iBoy

10100

At 19:45:37 that evening, freshly showered and dressed in clean clothes, I was standing outside Lucy's door, with my heart beating hard, hoping that everything was going to be perfect.

I'd been busy all afternoon.

I'd got everything ready.

And now all I had to do was do it. I took a deep breath ...

Slowly let it out.

Then reached up and rang the bell.

I was planning on being kind of cool when Lucy answered the door. You know, like it was no big deal, I was just calling round ... just wondering if, by any chance, you'd be interested in ... blah blah blah ...

It didn't happen that way, of course.

Instead, when she opened the door and said, "Hey, stranger," and I opened my mouth to say, "Hi," something got caught in my throat and I started coughing and retch­ing like a lunatic. By the time I finally managed to get some air into my lungs, my face was bright red and I was dripping sweat all over the place.

Very cool.

"Are you OK?" Lucy asked me.

"Yeah — hack! — yeah ... I'm all right, thanks. Just..." I coughed again — hyack! "Just a bit of a cough, you know ..."

Lucy smiled. "You want to stop smoking your gran's cigars."

I grinned at her. "Yeah ..."

She stepped back, opening the door to let me in.

"Uh, yeah ..." I muttered, suddenly unsure how to say what I wanted to say (even though I'd been practising all afternoon). "Listen, Luce," I said. "I was wondering if you'd like to ... well, you know ... I just thought we might..."

"Are you coming in or not?" she said.

"Well, the thing is ..."

"What, Tom?" She frowned at me. "What's going on?"

"Nothing ..." I took another deep breath, trying to calm myself down. Just take it easy, I told myself. Stay calm. Just open your mouth and say it. And that's what I did. I looked at Lucy, opened my mouth and said, "Do you fancy a picnic?"

She stared at me. "A what?"

"You won't have to go anywhere," I told her. "Well, you'll have to go somewhere ... but we won't have to leave the tower."

She shook her head. "I don't get it..."

"I know ... I mean, I know it sounds kind of strange, but it'll be all right. Honestly ... trust me. You'll be perfectly safe."

"But where ...?"

"I can't tell you, can I? It's a surprise."

She shook her head again. "A picnic?"

I smiled at her. "Yeah ... sandwiches, crisps, Coke ..."

"I don't know, Tom," she said anxiously. "I mean, it's a really nice thought and everything, and it's not that I don't want to be with you ... but, you know ... I just ... I just don't think I'm ready yet."

"Ready for what?" I asked gently.

"Anything ... going out, being with people ..."

"Yeah, but you won't be going out," I assured her. "And the only people you'll be with is me. I promise. There won't be anyone else near us. I guarantee it."

"I don't see how you can."

"Trust me, Luce."

She looked down at the floor, her face worried, her eyes sad ... and for a moment I seriously started to doubt myself. Maybe this wasn't such a good idea, after all. Maybe I was just being selfish, thoughtless, uncaring ...

But then Lucy said, very quietly, "I won't have to leave the tower?"

"No."

"And I definitely won't see anyone else?"

"Guaranteed."

She slowly looked up at me. "What kind of sand­wiches?"

Lucy's mum was out at work, but Ben was in, so Lucy told him that she was going out with me for a while, and that she wouldn't be long. She put on a coat and one of those knitted woollen hats with ear flaps, and then — after I'd checked to make sure that the corridor was empty — I started leading her along to the stairwell.

"All right?" I asked her.

She nodded hesitantly. "Yeah ... I'm just a bit ... I don't know ... this is the first time I've been out since it happened ..."

"I know."

She smiled at me, anxiety showing in her eyes. "Where are we going?"

I smiled back. "Follow me."

I led her through the stairwell door and up the two flights of steps to the padlocked iron gate. I'd already been up earlier and unlocked it, so I just pushed it open, guided Lucy through to the steel-reinforced door, and locked the iron gate behind us. As I reached up to the keypad on the wall, tapped in the security code, and opened the door, Lucy gave me a puzzled look.

"Don't ask," I said to her. "This way."

I ushered her into the little room, closing the reinforced door after us, and went over to the ladder on the wall. Again, I'd already been up and unlocked the hatchway, so all we had to do now was climb the ladder and we'd be out on the roof.

I looked at Lucy. "Still OK?"

"Yeah, I think so ..."

"Are you all right with ladders?"

She looked up at the hatchway. "Does that go where I think it goes?"

"You'll soon find out. Do you want me to go first?"

