iBoy

100

The next seven days were a bewildering mixture of mind- boggling weirdness and mind-numbing boredom. I was kept in my private room for a couple of days so the doctors could keep a close eye on my progress, and then, once they were satisfied that I was doing OK, I was moved to a bed in the general ward. Although Gram wasn't with me all the time now, she still came to see me every day, and she always stayed for at least a couple of hours. I kept asking her about Lucy, but she refused to tell me anything else, insisting that I concentrate on getting better and getting plenty of rest.

"Lucy's being well looked after for now," was all she'd tell me. "And worrying about what happened to her isn't going to do either of you any good. Once we get you settled in back home ... well, we'll talk about things then. All right?"

It wasn't all right, of course. I wanted to know every- thing now. But when Gram sets her mind on something, there's no point arguing with her. So I just went along with it. I rested. I slept. I ate. I read countless stupid magazines. And I tried not to think about anything.

Lucy. Me.

The weirdness inside my head ...

Electric shocks.

Bees, non-bees.

Definitions.

Newspapers.

Billions of humming filaments ...

I really did try my best not to think about any of it, but it was almost impossible, because whenever anything came into my mind, things started happening. I kept seeing things inside my head — faintly flickering things that I didn't understand, like the vaguest after-images of transparent insects. And I could hear things too — dis­embodied voices, scraps of conversations. And although these things were too fuzzy and fragmented for me to see or hear them with any real clarity, I sensed that they were related to whatever it was that I was thinking about. It was like that half-dreamy experience you get when you're falling asleep with the TV on, and whatever's on the TV at the time, it all gets mixed up in your half-asleep head with whatever you're thinking or half-dreaming about. . . and you know that it's not really coming from inside your head, but that's how it feels.

That's how it felt.

I'd be half-thinking about Lucy, and I'd start seeing bits of newspaper reports about her attack. I'd hear broken voices talking to each other about these newspaper reports, and sometimes those voices would be laughing. I'd see fragments of texts and emails which at first sight didn't seem to have anything to do with Lucy at all, but there was always something in the back of my mind that some­how knew that there was a connection.

And this kind of stuff didn't just happen when I was thinking about Lucy either, it happened all the time. Whatever I was thinking about, my brain would start tingling, and I'd sense things inside me connecting, searching, reaching out ...

It was unbelievable.

Incredible.

Bewildering.

Terrifying.

And what's more, whatever it was, it was changing all the time — becoming clearer, but at the same time more complex, as if it was somehow evolving ... and that was pretty scary too.

But the odd thing was, as the days and nights passed by, I kind of got used to it, and by the time Mr Kirby decided that it was OK for me to go home, it felt as if it had always been there. It was still pretty scary, and I still didn't understand it — although the first faint flutterings of an impossible explanation were beginning to grow in my mind but at least it didn't terrify me any more.

It was just there.

And it was still there when I walked out of the hospi­tal with Gram, on a dull and rainy Tuesday morning, and we got into the back of a waiting taxi and began the short drive home.

Of course, I knew that I should have mentioned all this weirdness to someone. I mean, Mr Kirby had told me how important it was to let someone know immedi­ately if I started experiencing anything unusual, and this was definitely something unusual. But ... well, I just wanted to go home, I suppose. I'd had enough of hospi­tals, doctors, nurses ... examinations, questions ... sick people. And I knew that if I'd told Mr Kirby about all this crazy stuff going on in my head, he would have wanted to keep me in hospital for more tests, more examinations, more questions. And I didn't want that. I just wanted to get away from it all and get back to the place I knew.

Not that Crow Town was a particularly nice place to get back to ... in fact, as the taxi trundled along the familiar South London streets, and the eight high-rise tower blocks came into view, I began to wonder why I was so pleased to be coming back here. What was there to be pleased about? The shitty tower blocks, the cramped little flats, the ever-present and overriding sense of empti­ness and violence?

Ah, home sweet home ...

The gang kids were going to be there too, I realized, and I was pretty sure that whatever had happened to Lucy and Ben — and me — it was bound to have something to do with the local gangs, and that meant that there were going to be repercussions. Because gang stuff always has repercussions. It never goes away — it always just hangs around, staining the air, like the stink of a vast and ever-present fart.

I thought about that for a while, wondering which of the gangs was more likely to have been involved in Lucy's assault — the Crows or the FGH — but, in a way, it didn't really make any difference. They were all just Crow Town kids. The Crows were generally from the north-side towers, while the FGH were mainly from the three towers to the south (Fitzroy House, Gladstone House, Heath House — hence the name, FGH), and although the two gangs were supposed to hate each other's guts, it didn't always work that way. Sometimes they hated each other, sometimes they didn't. Sometimes they tried to kill each other, sometimes they didn't. Sometimes they got together and tried to kill kids from other gangs ...

Sometimes this, sometimes that...

It didn't make any difference at all.

Lucy had been raped. Whoever had done it, they'd done it. Everything else was irrelevant.

