iBoy

110

It was around seven thirty in the evening when I knocked on Gram's door and went in to see her. Her curtains were still open, and through her window I could see the orangey-red glow of a distant sunset fading over the horizon. Gram was sitting at her writing desk, surrounded by papers and books and ashtrays and empty coffee cups.

"How are you feeling?" she asked me.

"All right, thanks."

"Did you get any sleep?"

"Yeah, a bit."

"Are you hungry?"

"No ... no, I'm fine, thanks."

She smiled at me. "What's on your mind?"

"Well ..." I said, "I was thinking of going up to see Lucy, you know ... just to say hello, see how she's doing. What do you think? Do you think that'd be all right?"

"I don't know," Gram said hesitantly. "I suppose so ... as long as Michelle thinks it's all right... and Lucy feels up to it. She might not, you know. I mean, I don't think she's been out of the flat since it happened ..." Gram looked at me. "She might not want to see anyone, espe­cially a boy ..."

"Yeah, I know. But I thought if I asked her mum first ... just ask her if Lucy wants to see me ... and then, if she says no, I'll just leave. I won't push it or anything."

"What about phoning her first?" Gram suggested.

I shook my head. "Yeah, I thought of that, but some­how it just doesn't feel right. I'd rather just go on up."

"Well, all right ... but be careful, Tommy."

"Yeah."

As she reached out to put her hand on my cheek, I concentrated hard on not giving her an electric shock. I'm not sure how I did it, but it seemed to work. She didn't yelp or snatch her hand away or anything.

"Are you sure you're all right?" she asked me.

"Yeah ..."

"Positive?"

"I'm fine, Gram."

"Well, like I said, be careful. All right?"

"Yeah," I told her, putting on my jacket. "I'll see you later. I won't be long."

"Have you got your phone with you?"

"Uh, yeah ... yeah, I've got my phone."

There were two boys in the lift when I got in. One of them was a youngish black kid from Baldwin House whose name I didn't know, the other one was a boy called Davey Carr. Davey lived on the twenty-seventh floor, and when we were at junior school he used to be my best friend. We were always hanging around together — at school, at the kids' playground, around the railway tracks and the wastegrounds. Davey used to be OK. But a couple of years ago he'd started hanging around with some of the Crows, older kids mostly, and although he'd kept trying to persuade me to join them, I really couldn't see the attraction of it, and after that we'd just kind of drifted apart.

"Hey, Tom," he said to me as I got into the lift. "Y'all right?"

"Yeah ... you?" I said, pressing the button for the thirtieth floor.

He nodded, smiling. But he looked a bit anxious.

I nodded at the other kid. He stared back at me, sniffed, then looked away.

The lift doors closed.

Davey grinned at me. "Where you going, Tom? Any­where exciting?"

"I'm going to see Lucy."

His grin faded. "Yeah?"

"Yeah ... any idea who did it?"

"What?"

"She was raped, Davey. Ben was beaten up. I was just wondering if you knew anything about it."

He shook his head. "Why would I know anything about it?"

I just stared at him.

"No," he said, shaking his head again. "No, I don't know anything ... honest. I wasn't even —"

"Hey," the black kid said to him. "You don't have to tell him anything. Tell him to fuck off."

I looked at the black kid.

The lift stopped.

Floor 27.

The black kid grinned at me. "Yeah? What you looking at?"

The doors opened.

I homed in on the mobile in the kid's back pocket, and in an instant an absolutely timeless instant — I'd downloaded and scanned everything on it. Names, phone numbers,, texts, photos, videos ... everything.

"You're Jayden Carrol, aren't you?" I said to him as he walked out of the lift with Davey.

"So?" he said.

"Have you answered that text you got from Leona last night?" I said casually, pressing the button to close the doors. "You know, the one where she asks you if you love her?" I smiled at him. "Better not keep her waiting too long for an answer."

"What the fuck —?" he started to say, but the lift doors closed on him, and I carried on up to the thirtieth floor.

I knew it was a stupid thing to do, egging him on like that. I knew it was pointless, and kind of pathetic. But I didn't really care. It made me feel good, and that was all that mattered just then.

