by Kevin Brooks
He shook his head. “It’s just the way it is, OK?”
“No,” I said, “it’s not OK.”
“Yeah, well . . .”
I looked at him, trying to see the old Davey, the Davey who used to be my friend. “Why didn’t you try to stop them?” I asked quietly. “Why didn’t you at least try . . . ?”
“Don’t be stupid,” he said. “They would have beaten me up, wouldn’t they? Same as they beat up Ben . . . worse, probably. When they tell you to do something, you fucking do it.”
“They told you to be there?”
He shrugged. “I was with them, wasn’t I? You’re either with them or you’re not. You don’t get to pick and choose.” He puffed on his cigarette and looked at me. “It’s a different world, Tom. Once you’re part of it, there’s nothing else. You’ve just got to live it.” He lowered his eyes. “I’m sorry . . . I shouldn’t have thrown the phone at you.”
I stared at him in disbelief. “You what?”
“I never thought it’d actually hit you —”
“I don’t care about the fucking phone,” I spat. “Shit . . .”
He looked at me, grinning. “You’ve got to admit, though — it was a pretty good shot.”
I was very close to hitting him then. I really wanted to smack him in the head and wipe that stupid look from his face. Not because he was grinning, not even because he’d momentarily lulled me into almost feeling sorry for him . . . but simply because of his complete lack of remorse for what had been done to Lucy. I mean, how could he even think about apologizing to me without feeling sorry for Lucy?
It was totally unbelievable.
And I knew then that it was a waste of time trying to reason with him, or trying to appeal to his better side, because he didn’t have a better side anymore. I just had to treat him as nothing. I had to ignore my disgust, bury my anger, and just use him to get what I wanted.
I looked at him, letting him see the coldness in my eyes. “Whose idea was it?”
“What?”
“To beat up Ben — who was behind it?”
He shook his head. “I’m not telling you anything. I can’t —”
“OK,” I said, taking my mobile out of my pocket. “I’m going to ask you again, and if I don’t get the answer I want, I’m sending the video to the police. And to your mum. And then I’m going to start shooting my mouth off, and pretty soon everyone’s going to know that you’ve been talking to me, and that I’ve been talking to the police —”
“You wouldn’t —”
I pressed a few buttons, pretending to select the video, then I keyed in a number (it was actually my own number), and said to him, “Last chance. Whose idea was it?”
“I can’t —”
“All right,” I shrugged, turning my attention to the phone. I moved my thumb, as if I was about to hit the send button.
“No!” Davey shouted. “No . . . don’t, please . . .”
I paused, without moving my thumb, and looked at him. “Whose idea?”
“Look,” he sighed. “It doesn’t work like that, OK?”
I moved my thumb again.
“It’s the truth, Tom,” he said quickly. “Honestly . . . it’s just . . . I mean, it’s not like there’s anyone in charge or anything. It’s not like that.” He shook his head. “All this stuff you see on TV about gangs, fucking Ross Kemp, you know . . . it’s all a load of shit. It’s just not like that. There aren’t any leaders or rules or anything . . . it’s just a bunch of kids, hanging around. We just do stuff, you know?”
“All right,” I said. “But one of you must have decided to beat up Ben. I mean, there must be some kind of hierarchy.”
“Higher what?”
“You know what I mean. Like with you and the two kids earlier on — they’re Crows, aren’t they?”
“Little Crows, yeah.”
“And they do what you tell them?”
“Yeah.”
“And there must be other Crows who tell you what to do, and you do it.”
“Well, yeah . . . I suppose.”
“Right. So who was it? I mean, you said just now that ‘when they tell you to do something, you fucking do it.’ So who told you and the rest of them to beat up Ben?”
Davey hesitated, scared to name names.
I looked at him. “Was it O’Neil? Firman? Adebajo?”
He said nothing.
“I’ve got the video, Davey,” I reminded him.
“Shit,” he sighed, shaking his head. “If they find out I talked to you . . . I’m fucked.”
