The Alarming Palsy of James Orr

by Tom Lee

  First published in Great Britain by Granta Books, 2017

  Copyright © Tom Lee, 2017

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published in 2019 by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lee, Tom, 1974– author.

  The alarming palsy of James Orr / Tom Lee.

  I. Title

  ISBN 978-1-64129-004-3

  eISBN 978-1-64129-005-0

  PR6112.E417 A78 2018 823’.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018027946

  Typeset in Galliard by Patty Rennie

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For E de Z

  Part One

  1

  When James Orr woke up, a little later than usual, he had the sense that there was something not quite right, some indefinable shift in the normal order of things, but it was not until he bumped into his wife on the landing—James had been sleeping in the spare room for several weeks—that he had a clue as to what it might be.

  “Oh!” said Sarah Orr, and put her hand to her mouth in genuine alarm.

  James continued to the bathroom and there, in the mirror, he saw the cause of her dismay—and such dismay did not seem unreasonable.

  The left-hand side of James’s face had collapsed, a balloon with the air gone out of it, a melted waxwork. The cheek was hollow and the skin hung in a bulge over the side of his jaw, a grotesque one-sided jowl. The side of his mouth had fallen, too, the pale line of his lips angling sharply downwards. Where the bottom of the eyelid had pulled down, the full white of the eye was exposed, as well as its veiny roots. The skin itself was different. Yellowed, bloodless, and a little shiny.

  James tried to smile. Only the right-hand side responded. The right eye narrowed, the skin creased into folds, the corner of the mouth hoisted itself upward and pulled his lips back over his teeth. The left side remained slumped, unmoved. The effect, a forced and crooked grin, the teeth bared on one side, was appalling.

  Sarah stood next to him, staring at his reflection in the mirror.

  “My god, James, what is it? Have you had a stroke?” She laughed, nervously. “I’m sorry—you just look so . . . awful.”

  James turned on the tap, splashed his face with water and then looked again. He put his hand to his face and it was like touching someone else. He pushed the left side up so that it was level with the right but it was not convincing, and when he let go, it dropped slackly back down.

  “It won’t move,” said James. The words came out thickly, caught in his half-closed mouth. “It’s paralysed.”

  And yet it was not simply this, the sight of the paralysed features themselves, that was so unsettling, it was the discord between right and left. If both sides hung like this, then perhaps, at least when his face was at rest, he would only resemble a much older man—himself thirty or forty years from now. As it was, it gave the impression of two different faces, two different people, welded savagely together.

  “Don’t come downstairs,” said Sarah. She had recovered herself. James recognised the tone—practical, coping, in charge—most often employed when there was some kind of drama involving the children, a sound that he usually found reassuring. “I’m going to sort out the kids.”

  “Okay,” murmured James, out of the side of his mouth.

  He turned back to the mirror. The only thing on the left-hand side of his face that moved was his eye. But when he blinked, only the right eye closed. The left stared unrelentingly back at him. Its gaze seemed agitated, intense, almost accusatory, as if all the expressiveness of that immobilised side of his face was now concentrated there. From downstairs, he heard the everyday noises of his wife and children having breakfast, getting ready to go out, sounds that suddenly seemed full of pathos, or at least a kind of anticipated pathos. The eye had a yellow, filmy look to it, almost as if it were sheathed in something else. The edges of the cornea were reddening. It felt dry and was already a little sore.

  2

  The previous evening James had been to a neighbour’s house for a meeting of the New Glades Estate Residents’ Committee, of which, for the last eight months, he had been the chair.

  They had run rapidly through the agenda: the long-awaited resurfacing of the estate road, problems with fly-tippers, problems with the gardening contractors for the shared land, arrangements for the summer party. There was some discussion about a resident who was having work done and who had left an overflowing skip in the street for weeks without it being picked up. James agreed that he would have a discreet word. William, a pedantic retiree whose two pairs of glasses hung in tangles around his neck, and who acted as the committee’s neighbourhood watch officer, reported that there had been two further incidents of “The Anti-Social Behaviour.”

  The Anti-Social Behaviour was a euphemism for the sporadic discovery of teenage couples, assumed to be from the sprawling local authority estate half a mile away, in cars parked up at the far dead end of the estate road, by the entrance to the woods. Discussion of the problem was a favourite of the committee—in need of a vicarious thrill, Sarah had suggested to James—and several of them were very worked up about it. James had never witnessed it himself, although he had seen the beer cans, cigarette butts and fast-food wrappers that were sometimes left behind. Even if all the reports were accurate, which he doubted, he did not see that a huge amount of harm was being done.

  “I have fed back to the police,” said William, looking up from his notes and replacing one pair of glasses with another, “and they have assured me they will increase the number of patrols in the area as a deterrent. If anyone has any other suggestions, please say so.”

