29 April 1989 [Continued]
Mrs Lynch was standing beside the grave with a ramrod straight back. Her long black coat made her shoulders look square and her figure non-existent. She was staring down at the headstone, and didn't turn around even as Jim walked over. He wasn't surprised to see her at all, and she didn't turn around in surprise, or even react to someone coming up behind her. In some way it felt like they had both been there all along. He stood a little way behind her for some time, not saying a word.
They looked at the headstone together, with Jim just in her peripheral vision, and he noticed how few words there were on it. How could the Powers' grief be contained in a few letters? The thing might as well have been blank for all the emotion the words imparted – there was so much left unsaid that even if the grave was as big as Ypres they couldn't have fitted it all on. Carl Powers, aged 11, beloved son. He will always be in our hearts. Jim wondered who tended to the grass over the plot, because whoever it was had carefully trimmed it so that the last line was only just visible. If the grass grew only a few more centimetres, it would have obscured the words.
He stared at them intensely, trying to feel the pain that Carl's family must feel when they stood there. But it was a place to him, as ordinary as any other. There wasn't an aura of sadness, or some left over pain hanging in the air. This was just a bit of ground; the fact that his enemy lay six feet under the soles of his shoes was irrelevant.
"Do you ever miss him, James?" Mrs Lynch asked, not turning to look at him when she addressed him. Her voice was strangely cold and detached in a matter-of-fact way. Of course they would be standing there discussing this. Of course it would be Jim who would come to visit.
For a few seconds, he didn't answer. He looked at the smooth polished stone and remembered Carl's floppy blonde hair, hanging over his forehead in a carefully tousled way that must have taken all morning to style. He remembered the way Carl had tripped him over on the way to class, him sitting beside Jim and struggling to read the title of Alan Quartermain, his horrible accuracy with punching in places where bruises wouldn't show, the cruel smirk and wicked glint in his eyes, the fading bruises on his arms that he usually kept covered.
"Yes," Jim replied, softly. It came out sadder than he'd intended, and he surprised himself. But Mrs Lynch seemed unfazed, and only nodded mutely.
"It's very peaceful here, isn't it?" She said, still not looking at him. Her gaze was fixed to the headstone, but she seemed to be looking at something further, something he couldn't see. As he gave her a sideways glance, he saw that she was smiling faintly. What could she see? What was she thinking that was making her smile so?
He shrugged as if it didn't matter to him. "It's just a place," he said nonchalantly, and in that he was saying more than his words did: he wasn't comfortable anywhere, so it really didn't matter to him. It's just a place, it holds no emotional significance for me. It's just a place, it doesn't matter that Carl is buried here.
She caught the meaning in his words. She must have done, because she turned to look at him sharply. She looked utterly furious – her eyes were burning, her lips were pursed and her nostrils were slightly flared. There was such a look of righteous anger in her face that he genuinely thought, in the same semi-detached way that he thought about everything, that she would throttle him. He stared right back at her, not even blinking. Go on, his look challenged, I dare you.
For a moment it looked like she was actually going to say something: her mouth opened a fraction and he could see the words forming in her mind. Hateful words, spat like bullets. Questions he wouldn't be able to give answers to. Statements that he couldn't disprove. But if she did, their fragile game would be ruined. In admitting Jim's fault, she would also bring to light the fact that she had failed countless times – she was as culpable as he was in the tragedy. A boy pushing another boy's pencils out of line, rolling them onto the floor, hoisting him up by the collar and yelling into his face, throwing him into a swimming pool and watching him struggle and slip under. She might as well have been there the whole time, watching without doing anything, for all the good she had done. Why didn't you save me?
But she withered under his steadfast black gaze, and closed her mouth. Whatever she was going to say was silenced, lest she end up shouldering some of the blame that she'd portioned entirely to him. How she point an accusing finger at him? She would end up pointing three back at herself.
Surrendering, Mrs Lynch broke the stare first and turned back to the headstone. Jim gave a dead smile of triumph, just a twitch of the corners of his mouth. He didn't say anything, knowing that she would feel the need to fill the silence before it grew too heavy.
"I'm sick, you know," she said simply. A pause. "Cancer is a wretched thing." There was something in her voice that he couldn't place. Self-pity? No, that wasn't it. What was that? He didn't recognise it, and it irritated him. People were so complicated. Where he was just a blank page, plain and devoid of anything beneath the surface, everyone else was a rich oil painting of different colours: the brightest blues and the deepest fiery reds, impenetrable blacks opposing virgin whites, forest greens mingling with earthy browns. No matter what he did, Jim didn't think he would ever understand.
