iBoy

by Kevin Brooks

  I nodded. “My mum died when I was a baby. She was run over by a car.”

  “Yes . . . your grandmother told me.” He looked at me. “She said that the driver didn’t stop . . .”

  “That’s right.”

  “And the police never found out who it was?”

  “No.”

  He shook his head sadly. “And your father . . . ?”

  I shrugged. “I never knew him. He was just some guy my mum slept with one night.”

  “So your gran’s been looking after you since you were a baby?”

  “Yeah, my mum had to go back to work straight after she had me, so Gram was looking after me most of the time anyway. After Mum died, Gram just carried on bringing me up.”

  Dr. Kirby smiled. “You call her Gram?”

  “Yeah,” I said, slightly embarrassed. “I don’t know why . . . it’s just what I call her. Always have.”

  He nodded again. “She’s a very determined and resolute woman.”

  “I know.”

  “She hasn’t left your side for the last seventeen days. She’s been here day and night, talking to you, watching you . . . encouraging you to wake up.”

  I just nodded my head. I was afraid that if I said anything, I might start crying.

  Dr. Kirby smiled. “She must mean a lot to you.”

  “She means everything to me.”

  He smiled again, stood up, and put his hand on my shoulder. “Right then, Tom . . . well, I’ve given your gran a direct phone number in case you need to contact us urgently when you’re at home. So, as I said, any problems, just tell your gran or call us yourself. Have you got a mobile phone?”

  I tapped the side of my head.

  He grinned.

  “Yeah,” I told him. “I’ve got a mobile phone.”

  Later on, in the hospital toilets, I took a good long look at myself in the mirror for the first time. I didn’t look very much like myself anymore. For a start, I’d lost a fair bit of weight, and although I’d always been pretty skinny, my face now had a strangely haunted, almost skeletal look to it. My eyes had sunk into their sockets, and my skin was dull and kind of plasticky-looking, tinged with a yellowish-gray shadow. My once-longish dirty blond hair had gone, shaved off for the operation, and in its place I had an embarrassingly soft and babyish No. 1 crop. I looked like Skeletor with a piece of blond felt on his head.

  For some reason, the skin surrounding the wound on my head was still completely bald, which made me look even weirder. The wound itself — a raggedy black track of twenty-five stitches — ran diagonally from just above my right ear toward the right-hand side of my forehead, about four inches above my right eye.

  I leaned closer to the mirror, gently touching the wound with my fingertip . . . and immediately drew it back, cursing, as a slight electric shock zipped through my finger. It wasn’t much — a bit like one of those static electricity shocks you get sometimes when you touch the door of a car — but it really took me by surprise. It was just so unexpected, I suppose.

  Unusual.

  I looked at my fingertip, then gazed at my head wound in the mirror. Just for a moment, I thought I saw something . . . a faint shimmering in the skin around the wound, like . . . I don’t know. Like nothing I’d ever seen before. A shimmer of something unknowable.

  I leaned in closer to the mirror and looked again.

  There wasn’t anything there anymore.

  No shimmer.

  I was tired, that’s all it was.

  Yeah? I asked myself. And what about the billion non-bees, and that definition of pterion that inexplicably popped into your head earlier on? Was that just tiredness, too?

  I didn’t answer myself.

  I was too tired.

  I left the toilets, went back to my room, and got into bed.

  The terms “Internet” and “World Wide Web” are often used without any distinction. They are, however, not the same thing. The Internet is a global data communications system, an infrastructure of interconnected computer networks, linked by copper wires, fiber-optic cables, wireless connections, and so on. In contrast, the World Wide Web — a collection of interconnected documents and other resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs — is one of the services communicated via the Internet.

  Now that I was no longer in a coma, and seemingly getting back to normal, Gram had taken the opportunity to go home for a few hours so she could change her clothes and take a shower and sort out whatever needed sorting out. As Dr. Kirby had said, she’d been sitting with me almost nonstop for the last seventeen days, and now, at last, she could start to relax a little.

  So, for the first time since I’d woken up, I was on my own in the hospital room. And now that I was alone, I could finally get round to thinking about things.

  Of course, the main thing on my mind was what Dr. Kirby had called my “accident.”

  I hadn’t forgotten it.

  Whatever else the head injury had done to me, it hadn’t caused any short- or long-term memory loss. I knew who I was, I knew what had happened to me . . . and I knew that it wasn’t an accident.

  I could remember quite clearly the distant barked shout from above — “Hey, HARVEY!” — and I could remember thinking for a moment that it was Ben, Lucy’s brother, shouting down at me from their flat on the thirtieth floor, and I could remember looking up and seeing the iPhone plummeting down toward me . . .

  But what I couldn’t remember very clearly — and what I was trying to remember now — was the figure I’d seen briefly in the window on the thirtieth floor, the figure who’d thrown the phone . . . thrown it at me.

  It wasn’t an accident.

  Hey, HARVEY!

  It wasn’t Ben’s voice, I was pretty sure of that.

  Hey, HARVEY!

  And it definitely wasn’t an accident.

  I closed my eyes and searched my memory, trying to bring the figure into focus, trying to see his face . . . but I couldn’t do it. He was too far away. And I got the feeling that he was wearing a hood anyway, a black hooded top. Not that that meant anything. All the kids in Crow Town wear black hooded tops . . . at least, all the gang kids do — black hooded tops, black track pants. It’s not like it’s a uniform or anything, it’s just that if they all wear the same kind of clothes it makes it harder for them to be identified individually.