  “There is a real danger,” said Vanessa, committee treasurer, “that the estate will get a reputation.” Her voice, pained, nasal and complaining, never failed to set James’s teeth on edge. As usual she was wearing too much of the gaudy, vaguely hippyish jewellery that he had heard she made in a studio at her house. “Then we will be overrun. It’s probably too late already.”

  James had not even wanted to be on the committee. With work and the kids he had enough on his plate already, but under pressure from his next-door neighbour, the incumbent chair, and with a view of himself as a good neighbour and a good citizen, he had agreed, assuming—not totally inaccurately as it turned out—that it would be a dispiriting assembly of time-wasters, busybodies, curtain-twitchers and NIMBYs. After each of the monthly meetings, James made Sarah laugh with impersonations of the other committee members who, in a discussion on whether to install a bike rack at the entrance to the adjacent woods, insisted earnestly and at great length on “maintaining the architectural integrity of the estate,” and who called for “heightened vigilance” following the sighting of an unidentified hooded man walking along the road after dark.

  After only a few months, the next-door neighbour had moved away and there seemed to be a tacit assumption that James would take over as chair. As he told Sarah at the time, he should have seen it coming. Since then, however, he felt he had run a pretty tight ship. The first thing he did was to establish a written constitution that clarified the committee’s role and responsibilities. From then on the meetings were short and efficien
t. He kept a lid on the other committee members’ tendency to digress and also tried to act as a corrective to the general air of parochialism and paranoia. At times this meant being rather abrupt, and initially this seemed to shock a couple of them, used to a more indulgent regime, but James was not doing this for fun, and soon enough he felt that most, if not all, of them came to appreciate his style. He ran meetings every day at work—he was a project manager at a medium-sized consultancy firm in town—and he sensed some deference to this professional background, as well as to his relative youth and energy.

  Already James felt he had earned some credit, and passed a little test in his own mind, when, over the summer, a group of Travellers had held a series of loud parties in the woods. In recent years this had become an annual event, viewed apocalyptically by many of the residents, and along with the noise, the battered cars parked everywhere and rubbish strewn all over the place, there had been bad feeling that had threatened to spill over into something worse. James had urged a light touch, and had spoken with the apparent leader of the group, a spectacularly tattooed and frankly terrifying-looking matriarch, and when they moved on after only a few days, the woods were spotless.

  James turned to Vanessa.

  “Well, we must to try to keep things . . .” he began, but he was interrupted.

  “I could rig up a few explosive devices? Booby traps?”

  This was Kit, a new resident. He had moved in just before Christmas, a few doors down from the Orrs, and joined the committee soon afterwards. He was about James’s age, lived alone, and was constantly at work renovating his house. Over the past few months, as James came and went from work, and even when it was very cold, he had watched Kit sand down and repaint the external woodwork, re-lay the steps up to the front door and dig out the garden. On the days when he was not outside, the sounds of hammering, sanding and drilling came from within the house. James wondered what Kit did which allowed him to rarely—if ever, as far as James could tell—go out to work, and yet afford the house and the expensive-looking Audi that was parked outside. He meant the explosives as a joke, no doubt, but perhaps he did know how to do something like that, James thought.

  “I wouldn’t mind,” said Vanessa, coyly, and the rest of the committee laughed. “But I would settle for some CCTV cameras.”

  “As I was about to say,” said James, before Vanessa could go any further, “we have to keep things in perspective. For now, I suggest we continue to monitor the situation. If there’s nothing else, then let’s wrap this up.”

  As usual, the meeting dissolved into general talk and drinks. James often stayed just for one, out of politeness to whoever had been hosting that evening, but on this occasion he was tired and decided to go straight home. Sarah was already in bed when he got in, presumably asleep, so he watched the news for a few minutes and then went up to the spare room.

  3

  “Remember Lisa’s husband?” Sarah whispered. “Lisa who I used to work with? He had something similar a couple of years ago. I forget what it was called. Something palsy . . .”

  James and Sarah were sitting in the packed Monday morning waiting room at the doctor’s surgery. Already Sarah had dropped the kids off at school and the nursery and had called James’s work to say he wouldn’t be in and then her own work—a small charity—to say she would be late, and she was now searching for clues to his condition on her phone. James was feeling acutely self-conscious. He wished he had brought a hat that might at least obscure the left side of his face. When he had stood up and tried to drink a cup of water from the cooler it had dribbled straight out of his mouth and soaked into his shirt. He did not remember Lisa’s husband.

  “Ah, here it is,” she said. “Bell’s palsy. A form of facial paralysis caused by a dysfunction of the cranial nerve. It results in the inability to control facial muscles on the affected side. That’s you, I think.”

  When they were called in, the doctor confirmed Sarah’s diagnosis. Asked to explain what had happened, James struggled to get his words out. Sarah laid a hand on his arm and he fell silent while she spoke for him.

