by Tom Lee
Several times, as he ran, he tripped or stumbled over something on the ground, and only just managed not to fall. Gradually, as he got used to the surface and picked his legs up higher, he began to gather speed. He recognised individual things from his daytime walks—the outline of a particular thicket of trees, the dry bed of a stream, a rising bank, turns in the path—but he had little overall sense of where he was and no time, he felt, to stop and work it out. He thought of Sammy. Bare-armed, wearing his new shoes, a tiny anomaly among the massive trees, his hair glowing like a blond orb, walking into the darkness—afraid or oblivious to fear, and James did not know which of these was more terrible.
Soon, and without expecting it, he arrived back at the train tunnel. He had forgotten that the path looped around. Without stopping, he took the left path. The ground had been baked hard by weeks of sun and his knees ached. It was getting harder to pick his feet high up off the ground and it seemed only a matter of time before he went over. He heard the blood rushing in his ears and felt his heart in his chest, but he strained himself to keep going. It seemed to him that he was running to find Sammy, and to slow down or even stop would be to accept that the worst, the unthinkable, had already happened.
But then, just as he arrived back in the clearing in front of the train tunnel for a second time, his legs gave way completely and he fell to his knees. He vomited, bringing up the pitiful half-baguette he had eaten at the party. And as he did so, his hands planted in the earth in front of him, he knew, with the same conviction that moments before he had known Sammy was lost, that he had been safely at home with Sarah all along.
He retched several more times, painfully, but nothing else came up.
Part Three
1
James knelt on the ground for some time, immobilised. Eventually he stood up, and walked through the woods to the entrance opposite the front of his house. He loitered there in the shadow of the laurel hedge until he saw the lights in the children’s bedrooms go out. Then he waited a little longer before crossing the road and climbing the steps to the house. Inside the porch he could hear the sound of the television from the living room and he closed the front door quietly and made his way straight upstairs. He pushed open Sammy’s bedroom door and saw what he knew he would see, his son’s small shape under the sheet in his cot, his head turned sideways under his hair, his arms thrown up above him. Then James went to the spare room.
The next morning he woke up in his clothes, physically wrecked. Every muscle in his body felt bruised, as if he had been beaten up. He had scratches on his face and hands and dirt and grit under his fingernails. There was a tear in his T-shirt and the taste of sick was still in his mouth. He stayed in bed until lunchtime, then had a shower and went apprehensively downstairs. Sarah was sitting at the kitchen table, with the laptop open.
“You had a late one,” she said, looking up. “I didn’t hear you come in. Probably just what you need.”
“What do you mean?” James said, anxiously.
“To have a few drinks. Talk to some people.”
James nodded. He had anticipated a row.
“I’m sorry I didn’t stay out,” she said.
After using the toilet, Sarah explained, she had come out and found Sammy sitting on the steps in the back garden, chattering to himself. His nappy needed changing and it was already past his bedtime so she had taken him in, read him a story and put him to bed. After that, she had stayed in herself. Laura had come in sometime later. Sarah had not seen the football match that had culminated in James’s crunching tackle on Ben Fuller or witnessed the hysteria that had sent him running into the woods in pursuit of Sammy. She did not even admonish him for leaving Sammy wandering alone in The Field. The completeness of James’s neglect had apparently not even occurred to her.
“Oh shit,” Sarah said abruptly, and looked at her watch. “We’re supposed to be somewhere. Kids!” she shouted.
Five minutes later the door slammed and they had gone. James went back upstairs to the spare room and lay on the bed.
In many ways, the conversation with Sarah was a relief. He had acted bizarrely at the party, no doubt, but perhaps the damage was not as great as he had feared and anyway, when he replayed the day in his mind, there were mitigating circumstances. He’d had felt a lot of pressure for the party to go well. He’d had only had a couple of hours’ sleep the night before, missed entirely the daytime nap he had become accustomed to, barely eaten, and it had been hot—not to mention the accumulated stress of the past months.
It was a disturbing lapse, of course, the way he had forgotten Sammy so completely before the football, but as Sarah’s reaction suggested, by itself it was not the dreadful misdemeanour he had initially taken it to be. When he realised he had forgotten him, instead of taking the rational course of action and locating Sarah, he had compounded the mistake by panicking and running maniacally into the woods. In the end, nothing bad—nothing irrevocable—had happened. It was all just a case of over-reacting.
But still, something in what Sarah had said rankled with him. “Probably just what you need,” she had said, “to have a few drinks,” “talk to some people.” Here it was again—like the suggestion that he take up a hobby—the implication that his current difficulties, the palsy and all that went with it, might simply be alleviated by getting out more or changing his habits, that it was all just something he could get over if he tried hard enough. It sometimes felt as if, from day one, she had not taken it—or him—entirely seriously. And yet, at the same time, she had indulged him. She had not pushed him to go back to work or queried why he was not helping out more at home. She had accepted his incapacity all too readily, worked around it without complaint. Previously, he had just thought that this was her way of coping—there was a good deal to cope with, after all—but she did not give the impression of someone who was only coping. If anything, she seemed to be thriving.