"OK."

I climbed the ladder, pushed open the hatchway and stepped out onto the roof, then I reached back down to help Lucy up.

"All right?" I said to her.

"Yeah ..."

"I really like your hat, by the way."

She grinned at me. "Do you always do this when you're trying to impress a girl? Give her a ladder to climb, then compliment her on her choice of hat?"

"It usually works for me."

As she reached the top of the ladder, I took her hand and helped her up through the hatchway onto the roof.

"Wow," she said quietly, getting to her feet and looking around. "This is amazing. You can see for ever ... I mean, I know I've seen it all before, but..."

"It feels different up here, doesn't it?"

"Yeah ..." She looked at me. "You're full of surprises, Tom Harvey."

"I do my best," I said.

She smiled at me.

"Are you hungry?" I asked.

"Why? Is there a restaurant up here or something?"

"It's a picnic, remember? I invited you to a picnic." I pointed towards the middle of the roof. "See?"

She gazed over at where I was pointing, and when she saw what was there, her eyes lit up and her face broke into the most wonderful shining smile. "Oh, Tom," she cried. "That's fantastic ... it's so beautiful." She turned to me, still smiling like a child on Christmas morning. "Did you do all that for me?"

I looked over at the picnic table that I'd set up in the middle of the roof, and although it was a pretty ramshackle affair — an old fold-away table and chairs I'd found in the spare room, a red and white tablecloth, a candle on a saucer, some paper cups and plates, sandwiches, crisps, a big bottle of Coke, half a packet of chocolate digestives and the remains of a fruit cake that Gram had made the week before — I had to admit that Lucy was right, it really did have a certain kind of raggedy beauty to it.

"Yeah," I said, turning back to Lucy. "Yeah ... I did it for you." I could feel myself blushing slightly now, but I didn't mind. "Do you really like it?"

She put her hand on my shoulder, leaned in towards me, and kissed me lightly on the cheek. "I adore it," she said, looking into my eyes. "Really ... I absolutely love it. Thanks, Tom."

She kissed me again, another quick peck on the cheek, and then we just stood there for a while ... just the two of us, high above the rest of the world, alone together in the dying light of a crimson sunset...

It was everything I'd ever wished for.

And in that moment, nothing else mattered.

It was just the two of us ... just Lucy and me.

Just like it used to be.

Lucy smiled and said, "Shall we eat?"

I bowed my head. "If Madam so wishes. Table for two, is it?"

"Please."

"Follow me, m'lady."

I led her over to the picnic table and held out the chair for her to sit down.

"Thank you, I'm sure," she said.

"You're very welcome."

I sat down and reached for the bottle of Coke. "Coca-Cola?"

"Don't mind if I do."

I poured a small amount into a paper cup and offered it to her to taste. She took the cup, sniffed the Coke, rolled it around in the cup for a while, then took a tiny sip.

"Mmm ..." she said, swallowing. "Delightful, thank you."

She held out her cup and I filled it up. I poured myself a cup, then offered her the plate of sandwiches. "There's cheese," I explained. "Or ... cheese spread. Or, if you'd prefer, there's the sandwich of the day."

Lucy grinned. "And what might that be?"

"Cheese."

She laughed and took a couple of sandwiches. "Did you make these yourself?"

I nodded. "Cheese is my speciality. It was also the only thing left in the fridge."

I opened a packet of crisps for her.

"Cheese and onion?" she said.

"Yep."

"Excellent."

For the next few minutes, we just ate. It was really nice ... just sitting there in the growing darkness, eating and drinking, not having to say anything, both of us unable to wipe the stupid smiles off our faces. The night was getting a little colder now, with a chilly breeze drift­ing across the roof, but we both had our coats on, and I don't think either of us were really bothered.

After a while, Lucy took a rest from chewing and said to me, "So ... what have you been doing recently? I haven't seen you for a while."

"Yeah, I know ... I'm sorry, I kept meaning to come round, but stuff just kept getting in the way."

"Stuff?"

I touched my head and shrugged, kind of ambiguously ... which I knew was a pretty crappy thing to do. But I just didn't know what to say, and I didn't want to lie to her ... and, in a way, it was the stuff in my head that had got in the way of me going round to see her.

"Right..." Lucy said, nodding uncertainly at me and slowly putting a crisp in her mouth. "Right... I see."

She chewed quietly on the crisp for a while ... which baffled me. I mean, how can anyone chew quietly on a crisp? And then she looked at me and said softly, "It's really quiet up here, isn't it?"

