by Kevin Brooks
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
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Acknowledgments
Also by Kevin Brooks
Copyright
The formula for calculating the velocity of a falling object from a given height is: v = , where v = velocity, a = acceleration (9.81 m/s2), and d = distance.
The mobile phone that shattered my skull was a 32GB iPhone 3GS. It weighed 4.8 oz, measured 4.5 in x 2.4 in x 0.48 in, and at the time of impact it was traveling at approximately 77 mph. Of course, I didn’t know any of this at the time. All I knew at the time, the only thing I was vaguely aware of, was a small black object hurtling down through the afternoon sky toward me, and then . . .
CRACK!
A momentary flash of blinding pain . . .
And then nothing.
Twenty minutes earlier, everything had been perfectly normal. It was Friday, 5 March, and the streets were still mushy with the remains of last week’s snow. I’d left school at the usual time, just gone three thirty, and I’d started the walk back home feeling pretty much the same as I always felt. Kind of OK, but not great. Alone, but not lonely. A bit down about things, but not really worried about anything in particular. I was just my perfectly normal ordinary self: I was Tom Harvey, a sixteen-year-old kid from South London. I had no major problems, no secrets, no terrors, no vices, no nightmares, no special talents . . . I had no story to tell. I was just a kid, that’s all. I had my hopes and dreams, of course, just like everyone else. But that’s all they were — hopes and dreams.
And I suppose one of those hopes, one of those dreams, was the girl I was thinking about as I made my way along the High Street, then down Crow Lane, toward the familiar gray sprawl of Crow Town, the projects where I lived (its official name is the Crow Lane Estate, but everyone calls it Crow Town).
The girl’s name was Lucy Walker.
I’d known Lucy for years, since we were both little kids and we used to live next door to each other. Her mum used to babysit for my gran sometimes, and my gran would babysit for her, and then later on, when we were both a bit older, me and Lucy used to spend a lot of time playing together — in each other’s flats, in the corridors, in the elevators, on the swings and stuff at the kids’ playground in the center of the projects. Lucy didn’t live next door to me anymore, but she was still in the same tower block (Compton House), just a few floors up, and I still knew her quite well. I’d see her at school sometimes, and occasionally we’d walk back home together, and every now and then I’d go round to her place and hang around for a while, or she’d come over to mine . . .
But we didn’t play on the swings together anymore.
And I kind of missed that.
I missed a lot about Lucy Walker.
So it’d been kind of nice when she’d come up to me in the school playground earlier that day and asked if I could come round to her place after school.
“I need to talk to you about something,” she’d said.
“OK,” I’d told her. “No problem . . . what time?”
“About four?”
“OK.”
“Thanks, Tom.”
And I’d been thinking about her ever since.
Right now, as I cut across the stretch of grass between Crow Lane and Compton House, I was wondering what she wanted to talk to me about. I was hoping it was something to do with me and her, but I knew deep down that it probably wasn’t. It was probably just something to do with her stupid brother again. Ben was sixteen, a year older than Lucy (but about five years dumber), and he’d recently started going off the rails a bit — missing school, hanging around with the wrong kind of people, pretending to be something he wasn’t. I’d never really liked Ben that much, but he wasn’t such a bad kid, just a bit of an idiot, and easily led, which isn’t the worst thing in the world . . . but Crow Town is the kind of place that preys on easily led idiots. It eats them up, spits them out, and turns them into nothing. And I guessed — as I went through the gate in the railings into the square beneath Compton — I guessed that was what Lucy wanted to talk to me about. Did I know what Ben was getting up to? she’d want to know. Had I heard anything? Could I do anything? Could I talk to him? Could I try to make him see sense? And, of course, I’d say — Yes, I’ll talk to him, I’ll see what I can do. Knowing full well that it wouldn’t do any good. But hoping that Lucy would really appreciate it anyway . . .
I looked at my watch.
It was ten to four.
(I had thirty-five seconds of normality left.)
I remember realizing, as I headed across the square toward the front entrance of the tower, that despite the mush of snow on the ground and the icy chill to the air, it was actually a really nice day — crisp and fresh, bright and clear, birds singing in a sunny spring sky. The birdsongs were almost drowned out by the usual manic soundtrack of Crow Town — distant shouts, cars revving up, dogs barking, music booming from a dozen different high-rise windows — and although the sun was high and bright, and the sky was bluer than blue, the square around Compton House was as shadowed and gloomy as ever.
But it was still a pretty nice day.
I paused for a moment, looking at my watch again, wondering if I was too early. Four o’clock, Lucy had said. And it was still only just gone ten to. But then, I reminded myself, she hadn’t said exactly four o’clock, had she? She’d said about four.
I took another look at my watch.
It was nine and a half minutes to four.
That was about four, wasn’t it?
(I had five seconds left.)
I took a deep breath.
(Four seconds . . .)
Told myself not to be so stupid . . .
(Three . . .)
And I was just about to get going again when I heard a distant shout from above.
