14 October 1984

"Did you hear what your Paddy mate did?"

Jim couldn't get past Carl because the other boy was leaning across the doorframe and blocking his way. He was smiling hungrily and crossing one ankle over the other – the epitome of calm. Sometimes Jim wondered if Carl actually dressed up for occasions such as this, so ridiculously casual was his clothing: a shirt with the top three buttons undone, dark blue jeans that were stupidly too big and scruffy hair, as though he'd been running his hands through it to achieve the look. He radiated a relaxed, predatory, aura: it was as if he made the effort.

It was just a day after the swimming pool event, and it had taken Jim everything to walk from his car to school this morning. He had shaken with every step and would have bolted into the bathroom, had he not been spotted by as teacher and sent to class. Then he had tried to walk across the playground but, to do so, he had to pass the classroom. Carl had seen him.

Knowing that it would be useless to try and push past Carl, or ignore him, Jim mutely shook his head. It was a lie of course – everyone had heard.

His mum had folded the paper away too quickly when Jim had come down for breakfast, smiled too warmly, and when she'd gone to get changed he'd grabbed it and seen: the IRA had tried to kill the Prime Minister. It was so brazen and simple, there on the paper, but the repercussions were like the ripples left when a bolder falls into a lake. Jim had felt like he was sinking all over again as he stared down at the news report. Brighton. It had happened here, in their town. His thoughts had immediately leaped to Carl and he'd run to the toilet to throw up.

"Well you're just a big old liar, then, aren't you Jimmy?" Carl said, but he didn't sound too annoyed about it. In fact he sounded pleased: this meant a game; this meant he had to extract the words from Jim slowly and messily, embarrassingly. "My dad told me that all your lot should go home." Carl said, shaking his head. "I think he was wrong there though: I think you should all be shot. You can't just come into our country and kill our Prime Min'ster." He said it oddly, like the word was a difficult one, but Jim didn't dare to grin. "You're all terrorists – hiding behind your stupid accents, nicking our jobs and killing our MP's."

At that Jim frowned. He knew that Carl wanted a confrontation, so he decided to fight it on a level which he might win: intellectually. "How would you know what an MP is?" He asked, scornfully. He hardly understood himself, truthfully, he only knew that they were important and made decisions about the country. But he also knew that he knew a damn sight more than Carl did.

"My dad told me," Carl stood up from his leaning position and glared at Jim, puffing his chest out a little. "Nobody wants you here, Irish, you should just go home. No one wanted to tell you but they were talking about it before you arrived. Everyone's scared you've got a knife or a bomb or something and you're going to kill us."

"That's so stupid," Jim cried, looking beyond Carl and seeing the group of worried faces watching them. They did seem too still, too quiet, to be normal. Maybe he was telling the truth and these people really were ignorant enough to be afraid of Jim because of where he came from, after all these were the children who had thrown him into a swimming pool against his will.

Carl shoved Jim in the chest and took a slow step forwards and Jim stumbled back. "Is it, Irish? Is it?" He asked, pushing him again. Jim didn't fall, but tripped backwards and just managed to stay standing. "Don't you have any bombs on you? Not going to pull a gun on us?"

"I'd never bomb people!" Jim shouted a little too loudly. He blinked to clear the mental images of sailing red chunks, shards of bone, tears mixing with blood. He had been fascinated with the idea of the Brighton Hotel bombing – how the building must have exploded into particles of dust and mortar, how the bricks must have shattered and the sound that it must have made. But Carl would never know that.

Carl grabbed Jim's collar and hauled in a few centimetres off the ground. Jim wasn't heavy, but this was still a feat and impressed murmurs broke out from the watching class. His arms were shaking, but Jim wondered if his shirt would rip before Carl dropped him. He could hear the material tearing already. "No one wants you here, Jimmy." Carl said, viciously blunt.

The piercing voice of Mrs Lynch broke the tirade: "Carl? What is going on?" Both the boys looked around to see her clipping neatly in her heels down the hall, her bun coming out in wisps and her high-necked jumper looking like it was choking her. "You should be inside the classroom by now!"

It was so obvious that Jim was being attacked – Carl was literally lifting him off the floor, and everyone was staring avidly – but Mrs Lynch just stood and looked at them both, as if the real crime here was their punctuality. More accurately, she was looking at Carl. Jim saw her flicker a nervous glance towards him, for hardly a second, and then look back to Carl. It only lasted for a split second but it was enough. Jim understood. He felt his feet touch the ground again, and the pain of his shirt digging into his shoulders subsided.

"Yes, Miss," Carl said, softly. He'd missed her ignoring of Jim and was scraped his foot along the ground. "Sorry, Miss," He didn't look at Jim again and traipsed past the fuming teacher, into the classroom where the other students had already taken their seats.