"Yeah," I agreed. "The whole estate seems pretty quiet at the moment."

She nodded, and for a moment or two she was silent again, concentrating on getting the last few crisp crumbs out of the packet. She licked her finger and ran it round the inside of the packet, sucked the bits off her finger, then upended the packet into her mouth.

"Finished?" I asked her, smiling.

She grinned. "I don't like wasting any."

I watched her as she twisted the empty crisp packet into a bow and placed it under the Coke bottle to stop the breeze blowing it away. She stared at the table top for a few seconds, thinking about something, then she looked up at me.

"Can you keep a secret?" she said.

"Yeah ..."

"Well... you know all this stuff that's been going on round the estate, all the arrests and everything?"

"Yeah."

"And you know there's all kinds of rumours going round that there's some kind of vigilante out there ... some guy in a costume?"

"Yeah."

She looked at me. "Well ... I think it's that kid I told you about, the one who calls himself iBoy. Remember?"

"The one who tried to throw Eugene O'Neil out of the window?"

"Yeah ..."

"The MySpace guy?"

"Yeah. I think it's him."

"Who?"

"The vigilante," she said impatiently. "The one who's been doing all this stuff round the estate. I think it's iBoy."

"Really?"

"Yeah ... I mean, we talk to each other quite often on MySpace, and although he hasn't actually admitted it's him, he hasn't denied it either."

"So what are you trying to say? You think this iBoy kid is some kind of superhero or something?"

"No, of course not. But he definitely exists. I saw him, remember. I was there when he sorted out O'Neil and the others ..." She shook her head in disbelief at the memory. "He zapped them, Tom. I mean he really zapped them. And he was wearing some kind of mask ... honestly."

"I believe you." I cut a couple of slices of fruit cake, passed one to Lucy, and started eating the other one myself. "What do you think he is then?"

"I don't know —"

"And why do you think he's doing it? I mean, do you think he's doing it for you, like he's some kind of guard­ian angel or something?"

She was about to bite into the fruit cake, but she paused in mid-chomp, lowering the cake and looking intensely at me. "What?"

"What?" I echoed. "What did I say?"

Her voice was quiet. "Why would you think he'd be doing anything for me?"

"Well ... you know ... I mean, he went after O'Neil and Firman and Craig, didn't he?"

"So?"

I suddenly realized that I wasn't supposed to know who'd raped Lucy, or who'd been there when it had happened. She hadn't told me. I looked at her, trying to hide the hesitation in my mind, "I just meant, you know ... he helped you when O'Neil and the others were outside your flat. iBoy, I mean. He was helping you, wasn't he?"

"Yeah, but —"

"Well, that's all I meant. He was helping you, and he got in touch with you on MySpace ... so, you know ... maybe it's possible that he's doing some of these things for you."

Lucy's eyes were fixed steadily on mine. "Right. . . but how would he know?"

"Know what?"

"How would he know who to go after? I mean, I know the only information I'm getting about any of this is what Ben tells me, but it seems like a lot of the people who were there when it happened ... you know, when me and Ben were ... when I was ... well, you know what I mean." She swallowed hard, trying not to cry. "A lot of those kids who were there ... well, they're the ones who've been getting beaten up or arrested or whatever."

"So maybe this iBoy really is your guardian angel?" I suggested.

"Yeah, right," said Lucy, biting into her fruit cake.

"Have you told anyone else about this?"

She shook her head, her mouth full of cake.

"What about the police?" I asked. "Have they been to see you?"

She nodded.

"What did you tell them?"

She swallowed. "Nothing."

"Same here."

She raised her eyebrows. "The police have been to see you?"

"Yeah ..."

"Why?"

I touched the scar on my head. "I was there, wasn't I? I mean, when they attacked you and Ben, I was there. Well, I was sort of there. The police wanted to know if I saw anything."

"How could you have seen anything? You were thirty floors below."

"I know ... and I was lying on the ground with an iPhone stuck in my skull."

She laughed, then almost immediately she said, "Sorry, I don't know why I'm laughing. It's not funny." She looked at me. "So the police just came to see you about that? They didn't ask you anything about the vigilante?"

"Yeah, they asked me about that too." I shrugged. "Apparently a bunch of FGH kids were attacked last week by our friendly neighbourhood Mystery Kid, and someone saw me sitting around the kids' playground a few minutes before it happened. So, you know, the cops just wanted to know if I saw anything."

