not these things, but representations of them. The model road wound smoothly through the terraces of miniature houses. There were model cars and intricately crafted gardens, model figures caught in some imitated pose or movement or gesture. Even the parakeets were there, high in the big tree, minutely small and obsessively detailed. The sun-streaked clouds had been painted artfully onto the background.

  James himself had stepped out of the scene and he had the unnerving sense that if he could find a loose end and yank it sharply, it would shake free like a tablecloth, stretch taut and then concertina back together in a spasm, all its features, the trees and houses and cars and people, thrown into the air and then scattered carelessly acro
ss it. But of course all this was an illusion. The scene was real, emphatically and appallingly so, and somewhere in it—he did not know where—was his son.

  “Sammy!” he called out. “Sammy!”

  James’s eye swept over it again, left to right, and this time settled on the spit of trees and thick undergrowth that stuck out from the main body of the woods and formed a natural border to that side of The Field. For the most part, it was too dense to get into, but there was one overgrown path through it which, after fifty yards or so, opened into the larger part of the wood. He could see the entrance to the path now, a small, darker patch in the dark green of the trees, towards the bottom of the hill. What child, seeing that, James thought, would not walk towards it?

  The torrential energy that had coursed through him on the football pitch now took hold of him in a different way, a second wind. James pushed and scrambled his way along the path, branches and leaves whipping at his face. He dropped to his knees to force his way under a fallen trunk. He thought of Sammy walking the same way, a few minutes earlier and in a different mood, his compact body easily negotiating the small gaps and constricted space, obstacles that might have been created precisely for his entertainment.

  James emerged adjacent to the old train tunnel into the clearing where several of the larger tracks through the woods intersected. The canopy was high here but still thick, like the vaulted ceiling of a cathedral, and the light was dim. It was a place he knew well, but he had never been here at this time of day and, drained of colour and definition, it was unfamiliar and he found it hard to orientate himself. He paused for a moment, wondering which path to take, and felt the hush around him, as if the wood itself was waiting for him to act. He took the path straight in front.