“Hey, HARVEY!”
(Two . . .)
It was a male voice, and it came from a long way up, somewhere near the top of the tower, and just for a moment I thought it was Ben. There was no reason for it to be Ben, it was just that I’d been thinking about him, and he lived on the thirtieth floor, and he was male . . .
I looked up.
(One . . .)
And that’s when I saw it — that small black object, hurtling down through the bright blue sky toward me, and then . . .
CRACK!
A momentary flash of blinding pain . . .
And then nothing.
(Zero.)
The end of normality.
The binary number system uses only the two digits 0 and 1. Numbers are expressed in powers of two instead of powers of ten, as in the decimal system. In binary notation, 2 is written as 10, 3 as 11, 4 as 100, 5 as 101, and so on. Computers calculate in binary notation, the two digits corresponding to two switching positions, e.g., on or off, yes or no. From this on-off, yes-no state, all things flow.
The next thing I knew (or, at least, the next thing I consciously knew), I was opening my eyes and staring up at a dusty fluorescent light-fitting on an unfamiliar white ceiling. My head was throbbing like hell, my throat was bone-dry, and I had that not-quite-there feeling you get when you finally wake up from a really long sleep. I didn’t feel tired, though. I wasn’t sleepy. I wasn’t dazed. In fact, apart from the n
ot-quite-thereness, I felt incredibly wide-awake.
I didn’t move for a while, I didn’t make a sound, I just lay there, perfectly still, staring up at the light-fitting on the ceiling, irrationally taking in all the details — it was cracked at one end, the plastic was old and faded, there were two dead flies lying on their backs in the dust . . .
Then I closed my eyes and just listened.
I could hear faint beeps from nearby, something whirring, a soft tap-tapping. In the background, I could hear the mutter of quiet voices, a faint swish of cushioned doors, muted phones ringing, the dull clank of gurneys . . .
I let the sounds flow over me and turned my attention to myself. My body. My position. My place.
I was lying on my back, lying in a bed. My head was resting on a pillow. I could feel things on my skin, in my skin, under my skin. Something up my nose. Something down my throat. There was a faint smell of disinfectant in the air.
I opened my eyes again and — without moving my head — I looked around.
I was in a small white room. There were machines beside the bed. Instruments, canisters, drips, dials, LED displays. Various parts of my body were connected to some of the machines by an ordered tangle of clear plastic tubes — my nose, my mouth, my stomach . . . other places — and a number of thin black wires from another machine appeared to be fixed to my head.
Hospital room . . .
I was in a hospital room.
It’s no big deal, I told myself. No problem. You’re in a hospital, that’s all. There’s nothing to worry about.
As I closed my eyes again, trying to relieve the throbbing in my head, I heard a sharp intake of breath to my left — a distinctly human sound — and when I opened my eyes and turned my head, I was hugely relieved to see the familiarly disheveled figure of my gran. She was sitting on a chair against the wall, her laptop on her knees, her fingers poised over the keyboard. She was staring at me, her eyes a mixture of shock, disbelief, and delight.
I smiled at her.
“Tommy,” she whispered. “Oh, thank God . . .”
And then something really strange happened.
How do you describe something indescribable? I mean, how do you describe something that’s beyond the limits of human comprehension? How do you even begin to explain it? I suppose it’s a bit like trying to describe how a bat senses things. A bat experiences the world through the sense of echo- location: It emits sounds, and it determines the location, size, and manner of objects around it through the echoes they produce. And although as humans we can understand that, and we can try to imagine it, we have no way of actually experiencing it, which makes the actual sensual experience impossible for us to describe.
In my case — as I looked at my gran, and she whispered my name — the phenomenon I experienced inside my head was so alien to anything I’d ever experienced before, I simply couldn’t digest it. It happened, it was happening, and it was undoubtedly happening to me, in me . . . but it couldn’t possibly have anything to do with me.
It couldn’t be.
But it was.
The best way I think I can describe it is like this. Imagine a billion bees. Imagine the sound of a billion bees, the sight of a billion bees, the sense of a billion bees. Imagine their movement, their interactions, their connections, their being. And then try to imagine that these bees are not bees, and these sounds, these images, these feelings are not actually sounds, images, or feelings at all. They’re something else. Information. Facts. Things. They’re data. They’re words and voices and pictures and numbers, streams and streams of zeroes and ones, but at the same time they’re not any of these things . . . they’re somehow just the things that represent these things. They’re representations of constituent parts, building blocks, frameworks, particles, waves . . . they’re symbols of the stuff that things are. And then, if you can, try to imagine that you cannot only experience everything about these billion non-bees all at once — their collective non-sound, non-image, non-sense — but you can also experience everything about every individual one of them . . . all at the same time. And both experiences are instantaneous. Continuous. Inseparable.
Can you imagine it?
You’re lying in a hospital bed, smiling at your gran, and just as she looks at you and whispers your name — “Tommy. Oh, thank God . . .” — a billion non-bees explode into life inside your head.