“Yeah, well,” I told him, “at least there’s a chance that they won’t find out. But if you don’t talk to me, you’re definitely fucked.”
He thought about that for a moment, then sighed again, and reluctantly started talking. “It’s Yoyo and Cutz mostly, they’re the ones who kind of . . . I don’t know . . . get stuff going.”
“That’s O’Neil and Adebajo?”
“Yeah . . . they’ve both got older brothers, like Elders, you know . . . ?”
“Elders?”
“The older kids,” he explained. “The big guys . . . you know? The buyers . . .”
“Buyers?”
“Yeah.”
“You mean they’re drug dealers?”
Davey shrugged. “Kind of . . . I mean, the younger kids do most of the actual street dealing. The Elders don’t go near it. I mean, they never even see the gear. They just take care of the business side, you know . . . the money stuff.”
“Right. So what’s all that got to do with O’Neil and Adebajo beating up Ben and raping Lucy?”
Davey shrugged again. “Nothing, really . . . I mean, it’s just all about respect and stuff. Power. You know . . . ?”
“No,” I said coldly. “I don’t know.”
“You can’t show any weakness, all right? If you want to be something, be respected, you can’t take any shit.” He looked at me. “It’s simple, really. Ben got beaten up because he said no to Yoyo. Yoyo told him he had to stab this guy, and Ben refused. If Yoyo hadn’t beaten him up, Yo would have looked weak. And everyone would have known it, and that would have blown Yo’s chance to be like his brother.”
“And what about Lucy?” I said quietly. “What was the simple reasoning behind ruining her life?”
Davey lowered his eyes. “It’s just . . . it’s what they do, Tom. I don’t know . . . I suppose part of it was to get at Ben, to hurt him, you know? But mostly . . . well, it’s like a power thing. They do it because they can . . . because they know they’ll get away with it.” He shrugged again. “It’s just what they do.”
“And what about you?” I said coldly. “Did you want to do it, too?”
He looked at me. “I tried to help her . . . afterward, I mean. I helped her pick up her clothes . . .”
“You helped her pick up her clothes?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, that was incredibly thoughtful of you, Davey. I’m sure Lucy really appreciated it. Did she remember to thank you before you left?”
“Fuck off, Tom,” he said quietly. “You weren’t there. You don’t know how it was.”
I didn’t say anything for a moment or two. I was sick of talking to Davey now. Sick of all this stuff about power and respect and weakness and shit. It was nothing to do with anything.
I breathed in, trying to forget how I felt, and I said to Davey, “What are their names? The brothers . . . ?”
“What?”
“O’Neil and Adebajo. What are their brothers called?”
“Why do you want to know?”
I just stared at him.
He hesitated for a few moments, instinctively wary of telling me, but almost immediately he realized that it was too late for keeping his mouth shut now. “Troy O’Neil and Jermaine Adebajo,” he said.
“Right. And who do they answer to?”
“What?”
“The brothers and the rest of them. The older guys . . . the Elders or whatever you c
all them. Who tells them what to do?”
Davey’s face suddenly paled. “No . . .” he muttered. “I mean, I don’t know . . .”
“Just tell me,” I sighed. “One more name, and then I’m gone.”
“No, I can’t . . . not him.”
“Who?”
“He’ll find out. He always does.”
I held out my mobile again. “It’s up to you, Davey. Give me the name, or I send the video.”
He was looking really worried now — blinking his eyes, nervously licking his lips — and I could tell that he was genuinely considering his options. Which made me think that whoever this guy was, the one that Davey was so frightened of, he had to be seriously scary.
Eventually, though, Davey looked me in the eye and said, “Some people call him the Devil.”
“Yeah? Why’s that? Has he got horns or something?”
Davey shook his head. “It’s not funny . . . I mean, this is a really bad guy. Yoyo and the rest are nothing compared to him. I mean, if you think what happened to Lucy and Ben was bad —”
“Davey,” I said wearily, “just tell me his fucking name.”
