22 April 1989
And then everything was spinning and blurring and there was a crowd of people around him, not just two people. And Jim knew he should care that he was laughing too loudly and stumbling a little as he walked, but he couldn't dredge up the effort required to think about anything besides the fizzing sensation in his veins. It felt like his skin was static on a broken TV. He could see the pavement lurching as he leaned against Sebastian, clinging to him like a child.
"Seb," he slurred. "Hey Seb." He wondered why the other boy was staring at him like he was deranged because nobody looked at him like that and Jim could've killed him for daring to. "How much did you give me?"
"Not much," Sebastian replied, frowning and coming to a halt, forcing Jim to stop walking too. He gripped Jim's shoulders and faced him square on, staring into his eyes. "Jesus; you're really whacked out, aren't you?"
Jim waved a hand carelessly and snorted, as if it didn't matter what state he was in. And it didn't. His mum hardly looked at him when he came home anymore, and they both pretended that the house didn't stink of coke and booze. She looked the other way when he crashed up the stairs, swearing and muttering to himself, and didn't question it when he rolled out of bed at 3pm, demanding breakfast. It was just another part of their elaborate game: Jim wasn't getting involved in gangs and drugs if Eva didn't see it.
"Look mate, you should sit down." That was Ben, sounding concerned but, as usual, being a total prat. Jim glared at him hatefully, and shook his head.
"I'm fine, dammit!" He insisted, letting go of Seb. The high was wearing off rapidly, as it did, and he was getting irritable. They'd snorted the lasts of their supply back at Seb's, and it would probably be weeks before he could get anymore. Their source wasn't exactly stable – Seb's older brother was at university, and only came back every few months with baggies of the stuff. It wasn't hard to make one or two go missing.
When Sebastian had come into school showing signs of being high (the mydriasis of his pupils and his shaking hands were a dead give-away) Jim had quietly pulled him aside and asked him where he got his supply. The thought of being high had been quite appealing at the time: he wanted to experience it at least once, just to see what it was like. He had no idea just how easily he would get hooked on the sensation of being out of his body, just how hard it was to go back to being normal. He'd always known it was painful to be himself – he was too aware of the world, so much so that he didn't realise how much better it was when he wasn't in his head – but he didn't realise how much more content he would be with being somewhere, someone, something, else.
He defiantly walked by himself, striding out ahead of Ben and Sebastian with the air of his ordinary arrogance. His chin jutted out as he squared his jaw in an attempt to seem in control. The truth was everything was blurry and seemed really distant and far away. Like he wasn't a part of it, he was separate from everything, and there was the pavement and there was the road and there were the streetlights. He was a physical entity and he could influence things in the world. He already had. Carl was dead because of something Jim had done.
"Isn't it weird," he asked, his voice childishly curious, "that everything exists?"
Ben patted his arm. "Sure mate, whatever." His tone was amused, the way you would address a little kid who thought the sky was green. He didn't take his hand off of Jim's arm, gently guiding him across the road. Jim stared at the puddles, thinking how pretty the streetlights looked shimmering on the water. They reminded him of something that he couldn't quite his finger on, something which happened a long time ago, to a little boy. Something bad.
As the effects of the high were diminishing, Jim could focus more. He frowned and shook Ben's hand off jerkily, shaking his head to try and clear it. He still felt strangely out of it, but more together than he had done. This was around the point where he considered going home to his mum. Or rather, going home to a house where his mother happened to live. They occupied the same space, but nothing more than that. Since his admittance a week ago, she hadn't spoken a word to him or had any contact with him at all. Jim used his home like a hotel, only returning for food and shelter.
He blinked and visibly straightened in his lucidity. This was a sign that he was gathering himself, and he sensed more than heard Ben and Seb backing off slightly. Being close to Jim when he was high was a bit like being close to a pit bull when it was drunk – it was a funny thrill. But being close to Jim when he was himself was more akin to being close to a shark when it was bored – anything could happen. Neither boy acknowledged their nervousness of their friend, but it was there all the same. An unspoken agreement to never get too close, and never mention that he used to be a skinny little Irish kid who had an obsession with straightening his pencils.
"You alright, Jim?" Seb asked in a forcefully cheerful voice.
"I'm fine," he repeated what he'd said earlier with more conviction this time, and a slight undercurrent of annoyance. He hated it when they saw him like that because it took away some of his aura of mystery and, though they never berated him for his weakness, he couldn't help but feel like they were silently sizing him up, waiting for the moment to overthrow him. Like Caesar and his senate.