Mrs Lynch was left outside with Jim. She swayed a little on her feet and seemed to be suffering an internal conflict of sorts. She looked both concerned and resentful but Jim couldn't tell if she was resenting being concerned about him, or if she was resenting him and being concerned about it. He was the struggle in her eyes and decided not to make in any easier for her: he wouldn't move until she told him to. Her obligation as a teacher was to demand that he went into the classroom, yet her morals as a human seemed to be telling her that she didn't want him there. Jim watched her, stock still.

At last she said, "You too, Jim." She didn't look at him and stared at the floor in front of his feet instead. Then she whipped her head up and stalked into the room, without a backwards glance. It took Jim a few seconds to realise that she hadn't called him James. He followed her with his eyes as she picked up her chalk and began writing on the blackboard, brushing some hair out of her face and babbling about quietening down, even though nobody was talking.

When Jim took his seat next to Carl he felt the heat of everyone's gaze on him and kept his head bent, pulling out his pencil case and notebook to begin the monotonous routine of his daily ritual. He didn't look up even as he felt their stares drift away, instead carefully straightened his stationary and flipped open his notebook and sat with his back straight, his hands clasped together on the desk. Nor did he once let himself look at Carl who, in turn, ignored him. All the students silently let the lesson progress in that dull, half-asleep state that they sometimes lulled into. Mrs Lynch just talked at them as they took notes and nobody asked questions, nobody said anything out of turn, but they all felt it in the air: the presence in the back of the classroom. They flinched when Jim moved his chair and chanced glances at one another as his pencil scraped on his paper. Jim pretended not to notice; they pretended not to be bothered.

As the lesson dragged itself onwards, Jim let his mind float above and beyond the mediocrity of it all. He imagined that there was someone out there, in the world, who understood him. Someone who was the same; a person who got bored with it all too. He envisioned that they were on the same intellectual level. Maybe they were even the same age, he pondered, and there was another boy somewhere who was thinking exactly the same thing as him right now. He vowed that if he were to ever meet this person, he would fall in love with them. They would be above the ordinary people, better than them, but it would be alright because they'd have each another.

Jim looked around at these normal, monochrome children. They terrified him, yes, each and every single one of them – they could physically overpower him in an instant. But he also despised them because they were so dull. They didn't think outside of the constricting boxes of their lives: their fates had laid out for them an average job, an entrapping marriage, an unassuming death. But Jim, sitting in the back of the classroom with only his stark thoughts, was planning something more spectacular for himself.

He could sense a shifting inside his head and had no idea what the cause of it was. Maybe it was the blatant disregard from the other students, or his near death experience. Perhaps it was the bottomless loneliness or the thought that someone else had wanted to do something, attack the Prime Minister, and they had just gone ahead and done it. So maybe it wasn't wrong. If it had been the wrong thing to do, Jim reasoned, then God or destiny or something would have stopped it.

Perhaps these ordinary people had right and wrong, good and bad, mixed up. Just because everyone agreed on something, did that make it correct? He thought of the swimming pool. He knew the answer. Jim felt a sudden sense of clarity when he came to the conclusion that there was no reason to do all of the good he could, all of the time, when he didn't want to. He had hidden his dismembered beetles and other experiments with shame because he thought that there was something not right in them. He thought he was the one with the problem.

But he could see that it was them, the ordinary people, who had the problem. People like Carl, who caused pain with no regard of subtlety or beauty. Mrs Lynch, who ignored issues that were staring her right in the face. His mum who believed the lies that Jim was telling her about having friends, because it was easier than seeing the truth: her son was a freak. His dad, who called him James again and again as he hit him. But no, no, no. He was Jim now.

The thought about his dad shocked him for a moment, before he realised that it was alright: that part of his life was finished and he had nothing to fear from it. His dad had left when his mum had threatened him with the police. He had only left Jim with bruises and an obsession with shortening his name. The bruises had been intention. The name had been an accident. He was just another person in the long line of people who were beneath his care, Jim realised. There were so many that he sorted them into categories: lasting and unintentional. Mrs Lynch's crimes weren't on purpose, she was just ignorant. Jim forgave her because she was stupid. But then he placed the face of everyone in his class in the line. They were in the lasting category, because what they had done to him would never fade. He supposed he should thank them for shaping him, but he knew they wouldn't understand. His transformation was beyond their simple capabilities.

He mentally jostled through the line until he reached Carl. He watched the physical boy sitting beside him, for once giving him peace, and copied the image into his head. Mentally, he ran his gaze across every contour of Carl's face and took notice of the dash of every vein. He lifted Carl's arms up and danced him like a puppet. He pulled back Carl's skin and watched his muscles jump and twitch. He climbed the rungs of his ribs and bit his heart. He played his sinews and drank his cherry blood.

I will let the bully have his Golden Era, Jim decided mercifully. He wouldn't fight back anymore, and wait until the opportune moment. Whether it happened next week or in a year, Jim knew that his heyday would come. He would make Carl pay for everything. Jim thought of chlorine shadows and breathlessness. He smiled to himself.

With hollow promises, he guided Carl to the edge of the pool and there, in his head, Jim played with his enemy, in his own way.