I stopped thinking about it then and looked at Gram. She was sitting beside me, tapping away at the open laptop resting on her knees.

"How's it going?" I asked her, glancing at the screen.

She shrugged. "Same as ever."

Gram writes romance novels, love stories ... Mills & Boon kind of stuff. Books with titles like The Lord and the Mistress, or Angels in Blue. She hates them. Hates what they are, hates writing them. She'd much rather write poetry. But poetry doesn't pay the rent, and love stories do ... just about.

"Is this a new one?" I asked her, looking at the screen again.

She smiled. "It's supposed to be."

"What's it about?"

"You don't want to know."

"Yeah, I do."

"Well..." she said, hitting the save button. "It's about a woman who falls in love with two brothers. They're twins, these brothers, so they look exactly the same, but their characters are totally different. One of them's a soldier, an all-action kind of guy. The other one's a musi­cian. He's the really sensitive one ... you know, he writes love songs and beautiful poems for her, that sort of thing."

"And the other one beats up the bad guys?"

Gram smiled. "Yeah ... which, of course, she finds irresistible."

"Which one does she end up with?"

"I don't know yet."

"I bet it's the wimp."

"You think so?"

I nodded. "She'll think she's in love with the tough guy, but eventually she'll realize that her only true love is the wimp. That's always how it happens in books, isn't it?"

Gram smiled. "But not in real life?"

"No," I said. "In real life, the girl always ends up with the tough guy, and the wimp stays at home and writes wimpy poems about how bad he feels."

The eight tower blocks of Crow Town are spread out in an uneven line along Crow Lane over a distance of about a mile. There are five towers on the north side (Addington, Baldwin, Compton, Disraeli, and Eden), and three towers to the south (Fitzroy, Gladstone, and Heath). In between, about two-thirds of the way along Crow Lane, there's a mini-roundabout, a scattering of low-rise flats, and the kids' playground. An industrial estate takes up most of the west side — warehouses, car-repair places, railway tracks and tunnels — and the High Street is about half a mile to the east.

The taxi driver pulled up at the side of the road, near the far end of the High Street.

"Uh, yeah ..." he said, fiddling with his meter. That'll be £9.50, thanks."

"Sorry," said Gram, thinking he'd got the address wrong. "We wanted Crow Town, please. Compton House."

"This is as far as I go."

"What?"

"This is as far I go ... it's £9.50."

"No, you don't understand —"

"I'm not going into Crow Town, OK?"

"Oh, don't be ridiculous," Gram sighed. "It's perfectly safe, for Christ's sake."

"Yeah, well... whatever. You can either get out here, or I'll take you back to the hospital. It's up to you."

"But it's raining," Gram pleaded. "And my grandson's just got out of hospital ..."

The taxi driver shrugged. "Sorry, love."

Gram sighed again, but she knew there was no point arguing. She paid the taxi driver, closed her laptop and put it in her bag, and we got out and started walking.

It didn't take long to walk back, but I hadn't done a lot of walking in the last few weeks — I hadn't done a lot of anything in the last few weeks — and by the time we reached Compton House, I was starting to feel really tired.

"Do you want to stop for a minute?" Gram asked me as we crossed the square towards the entrance. "You look a bit pale."

"No, I'm all right, thanks," I told her."We're nearly there anyway."

As we approached the entrance, the glass doors swung open and a bunch of kids came strolling out. There were half a dozen of them, all dressed in the usual black hood­ies and tracks. One of them had a brown Staffordshire bull terrier on a thick chain lead. I recognized most of them — Eugene O'Neil, DeWayne Firman, Yusef Hashim, Carl Patrick. They were all gang kids, Crows, and right now they were all nudging each other and pointing at me, grinning and laughing.

"Hey, Harvey," O'Neil called out. "How's your head?"

The others laughed.

"Yo, look at that scar, man," someone said.

"Yeah, shit, it's Harry fucking Potter ..."

"Just ignore them," Gram said quietly to me. "Come on ..."

As we carried on walking towards the doors, the six boys moved aside to let us pass, but they didn't stop making their comments.

"Nice fucking haircut."

"Lend us your phone."

"Yeah, I heard you got an iPhone —"

"He bust it."

"Fucking iHead, more like ..."

"iBrain ..."

We were going through the doors when something hot flicked against the back of my h2ead, and when I turned round I saw a burning cigarette end rolling on the ground. I looked back at the boys. I couldn't tell which one had flicked the cigarette end at me, but it didn't really matter. I mean, I wasn't going to do anything about it, was I? I looked at them all for a moment, then I turned round and carried on into the tower. Just as the glass doors were swinging shut behind me, I heard a couple of parting shouts.

"See you, fuck head."

"Yeah, see you later, iBoy."

I couldn't help smiling to myself as I crossed over to the lift with Gram.

"What?" Gram asked me. "What's so funny?"

"Nothing ..." I looked at her, grinning. "It's just... well, iBoy ... I mean, that's actually pretty good, isn't it?"

Gram shrugged. "It's better than fuck head."

