29 November 1984
The table was covered with sandwiches wrapped in cling film, bottles of lemonade and cola, tiny wrinkled sausages and chocolate digestives. Plastic plates and Styrofoam cups were piled up in the corner, balanced precariously on the edge. It looked, for the entire world, like a typical party scene – the bright colours, the safe falseness of the cutlery, the ridiculous amount of food. But there was one problem, obvious and stark as the sickly white sunlight that streamed through the threadbare curtains: there was only one boy present.
Jim blinked down at the assortment of food and cutlery, each as plastic and false as the other, and swallowed slowly. All that could be heard was the ticking of the wall clock and the muffled crackle of The Bee Gees – his mum had left the radio on. Staying Alive was accompanying his spiral into horror at the sight of the party lunch that his mum had so painstakingly laid out for him. He could practically see her, an hour before he'd woken up, scurrying back and forth from the kitchen with trays of food and bottles from the fridge. She must have saved up for weeks to be able to pay for all this.
He felt sick with anger, and clenched his hand into a fist to stop him from hitting something. Why had she bothered? Jesus Christ, was she so dense that she actually thought he had friends? Why was she so content to simply ignore the fact that he was obviously a freak, just like Carl said, just like everyone said? His heart ached as he beheld the table, straining under the weight of his birthday feast.
The clock ticked down the minutes until midday, when he'd actually been born, and Jim glanced at it, wishing it would stop its progress. The unending ticking was grating on his nerves, and he knew that was just counting down to the inevitable time when his mum would return and find the food uneaten, the sandwiches not unwrapped, and the plates unused. As much as he was furious at her for going to all the trouble of making a lunch for a ghost party, Jim knew that it had burnt a hole in her pocket and she had put a lot of effort into it. He could feel that awful thing nagging at the edges of his mind, the thing that he'd thought he'd crushed: the withered remains of a conscience.
The scream of the wooden chair legs against the floor set his teeth on edge as he pulled it out. He felt a little ridiculous, like a kid playing at being an adult, when he sat at the head of the table and surveyed the food. The air was weighted with inevitability – nobody was going to arrive, and the food had to be eaten. There was too much to justify one boy eating it in one go, but Jim pictured his mum coming home and seeing the sandwiches curling and the fizzy drinks going flat.
His stomach clenched at thought: she'd be so disappointed, and they would have to silently clear away the plastic plates together without looking at one another. Neither of them would mention it again, but it would always hang over them. The time that there was an undeniable display of how freakish he was. No matter how good his mum was at denying it, the fact that no-one had turned up for his birthday could not be ignored. Not like the knife under his bed, the strange statements he muttered under his breath, the dissected insects in the corner of his room. These things could be pushed aside, hidden behind her motherly smiles and excuses; but a party with no guests couldn't.
As he pulled the cling film off the first of five plates of sandwiches, Jim realised that he was doing this for himself as much as he was doing it for her: he couldn't have lived in the same flat as her knowing that she had no choice but openly acknowledge that he was a loser. As much as he despised her ignorance, and as much as he resented her for it, the only thing he couldn't stand even more was seeing her every day and knowing that she was seeing what Carl saw: an outcast, a freak. His heart ached when he realised that he had to do this just to keep up appearances – he had to allow his mother the small mercy of thinking her son was normal.
When he took the first bite his immediate thought was: I can't do this. It was full of watery tuna, a grey and congealing mush of fish and mayonnaise, and it stank of the beach. The bread was chewy and covered in too much butter – Jim remembered too late that his mum often buttered his sandwiches too thickly – but the butter was overpowered by the mixture of tuna and mayo. It was slimy and slick in his mouth, like swallowing cold porridge with lumps in it. He swallowed it slowly and felt it slide down his throat like bile and resisted the urge to rid his body of it. That was just one bite; he reminded himself cruelly that it was just one bite of one sandwich. Oddly enough, his mental voice sounded just like Carl and that somehow spurred him to crush the remains of the sandwich into a ball, feeling the soft bread ooze through his fingers and the butter smear his skin with grease, and cram it into his mouth in one go.