"Did you?"

"No."

"What were you doing at the playground?"

"Not much ... just hanging around, you know."

She smiled. "On your own?"

"Yeah."

"Did you go on the swings?"

I shook my head. "They were all broken."

Lucy grinned. "Yeah, I bet they were."

"They were ... what are you grinning about?"

"You were always scared of going on the swings."

"No, I wasn't."

"You were. When we were kids ... you always had an excuse for not going on the swings — your gran wouldn't let you, they didn't look safe, you had a bad back —"

"Yeah, well, they weren't safe, were they? Kids were always falling off and cracking their heads open."

Lucy laughed. "I went on them."

"Yeah, but you never went on the whizzy-round thing, did you?"

"The whizzy-round thing?"

"Yeah, you know — the wooden roundabout thing that whizzes round really fast?" I smiled at her. "You never went on that."

Lucy shrugged. "It made me dizzy."

"You were scared of it."

"Yeah, but I was a little girl. Little girls are allowed to be scared." She looked at me, her eyes sparkling. "What's your excuse?"

I held my hands up. "All right, I admit it. I'm a wimp. Always have been, always will be."

Lucy shook her head. "You're being too hard on your­self, Tom. You're not a wimp."

"Thanks."

"You're more of a nerd than a wimp."

I gave her a pained look. "Now you're going too far. I mean, wimpiness I can accept. In fact, I kind of like being a wimp. But calling me a nerd ...?" I shook my head. "That hurts, Luce. Honestly ..." I put my hand on my heart, it gets me right here."

"In that case," Lucy said, "please accept my humblest apologies."

"Apologies accepted."

She smiled. "Actually, I kind of like wimps too."

"You're just saying that to make me feel better."

"No, really ... I do. I'd rather be with a wimp than a non-wimp any day."

"A non-wimp?"

She grinned. "You know what I mean."

"All right," I said. "Name one."

"One what?"

"A wimp who you like ... name one."

"Apart from you?"

I shook my head. "It's no good trying to distract me with cheap compliments."

"It wasn't cheap."

"Come on," I said. "Name that wimp."

"OK ... all right, let me think. Right... a wimp that I like ..."

As she gazed up at the night sky, trying to think — or maybe just pretending to try to think — of a wimpy guy who she really liked, I did my best not to stare at her, but it was really hard. She looked so good — all muffled up in her coat and hat, with cake crumbs on her lips and crisp-dust on her fingers ... and I wondered if I could really let myself think that this game we were playing was perhaps something more than just a game. Were Lucy's joke compliments actually real compliments? Was it really possible that she liked me as more than just a friend?

"Spider-Man," she said suddenly.

"What?"

"Spider-Man ... a wimp I really like."

"He's not a wimp," I said. "Spidey's really tough."

"Yeah, no ... I don't mean Spider-Man, I mean the other one, the real one, what's-his-name, you know ..." She clicked her fingers, trying to remember the name.

"Peter Parker?"

"Yeah, that's it. Peter Parker. He's a wimp, isn't he?"

"Yeah ..."

"And I like him."

"No, you don't. It's Tobey Maguire that you like."

She shrugged. "Same thing."

I laughed. "It's not the same thing at all. Peter Parker, the fictional character ... yeah, he's a wimp. But Tobey Maguire is a Hollywood film star. He's rich and famous and —"

"Very attractive."

I pulled a face. "You think so? He's a bit kind of loopy-looking, isn't he?"

"Loopy?"

"Yeah, you know, that loopy kind of lop-sided face he's got —"

"No," Lucy said. "He's really cute. And he's sexy. Do you remember that bit in the first film when he's hanging upside down in the rain and he kisses what's-her-name —"

"Mary Jane Watson. MJ."

"Yeah ... I mean, that's a really sexy kiss."

"Only because he's still got his mask on, so you can't see his face."

"You don't have to see it. You already know how cute and sexy he is."

"Mary Jane doesn't know."

"Who cares about Mary Jane?"

"I think you'll find that a lot of people care about Mary Jane, especially when she's kissing the aforementioned upside-down Spider-Man in the rain, and her shirt is all wet and clingy."

Lucy laughed, shaking her head and wagging her finger at me. "Now who's getting their characters and actors mixed up?"

"What?" I said innocently.

"It's Kirsten Dunst's rain-soaked shirt that you care about, not Mary Jane's."