“Ellman,” he said quietly. “His name’s Howard Ellman.”
Moral relativism is the view that ethical standards, morality, and positions of right or wrong are culturally based and therefore subject to a person’s individual choice. We can all decide what is right for ourselves. You decide what’s right for you, and I’ll decide what’s right for me. There are no absolute rights and wrongs.
It was still raining when I left the abandoned gym, so there weren’t many people around, but as I headed back round the rear of the main building toward the workmen’s gate, I saw something going on over by the science block. Two boys and two girls were arguing about something, shouting and swearing, pushing each other around. I recognized three of them — Jayden Carroll, Carl Patrick, and Nadia Moore — and I guessed the other girl was Leona, Jayden’s girlfriend. From the way Nadia kept waving her mobile around, shoving it into Leona’s face, I assumed the argument was about the text I’d sent last night — the one that had made Nadia think that Carl had been seeing Leona.
I hung back behind a pillar and watched as the argument intensified. The shouting and swearing got louder, the pushing and shoving got nastier, and then I saw Nadia grab Leona by the shoulder and smack her across the face with her mobile. After that, everything really kicked off. Jayden grabbed hold of Nadia and shoved her into a wall, Nadia retaliated, scratching her nails down Jayden’s face . . . and then, as Jayden yelled out in pain and swung his fist at Nadia, I suddenly realized that Carl Patrick had a knife in his hand. I saw him lunge at Jayden and grab his shoulder with one hand, and then he just kind of pumped his other arm a few times, and Jayden staggered backward, clutching at his stomach, before falling to his knees in a puddle and slumping slowly to the ground . . .
And that was it.
Everything stopped then.
Carl Patrick and the two girls didn’t really do anything, they just kind of stood around Jayden, looking down at him, looking at each other . . . I even saw Patrick shrug, as if to say — don’t blame me, it was his fault . . .
Which, of course, it wasn’t.
It was my fault.
I dialed emergency services in my head, anonymously called for an ambulance, then I walked back round the other side of the main building and went out through the work- men’s gate.
I knew that it wasn’t really my fault. I might have unwittingly caused it by sending the text to Nadia, but that’s all I’d done. I hadn’t stuck the knife in Jayden’s gut, had I? I couldn’t blame myself for that . . .
Could I?
I played it all back in my head, then anonymously sent the video to DS Johnson’s mobile phone, with a text message identifying Carl Patrick as the one with the knife. And then, as I started walking back toward Crow Town, I tried to forget it all. I tried telling myself that it was no big deal, that people get stabbed around here all the time . . . that you can’t do anything about it, it’s just how it is . . .
But the words in my head sounded pretty empty. They were the kinds of words that Davey would use — it’s just the way it is, it’s just what they do — words that mean nothing. And maybe, in a funny kind of way, that’s why he used them. Meaningless words for meaningless actions.
I stopped thinking about it then.
Lucy was logging on to her Facebook page.
While I waited for her to read my message (iBoy’s message), I dialed Gram’s number in my head. As it rang, I suddenly realized that it’d look a bit strange if I was walking along talking to Gram without either a mobile or one of those stupid hands-free/Bluetoothy things stuck in my ear, so I quickly pulled out my mobile and held it to my ear.
“Tommy?” Gram answered. “Where are you? You’re late.”
“Yeah, sorry, Gram,” I said. “I bumped into Mr. Smith, you know, my English teacher . . . ? He just started talking to me about stuff, and I couldn’t get away. I’m on my way back now.”
“You’d better be. Where are you?”
“Just passing the garage. I’ll be five minutes.”
“Right . . . well, don’t hang around.”
“I’ll see you in five, Gram.”
Lucy had replied to my Facebook message. iBoy, she’d written, i can’t talk to you. please don’t write again.
And I guessed that was fair enough.