  “There is the possibility of Lyme disease,” said the doctor, addressing Sarah, “but as James has not been to any known risk areas recently, and hasn’t had a rash, that seems unlikely. With a stroke, one is usually able to wrinkle the forehead, even on the affected side, and he doesn’t have any of the other symptoms. We’ll send him for the relevant tests, of course, but it’s classic Bell’s. I’d pretty much stake my reputation on it, such as it is.” She smiled at Sarah and then held the smile as she turned to James. He had met the doctor a few times before—once when the surgery had written to him the previous year, soon after he turned forty, inviting him for a “health MOT,” and also on the occasions when he had taken the children in. Rebecca Moffat, her name was. She was young, extremely tall, bony and grey-faced, never less than cheerful.

  “It’s a very odd thing,” said Sarah. “I was quite shocked.”

  “Yes, the effect is rather extraordinary, isn’t it? But I see it surprisingly often—usually in men, as it happens. We don’t know why, but there you have it. Given everything we have to contend with as women—I’m thinking about childbirth, among other things—it doesn’t seem that unreasonable. In fact, I had a boyfriend once who . . .” She trailed off, preoccupied. “Never mind. The point is, the pathology is still largely a mystery. It’s one of those conditions we can’t exactly diagnose, we can only say what it isn’t. Have you been particularly stressed recently, James? Anything bothering you at all?”

  James shook his head, tried to smile, but then thought better of it.

  “Well, that’s something.”

  Dr. Moffat went on, talking to Sarah again now. “After a while, you’ll probably stop noticing it. It’s amazing what we can get used to.” She turned to her computer and began typing. “I’ll refer you to the hospital for those tests. Then it will probably be steroids to sort you out. Meanwhile, let’s prescribe some drops to keep that eye nice and fresh. Take some time off work. Rest is important. I’ll write you a note. Come back and see me if you have any concerns.”

  “It will get better though?” asked James, with difficulty. He had not meant to sound so desperate, so pathetic. Sarah and Dr. Moffat turned to him, a little startled, as if they had forgotten he was there.

  “Oh, yes,” said Moffat, recovering her enthusiasm, “almost definitely. The vast majority start to get better within a few weeks. In the long run, only a small percentage do not return to more or less normal.”

  “More or less normal,” said Sarah, and then laughed, briefly. “I’ll take that.”

  By the time they turned back into New Glades, James was feeling a little better. What had happened was not as bad as it looked, or as serious as he had feared. It was an inconvenience, a bizarre inconvenience, that was all. He could already see himself describing it to people at work, how he had woken up with the face of the elephant man, making a joke of it—a few weeks or even a month from now maybe, but still. And he was buoyed, as he almost always was, by the sight of where he lived.

  The New Glades Estate was, James still thought, a pretty unique sort of place. He and Sarah had stumbled across it one day, entirely by accident. They had already been house-hunting for six months and had had two properties fall through at the last moment. That afternoon, an estate agent had stood them up for a viewing. Their daughter, Laura, who was four years old at the time, was having a rare tantrum and Sarah, pregnant with their son Sammy, felt sick every time she stood up. Exhausted and fractious, they had taken a wrong turn on the way home and arrived on the estate. They drove to the end of the road in order to turn around and there was the house, with an estate agent’s board outside it. It was empty, so they went up the steps and looked through the windows. A flock of parakeets that had been roosting in the cherry tree in the front garden flew up in a riot of exotic greens and yellows, delighting Laura, and they kn
ew immediately that this was the place. Even James, not given to such declarations, told friends it seemed like fate.

  New Glades was a sixties’ development, built on an area of ancient woodland owned by a monstrously wealthy private trust. The forty-eight identical houses were stacked in four terraces up the side of a hill. Each had its own small gardens, front and back, and the rest of the land was communal, sweeping lawns landscaped around many of the original giant spruce trees. On two sides and at the bottom of the hill were the woods that the estate itself had been carved from. From the front of the houses there were views over the woods, north towards the city skyline. It felt like a world away, but, as James often told people, fifteen minutes on the train and you were in the centre of town, a journey he made every day to work.

  Whenever it came out that he lived on a private estate, James was always quick to add, “It’s not as grand as it sounds.” It was true that the term “private estate” didn’t mean much: a small sign to that effect at the entrance, a monthly maintenance fee paid to the trust and various antiquated regulations about the colour of the front doors and the style of the window frames that the residents had long since stopped paying attention to. The houses themselves were not particularly large and certainly not ostentatious, just well designed and full of light. They had been built, in part, from the trees cleared from the site, and there was some element of copper in the roofs that had given them a sheen of verdigris over time, as if they were slowly reintegrating with the organic environment. The relative modesty of the houses was one of the things James liked best, the democratic and egalitarian spirit of neighbours all living in equivalent homes, as well as this apparent sympathy with the original landscape. They had featured in magazines when they were first built, an example of the utopian spirit of the era, and had sold at a premium. These days, as the estate agent told them, everyone wanted to live in a Victorian villa with period features, and the Orrs picked the house up—the previous owner had died and left it to his sister, who just wanted rid of it—for what was undoubtedly a bargain.