He kept them in line with bribery – money and sweets – but also unspoken threats. It wasn't what he said, but rather the way he carried himself with the particular self-consciousness that was strange to his peers and made them wary of him. He walked with the air of someone who knew the precise effect of every move, as if he'd been at home in his body for a long time. The change was so overt because it was so sudden – Jim had transformed seemingly overnight from the scared little kid into the confident young man. His hair had been cut from the childish floppiness to a controlled bouffant helmet, but nobody dared tell him how the way he brushed it backwards made his forehead seem larger. This new Jim had also picked up an unusual mannerism of tilting his head a little, smoothly jutting his chin to one side as he fixed whomever he was looking at with a piercing stare. Maybe this was to detract from the fact that he was smaller than most people, because the person he was facing was often drawn to the movement as opposed to his size, or maybe it was just his innate uncanniness bleeding into his every-day motions. The action was reptilian in its fluidity, threatening in its oddness, and altogether disturbing.
It was with this trademark tilt and sideways arching of his neck that Jim turned to face his group, his gaze quietly angry. "I'm alright now, okay?" It sounded like he was trying to convince himself, which was strange because he seemed to be fine. They nodded cautiously in response, careful not to antagonise him. Whatever had gotten him so riled was obviously still bothering him, and it was becoming a self-sustaining fury. Since hanging out with Jim, Seb and Ben had seen this happen before: he got annoyed with the mildest thing and that ballooned until he wasn't angry at anything in particular, but he still seethed without a cause. It didn't need a catalyst, it just happened. He carried too much indignation to keep it inside all the time, and it had to be let out in random bursts.
"We know, Jim," Ben replied, frowning. Often, the way to placate him was to agree completely with whatever he said. The speed at which the situation had changed from a normal night out to a weird argument about nothing was confusing, and the other two boys were having trouble adapting.
Jim lowered his squared shoulders and straightened his head. That usually signalled the end of the random anger, but there was a tenseness about Jim's posture which suggested that this was just the beginning. He smiled with closed lips, and it was an empty smile.
"Do you guys remember Carl?" He asked in a knowing way, because of course they did. That tragedy had defined their year group – they'd watched him die. Mentions of Carl were scarce, because everyone was nervous that someone would say something harsh about him, and you couldn't speak ill of the dead. But the truth was always there, unspoken: Carl had been a bully. They'd all banded together against the new kid under Carl's banner and thrown him into the swimming pool; they'd listened when Carl preached about being in danger from Jim because he was Irish and all Irish people were terrorists; they'd watched mutely as Carl had cornered Jim on various break-times and turned the other way, pretending not to see when Jim came into the classroom with a crumpled shirt and dirt-covered trousers. They couldn't say any of that though.
The worst thing had been the fact that they'd basically all gone to same secondary school. With the exception of a few kids whose families moved away, they'd all transitioned between primary and secondary school together. And that meant that they carried their tragedy with them, like weights on their shoulders. The same old wounds that had healed messily, the same bitter hatred and silent memory of a young boy drowning desperately in a swimming pool.
The only person who got to leave Carl behind was Mrs Lynch and yet, ironically enough, she was probably haunted by him just as much as Jim was. His impish smile and the sight of him hoisting Jim up by his collar, and their agreement that there was something wrong with James Moriarty, something alien. But, unlike Carl, Mrs Lynch didn't do anything about it. She thought that if she ignored the problem, it didn't exist. And now she was the one who had to stay in the same classroom and look at the same chairs with new faces looking at her, and see ghosts of the boys she wished she'd saved.
Seb spoke first, his voice brightening a little in an attempt to shake this whole thing off as a joke. "Of course we remember Carl." He drew the name out, like Jim was asking him if he remembered the fact that he breathed. But his eyes were flickering to Ben nervously – this was unknown territory. They could discuss who'd won the football and how crap homework was, but they never went deeper than that. It was all superficial. And they never, never talked about Carl. Neither of them asked Jim why he wanted to talk about this now, because the chances were that Jim himself didn't even know.
"Do you remember what he did to me?"
Maybe it was the question itself, or the way it was asked, so quietly and vulnerably, as if the very phrasing of the question was Jim bearing his soul, but Ben and Seb both stared at him with wide eyes. Here was James Moriarty admitting that he was indeed the same little kid who'd had a fit when his pens were knocked out of line, the same Irish loser who'd torn his trousers on the first day of school and not been able to make eye contact with anyone. Jim had so successfully severed himself from that kid that Sebastian and Ben had a hard time accepting that they'd been the same person, but Jim's admission had brought all the memories back. Sebastian had been the one who'd yelled "get him!" and Ben had been the one who'd dragged Jim to the edge of the pool. They'd both watched as Carl shoved Jim out of the classroom – no one wants you here Irish – without doing a thing to help him. They couldn't. You don't fight against Carl.
