by Kevin Brooks
It was too close.
Too raw.
Too confusing.
And now she was just sitting there, not smiling anymore, just looking down sadly at her hands in her lap as she twisted and picked at a paper napkin.
“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “I should have realized . . .”
“It’s OK,” she said, trying to smile at me. “It’s not your fault. I just . . .” She shrugged. “Sometimes it goes away for a while, you know? I actually forget about it . . . at least, I’m not aware that I’m thinking about it. But then . . .” She shook her head. “It always comes back. It’s like it’s never not there. And even when I do forget about it for a few minutes, there’s always something that brings it back to me. Something on the TV, you know, a sex scene or something, or just some guy in a hood who reminds me of them . . . I mean, God, you wouldn’t believe how hard it is to watch TV without seeing a guy in a hood.” She smiled shakily at me. “They’re everywhere.”
I self-consciously pulled down my hood.
Lucy laughed. “What did I tell you?”
“Sorry . . .”
“Actually, I hadn’t even noticed yours until now.”
“Sorry,” I said again.
“No, it’s fine. Really.” She frowned to herself. “It’s weird that I didn’t notice it before, though . . .”
“It’s probably just the way that I wear it,” I suggested, smiling.
“What — on your head, you mean?”
We were starting to get back to each other again now. It didn’t quite feel the same as before — we were quieter now, less boisterous — but that was OK. In fact, I really quite liked it. It somehow made me feel as if we knew each other a lot better. And I think Lucy was OK with it, too.
“All right?” I said to her.
She smiled. “Yeah.”
“Do you want anything else to eat?”
She shook her head. “I’m stuffed.”
“Do you want to go for a walk?”
“Where to?”
“How about the edge of the roof?”
Lucy looked over at the edge, then back at me. “You sure it’s not too far?”
“I can call a taxi, if you want.”
“No,” she said. “It’s a nice enough night. Let’s walk.”
I’d never had a girlfriend before . . . well, not a proper girlfriend anyway. I mean, I’d been out with a few girls, you know, I’d gone on a few dates — to the movies, to see a band, that kind of thing. But although I’d quite liked the girls I’d been out with, I hadn’t been absolutely crazy about any of them or anything, and so I’d never really given all that much thought to what I was expected to do with them, or to what I thought I was expected to do . . . and, no, I don’t mean that in a sexy/sexual/sexist kind of way. I just mean the stupid stuff, you know . . . like knowing if it’s OK to hold hands or not, and whether it’s expected . . . and, if it is expected, when do you do it? And how? And what if you make the first move, but it turns out that it’s not OK . . . what do you do then?
That kind of stuff.
And it was that kind of stuff that I thought I’d be thinking about as I got up from the picnic table and walked over to the edge of the roof with Lucy. Because I was crazy about her. I always had been crazy about her. And now here we were, finally on some kind of date together . . . although, admittedly, it wasn’t the most traditional of dates. But still, we’d had a meal together, and we’d talked and laughed and suffered about stuff together, and now we were going for a walk together . . . and I’d dreamed of this moment so many times. I’d pictured it, imagined it, lived it . . . worried about it. Should I hold her hand? Should I put my arm around her? Should I try to be cool about things? Should I do this, or do that, or try this, or try that . . . ?
But the strange thing was, now that it was actually happening, none of this stupid stuff even entered my mind. I just got up and walked across the roof with Lucy, not worrying about anything, not caring about anything, just knowing that we both felt OK — walking side by side, as close to each other as we wanted to be . . . it all felt perfectly natural.
“What are you smiling about?” Lucy asked me.
I looked at her. “Was I smiling?”
“Yeah, like an idiot.”
I grinned at her.
She smiled back at me.
“Careful,” I said, reaching out and touching her arm.
She stopped, realizing that we were nearing the edge of the roof.
“Wow,” she said softly. “It’s a long way down.”
“Are you OK?” I asked her. “Not dizzy or anything?”