Each of the towers in Crow Town has thirty floors, and each of the floors has six flats. That's 180 flats to a block, 1,440 flats in all. Each of the floors in each of the towers is pretty much the same. There's a central corridor on each floor, with a row of flats on either side, and there's a lift at one end of the corridor and a stairwell at the other.

The lift in Compton is usually OK.

Well, it's not OK — it stinks, it's filthy, and it moves really slowly — but at least it usually works. This is because most of the people you'd normally expect to vandalize a lift actually live here, and they don't want to walk up the stairs every day, so they generally leave the lift alone. So most of the time it works. Leaving the stairwells free for other purposes — taking drugs, having sex, beating people up ... the usual stairwell-based activities.

I was so tired by now that if the lift hadn't been work­ing, I would have had to lie down on the floor and wait for it to get fixed. But it was working, and a few minutes after we'd entered the tower, Gram and I were getting out at the twenty-third floor and making our way down the corridor to Flat 4.

Home at last.

It was really nice to be back, and I spent a while just wandering slowly around the flat — the front room, the hallway, my room, Gram's room. I wasn't really doing anything, or even looking at anything, I was just enjoy­ing being there, being back with the things I knew.

It felt good.

After that, I slept for a while, and when I woke up I had a long hot bath. Then Gram made me a huge plate of cheese on toast, and then, finally, she got round to telling me about Lucy and Ben.

"I don't really know any details," she explained. "All I can tell you is what I've been hearing around the estate, and you know what it's like round here. Rumours, gossip, someone heard this, someone heard that..." She looked at me. "I haven't actually talked to Michelle about it yet." I nodded. Michelle was Mrs Walker, Lucy's mum. "I thought it best to leave it for a while," Gram continued. "You know, let Michelle come to me when she's ready. If she's ever ready, that is ... I don't know ..." Gram sighed. "Anyway, the story going round is that Ben was having some kind of problem with some of the boys in one of the gangs ... the Crows, most people think. That Friday, a group of them waited for him to get back from school, knocked on his door, made sure his mum wasn't in ... and then they just started beating him up. Lucy ... well, Lucy was in her room, apparently. She heard all the noise, came out to see what was going on ..." Gram paused, looking hesitantly at me.

"Go on," I said quietly.

She sighed again. "There's no easy way of putting it, Tommy. They raped her. They beat up Ben, broke some of his ribs, cut his face up a bit... and then they started on Lucy."

"Christ," I whispered. "How many of them were there?"

"Six or seven ... maybe more."

"And did they all...? You know, with Lucy ...?"

"I don't know."

"Shit," I said quietly, shaking my head with disbelief. There were tears in my eyes now ... it was just such a terrible thing to imagine. So sickening, so awful ... so utterly unbelievable. But the trouble was ... it wasn't unbelievable. It was the kind of thing that happened. It had happened before, just a few months ago. A young girl had been attacked and gang-raped in a lock-up garage at the back of Eden House.

It happened.

"Do the police know who did it?" I asked Gram.

She shook her head. "No one's talking, as usual. There are lots of rumours, and the same names keep cropping up I think most of the gang kids know who it was. But no one's going to say anything, especially not to the police."

"What about Ben? He must know who they were."

"According to him, they were wearing hoods, bala­clavas ... he couldn't see their faces."

"What about Lucy?"

"I don't know, Tommy. Like I said, I haven't seen Michelle yet, so I don't know if Lucy's been able to iden­tify her attackers or not." Gram looked at me. "No one's been arrested though ... I mean, you know how it is."

"Yeah ..."

I knew how it was, all right. The number one rule in Crow Town is — you never talk to the police. You never admit to anything. You never grass. Because if you do, and you get found out, you might as well be dead.

Gram said, "The police haven't been able to get any information from the mobile phone that hit you either. Most of what was left of it had been trampled into the ground by the time they finally realized it was evidence, and the bits that were left were too badly smashed up to retrieve any information. But they think that one of Lucy's attackers must have just thrown it out of the window, and you just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"No," I said. "Whoever threw it, they called out my name. They knew I was there. I don't suppose they expected it to actually hit me, but I'm pretty sure they threw it at me."

"You'll have to tell the police, Tommy. Tell them that it wasn't an accident."

I shrugged. "What's the point? They're not going to find out who it was, are they?"

"Well, you never know ..."

We looked at each other, both of us knowing that I was right. There wasn't a chance in hell of anyone ever being charged with cracking open my skull. And even if there was, even if someone was arrested, charged, and convicted ... what good would it do? It wouldn't change anything, would it? I'd still have bits of iPhone stuck in my brain. Ben would still have been beaten up. And Lucy ...

Nothing was ever going to make Lucy feel better.

After Gram had asked me at least a dozen times if I minded if she went into her room to carry on working on her new book, and after I'd assured her that I didn't mind at all, and that I was fine, and that she didn't have to keep worrying about me all the time ... after all that, I finally went into my room, lay down on my bed, and tried to get to grips with the growing realization that I knew what was happening inside my head ... and that although it had to be impossible, it wasn't.