17 December 1987
We last left Jim Moriarty at the young age of nine – already having witnessed the horrific truth of hatred and the depth of prejudice. As the author, I may have been staving off the later years of Jim's childhood so as to save him some of the little dignity he had left. Because is there any dignity to be had in his inevitable decline into spite and psychopathy? Where is the honour in a premeditated murder, meticulously formed and ironed out upon each visitation?
Surely Jim deserves some fairness, some goodness, after the cruelty so callously doled out to him. His should be a story of redemption and inspiration – I would love to report that he rose above the bullying and became a good person. However, as the author, it is my solemn duty to record what happened to the little boy who sat at the back of a classroom in Brighton. A little boy who remembered bars of light slicing through endless fathoms of water as he sank to the bottom of the swimming pool. It falls to me to tell you, reader, what he was driven to do.
Hervey Cleckley, the author of one of the earliest books on psychopathy, would argue that psychopaths don't follow a life plan, and that they have no end goal to their existence. But if someone was to chronicle Jim's thought processes from his dreadful ninth birthday, noting down every dark desire and violent wish, they would see that Cleckley was wrong: it would be quite clear that the telos of Jim Moriarty's life, his be-all-end-all, was to rid the world of Carl Powers. At some unknown point, Jim's fantasies transitioned from if to when; from what if to how.
It is a rather unknown fact that a particular vicious strain of bacterium grows on household foods of low acidity: clostridium botulinum. It causes paralysis and is virtually undetectable, especially when it's not being looked for. And why would anyone look for it on the body of an unfortunate boy who drowned in a tragic accident? Such an unfortunate thing, people would murmur. Such a loss for his parents. Wasn't Carl Powers such a nice boy?
The telos had been achieved, but I'm getting ahead of myself. First, I need to tell you about the day Jim discovered that the people in his life were willing to ignore even the most obvious signals. And this, for the first time in his life, could work in his advantage.
As is wont of time, it passed. Jim didn't feel he changed with the passing of every day, but people who knew of him (because people only ever knew of Jim Moriarty, they never knew him) said that he became more volatile and jaded. He pushed younger children over in the playground, kicked the football over the fence at break-time, muttered rude comments just loud enough for insecure girls to hear.
In himself, Jim simply felt that he saw things as they were: there was nothing wrong with causing a little pain to get to the top. If people were horrible to him, shouldn't he just be horrible back? Didn't the Bible, that hateful black book embossed with a gold cross that they read from every assembly, say "treat others as you yourself would be treated"? So Jim was just following Jesus' teachings when he pulled this little girl's pigtails, or tripped up that boy so he skinned his knees on the gravel.
But one thing didn't change: Carl Powers. Like a cliff-face next to a raging sea, Carl wasn't worn down by Jim's sudden 260 degree transformation. Actually, he didn't see much of it. He and his friends hung out in the corner of the field, out of sight of the playground, and never witnessed Jim's acts of violence. To Carl, Jim was still just a weedy foreigner with a stupid accent. And despite Jim's sudden incline in cruelty, he couldn't bring himself to stand up to his long-time tormentor. He still hung his head when he entered the classroom; he still didn't speak in class out of fear of fuelling the hurtful whispers; he was still the victim.
Mrs Lynch had moved up the school with her class, determined to carry them through their primary education like a scrawny eagle, watching over them as they grew and progressed. As she did when they were eight years old, she allowed her gaze to sweep over Jim's cut lip and bruised face. It wasn't her business, she told herself. He should stand up for himself; boys will be boys; it's character building. She recycled so many empty phrases to herself that she felt like a mass-produced leaflet.
"James," Mrs Lynch kept her eyes on her pile of papers and straightened the top one – Stanley Hopkins had apparently got an A. In the three years she'd taught him, not once had Mrs Lynch said his name correctly, and Jim had long since given up correcting her out loud. She only afforded him a tight-lipped smile and said yes in a patronizingly patient way. So, he'd given up and instead only corrected her in his head. It's Jim you stupid bitch.
"Yes, Miss?"
She kept her gaze fixed on the papers. That was another thing Jim noticed about her: she never met his eyes. Maybe it was their unsettling blackness, and the fact that they always held wordless anger. Maybe it was a kind of apology for that first time three years ago, when she'd seen Carl holding Jim up by the collar, and for every time after that. "I heard that you pushed Emma over." Her tone was accusing and they both knew she'd already made up her mind – there was no other side to this story. It didn't matter that Carl had told Jim that if he didn't give him five pounds, he'd get a beating. And it didn't matter that Emma Silver was the richest girl in the year and she'd refused to give Jim the money even when he'd asked politely, so he'd had no other choice.