Even as he moved his jaws mechanically, chewing it quickly and gulping it down in manageable chunks of barely edible fish and butter, he reached for the next one. Don't think; don't think; just eat; you have to. He found that it was easier if he didn't blink, and instead just stared at the multi-coloured balloons that adorned the plastic tablecloth, as he chewed and swallowed. It soon became a rhythm – chew, chew, swallow, swallow, breathe, pick up the next one.
The clock ticked past midday but Jim didn't notice, just slid the first plate away and pulled the next one towards him. His mouth was full of the taste of tuna and his lips were shining with butter. The mixture was watery enough not to warrant opening the bottle of coke yet, but he had to wash the taste of the sea away. Knowing that it was stupid – he'd get full up on the fizziness – Jim reached for the litre bottle and unscrewed the cap. He momentarily considered just drinking it straight out of the bottle, but then reasoned that his mum would think it was strange that none of the cups had been used.
With shaking hands he grabbed the tower of plastic cups and began to line them up with the same painful precision that he laid out his stationary at school. He bent down beside the table and twitched the cups a little until they were perfectly in line with one another, with only a few centimetres between them. For those few precious seconds, as he was moving the cups slightly left or slightly forward to get them perfectly straight, he could pretend that he was somewhere, anywhere, but there. All the world was those cups and the table and getting them right because it was the only thing that he had control over.
Once they were in a line, he stood up and sat back on the chair again. Leaning back, he lifted the large bottle and poured the coke, careful not to fill it more than a third because that was how he had to have it. He set the bottle down with a thud and grasped the cup tightly, bending the plastic slightly out of shape. He dared himself to down it all in one go, and tipped his head back as he drank, feeling the fizz sting his throat and needle at the inside of his mouth, like a thousand tiny pins. Like all fizzy drinks, it was difficult to drink without stopping, but he'd dared himself so he couldn't not do it now. How pathetic would he be if he couldn't even keep a promise to himself?
When the torrent of coke became a trickle, he slammed the cup down harder than was actually necessary and gulped thickly. He could feel residue liquid on his cheeks and dripping down his chin, and he realised that at some point it had dribbled out of his mouth and over his face. It felt too sticky for normal liquid because it contained too much sugar and he wiped it away with his sleeve. Dutifully, he poured another cupful but didn't drink it yet, instead stared blankly at the bubbles rising to the surface in streams.
He felt achingly tired all of a sudden, and his bones weighed him down, forcing him to sink into the chair and fold his spine into a curved L shape. Outside, on another planet, a cuckoo cawed.
Pulling the cling film off of the new plate, Jim counted the ridges along the edge and scrunched the cling film into a ball. There were fifty. He picked up the sandwich and watched as the jam dripped out onto the table. Each plate had fifty ridges, and there were three more plates to go. One hundred and fifty ridges more, he told himself, and then he was done. Biting into the sandwich and tasting the sugary sweet strawberry jam, Jim realised how bright it was against the pale bread and how bright the plates were and how bright the tablecloth was and how everything in the room was so bright, painfully so. He was in a freak-show – too many colours and too much sugar. It was like a caricature of real life, a parody.
It was a goddamn horror show, he thought as he methodically finished the crusts and started the next sandwich. And he wasn't crying, no: he wasn't doing anything but eating. See, that was the thing about horror shows: they were full of distorting mirrors. And that was what this was. So it only looked like the world was blurring and wavering – because this was a freak-show and he was looking into one of those mirrors.
Later that night, Eva Moriarty drew her knees up to her chest and clutched her elbows across her chest. The dimness of her bedroom allowed for the belief that her pile of dirty laundry was a monster, like something out of a child's fairy-story. And the thin curtains let in the palest moonlight, illuminating the stack of unpaid bills and last demands, but in the half-light Eva could tell herself that they were just paper.
And her bedroom door had a gap in the bottom which meant that a bar of light could shoot through across the floor, because the bathroom light was on. However, in the safety of her own room, Eva convinced herself that she had simply forgotten to turn it off, and the sound of her son was just a neighbour vomiting and sobbing simultaneously, as if they would never stop. Catching his breath in hitching gasps over and over. Yes, in the comfort of her room, as she had done so many times, Eva could pretend that Jim was a normal child and he wasn't doing what she knew she could hear.