  With my eyes still closed, and with a drifty kind of sleep-iness beginning to take hold of me, I gave up trying to work out who the figure at the window was and turned my attention to the window he was leaning from. It was definitely on the thirtieth floor. Compton House has thirty floors, so the thirtieth is the top floor, and the picture in my mind clearly showed that the window was on the top floor.

  The floor where Lucy lived . . .

  I pictured her flat, the window of her flat, and I started trying to work out the position of the window in my mind in relation to Lucy’s window . . . and then I started trying to remember who else lived on the thirtieth floor, and where they lived in relation to Lucy . . .

  But my head was getting heavier and heavier now, sleepier and sleepier . . .

  It was too hard to concentrate.

  Too hard to see . . .

  Too hard to think.

  I fell asleep.

  It’s not a dream, I know it’s not a dream . . . it’s something real . . . something happening inside me. Inside my head. Tingling, racing . . . reaching out in electric silence . . . reaching out at the speed of light into an infinite invisibility of absolutely everything . . . everything . . . everything. I see it all, I hear it all, I know it all — pictures and words and voices and numbers and digits and symbols and zeroes and ones and zeroes and ones and letters and dates and places and times and sounds and faces and music and books and films and worlds and wars and terrible terrible things and everything everything everything all at once . . .

  I know it.

  I know it all.

  I know where it is.

  I am connected.

 
Wires, waves, networks, webs . . . a billion billion humming filaments, singing inside my head.

  I know it all.

  I don’t know how I know it, I don’t know where it is, I don’t know how it works. It’s just there, inside me, doing what it does . . . showing me answers to questions I’m not even aware of asking — your brain is made up of 100 billion nerve cells . . . each cell is connected to around 10,000 others . . . the total number of connections is about 1,000 trillion — and letting me hear voices I don’t understand — Yeah, yeah, I know . . . but Harvey didn’t see nothing — and it knows what I’m thinking about, this presence inside my head . . . it knows my concerns, my thoughts, my feelings, and it soaks them up and takes them to a place that shows me what I’m scared of, what I unconsciously know, but don’t want to face up to. It shows me the front page of the Southwark Gazette, dated 6 March, sixteen days ago:

  TEEN IN RAPE ORDEAL

  A 15-year-old girl has been raped by a gang of youths at the Crow Lane Estate.

  The teenager was attacked in her home on Friday afternoon between 3:45 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. The girl’s 16-year-old brother was seriously injured during the assault and another 16-year-old boy suffered a severe head injury when hit by an object thrown from a high-rise window.

  Detectives believe at least six young men took part in the attack, and are urging anybody with information on the “heinous assault” to come forward.

  They have described the suspects as local youths, possibly with gang connections, aged between 13 and 19 years.

  I woke up suddenly, covered in sweat, with my heart pounding hard and a sleep-strangled scream in my throat.

  “Lucy!”

  It came out as a petrified whisper.

  “It’s all right, Tommy,” I heard someone say. “It’s all right . . .”

  It took me a moment to recognize the voice, but then I heard it again — “It was just a dream, Tommy . . . you’re OK now” — and I knew it was Gram. She was sitting on the bed beside me, holding my hand.

  I stared at her, breathing hard. “Lucy . . .” I whispered. “Is she all right? Is she —?”

  “She’s fine,” Gram said, wiping my brow with a tissue. “She’s . . . well, no, she’s not fine, but she’s safe. She’s at home with her mum.” Gram glanced over her shoulder, and I realized that she wasn’t alone. There were two men in suits sitting on chairs behind her.

  “Who are they?” I asked Gram.

  She turned back to me. “Police . . . they’re investigating the attack on Lucy and Ben. I told them you didn’t know anything about it —”

  “Perhaps we could ask Tom himself,” one of the policemen said, getting to his feet. He was tall, fair-haired, with tobacco-stained teeth and bad skin. “Hi, Tom,” he said, smiling at me. “I’m DS Johnson, and this . . .” He indicated the other man. “This is my colleague, DC Webster.”

  Webster nodded at me.

  The wound on my head tingled, reminding me of the dream that wasn’t a dream, the crazy stuff in my head — the electric silence . . . an infinite invisibility of absolutely everything . . . spoken words, words in a newspaper — A 15-year-old girl has been raped by a gang of youths on the Crow Lane Estate . . .

  “Who did it?” I asked DS Johnson.

  “Who did what, Tom?”

  “Lucy was attacked . . . Lucy Walker. She’s a friend —”

  “How do you know she was attacked?”

  “What?”

  “Did you see anything?”

  “No . . . no, I didn’t see anything. I was knocked out . . . I was lying on the ground with my head smashed open. I didn’t see anything.”

  “So how do you know what happened?”

  “I don’t know what happened.”

  “Sorry, Tom,” Johnson said, “but you just asked me who did it. You just said that Lucy was attacked . . . which seems to suggest that you do know what happened.”

  My mind was struggling now. I was confused, not sure what to say. But I still only hesitated for a second. “I saw the report in the local paper,” I said. “The Southwark Gazette.”

  “Right . . .” Johnson said doubtfully. “And when was this?”

  “Today . . . earlier on. I was in the toilets, down the corridor . . . someone had left an old copy of the paper behind.”

  Johnson nodded, looking at Webster. Webster shrugged. Johnson looked back at me. “So you’re saying that you don’t have any firsthand information about the attack, you only know what happened because you read about it in the newspaper. Is that right?”

  “Yeah . . .”

  And it was right, I realized. It was the truth. It might not have been the whole truth, but I wasn’t going to tell him that, was I? I wasn’t going to tell him that the newspaper report just appeared in my head out of nowhere.

  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.