She looked at me. “Is that meant to be a joke?”
“No.” I grinned. “Honestly . . . I mean, some people don’t like heights, do they? I was just checking that you were OK, that’s all.”
“Yeah,” she said, smiling. “I’m fine.” She looked down over the edge again, not saying anything, just looking and thinking.
“Shall we sit down?” I suggested.
“Why? Are you feeling dizzy?”
“You know me,” I said, lowering myself cross-legged to the ground. “Tommy the Wimp.”
She smiled and sat down beside me, and then we just sat there in silence for a while, both of us gazing out over Crow Lane at the distant lights of London. Streetlights, traffic lights, headlights . . . office blocks, tower blocks, shops and theaters . . .
It was all a long way away.
“Is that the London Eye?” Lucy said after a while.
“Where?”
She pointed into the distance. “There . . . by the river.”
I couldn’t see it, and just for a moment I thought about logging on to Google Earth in my head to help me find it . . . but that was iStuff, and iStuff didn’t belong here. So I didn’t.
“I can’t even see the river,” I told Lucy. “Never mind the London Eye.”
She smiled, but I could tell that her mind was on something else now. She’d stopped looking into the distance and had turned her attention to the more immediate surroundings of the estate down below, gazing around at the streets, the towers, the low-rises, the kids’ playground . . .
“It’s funny, isn’t it?” she said quietly, her voice full of sadness.
“What’s that?”
“Knowing that they’re all out there somewhere . . . you know, the boys who raped me. They’re all out there . . . living their lives, doing whatever it is they do . . .” She breathed out wearily. “I mean, they’re all just out there . . .”
“Some of them will be in cells now,” I said. “Or in the hospital.”
Lucy looked at me, her eyes wet with tears. “You know, don’t you?” she said. “You know who they are.”
I nodded. “Most of them, yeah.”
“How do you know?”
I shrugged. “People talk, you know . . . you hear rumors. It’s not too difficult to work out the truth.”
“The truth . . . ?” she said, her voice barely audible. “I’m the only one who knows the truth.”
As she looked away from me and went back to gazing down at Crow Town, I could have kicked myself for being so stupid. Not that I’d meant to imply that I knew what she’d been through, but still . . . it was just so thoughtless, such a brainless thing to say.
I really was an idiot.
“Sorry, Tom,” Lucy said.
I looked at her, not sure I’d heard her right. “What?”
“I know you didn’t mean anything . . . and I didn’t mean to snap at you —”
“No, please,” I said, “I’m the one who should be saying sorry. Not you. I just didn’t think, you know . . . I just opened my big stupid mouth and —”
“You haven’t got a big stupid mouth.”
I stared at her. She was smiling again.
“It’s OK,” she said. “All right?”
“OK.”
“All right.”
We went back to our silent gazing for a while, watching the lights, the sk
y, the stars in the darkness. I could hear the wind sighing in the night, and there were a few faint sounds drifting up from the estate — cars, voices, music — but, all in all, everything was still pretty quiet. And even the sounds that were breaking the silence didn’t seem to have any menace to them.
They were just sounds.
“Does it make any difference?” I said quietly to Lucy.
She looked at me. “Does what make any difference?”
“All this stuff that iBoy’s done . . . or whoever it is that’s doing it. You know, making O’Neil and Adebajo and the rest of them suffer . . . I mean, does it make you feel any better?”
She didn’t answer for a while, she just stared at me, and for a moment or two I thought she was going to say — “It’s you, isn’t it? It’s you . . . you’re iBoy” — and I started to wonder how that would make me feel. Good? Embarrassed? Ashamed? Excited? And that made me wonder if perhaps, subconsciously, I wanted her to know that it was me, that I was iBoy, that I was her guardian angel . . .
