The Alarming Palsy of James Orr

by Tom Lee

  6

  It had rained overnight and everything felt rinsed clean and fresh. Kit was outside his house. After weeks of sawing and sanding, he had begun to glue and nail the wood together to make the new window frames. Two days ago the glass had been delivered in a van and the driver had helped Kit secure it in the frames and then lift them into place on the house. Now Kit was balanced halfway up a ladder, wearing only shorts and workmen’s boots, applying a layer of white paint.

  After a while, Greg came out of the Fullers’ house next door, also in shorts and wearing a straw hat and sunglasses, and carrying a suitcase in each hand. He called out to Kit, Kit shouted something back, and they both laughed. Greg unlocked the car, put the cases in the boot and went back inside. For the next half hour he came and went, carrying more suitcases, bags, a cooler box, boxes of food, a football, tennis rackets. When the boot was full he opened the box on top of the car and filled that, too. Then he fixed the children’s bikes to a rack on the back. Eventually the children came out, the older two in front, the little one trailing behind, and got into the car. Last came Connie, also in sunglasses. She pulled the door shut and then locked it. Kit had come down the ladder and he rubbed his hands on his shorts and shook hands with Greg and kissed Connie on both cheeks. Greg and Connie got into the car, Kit banged his fist twice on the roof and they drove off, slowly at first, and then faster.

  At the top of the hill, where the estate road met the main road, a van was parked. Large letters on the side of the van read “Expert Security Solutions” and gave a website address and phone number. Two men in hard hats and high-visibility orange vests had assembled a scaffolding platform adjacent to the first house on the estate road and were standing on top of it to secure a pair of cameras to the wall, one pointing in each direction. After a while William came out of his house opposite with two cups of tea and a packet of biscuits on a tray. The men took off their hats, took the tea and sat in the open back of the van to drink it. William stayed talking to them until they were finished and then carried the tray back inside.

  Later on, when the light had turned dusky, James stood outside the front window of his own house, looking in through a gap in the blinds. The lights were on inside and the three of them, Sarah, Laura and Sammy, were sitting on the sofa. The children were in their pyjamas. They had both had their hair cut. Laura was wearing the headdress she had made from parakeet feathers and reading a book. Sammy was sitting on Sarah’s lap, eating something out of a bowl and watching TV. It was as if James himself had just left the room for a moment, to get something from the kitchen perhaps or to go the toilet, and at any second he would reappear and sit down with the rest of his family.

  Something caught Laura’s eye and she glanced up from her book towards the window, but James ducked out of sight and went quickly down the steps.

  In the folly, he had rearranged things a little. He had cleared the old ashes from the fire and there was a pile of fresh logs in the corner. He had removed several loose bricks from the wall to make a shelf, where he kept a pan and a mug. Now he swept the floor. He felt that it might rain again overnight and so he climbed the side of one of the walls and retied the tarpaulin at a better angle. There was a small tear in it and at some point, he thought, it would need patching. When he got down he took off his boots and put them in the corner next to the stove. He took off his shirt and trousers, put them on hangers and hung them from a branch. He passed his hand absently over the left-hand side of his face, then took out the sleeping bag, unrolled it and got in.

  The air was cooler now but when he laid his head down he could smell the warm, swept earth. He looked up. Everywhere in the branches above were the vivid greens and yellows of the parakeets, their scarlet beaks, as if some florid blight had spread through the tree. The flock had grown since the beginning of spring, the birds had reproduced themselves or merged with another group, and there were more than he could count. The screeching had almost subsided now they were settled in to roost. James was tired, too. He closed his one good eye. He could hear faintly, very faintly, the hum of traffic on the main road and knew that before long he would be asleep.

  Acknowledgments

  Gratitude and thanks are due to Alistair Daniel, Maura Dooley, Ben Felsenburg, Cathryn Summerhayes, Anna Stein, Laura Barber and everyone at Granta in the UK, and Mark Doten and everyone at Soho Press in the US. Thanks and apologies to Jamie Johnson. Love and thanks to all the Lees, all the de Zoysas, and of course, and especially, the Lee de Zoysas.

  I would also like to acknowledge the generous assistance of Arts Council England and the Royal Society of Literature’s Brookleaze Grant, which enabled the writing of this book.