I shrugged. "Same thing."

We both started giggling then, and it felt really good — just sitting there, looking at each other, laughing and giggling like two little kids ... but then, after a while, I think we both slowly realized that the stuff we'd just been talking and laughing about was the kind of stuff that maybe we shouldn't have been talking and laughing about. Because although we'd only been messing around and enjoying ourselves, and although we'd only been talking about sex in a totally superficial and unsexual way, that still didn't change the fact that we had been talking about sex. And now that she'd realized it, that, for Lucy, was just too much.

It was too close.

Too raw.

Too confusing.

And now she was just sitting there, not smiling any more, just looking down sadly at her hands in her lap as she twisted and picked at a paper tissue.

"I'm sorry," I said quietly, i should have realized ..."

"It's OK," she said, trying to smile at me. "It's not your fault. I just..." She shrugged. "Sometimes it goes away for a while, you know? I actually forget about it... at least, I'm not aware that I'm thinking about it. But then ..." She shook her head. "It always comes back. It's like it's never not there. And even when I do forget about it for a few minutes, there's always some thing that brings it back to me. Something on the TV, you know, a sex scene or something, or just some guy in a hood who reminds me of them ... I mean, God, you wouldn't believe how hard it is to watch TV without seeing a guy in a hood." She smiled shakily at me. "They're everywhere."

I self-consciously pulled down my hood.

Lucy laughed. "What did I tell you?"

"Sorry ..."

"Actually, I hadn't even noticed yours until now."

"Sorry," I said again.

"No, it's fine. Really." She frowned to herself. "It's weird that I didn't notice it before, though ..."

"It's probably just the way that I wear it," I suggested, smiling.

"What — on your head, you mean?"

We were starting to get back to each other again now. It didn't quite feel the same as before — we were quieter now, less boisterous — but that was OK. In fact, I really quite liked it. It somehow made me feel as if we knew each other a lot better. And I think Lucy was OK with it too.

"All right?" I said to her.

She smiled. "Yeah."

"Do you want anything else to eat?"

She shook her head, "I'm stuffed."

"Do you want to go for a walk?"

"Where to?"

"How about the edge of the roof?"

Lucy looked over at the edge, then back at me. "You sure it's not too far?"

"I can call a taxi, if you want."

"No," she said, "It's a nice enough night. Let's walk."

I'd never had a girlfriend before ... well, not a proper girlfriend anyway. I mean, I'd been out with a few girls, you know, I'd gone on a few dates — to the pictures, to see a band, that kind of thing. But although I'd quite liked the girls I'd been out with, I hadn't been absolutely crazy about any of them or anything, and so I'd never really given all that much thought to what I was expected to do with them, or to what I thought I was expected to do ... and, no, I don't mean that in a sexy/sexual/sexist kind of way. I just mean the stupid stuff, you know ... like knowing if it's OK to hold hands or not, and whether it's expected ... and, if it is expected, when do you do it? And how? And what if you make the first move, but it turns out that it's not OK ... what do you do then?

That kind of stuff.

And it was that kind of stuff that I thought I'd be thinking about as I got up from the picnic table and walked over to the edge of the roof with Lucy. Because I was crazy about her. I always had been crazy about her. And now here we were, finally on some kind of date together ... although, admittedly, it wasn't the most traditional of dates. But still, we'd had a meal together, and we'd talked and laughed and suffered about stuff together, and now we were going for a walk together ... and I'd dreamed of this moment so many times. I'd pictured it, imagined it, lived it ... worried about it. Should I hold her hand? Should I put my arm around her? Should I try to be cool about things? Should I do this, or do that, or try this, or try that...?

But the strange thing was, now that it was actually happening, none of this stupid stuff even entered my mind. I just got up and walked across the roof with Lucy, not worrying about anything, not caring about anything, just knowing that we both felt OK — walking side by side, as close to each other as we wanted to be ... it all felt perfectly natural.

"What are you smiling about?" Lucy asked me.

I looked at her. "Was I smiling?"

"Yeah, like an idiot."

I grinned at her.

She smiled back at me.

"Careful," I said, reaching out and touching her arm.

She stopped, realizing that we were nearing the edge of the roof.

"Wow," she said softly, "It's a long way down."

"Are you OK?" I asked her. "Not dizzy or anything?"

She looked at me. "Is that meant to be a joke?"

"No," I grinned. "Honestly ... I mean, some people don't like heights, do they? I was just checking that you were OK, that's all."