"I'm sorry," he offered.
Mrs Lynch snorted in disbelief and shook her head. "No; you're not." The statement wasn't hateful, it was simply matter-of-fact. They both knew he cared more for the grass beneath his feet that he did for her life. They were silent for a few seconds, and Jim stared at the smooth marble of the grave and thought of absolutely nothing. When she spoke again, she was quieter: "There was so much I didn't get to do." There it was again – that unplaceable note in her voice. Jim frowned as he struggled to work out what it was. She sounded sad, of course, but not the way he recognised.
Because he didn't know what to do, he just shrugged. "Sometimes life just throws you a curve ball." It was a pointless thing to say, almost not worth the time and effort it took to say it, but it had been said now.
"And you need to learn how to deal with it when it does," Mrs Lynch said, pointedly. Even though Jim didn't understand people, he understood their motives and it was so clear she was talking about Carl that he wondered why she didn't just say it. But of course, she never directly addressed their topic – neither of them did. They just danced around it with empty phrases and unspoken words, because that was so much easier than admitting the fact that they were standing a dead boy's grave not-quite talking about him. A murderer and his ignorant accomplice.
She continued, talking to him now, even though she still wasn't looking at him. "You need to learn how to deal with things, James." And again, it was obvious what she meant: you can't keep killing all the people who oppose you. You will get caught and it will be your downfall. After a brief moment, she changed the subject. "I handled my illness very well, I think. Given my chances of survival, I don't think I panicked as much as someone else might."
Jim shrugged again, not bothering to congratulate her on her strength because he'd used up his quota for false politeness and she'd only point out that he was lying again and annoy him. "Everyone dies sometime." He said it like it was a profound statement, as if he'd said something unique and ground-breaking. And right then she wanted to kill him – everyone died, of course, but Jim had brought about Carl's death too early and it wasn't fair. Because she couldn't say anything against him, not a word, without shouldering some of the blame.
"Yes," she replied, sharply. "Everyone does; but at their right time. It's my time to go, so I will."
"Go?" Jim smirked at the synonym, if one could be so kind as to call it that. His voice rang with cruel laughter, barely supressed. "Don't you mean die?" He looked at her, turning away from the gravestone, suddenly feeling empowered by the fact that hung between them. Yes, she wasn't saying what they both knew, but that allowed him a sense of superiority – she knew what he'd done, what he was capable of, even if she didn't face it. He revelled in his role as the Damien Thorn in her life, because he knew this would be the last time he would see her, so he wanted things to be as transparent as they could. But, of course, where Mrs Lynch was involved, things was hardly transparent.
"There's no need to be so blunt about it, is there?" She snapped, finally turning to look at him as if this was an ordinary conversation. "All right. I'm going to die. I don't know why you're suddenly so bothered."
He grinned, pleased at having finally gotten a reaction. "I'm not bothered. You know I hate you." He said it with such awful disinterest that it was chilling. He might as well have been saying it was a nice day, or that it was going to rain later. He was as detached from his emotions as he was to the movements of the world around him. Nothing touched him. Nothing stuck. Even his hatred for her was as removed and unreachable as Carl's body, six feet under the dirt. How could he have lived like that? Mrs Lynch couldn't even comprehend a life lived as a play, or game, with everyone acting a role in his egotistical existence.
Jim had never forged a meaningful connection in his life, because the one person he'd actually been interested in he had killed. His mother was nothing more than a necessary component of his life as a child, and she'd be cast aside when he didn't need her anymore. The cameo of the mysterious Sherlock Holmes was a novel experience, but Jim hadn't yet tried to get back in touch with the boy. He was too clever for Jim's liking, so he wanted to wait a few years before trying to contact him. Until he'd made a safe departure from the death of Carl. Ben had been nothing more than a source of information from a world that Jim took little interest in.
Mrs Lynch didn't know any of that, of course, and she didn't flatter herself by assuming that she was somehow special to Jim. His deep-seated hatred of her didn't mean she was unique – he hated everyone – and the fact that he'd allowed her tantalizing glimpses of what he'd done, and what he was able to do, only meant that he thought her coincidental position in his life as his teacher warranted some kind of exclusive look into the inner workings of his murder. She would come close, but never fully obtain the proof she needed.
"I was aware, yes," she said with a smile.
He smiled back, and for a minute they shared a strange kind of link, held together by this blood-deep abhorrence of one another. And wasn't that funny? That she, a grown woman, who had taught countless children and watched them pass her by like mayflies, could be so affected by one single boy. It shouldn't have happened. In the grand scheme of things, Jim Moriarty should have been a normal little boy whom she had pitied and been a little nervous around. He'd been bullied and she hadn't protected him, but in all her long years of teaching that had happened several times. Jim was the only one who'd fought back and laid the blame at her door, with all the disgust it deserved.