Lucy's flat was right at the end of the corridor, and as I walked down towards it, I realized how nervous I was feeling. I always felt a little bit nervous when I was about to see Lucy, but this was different. This was an anxious kind of nervousness, a fear of the unknown. What would I say to her? What could I say? How would she be? Would she have any interest in seeing me at all? I mean, why should she? What was so special about me? What did I have to offer her?

I stopped at the door to her flat.

The word SLAG had been sprayed across the door in bright red aerosol paint. I stood there for a while, just staring at that ugly scrawl, and for a moment I felt angrier than I'd ever felt before. I wanted to hit someone, to really hurt someone ... I wanted to find out who'd done it and throw them off the tower ...

My head was aching.

My wound was throbbing.

I closed my eyes, breathed slowly, calmed myself ...

"Shit," I muttered to myself. "The bastards ..."

I waited until my head had stopped throbbing, then I took another calming breath and reached up and rang the doorbell.

Lucy's mum had a history of drink and drug problems. It was mostly all in the past now — apart from the odd little slip now and then — but when she opened the door and looked at me, I was pretty sure that she'd gone back to her bad old ways. She looked terrible. Her skin was dull and greyish, her eyes were bloodshot and slightly unfocused, and it looked as if she hadn't washed or combed her hair for a week.

"Hello, Mrs Walker," I said to her. "It's me ... Tom."

She squinted at me.

"Tom Harvey," I explained. "Lucy's friend ...?"

"Oh, right ... yeah. Of course, Tom ... sorry. I only just woke up. I was just... ahh ..." She rubbed her eyes. "How are you, Tom?" She suddenly noticed the wound on my head. "Oh, God ... of course ... your head ... you were in hospital. I'm so sorry, I forgot..."

"It's all right," I said. "Don't worry about it."

"No? Well, I mean ... I just ..." She blinked heavily. "So when did you get home, Tom?"

"Today. This morning , . ."

"Right, right..."

"I was just wondering — "

"Did you want to see Lucy?"

"Well, only if —"

"Come in, come in ... I'll go and see if she's awake. She was sleeping ... she gets really tired."

As I followed Mrs Walker into the hallway and shut the door behind me, I didn't feel very comfortable at all. My head was full of questions: maybe Lucy's mum wasn't in the right frame of mind to decide if I should come in or not? maybe I should have waited outside? maybe I shouldn't have come up here in the first place? But it was too late to turn back now. I'd already followed Mrs Walker into the front room.

"Just wait there a minute," she told me. "I'll go and see if she's awake."

I watched her go into her bedroom (wondering why she was going into her bedroom and not Lucy's), and then I looked over at Ben, who was sitting on the settee watching TV. Although the bruises on his face were fading, and the cuts were starting to heal, it was pretty obvious he'd taken a really bad beating. He was sitting kind of hunched up, which I guessed was on account of his broken ribs, and his left wrist was heavily bandaged.

"Hey, Ben," I said to him. "How're you doing?"

He stared at me. "How d'you think?"

I looked around. The flat was a mess. Empty pizza boxes on the floor, bottles, cans, dirty plates. There were piles of clothes on the dining table, piles of old newspapers on an ironing board. The curtains were closed. The light was dim.

I turned back to Ben. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"No."

"OK, fair enough ... but if you change your mind —"

"I said no, all right?"

"OK."

Mrs Walker came out of her bedroom then. She smiled at me — a fairly vague kind of smile — and said, "Don't be too long, Tom, all right? She's not used to seeing people yet... she gets really tired."

I looked at her.

She smiled again, indicating the open bedroom door with a slightly wobbly jerk of her head, and I guessed that meant that I was supposed to go in. I glanced back at Ben, saw that he was immersed in the TV, and I went on into the bedroom.

The curtains were closed, and the only light came from the pale orange glow of an electric heater standing on the floor. There was something about the room that made it feel like a sick person's room. The stuffy air, perhaps ... the low light, the lack of energy. I didn't know. It just felt like a room without any life.

