iBoy (4 page)

Gram said to Johnson, “I think that’s enough for now, don’t you? Tommy’s tired. He’s still very weak.”

“Yes, Mrs. Harvey, I realize that, but —”

“It’s Miss,” Gram said coldly.

“I’m sorry?”

“
Miss
Harvey. Or Ms. Not Mrs.”

“Right . . .” Johnson muttered. “Anyway, if Tom wouldn’t mind —”

“He’s told you everything he knows.”

“Well —”

“No,” Gram said firmly. “No more. If you need to talk to him again, you’ll just have to wait.”

“But —”

“Do you want me to start screaming?”

Johnson frowned at her. “What?”

“One more word from you,” Gram told him calmly, “and I’m going to start screaming and sobbing. And when the nurses and doctors come running in, they’ll find a poor old grandmother crying her eyes out because the two nasty policemen have been virtually
torturing
her gravely ill grandson.” She smiled at DS Johnson. “Do you understand?”

Johnson nodded. He understood.

“Good,” said Gram. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like you both to fuck off.”

“They [gang rapes] happen all the time, man. You hear about them in school . . . It’s so common. You know that if you talk about it, they can do it again. If they want you to be quiet, that’s all you gotta do, just bite your tongue and continue. It’s a sad thing, but it’s reality. Hard reality.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/jun/05/gender.ukcrime

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 everything
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 afterimages 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 Dr. 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 anymore.

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, Dr. 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 Dr. Kirby about all this crazy stuff going on in my head, he would have wanted to keep me in the 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 . . . “bodice ripper” 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–traffic circle, a scattering of low-rise flats, and the kids’ playground. An industrial park 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.”