“I don’t know, Tom,” she said sadly. “I really don’t know if it makes any difference or not. I mean, yeah . . . there’s a bit of me that gets something good out of their suffering . . . you know, I really want them to feel pain . . . I want them to fucking hurt . . . because they deserve it . . . God, they deserve everything they fucking get . . .” Her voice had lowered to an ice-cold whisper. “So, yeah, it makes a difference in that way. It gives me something that part of me really needs . . .” She sighed. “But it never lasts very long. I mean, it’s just not enough . . . it can’t be enough. It can’t take anything away.” She looked at me. “Nothing can take anything away.”
“They’ll always have done it . . .” I said quietly.
She nodded. “And whatever happens, nobody can change that.”
As we sat there looking at each other, alone together in the boundless dark, I found myself thinking about an old Superman film that I’d seen on TV at Christmas. I’d only been half-watching the TV at the time, so I couldn’t remember all that much about it, but there was a bit in the film where Superman’s so busy saving the lives of other people that he doesn’t have time to save the life of Lois Lane, the girl he loves. And when he finds out that she’s dead, he gets so distraught that he flies up into the atmosphere and starts whizzing in circles around the Earth, and he flies so fast that somehow the Earth begins to slow down, and eventually it stops spinning altogether and begins to rotate in the opposite direction, making everything go back in time, allowing Superman to go back into the past and prevent Lois Lane from dying.
Which was all pretty ridiculous, of course.
But I couldn’t help thinking that if only I could do that, if only I could go back in time . . . well, then I really could change things for Lucy. I really could make everything all right again.
But I knew that was never going to happen. This was the real world, not a movie. And in the real world, no matter how impossible things might be, they’re never quite impossible enough.
“What are you thinking about, Tom?” Lucy asked me.
“Nothing . . .” I shrugged. “You know, just stuff . . .”
She smiled. “There’s a lot of stuff to think about, isn’t there?”
“Yeah . . .”
“And it’s always . . . I don’t know. It’s like it’s never straightforward, is it? It’s never just this or that. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s always two sides to everything. You feel good about something, but you still feel bad. You like something about someone, but you don’t want to like it.” She looked thoughtfully at me. “Two sides, you see? Even the stuff we were talking about earlier, you know . . . Tobey Maguire’s cute, Kirsten Dunst’s sexy . . . I mean, that’s OK — kissing and stuff, people looking sexy . . . it’s just kind of nice. But then there’s the other side of it, the other side of sex — the bad side, the shit, the fucking awful things that people do . . .” She shook her head. “I just don’t get it, you know?”
“Yeah . . .”
She sighed again. “And it’s the same with people, too . . . you think you know them, you think you know exactly what they’re like . . .” She looked slowly at me. “But maybe you’re wrong . . . maybe you’ve always been wrong, and maybe this person who you thought you knew . . . well, maybe they’ve got another side to them. A side you’re not sure about.”
“Right . . .” I said tentatively.
Lucy looked at me for a long moment, her eyes never leaving mine, and then she smiled. “Or maybe I’m wrong about that, too?”
I smiled back at her. “Don’t ask me. I haven’t got the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”
“You never do, do you?”
“Never do what?”
She laughed, and I grinned at her, and then we just sat there in silence for a few moments, smiling at each other in the darkness . . . and I knew in my heart that this was how it was supposed to be. This was everything I could ever want, everything there was to want.
This was it.
After a while, Lucy looked at her watch and said, “I’d better get going, Tom. Mum’ll be back soon.”
“OK.”
We both got to our feet then, and as we stood there at the edge of the roof, looking out into the darkness, I remembered the last time I’d been up here — all on my own, with my hood up and my iSkin glowing . . . a softly glowing figure, sitting cross-legged on a cold stone roof, thirty floors up . . .
Like some kind of weird hooded Buddha . . .
A skinny, glow-in-the-dark iBuddha.
Or maybe an iGargoyle.
It was so much better now.
“Tom?” Lucy said.
I turned to her.
“Thanks,” she said quietly, looking at me. “This has been a really wonderful night. I’ll never forget it.” She moved closer to me, put her hands to my face, and kissed me softly on the lips.