Lucy was sitting on the bed with her knees scrunched up against her chest. She was wearing a baggy old jumper, loose-fitting jogging pants, and big woolly socks. And as I stood there in the doorway, doing my best to smile at her, I could see straight away that she wasn't the same Lucy any more. Her face was very pale, her skin very dull, and there was something about her that seemed to have shrunk. It was as if her entire self — her body, her mind, her heart was trying desperately to retreat from the world. And even in the muted light, I could see the depth of pain in her eyes, the faded bruises on her face, and more than anything else I could see that she'd been through the worst thing imaginable. It was in her, it had become part of her.

She'd been violated.

She smiled weakly at me. "Hey, Tom ... do you mind shutting the door?"

I closed the door.

"Sorry, about the mess," she said, looking around the room. She indicated a chair by the bed. "You can sit down ..."

I went over to the chair.

"Sorry," she said again, realizing that the chair was piled up with clothes and books. "Let me —"

"It's all right," I told her, clearing the clothes and books off the chair.

"Sorry," she said once more. She smiled anxiously. "I don't know why I keep saying sorry all the time ..."

"Sorry?" I grinned.

She smiled weakly back at me.

I sat down in the chair and looked at her. I'd always loved the way she looked — her messy blonde hair, her pretty blue eyes, her slightly crooked mouth ... I'd always liked that crookedness. It had always made me smile. And another thing that I'd always liked about being with Lucy was that we could look at each other without feeling uncomfortable ... we could just be together, and look at each other, and neither of us felt self-conscious about it. But now ... I realized that Lucy kept touching her hair, pretending to fiddle with her fringe, and I guessed that what she was really doing was trying to cover up the ugly yellow bruising around her right eye. I wanted to tell her that she didn't have to cover it up for my sake, but I wasn't sure if it was an appropriate thing to say. I mean, if she wanted to cover it up, if it made her feel better, who was I to tell her any different?

The truth is, I simply didn't know what to say to her.

What do you say to a girl who's been raped?

What can you say?

"It's all right," Lucy said quietly. "I mean ... you know ..."

"Yeah," I muttered.

"How's your head?" she asked.

I instinctively reached up and touched the wound.

"Yeah, it's OK ... it doesn't even hurt any more." I looked at her, wanting to ask her how she was ... but I didn't know how. Instead, and kind of stupidly, I said to her, "This isn't your room, is it? I mean, this used to be your mum's room ..."

"Yeah," she said, absently looking round. "Well, it's still my mum's room really. I just... well, I just couldn't sleep in my own room any more." She lowered her eyes. "That's where it happened, you know ... that's where ... in my room ..."

"Oh, right..

"I can't go back in there ... not yet, anyway. It makes me feel... you know ..." She shrugged. "So I've been staying in here."

"It must have been terrible," I said, without thinking. "I mean, what happened... "

"Yeah" she muttered. "Yeah, it was terrible ..."

"Sorry," I said quickly. "I didn't mean to —"

"No, no ..." Lucy said. "It's all right ... honestly. It happened ... there's no point trying to pretend that it didn't, is there?" She looked at me. "It happened, Tom."

"I know ... and I'm so sorry. I'm sorry it happened, Luce."

"Me too," she said sadly.

"Can you ...? I mean, do you want to ...?"

"What? Talk about it?"

"Yeah."

"What for? What's the point? I mean, talking about it isn't going to change anything, is it?"

"No, I suppose not..."

She looked at me, her eyes wet with tears now. "I can't, Tom. I can't do it. I know I should, but I can't."

"What do you mean?"

"I can't say anything ... you know, to the police. I can't tell anyone. I just can't..."

"Yeah, I know."

I wasn't just agreeing with her because it was the easiest thing to do, I was agreeing with her because she was right. If she knew who her attackers were — and I was pretty sure that she did — her life wouldn't be worth living if she gave those names to the police. She'd have to endure an endless nightmare of threats, abuse, verbal and physical assaults ... maybe even worse.