"Yes, Miss, I did. But –"
"You know what the punishment is for bullying, James." Mrs Lynch's voice was stern, and she twitched one of her pencils so that it was exactly in line with the edge of the desk. Jim wanted to knock it out of line. Straighten, swish; straighten, swish. See how it feels, Miss? Why can't you see? "A week's detention and it's another note home to your mother."
Unable to contain his fury, Jim clenched his hands into fists and shoved them into his pockets so she wouldn't see that he was literally shaking with rage. A note home meant no pocket money and a "talk". Oh, Jim, you know it's wrong to hit. You have to be a good boy. And he would nod and say yes, he understood, and he was sorry. It wouldn't happen again. But she wasn't to worry, because he was okay. Lies, lies, lies.
He remembered something he'd read once about a man who'd had neurosurgery – when his brain was poked in a certain place, he'd suddenly started talking a completely new language. That was like his life, Jim thought: Carl poked him and out spewed lies.
Jim nodded in reply to Mrs Lynch, his lips pressed tightly together. He bit back the retorts that he wanted to yell at her, knowing it would do no good. To her, bullying was only bullying if you could see it. A bruise only counted if someone reported it. Tears unheard were tears unshed. She was pleased with his trivial attack on Emma – it meant that she had another excuse to turn a blind eye to what she'd been ignoring for the past three years, and twist Jim into the bad guy to justify her lack of action to herself. Seeing him as the villain, not the victim, helped her to sleep at night.
"Say, 'yes Miss.'"
"Yes Miss." His voice came through gritted teeth, and he couldn't look at her. There were pencil shavings littering her desk – little flecks of black on an otherwise pristine table – but Mrs Lynch didn't seem bothered by them. In fact, she ignored the imperfections completely.
"Dismissed." She raised a hand to wave him away, like a stray animal, not even affording him a glance. Jim supposed he should commend her: she'd managed an entire exchange with him without looking up. Often, in their numerous uncomfortable conversations, she had to look at him just once. It was only ever a quick flicker of her eyes, running her gaze past him for a few seconds, inventorying the classroom and hardly taking him in at all. But this was a new achievement even for her: she hadn't looked at him once.
Without another word, Jim stormed out of the room with his hands still deep in his pockets, his shoulders hunched and his muscles tensed as if he was battling an oncoming storm.
He started across the playground, pushing his encounter with Mrs Lynch out of his mind, deciding that the inevitable talk with his mum could be glossed over if he applied Guilty Expression, his pet name for a trick which he had learned to perform whereby he appeared to be sorry for something he didn't give a damn about.
His mother would play her role perfectly, as ever: the concerned and mildly irritated parent. Her tone would reflect her worry and annoyance, and she would use words like ashamed and raised you better. But he could see in her eyes that she would rather be doing anything but talking to him. His actions at school only confirmed her unsaid knowledge about him, and she hated to be proven right.
With every note home, every detention, his mother fought harder and harder to not face what was plainly in front her face. She had the amazing ability to make what was there into something she wanted to see, a skill which surpassed even Mrs Lynch's ignorance, because she had more reason to believe there was something abnormal about Jim. But no; her son was not dangerous, he was merely troubled. The skinned neighbour's cat? What on earth did her little Jim have to do with that? Her adeptness at the role of Blind Mother would make his part as the Apologetic Son all the more easy to play, because she hardly needed him to act at all to believe whatever he told her. They spoke their scripts almost to the letter with every repetition, putting on the show for her sake.
When he reached the school gates, Jim decided he would take a detour before going home. He'd found the local library to be a brilliant resource for his extensive research into taboo subjects. For instance, did you know that you should bury a murdered body nine feet under, instead of six, and bury a chicken carcass six feet? That way, if a sniffer dog catches the scent of rotting meat, they dig up a chicken and the police look no deeper than that. Always give yourself an alibi for the night of committing a crime – cinema, homework, family occasion – and tell someone. Then they can vouch for you if you get questioned.
More recently, his exploration had veered towards the biological. He found it fascinating that humans were just endless cells, constantly dying and changing and battling one another. But, ultimately, those cells formed something as complex and unique as the human body. Bones were welded together with fibrous ligaments; skeletons formed a delicate frame covered by layers of muscle like tarpaulin. Skin was stretched to the breaking point, so easily sliced and snapped back, encasing the infrastructure so precisely. Miles and miles of sinews and veins tracked their way through the anatomical design like pathways. It was like the world's most complicated machine. And, like any machine, Jim was entranced with how it could be broken.
He realised quickly, after trawling through pompous books with wordy titles, that the best way to kill someone undetected was through what he had dubbed to be elegant warfare. A knife to the throat, a shove off a building, was too risky. It could be traced. But ground glass in a cup of tea? Carbon monoxide poisoning in a contained room? It could be put down to an unfortunate accident. And it was far more poetic, he felt, to have someone's own body rebel against them. For someone to die choking on poisoned air, or their trachea shredding as it was pierced with tiny shards of glass.