After an hour James got up and went round to the Fullers’.
For a long time after he knocked no one came to the door. He was just about to turn away, disappointed, when Connie opened it.
“James,” she said.
“Hi,” said James.
She hadn’t opened the door very far. She was leaning on it with one shoulder and her other arm was raised in a right angle, her hand resting high up on the frame.
“I wanted to apologise for last night,” James said.
“Okay.”
“I was . . . I got carried away. Can I speak to Ben?”
Connie looked at him but said nothing. She was still wearing the denim dress from the night before. Her hair was a mess and she seemed drowsy, a little out of it, her green eyes a little unfocused behind her glasses. Perhaps she was hungover from the party or perhaps she had been asleep. James could see Sidney skulking in the porch behind her.
“He’s out,” she said eventually. “Everyone’s out.”
“Right. Is he okay?”
Connie carried on looking at him, her head at a slight angle, as if it were she who had just asked a question and was waiting for his reply. He touched his face self-consciously.
“I got carried away,” he said again.
There was a long pause and then Connie said, “I know you have been having a difficult time, James—”
“I have!” James said eagerly.
He was surprised by this, but pleasantly so. It was good of her to acknowledge it, and he felt a tremendous surge of gratitude. He smiled. He was standing very close to her, almost in the doorway himself. He followed the line of her angled arm, from her hand on the door frame, along the taut curve of her bicep, onto her bare freckled shoulder and then opening into the fine, clear structure of her collarbones and throat.
She had told him everyone was out. It was as if this act, his violent collision with Ben on the football pitch, had caused another kind of rupture, a brutal but necessary reordering of po
ssibilities, the stripping away of previously maintained levels of inhibition and restraint. A whole new vista of understanding had opened up between them—and, with it, the chance of some even greater form of forgiveness or relief.
“I know you have been having a difficult time, James,” Connie said, and James was not sure if she had repeated this, or if it was simply the echo of her words in his head. She released her hand from the door frame and for a moment it seemed as though she were going to reach out and touch his face, the palsied side, to lay her hand on it—but she did not. She placed it in the middle of his chest and pushed him sharply, so that he tripped and stumbled backwards, only just staying on his feet.
“But this is not okay,” she said and closed the door.
2
On Thursday night, there was a meeting of the residents’ committee. This was standard procedure, an opportunity to debrief and tie up any loose ends from the party, but James, who had not left the house all week except for the brief, unsatisfactory visit to the Fullers’ on Sunday afternoon, had not been looking forward to it. In the event, it did not go well.
James had prepared some opening remarks for the meeting, to the effect that the party had been a great success and everyone on the committee could be proud of their own contribution. He hoped to get through the evening quickly and without any disasters like the spontaneous welling up of his eye that had sabotaged the last one, but he had only just begun to speak when William interrupted him.
“I think it would be better to get this out of the way straight off the bat, as it were.” He paused, took the lid off the pen he was holding, then put it back on. “James, you are to be relieved of the chair’s role, I’m afraid, effective immediately.”
“Excuse me?” said James.
“You aren’t the chair any more, James,” said Vanessa, not kindly.
They were meeting at Vanessa’s house. It was the first time James had been there and there was an unmistakably psychedelic feel to the décor. A vast sunburst tie-dye hung from one wall, and on the others were images of elephants, Buddhas and Indian gods with many arms. They were all sitting, rather uncomfortably as far as James was concerned, on beanbags and cushions around a low table in the centre of the room.
“Well, I’m not sure what you mean,” said James. “Apart from anything else, the constitution of the committee does not permit . . .”
“On the contrary,” William continued, sliding one of the pairs of glasses hanging around his neck onto his nose and looking down at the notes in front of him, “it states explicitly that if a majority of the committee believe that the chair can no longer be deemed fit to hold the position then a vote of no confidence automatically removes him—or her—from office. You wrote these regulations yourself.” He held up a piece of paper and flapped it in the air. “That vote took place before you arrived this evening.”
It was a bureaucratic coup, a stitch-up. James looked around the room at the rest of the committee. Only Vanessa met his eye, unrepentantly. Was this to do with his behaviour at the party? Another thought went through his mind, that somehow they knew about the couple in the car and how James had stood and watched them and then failed to mention it to anyone. He had the sudden image of someone—who?—standing at a window or on a porch in the darkness, watching him watching them.
“No longer deemed fit?” James said. “May I ask on what basis?”
“We have received a complaint. In fact, a number of complaints.”
“From who?”