"And the thing is," Lucy said quietly, her voice trem­bling with tears, "the thing is ... even if I did, you know ... even if I did tell the police who did it, they'd still get away with it, wouldn't they?"

"Well . . .

She shook her head. "Come on, Tom, you know how it works. Even if I could identify them, give the police names ... I mean, it doesn't matter how much evidence the police have got. DNA, fingerprints, whatever ... none of it makes any difference." Her voice was still trembling, but now it was tinged with anger too. "All they'd have to say was that it was consensual... I agreed to it. You know, because I'm a slag ... I mean, it says so on my door, doesn't it?"

She was getting really upset now, and I was tempted to get up and put my arms round her, just hold her for a while, but — again — I didn't know if it was the right thing to do.

"What about Ben?" I said to her.

"Ben?" she said, almost spitting out his name. "What about him?"

"Well, they can't say that he agreed to being beaten up, can they?"

She shook her head. "Ben won't say anything. He's too scared. He's already told the police that he couldn't see their faces because they were all wearing hoods or bala­clavas."

"Were they?"

"What?"

"Wearing hoods?"

She looked at me, hesitating. "Some of them were ... but not the ones who actually did it." She sniffed back tears. "They wanted me to know who they were ... and they wanted me to know that they didn't care that I knew, because they knew there was nothing I could do about it."

She was crying silently now, mute tears pouring down her face, and all I could do was sit there, trying hard not to cry myself, feeling more helpless than I'd ever felt before. I just didn't know what to do. Should I try to comfort her? Would she want to be comforted? Was comfort even the right thing to consider? Or should I just sit here, listening to her cry ... should I just be here for her?

As I thought about all this, I could feel my wound throbbing, and I guessed there was something going on inside my head, some cyber-connected part of me that was trying to do what it thought was the right thing ...

But, just for the moment, I didn't want anything to do with that. Whatever it was, whatever it was doing, it wasn't right for now.

"Is your head all right?" Lucy asked me, sniffing back tears and giving me a baffled look. "Why's it doing that?"

"Doing what?" I said, suddenly embarrassed.

"I don't know ..." She was frowning at me, her eyes wrinkled with puzzlement. "It's stopped now. It was kind of..."2 She put her hand to the side of her head, just where my scar was, and waggled her fingers. "It was glowing, you know ... like, it was all shimmery ..." She looked at me. "Honestly, Tom ... it was really weird."

I shrugged. "It was probably just a trick of the light or something."

She shook her head. "I don't think so."

"Well, it feels perfectly all right," I said, carelessly rubbing the wound, as if somehow that proved there was nothing wrong with it. "So, uhh ..." I started to say, trying to think of a way to change the subject, but I couldn't think of anything that seemed OK to talk about.

"So ... what?" Lucy asked me.

"Nothing ..." I smiled awkwardly at her. "I was going to ask you when you're going back to school ... but, you know ... it's a pretty stupid thing to ask."

"Yeah, I don't know ..." she said distantly. "I haven't really thought about it. I suppose I'll have to go back at some point ... maybe after the Easter holidays ... but at the moment, I just can't face it. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to face it, to tell you the truth. I just... it's like I don't want to do any thing. I don't want to see anyone or talk to anyone or think about anything. All I want to do is stay in here, with the curtains closed ... no, I don't even want to do that." Her voice was a broken whisper. "They ruined me, Tom. They totally fucking ruined me."

"Yeah ..."

"Look, you'd better go ... I'm sorry, I just..."

"It's OK," I said quietly, getting to my feet.

"Maybe another time ..."

"Yeah, yeah, of course..." I looked at her. "I could come round tomorrow, if you want ... or not. I mean, whatever you want. . ."

"Yeah," she muttered. "Tomorrow. I'd like that... I just need to be on my own for a bit now."

I nodded a2t her, then turned and headed for the door.

"Thanks, Tom," I heard her whisper.

I turned back and looked at her.

She smiled sadly at me. "I mean, thanks for ... I don't know. For just listening and everything. It was ... it was ... well, you know. Thanks."

"No problem," I said. "See you later, Luce."

"Yeah ..."