They kept smiling for a few seconds before he let it fade. He looked at her with widening eyes, and for a brief moment she caught a rare sight of emotion in his eyes. It was something other than hatred, some kind of sadness that shouldn't be in a child's gaze. It looked as though he'd lost everything that had ever mattered to him, and maybe, in a way, he had. She had to turn away from such a raw emotion, because it was so naked and hurt and unlike Jim that it embarrassed her on his behalf. And, as always with Hilda Lynch, if she couldn't see it then it didn't exist. She stared stoically at the headstone.
His voice was barely a whisper when he spoke next, and for the first time he sounded just like the young teenager he was. If she didn't know him better, if she didn't know he was above such human things, she would honestly believe he was struggling not to cry. "Why didn't you help me?"
Mrs Lynch swallowed and pressed her lips tightly together. What could she say? As with his politeness, anything she said could be immediately called out as a lie. If she said that she always believed boys should fight their own battles, Jim could easily counter with the fact that it wasn't a fair fight if it was him against his entire class. And if she said it had toughened him up, he'd argue that she'd watched him run into the changing rooms of the swimming pool, crying controllably. Did that seem tough to her? She could already see the smarmy grin that would accompany his responses. But her silence had gone on for too long, so anything she said would sound like a lie. Even if it was the truth – she'd hated him because he'd ruined her otherwise perfect class of English children. And then, when he'd been bullied, she had hated him because she hadn't stood up for him. He was a physical representation of her failure as a teacher. The scar that wouldn't heal. The nightmare that wouldn't fade. The sickness that wouldn't die. She'd hated him because he was Irish, because she was a bad person, because she hadn't helped him and in doing so she'd lost an integral part of herself.
"I'm sorry," she said at last. It was the only thing she say that wouldn't sound like a lie. Her voice was pitifully weak, even to her own ears, and she cringed. Was this how he felt, all the time? So disgusting and useless and hated? Forget living with no meaningful connections – how could Jim live with himself?
"I know you are," he replied coldly. "Everyone is."
And they stood for a while in silence, looking at Carl's grave without looking at each other again. They didn't acknowledge the other, each lost in their own thoughts, even as Mrs Lynch walked forwards to touch the top of the headstone gently with her fingertips and whisper something under her breath. Jim vaguely wondered what she had to say to Carl, but whatever it was in the end it wasn't important. She said it and turned away, walking past him and across the cemetery without looking back at him. He would never see her again.
So Jim was there with his old enemy, the boy who had shaped him into the man he would become. No longer needing to stay standing, he dropped to the grass and sat cross legged. For a long time he didn't say anything, just looked at the polished stone blankly.
What's up, Indiana Jones, huh? What's up? Don't you want to talk to me? Too clever for me? Huh?
He shook his head fiercely and reached down to pull up some of the grass, twisting it between his fingers. "I kept the shoes," he said at last. It was an arrogant statement, a pointless boast of his power. He owned something as trivial as shoes because they had belonged to Carl. They were his now. He'd won, and they shoes were his trophy.
"Someone almost solved it, y'know," he remembered the one boy who had gotten remotely close, but not near enough. Sherlock Holmes, with his loud brother and awkward stance and disarming stare. "Had a name you'd have had a field day with. Sherlock." Jim laughed once to himself and yanked a new piece of grass up, sending a fine spray of dirt flying across his fingers. "But of course he never convicted me or anything. What kid could murder another kid, right? What kid would be clever enough?" He sneered at the headstone, thinking about every time Carl had mocked his cleverness. But he was proud of it – he was special.
There was a pause in which Jim pictured Carl was sitting opposite him, where the grave was, with his legs drawn up to his chest and his chin resting on his knees. And they sat like that for an immeasurable amount of time, staring at each other with wide eyes. One boy frozen at eleven, and the other who had his whole life ahead of him.
Even though Jim's hair was dark and his eyes were so brown they were almost black, and Carl's hair was light like honey and his eyes were hazel, their hunched, terrified, sitting positions were almost identical. If someone had seen a photograph of what Jim was imagining, of the two children sitting facing one another, with agonized apologetic expressions, it would have been impossible to tell the difference between them. One boy frozen at eleven forever, and the other thirteen years and counting. But which was Carl Powers and which was James Moriarty? Who had done the wrong thing, and who had paid the ultimate price for that wrong? Who had won, in the end?