“I am not at liberty to share that information, I’m afraid.” William paused and then went on: “In retrospect it would perhaps have been better for you not to have taken the role in the first place, without proper consultation. But you were very insistent. A lesson for all of us about the importance of process, I think.”
“But I didn’t—”
“Have some dignity, James,” said Vanessa.
She was right. What was the point of protesting further? It was over, a fait accompli. James looked around at the committee and for a prolonged moment he felt the same dislocation he had experienced when he stood at the top of The Field and surveyed the estate below as he looked for his lost son. This time it was the image of his neighbours, the committee, squatting awkwardly around the too-low table that struck him as just some brittle veneer on reality, one that might fracture or shatter entirely at any time. There was a sudden loud laugh, almost a shriek, but it was not clear who it had come from, and then the room was silent again.
“James,” William went on, “let me take this opportunity to note our thanks to you for all your work on behalf of the committee and the association. We would welcome your continuing participation as an ordinary member of the committee and the experience that you bring, but of course understand completely if, under the circumstances, you would prefer not to attend in future.”
James was barely listening now. Everything had an air of inevitability, as if he were watching a film he had seen many times before.
“Kit has kindly agreed to take on the chair’s responsibilities temporarily, as of this evening, until we can organise an election and make a more permanent appointment. I know he has some exciting ideas.”
William looked up and nodded at Kit. James looked over at him too. He was sitting in his beanbag with his hands clasped together and resting on the table in front of him. His expression was impassive but he nodded faintly when William mentioned his name, as if the acceptance of this responsibility was an extremely sober matter. He had not spoken throughout the meeting, but of course he didn’t need to.
The meeting moved on to other matters. James listened vaguely to the discussion—about the CCTV cameras, the gardening and maintenance contract, plans for a bonfire night party in the autumn—things that no longer seemed to have much to do with him. Then, after a few minutes, and with some difficulty, he pushed himself up from the beanbag, packed his papers in his bag and, for the second time in as many meetings, left early.
3
James was still not sleeping well. He expected to get little more than two or three hours a night now, and usually not until towards dawn. Nevertheless, he carried on going to bed at his usual time, in the hope that that particular night might be different. When, after an hour or so, it was not, he would get up, pull up the blind and stand looking out of the window at the estate and the woods beyond. He looked along the laurel hedge that bordered the woods, the pools of sodium light around the streetlamps, the procession of neat front gardens that led away to the bend in the road. He was half-looking, he supposed, for unfamiliar cars pulled up silently in the shadows, though what he would do if he saw one, he did not know.
He brooded. The residents’ meeting was a humiliation, undeniably, but really, what did it matter? Despite what William had said—and this idea that James had been “very insistent” about chairing the committee was absurd—he had never wanted the job anyway. It would be a weight off him not to have to deal with the tedious administration and petty politics that went with it. No, it was not this that he brooded on now but Sarah, or, more precisely, his and Sarah’s relationship—the separate beds, the silly things he had not told her about, the distance between them, his passivity in allowing all this to occur. And the more he thought about it, night after night, the clearer it became that over the last weeks and months he had been preoccupied with precisely the wrong things. He had inflated the trivial and diminished the important. He had got everything terribly wrong.
On one of these nights, a few days after the residents’ committee meeting—a few days when he had seen Sarah and the children barely at all—when he had already lain awake for several hours and then stood for some time at the window, he went to the bathroom to use the toilet before trying again to get to sleep. He stood to wash his hands and looked up at the mirror above the sink. He thought of the first morning of the palsy (How long ago was that now? Three months? He had lost track) when h
e had stood in the same place, with Sarah next to him, and contemplated his transformed face.
There was the beard now, bushy, fully gingery, in need of a trim. His hair was nearly down to his shoulders, longer than he had ever had it. As it grew, the curl had come through, but now the weight of it was pulling it flat and straight against his head. Perhaps he should think about tying it back. And there was the patch, too, which he rarely took off.
James tried to smile. The right side of his mouth pulled back over his teeth and he grimaced in the mirror. He pulled the left side up to match the right, then dropped it back down. He watched as he ran his finger slowly down the left side of his face and still he felt nothing. He pushed back the patch. His eye, red and inflamed, stared back at him and he had an urgent sense of what he should do.
James pushed open the bedroom door with his fingertips. It was dark, just a little moonlight coming through a gap in the blind, but he could make out the rough shape of Sarah’s body, the rise of her hips and then her shoulders, under the sheet. She was towards the left side of the bed, where she had always slept when James was in there with her. She was lying on her right-hand side, the sheet pulled up to her chin, her hair spread on the pillow. Her hands were flat against each other and wedged under her cheek, in a way that seemed almost posed. Her jaw had dropped a little, opening her mouth, and she was snoring gently. It had been weeks, months now, since James had seen her like this, he realised, and the thought of this—that the sight of his sleeping wife had become so unfamiliar—overwhelmed him for a moment.