Just before I got to Crow Town, I took a quick detour down Mill Lane, a little back street that leads down to an old part of the industrial park that isn’t used anymore. There’s not a lot down there — abandoned warehouses and factories, vast stretches of wasteground — but it’s the only place I know around here where you can’t get a signal on your mobile, and I wanted to check what happened to the iStuff in my head when there wasn’t any mobile reception.
It’s not a very nice place, the old industrial park. It’s sort of gray and flat and lifeless, and it always has this weird kind of dull silence to it . . . in fact, even when it’s not actually silent, the whole place seems to be muffled with a cold and empty hush. Although it’s not used anymore, there’s always a lot of stuff going on down there, especially at night. A lot of the local kids hang around in the old warehouses and factory buildings, just doing what they do — taking drugs, having sex, partying, fighting — and sometimes you hear about more serious stuff going on — gang stuff, shootings, stabbings, dead bodies.
So, no, it’s not the nicest place in the world, and I didn’t like being there, but I carried on walking — with my iBrain turned on — until I reached a point where the signal receptor in my head faded to zero, and then I stopped.
No signal.
No reception.
No iBoy.
I looked around. There was a block of old factory buildings behind me, towering concrete structures with even taller brick chimneys, and on either side of the road there was nothing but vast stretches of wasteground. About a hundred feet up ahead, I could see a disused complex of industrial units and warehouses.
I tried reaching out inside my head, searching for a signal, a network, anything . . . but there was nothing there.
My iHead was empty.
My iSkin non-functional.
The electric was off.
I walked back the way I’d come, and after about thirty feet or so, everything switched back on again.
I stopped and looked around. There was no one in sight. No cars, no bikes, no nothing. I stepped off the pavement and crossed over the wasteground to a blackened patch of earth — the remains of an old bonfire. I stooped down and picked out some charred tin cans from the ashes, then I went over and placed them on a huge slab of reinforced concrete that was lying nearby.
I looked around again, making sure that I was still alone, and then — for the next ten minutes or so — I experimented with my zapping capabilities. I started off by simply touching one of the cans and giving it an electric shock, zapping it right off the sl
ab, and then I tried controlling the power — increasing it, decreasing it, moving away from the cans to see if I could knock them off from a distance . . .
By the time I had to stop, when I saw a car cruising slowly down the road toward me, I’d learned that I could control the power, although as yet my degree of control wasn’t too great, and that my maximum range for zapping at a distance was no more than three feet at most.
I crossed back over to the pavement just as the approaching car was pulling up at the side of the road. The front window wound down and a seedy-looking guy leaned out and said, “Hey, kid, is this Crow Lane?”
I shook my head and pointed toward the tower blocks. “It’s back there.”
He glanced at where I was pointing, then turned back to me. “Baldwin House?”
“Second tower along.”
He nodded but didn’t say anything. He just wound up the window, turned the car round, and drove off.
“You’re welcome,” I muttered, watching him go.
Gram was working when I got home — tap-tap-tapping away — and after we’d said hello, and she’d pretended to be a bit annoyed with me for staying out longer than I’d promised, I left her to her writing and went into my room.
I didn’t know what I was going to do with all the information I’d got about O’Neil and Adebajo and everything else — the attack on Lucy and Ben, the gang stuff, the Elders, Howard Ellman . . . I didn’t even know why I’d gone looking for it all in the first place. But as I sat at my window, looking down at the rainy-day dullness of Crow Town below, I knew in my heart that I only had two options: I could either do nothing, just forget about everything and try to get on with my life; or I could try my best to do something.
And maybe if I’d still been my old self — the perfectly normal, non-iPhoned Tom Harvey — maybe I might have accepted that there was nothing I could do, because the only thing the normal Tom Harvey could have done was pass on the information he’d collected to the police, and it wouldn’t have mattered how carefully or cleverly he did it, the end result would have been the same: Not just the Crows, but most of Crow Town, would have turned against Lucy and her family and made their lives even more hellish than they already were.