After the silence had gone on long enough for it to become awkward, at last Ben replied in a very cautious voice. "Yeah." For the first time in a long time, he wasn't looking at Jim with mild fear. He was looking at him seriously, with a slight frown. There was something underpinning his gaze, something like pity; but it couldn't have been. He wouldn't dare. "I'm really sorry y'know, Jim," he said quietly.
Jim just stared at him silently, completely floored. He remembered his mum throwing words at him like shuriken, Mrs Lynch glaring at him over the top of her desk, all the faces of the other children gathering at the door of the classroom, clamouring to watch him getting beaten up. They had all looked at him with some measure of distaste, like they were fighting not to hate him. None of them had ever, ever, apologised. Jim liked to consider himself well-adjusted to almost any situation (excluding the surprise visit from Sherlock Holmes, which Jim tried to forget about) but he had no idea how to respond to Ben. He was the first person to look at Jim like he was a human in a long time. It had been so long, in fact, that Jim had stopped thinking of himself like a person. People were idiots like Carl, who tried to save themselves too late, or weaklings like his mum, or jerks like his dad. No; Jim wasn't like them. He had started, at some undefinable point, to think of himself as Something More.
And this simple statement from Ben had brought all of that to a grinding halt. All of those hours spent lying in bed, reliving the sight of Carl struggling against the lifeguard's grip and sinking, all of that time he'd used up on sharpening his paring knife and jabbing it into the flesh of small blocks of wood, thinking this will work on humans too, every day he'd spent so scared to go to school and scared to exist and scared not to. Every night he'd laid in bed and rapped on his wall in Morse code gently with his knuckles, even though there was nobody on the other side, because he longed so much for a friend in the world who would knock back to him. The stupid little diagrams he'd made, highlighting the weak points on a human's body, just in case today was the day he stood up to Carl.
After all of that, would it be possible to forgive him for crossing the line and apologizing? Jim didn't know what he'd wanted when he'd brought it up. But he hadn't expected this sudden display of humanity from someone who he'd thought of as a paper doll – Ben and Seb didn't exist; not really. Like his mum and Carl and Mrs Lynch, they didn't have feelings and lives. They were just extras in Jim's life, existing only when he saw them and vanishing when he closed his eyes. But this apology was more shocking that Carl's murmured "sorry" on the playground bench because Ben looked so open and pained, like the words were hurting him with their honesty. He didn't whisper the apology as if it shamed him to say it, but he looked right at Jim like he meant every word and spoke with such sincerity that it was difficult to look at him.
Jim stared down at the pavement, which was such a dark shade of navy blue that it was almost black, intersected with silvery-white discs of water. He knew that he should say something, but he didn't know what. Smooth lies that usually came to him with reassuring ease were running away, leaving him alone with nothing but himself. His whole body was tense, his shoulders squared and his arms taut as his shoved his hands deep into his pockets. The black double-breasted coat which had seemed so suave when he put it on now just seemed to swallow him. He closed his eyes because the pavement had started to swim before him, and his eyeballs felt hot and itchy. He swallowed thickly and pressed his lips together, trying to hold in whatever was trying to rise up inside his chest like a physical sadness. It felt like a concrete block was growing up inside his lungs.
When he finally got control of himself enough to speak, he breathed: "I know". His voice was wavering horribly and it was a struggle to just say those two words, but he managed. He opened his eyes and looked at them, repeating himself with more conviction. "I know."
Because in the end it didn't matter. It didn't matter that Ben was sorry for what he'd done when they were nine years old and he was sorry for pushing Jim in the swimming pool, so that he'd caught a glimpse at everything that came after everything, because he still did it. They had tipped his hand and made him kill Carl. No amount of words would stop that being a fact. Just like the immovability of Carl's death (no matter how many times people visited his grave and gave the Powers family their condolences, he would still be gone forever) the wrongs that had been done against Jim couldn't be wiped away. They had shaped him into the person he was right then – strong, free of empathy, merciless. In a way, Jim supposed, he should have thanked Ben, Seb, Carl, Mrs Lynch and his mother. They were the cast of his life and they'd all played their roles so well that he'd been able to believe, for the most part, that he really was a ruthless psychopath.
"But it doesn't change anything," he said, turning away from them and walking away down the dark street without another word, leaving them behind.