Carl, Jim decided, was going to receive that kind of carefully planned death. There would be abhorrence in the arrangement of details, repulsion in the revenge. The structured undertaking of Carl's demise would embody Jim's hatred for him, because each second would be mapped out – every painful detail would be carefully accounted for and thought through. His attention to detail wouldn't reflect that Jim cared about Carl in the slightest; rather it would show that he cared about Carl's death. There was a big difference.
He wanted the suffering to be strung out, the fear to ratchet, as the other boy realised that he was going to die. What was that stupid phrase? Ah, yes: hate the sin and not the sinner. Jim felt that this was applicable here. Love the death, not the dead. The planning of the event was what he obsessed over, it just so happened that the event was going to happen to Carl. Of course, too, it was happening because of Carl, because he deserved it. Funny how those things happened: life was a circle.
The Jubilee Library was a short walk from school, and Jim could probably have walked there with his eyes closed. It had been a safe-haven a few months ago when Carl and a few of his homogenized friends had waited for him at the school gates, given him a few minutes head-start, and chased him down the high street. The sound of his feet slamming against the pavement had matched the erratic pace of his heart, almost drowning out the cries of get him and the harsh mocking of his accent. When he'd reached the large wooden doors he shoved them open and stumbled across the plush carpet, breathless.
Don't follow me in here. Oh God, please, don't follow me.
They hadn't gone after him. Perhaps they'd lost sight of him, or realised that they couldn't very well shove him up against a shelf of books in a public place and punch him. But just because they hadn't come into the building didn't mean they'd left, and Jim had resigned himself to an entire afternoon spent in the library. He'd walked through the fiction books before realising that he didn't want to live in someone else's life. The titles tempted him with promises of escapism from the constant balloon of pain in his chest, but Jim had wanted to remain grounded. He was sick of running away.
So it was in this way that he delved into factual volumes. Theirs were large chunks of small print, boasting knowledge like aged professors in cramped black blocks of text. Whereas the covers of fiction books teased him with ambiguity, non-fiction books patronized him with the simplicity of their titles. The facts they laid out on pages unsullied with other children's jam and crumbs (because these books were read by adults) were stark and to the point, once Jim had navigated his way around their learned language.
He found an extensive work focused on biology, and hauled it over to the large reading desk. It was the 39th in a series of volumes on Applied and Microbiology by H.H. Huss. The contents wasn't alphabetised, so Jim spent that afternoon flicking to random pages to see what caught his eye. He wasn't looking for anything in particular; it was more that he was curious about what the book had to offer him. He'd stayed in the library until it closed, and the cleaner had demanded that he went home, his eye glued to the pages. Gallons of information poured into his eager mind, and he realised that he'd been thirsting for it. Never before had it occurred to Jim was a safe-house the library was, and his visits had become biweekly, or weekly, depending on the weather.
As per usual, when he reached the library, he nodded at the librarian and smiled quickly, before walking to the Biology section and pulling the same book down. He put it back in exactly the same place every time, so he knew where it would be, and carried it with both hands almost reverently to his table. He'd come to think of it as his table, because nobody sat on it with him. Perhaps there was something unnerving in his expression as he read intently, or maybe it was the intensity with which he swallowed the information with his gaze. Whichever it was, he had named the table, and the book, his.
As his routine dictated, Jim thumbed through the pages and stopped at a random section before skimming it quickly for key words of interest. Tests for the presence of toxins sprang out at him, and he quickly reread the entire passage. The bacterium being discussed was C. Botulinum, and it was described as an antagonistic organism that was often found in soil and poorly stored canned foods of low acidity. It was given to lab mice, which both showed symptoms of something called botulism.
Leaping up, feeling he was onto something, Jim hurried over to the shelves and scanned them, well-practiced at looking quickly for something. He grabbed the first medical dictionary he saw and took it back to the table, dropping it beside the other book and flicking to B. The prose was extensive, and it took a couple of impatient page-turns, but eventually he found it:
Botulism: A sometimes fatal disease which affects the central nervous system producing difficulty in swallowing, visual disturbances, and paralysis: often fatal.
Sitting back, Jim blinked at the two open books before him. The answer to all of his problems was laid out with laughable conspicuousness, worded prettily by clever Oxford scholars and botanists, shrouded by exclusive lexis and clustered with scientific facts. But it seemed so easy, so attainable, that he hardly dared to hope it could be done. Surely C. Botulinum couldn't be gotten so effortlessly? All he needed to do was steal one of his mum's many canned foods and wait, checking on it daily. Of course distributing it to Carl would be an issue, but Jim thought that he would cross that bridge when he came to it.
For now, he was content to sit in the library and read further, allowing the half-formed plan to fester in the back of his mind. And, if you were to ask anyone watching him that day, they would tell you that he was smiling throughout the whole time of being there.