God, it felt good.
So perfect, so right . . .
It felt so good, I nearly fell off the roof.
“OK?” she whispered.
I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t even smile. It was all I could do just to breathe. Lucy moved her hand to my head and gently stroked my scar with her fingertips.
“It feels warm,” she said quietly.
“Warm . . .” I muttered.
She smiled at me. “Come on, we’d better go . . . before you start drooling.”
She held my hand as we walked back across the roof to the hatchway. I helped her down the ladder, then we held hands again as we went out through the doors, down the stairs, and along the corridor to her flat.
“Thanks again, Tom,” she said. “That was really nice.”
“Thank you,” I said.
She smiled and kissed me on the cheek. “Are you coming round tomorrow?”
I nodded. “If it’s OK with you.”
“It’s perfectly OK with me.”
“Good.”
She smiled again and opened the door. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”
“Yeah.”
I waited for her to close the door, and then I just stood there for a while, smiling the biggest, floatiest, stupidest smile in the world . . . and then, breathing in a breath of pure satisfaction, I turned round and started heading back to the roof to clear all the picnic stuff away.
Just before I got to the stairwell, I heard Lucy’s door opening.
“Tom?”
I turned round and saw her leaning out through the doorway.
“Be careful,” she said.
I smiled at her. “I’m always careful.”
She gave me a long, thoughtful look, almost frowning at me, then she smiled again, nodded her head, and went back into the flat.
My name is Legion; for we are many.
New Testament, Mark 5:9
After I’d cleared away the picnic stuff from the roof and lugged it all back to the flat — and after Gram had virtually forced me
to tell her how it had all gone with Lucy — I went to my room and lay down in the dark and tried not to think about anything. I didn’t want to think at all — I just wanted to feel what I was feeling . . . and nothing else. I just wanted to lie there with Lucy.
The memory of her sunset eyes.
Her lips.
Her smile.
Her face.
Her kiss . . .
It was all I’d ever wanted. All I’d ever needed.
I knew that now.
Nothing else mattered. Revenge, punishment, retribution . . . none of it mattered. My iPowers, my abilities, my knowing . . . none of it was me. It was iBoy. And I wasn’t iBoy — I was Tom Harvey, a perfectly normal sixteen-year-old kid, with no major problems, no secrets, no terrors . . . no story to tell. Just a kid, that’s all. With hopes and dreams . . .
And a girl to think about . . .
iBoy could never dream.
He could never make a wish come true.
But Tom Harvey could.
iBoy had to go.
It was the only way I could get back to being Tom Harvey again, and being Tom Harvey was the only way I was ever going to be with Lucy. And that was my dream, and I needed it more than anything else.
Tomorrow, I decided.
I’d do it tomorrow.
First thing in the morning, I’d tell Gram everything — what had happened to me, what I could do, what I’d done, what I knew — and then, with her help, I’d tell everyone else who needed to know. The police, Dr. Kirby, Lucy . . .
It wasn’t going to be easy, of course. The police were going to want to interview me about all the stuff I’d done, the damage I’d caused, the people I’d hurt, and how I’d hurt them . . . and I was probably going to be arrested and charged . . . if, that is, they actually believed me. Which was by no means guaranteed. But once I’d explained everything to Dr. Kirby, and maybe proved to him and the police what I could do with my iBrain . . . maybe then Dr. Kirby could start working out how to get inside my head and get rid of whatever it was I needed to get rid of in order to get me back to normal again . . .
Maybe.
And Lucy . . . ?
God, what was she going to think? I mean, even if she did already have a sneaking suspicion that I might have some connection with iBoy — and, after tonight, I was pretty sure that she suspected something — how was she going to react when she found out that it really was me who’d done all those things? And, even worse, that it was me she’d been talking to on Facebook . . . me, pretending to be someone else. Lying to her. Betraying her trust. Using her . . .