"Yeah," she said, smiling, "I'm fine." She looked down over the edge again, not saying anything, just looking and thinking.

"Shall we sit down?" I suggested.

"Why? Are you feeling dizzy?"

"You know me," I said, lowering myself cross-legged to the ground. "Tommy the Wimp."

She smiled and sat down beside me, and then we just sat there in silence for a while, both of us gazing out over the estate at the distant lights of London. Streetlights, traffic lights, headlights ... office blocks, tower blocks, shops and theatres ...

It was all a long way away.

"Is that the London Eye?" Lucy said after a while.

"Where?"

She pointed into the distance. "There ... by the river."

I couldn't see it, and just for a moment I thought about logging on to Google Earth in my head to help me find it... but that was iStuff, and iStuff didn't belong here. So I didn't.

"I can't even see the river," I told Lucy. "Never mind the London Eye."

She smiled, but I could tell that her mind was on some­thing else now. She'd stopped looking into the distance and had turned her attention to the more immediate surround­ings of the estate down below, gazing around at the streets, the towers, the low-rises, the kids' playground ...

"It's funny, isn't it?" she said quietly, her voice full of sadness.

"What's that?"

"Knowing that they're all out there somewhere ... you know, the boys who raped me. They're all out there ... living their lives, doing whatever it is they do ..." She breathed out wearily. "I mean, they're all just out there ..."

"Some of them will be in cells now," I said. "Or in hospital."

Lucy looked at me, her eyes wet with tears. "You know, don't you?" she said. "You know who they are."

I nodded. "Most of them, yeah."

"How do you know?"

I shrugged. "People talk, you know ... you hear rumours. It's not too difficult to work out the truth."

"The truth ...?" she said, her voice barely audible, "I'm the only one who knows the truth!

As she looked away from me and went back to gazing down at the estate, I could have kicked myself for being so stupid. Not that I'd meant to imply that I knew what she'd been through, but still... it was just so thoughtless, such a brainless thing to say.

I really was an idiot.

"Sorry, Tom," Lucy said.

I looked at her, not sure I'd heard her right. "What?"

"I know you didn't mean anything ... and I didn't mean to snap at you —"

"No, please," I said, "I'm the one who should be saying sorry. Not you. I just didn't think, you know ... I just opened my big stupid mouth and —"

"You haven't got a big stupid mouth."

I stared at her. She was smiling again.

"It's OK," she said. "All right?"

"OK."

"All right."

We went back to our silent gazing for a while, watch­ing the lights, the sky, the stars in the darkness. I could hear the wind sighing in the night, and there were a few faint sounds drifting up from the estate — cars, voices, music — but, all in all, everything was still pretty quiet. And even the sounds that were breaking the silence didn't seem to have any menace to them.

They were just sounds.

"Does it make any difference?" I said quietly to Lucy.

She looked at me. "Does what make any difference?"

"All this stuff that iBoy's done ... or whoever it is that's doing it. You know, making O'Neil and Adebajo and the rest of them suffer ... I mean, does it make you feel any better?"

She didn't answer for a while, she just stared at me, and for a moment or two I thought she was going to say — "It's you, isn't it? It's you ... you're iBoy," — and I started to wonder how that would make me feel. Good? Embar­rassed? Ashamed? Excited? And that made me wonder if perhaps, subconsciously, I wanted her to know that it was me, that I was iBoy, that I was her guardian angel...

"I don't know, Tom," she said sadly. "I really don't know if it makes any difference or not. I mean, yeah ... there's a bit of me that gets something good out of their suffer­ing ... you know, I really want them to feel pain ... I want them to fucking hurt ... because they deserve it ... God, they deserve everything they fucking get ..." Her voice had lowered to an ice-cold whisper. "So, yeah, it makes a difference in that way. It gives me something that part of me really needs ..." She sighed. "But it never lasts very long. I mean, it's just not enough ... it can't be enough. It can't take anything away." She looked at me. "Nothing can take anything away."

"They'll always have done it..." I said quietly.

She nodded. "And whatever happens, nobody can change that."

As we sat there looking at each other, alone together in the boundless dark, I found myself thinking about an old Superman film that I'd seen on TV at Christmas. I'd only been half-watching the TV at the time, so I couldn't remember all that much about it, but there was a bit in the film where Superman's so busy saving the lives of other people that he doesn't have time to save the life of Lois Lane, the girl he loves. And when he finds out that she's dead, he gets so distraught that he flies up into the atmosphere and starts whizzing in circles around the Earth, and he flies so fast that somehow the Earth begins to slow down, and eventually it stops spinning altogether and begins to rotate in the opposite direction, making everything go back in time, allowing Superman to go back into the past and prevent Lois Lane from dying.