Can you imagine that?
There was no time to it at all. In one sense, it lasted less than a moment, less than an instant . . . an unknowable and instantaneous explosion of crazy stuff in my head. But in another sense, a more accurate sense, it didn’t even last less than a moment. It didn’t last at all. It happened without time, beyond time . . . as if always-there and never-there were one and the same thing.
It didn’t hurt, this unknowable experience, but the shock of it made me squeeze my eyes shut and scrunch up my face as if I was in some kind of terrible pain, and I heard my gran curse under her breath and scramble up out of her chair, knocking her laptop to the floor, and then she was flinging open the door and calling out at the top of her lungs . . .
“Nurse! NURSE!”
“It’s all right, Gram,” I told her, opening my eyes again. “I’m OK . . . it was just —”
“Lie still, Tommy,” she said, scuttling over to me. “The nurse is coming . . . just take it easy.”
She sat on the edge of the bed and took hold of my hand.
I smiled at her again. “I’m all right —”
“Shhh . . .”
And then a nurse came in, followed shortly by a doctor in a white coat, and everyone started fussing around me, checking the machines, looking into my eyes, listening to my heart . . .
I was OK.
I wasn’t OK, but I was OK.
I’d been in a coma for seventeen days. The iPhone had split my head open, fracturing my skull, and — according to Dr. Kirby, the neurosurgeon who’d operated on me — a number of significant complications had arisen.
“You have what we call a comminuted skull fracture,” he explained to me the day after I woke up. “Basically, this means that the bone just here . . .” He indicated the area around the stitched-up wound on the side of my head. “This area is known as the pterion, by the way. Unfortunately, this is the weakest part of the skull, and for some reason yours seems to be particularly weak.”
As he said the word pterion, something flashed through my head — a series of symbols, letters, and numbers (non-symbols, non-letters, non-numbers), and although I didn’t recognize or understand them, they somehow made sense.
Pterion, I found myself thinking, pronounced teery-on, the suture where the frontal, squamosal, and parietal bones meet the wing of the sphenoid.
Very strange.
“Are you all right?” Dr. Kirby asked me.
“Yeah . . . yeah, I’m fine,” I assured him.
“Well, as I was saying,” he continued, “the iPhone was apparently thrown from the top floor of the tower block, and when it hit your head, this area here — around the pterion — was shattered, and your brain was lacerated and bruised by a number of broken skull fragments and smashed pieces of the phone. There was damage to some of your blood vessels, too. We managed to remove all of the bone fragments and most of the phone debris, and the bleeding from your ruptured blood vessels doesn’t seem to have done any permanent harm. However . . .”
I’d kind of guessed there was a however coming.
“I’m afraid we’ve been unable to remove several pieces of the shattered phone that were driven into your brain at the time of your accident. These fragments, most of which are incredibly small, have lodged themselves into areas of your brain that are simply too delicate to withstand surgery. We have, of course, been closely monitoring these fragments, and, as far as we can tell, they’re currently not moving and they don’t seem to be having any injurious effect on your brain.”
I looked at him. “As far as you can tell?”
He smiled. “Well, t
he brain’s a highly complex organ. To be honest, we’re only just beginning to understand how it works. Here, let me show you . . .”
He spent the next twenty minutes or so showing me X-rays, CT and MRI scans, showing me where the tiny fragments of iPhone were lodged in my brain, explaining the surgery I’d undergone, and why the fragments couldn’t be removed, telling me what to expect over the next few months — headaches, dizziness, tiredness . . .
“Of course,” he added, “the truth of the matter is we have no way of knowing how anyone is going to recuperate after this type of injury, especially someone who’s spent a considerable amount of time in a coma . . . and I must stress how important it is for you to let us know immediately if you start feeling anything . . . ah . . . unusual.”
“What kind of unusual?”
He smiled again. “Any kind.” His smile faded. “It’s very unlikely that the remaining fragments will move any further, but we can’t rule it out.” He looked at me. “We’ve been monitoring your brain activity continuously since you were admitted, and most of the time everything’s been fine. But there was a period of a couple of days — this was just over a week ago — when we noticed a series of somewhat unexpected brain patterns, and it’s just possible that these may have been caused by an adverse reaction to the fragments. Now, while these slight abnormalities didn’t last very long, and there’s been no noticeable repetition since, the readings that concerned us were rather . . .” He paused, trying to think of the right word.
“Unusual?” I suggested.
He nodded. “Yes . . . unusual.” Another brief smile. “I’m fairly sure that this isn’t anything you need to worry about too much . . . but it’s always best to be on the safe side. So, as I said, if you do start experiencing any problems, anything at all, you must tell someone immediately. We’ll be keeping you in here for another week or so, just to make sure everything’s all right, so all you have to do if you do feel anything unusual is let someone know — me, one of the nurses . . . anyone really. And when you go home, if anything happens, you can either tell your grandmother or call the hospital yourself.” He paused, looking at me. “It’s just you and your grandmother at home, I believe?”
