by Kevin Brooks
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.”
“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 the 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 toward 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 leash. 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 toward 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 head, and when I turned round, I saw a burning cigarette butt rolling on the ground. I looked back at the boys. I couldn’t tell which one had flicked the cigarette 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 o
n into the tower. Just as the glass doors were swinging shut behind me, I heard a couple of parting shouts.
“See you, fuckhead.”
“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 fuckhead.”
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 an elevator at one end of the corridor and a stairwell at the other.
The elevator 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 place, and you know what it’s like round here. Rumors, 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 lockup 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 rumors, 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 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 come 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.
The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use.
Arthur Koestler
Imagine you’re trying to remember something . . . anything — the last time you cried, someone’s telephone number, the names of the seven dwarfs — it doesn’t matter what it is. Just search your memory, try to remember some- thing . . . and when you’ve done it, try to imagine how you did it. How did you find what you were looking for? What did you search with? Where exactly in your brain did you search? How did you know where to look, and how did you recognize what you were looking for?
If someone asked me those questions, I couldn’t answer them. All I could say was — well, I just did it. The things inside my head, inside my brain . . . they just did what they do. I told myself to remember something, and the stuff in my brain did the rest.
It’s my head, my brain, and it makes me what I am — but I don’t have a clue how it works.
And as I lay on my bed that day, listening to the distant babble of soundless sounds in my head, that was the only way I could think of it: It was my head, my brain, it made me what I was . . . but now there was something else in there, something that had somehow become part of me, and it was doing
what it did — reaching out, finding things, an infinite number of things — and I didn’t have a clue how it worked . . .
But it did.
It was working right now.
It was showing me bits of websites, random pages from random sites — words, sounds, images, data. It was scanning a world of emails, a world of texts, a world full of phone calls . . . it was connecting, calculating, photographing, filming, downloading, searching, storing, locating . . . it was doing everything that an iPhone could do. And that’s what it had to be — the iPhone. The fragments of iPhone that were lodged in my brain . . . somehow they must have fused with bits of my brain, bits of my mind . . . bits of me. And somehow, in the process of that fusion, the powers and capabilities of the iPhone must have mutated, they must have evolved . . . because as well as doing everything that an iPhone could do, I could also do a whole lot more. I could hear phone calls, I could read emails and texts, I could hack into databases . . . I could access everything.
All from inside my head.
I was connected.
I knew it now. I knew it, I knew it, I knew it . . . but I still didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t know how it was happening. I had no control over it. It just happened . . . and, like I said, it had to be impossible.
But it wasn’t.
It was happening.
Other things were happening, too. As I lay there, trying to digest this impossible truth, I could feel a glow of heat in my head, a warm tingle around my scar. It felt really weird, kind of shimmery, and I didn’t like it.
I got up off the bed and went over to the mirror on my wall.
I didn’t believe what I saw at first. It had to be something else, a trick of the light, a distorted reflection . . . but when I leaned in closer and stared intently at my face in the mirror, I knew that it was real. The skin around the wound was shimmering, vibrating almost, as if it was alive. It was radiating, glowing with countless colors, shapes, words, symbols . . . all of them constantly changing, merging into each other, floating and drifting, sinking and rising, pulsating like minute shoals of multicolored fish.