Which was all pretty ridiculous, of course.

But I couldn't help thinking that if only I could do that, if only I could go back in time ... well, then I really could change things for Lucy. I really could make every­thing all right again.

But I knew that was never going to happen. This was the real world, not a movie. And in the real world, no matter how impossible things might be, they're never quite impossible enough.

"What are you thinking about, Tom?" Lucy asked me.

"Nothing ..." I shrugged. "You know, just stuff ..."

She smiled. "There's a lot of stuff to think about, isn't there?"

"Yeah ..."

"And it's always ... I don't know. It's like it's never straightforward, is it? It's never just this or that. Do you know what I mean?"

"Yeah."

"There's always two sides to everything. You feel good about something, but you still feel bad. You like some­thing about someone, but you don't want to like it." She looked thoughtfully at me. "Two sides, you see? Even the stuff we were talking about earlier, you know ... Tobey Maguire's cute, Kirsten Dunst's sexy ... I mean, that's OK — kissing and stuff, people looking sexy ... it's just kind of nice. But then there's the other side of it, the other side of sex — the bad side, the shit, the fucking awful things that people do ..." She shook her head. "I just don't get it, you know?"

"Yeah ..."

She sighed again. "And it's the same with people too ... you think you know them, you think you know exactly what they're like ..." She looked slowly at me. "But maybe you're wrong ... maybe you've always been wrong, and maybe this person who you thought you knew ... well, maybe they've got another side to them. A side you're not sure about."

"Right..." I said tentatively.

Lucy looked at me for a long moment, her eyes never leaving mine, and then she smiled. "Or maybe I'm wrong about that too?"

I smiled back at her. "Don't ask me. I haven't got the faintest idea what you're talking about."

"You never do, do you?"

"Never do what?"

She laughed, and I grinned at her, and then we just sat there in silence for a few moments, smiling at each other in the darkness ... and I knew in my heart that this was how it was supposed to be. This was everything I could ever want, everything there was to want.

This was it.

After a while, Lucy looked at her watch and said, "I'd better get going, Tom. Mum'll be back soon."

"OK."

We both got to our feet then, and as we stood there at the edge of the roof, looking out into the darkness, I remembered the last time I'd been up here — all on my own, with my hood up and my iSkin glowing ... a softly glowing figure, sitting cross-legged on a cold stone roof, thirty floors up ...

Like some kind of weird hooded Buddha ...

A skinny, glow-in-the-dark iBuddha.

Or maybe an iGargoyle.

It was so much better now.

Tom?" Lucy said.

I turned to her.

"Thanks," she said quietly, looking at me. "This has been a really wonderful night. I'll never forget it." She moved closer to me, put her hands to my face, and kissed me softly on the lips.

God, it felt good.

So perfect, so right...

It felt so good, I nearly fell off the roof.

"OK?" she whispered.

I couldn't speak. I couldn't even smile. It was all I could do just to breathe. Lucy moved her hand to my head and gently stroked my scar with her fingertips.

"It feels warm," she said quietly.

"Warm ..." I muttered.

She smiled at me. "Come on, we'd better go ... before you start drooling."

She held my hand as we walked back across the roof to the hatchway. I helped her down the ladder, then we held hands again as we went out through the doors, down the stairs, and along the corridor to her flat.

"Thanks again, Tom," she said. "That was really nice."

"Thank you," I said.

She smiled and kissed me on the cheek. "Are you coming round tomorrow?"

I nodded. "If it's OK with you."

"It's perfectly OK with me."

"Good."

She smiled again and opened the door. "I'll see you tomorrow then."

"Yeah."

I waited for her to close the door, and then I just stood there for a while, smiling the biggest, floatiest, stupidest smile in the world ... and then, breathing in a breath of pure satisfaction, I turned round and started heading back to the roof to clear all the picnic stuff away.

Just before I got to the stairwell, I heard Lucy's door opening.

"Tom?"

I turned round and saw her leaning out through the doorway.

"Be careful," she said.

I smiled at her. "I'm always careful."

She gave me a long thoughtful look, almost frowning at me, then she smiled again, nodded her head, and went back into the flat.