iBoy (11 page)

Some of them had their faces covered, so I couldn’t make out all of them from the video, but I recognized most of them. Jayden Carroll was there, and a couple of brothers from Addington called Big and Little Jones. There were a few youngish kids — no more than twelve or thirteen years old — who I didn’t know, but I’d seen them around. And Davey Carr was there, too. It was Davey who’d taken the iPhone out of Ben’s pocket and thrown it out the window. He was laughing when he did it.

I wanted to delete the video, to erase it from my head. I didn’t want it to be there anymore . . . I didn’t want it to
exist
.

But I couldn’t delete it.

Not yet.

I might need it.

Inside my head, I reached out in anger to Carl Patrick’s mobile and instantly sent a text from his phone to his girlfriend’s, Nadia Moore.
leona
, I wrote,
gotta cu agin soon. ur SO xxxx hot!! trkxxxxx

It was a pathetic thing to do, I knew that. It was petty and stupid and utterly pointless, and it didn’t make me feel the slightest bit better. But what the hell? It didn’t make me feel any worse either.

At 03:41:29 Lucy logged on to her Facebook profile, went to her notes, and started writing. As far as I could tell, it was the first time she’d ever written anything in her notes. I knew that I shouldn’t be spying on her, and I did feel kind of sneaky and ashamed of myself for doing it, but however much guilt I felt, my desire to know how she felt, to know what she was thinking, was that much stronger.

She didn’t write very much.

i don’t know why i’m writing this
,
she began
, cos i know nobody’s ever gonna read it, but i think i just need to write down what i’m feeling. i need to tell someone even if it’s only me. i feel dead. i hurt. nothing’s ever going to be good again. nothing means anything anymore. all the good things are gone.

T was good and it was really nice to see him, he made me feel not so dead for a while, but tonite in the dark it all comes back and i can’t see any light anywhere. there’s nothing to feel. i want to hurt them, kill them. i hate them. i want them to die, to suffer. but what good would it do? they’ll always have done it and i can’t make that go away.

I waited for a while to see if she wrote any more, but after about fifteen minutes or so, she logged off Facebook and shut down her laptop. I waited some more, thinking about what I could do, what I should do, what I wanted to do . . . and then, at 03:57:33, I closed my eyes, reentered my cyber-head, and created a Facebook page for myself. It was almost as blank as Lucy’s page — i.e., no pictures, no information, etc. — but I did include two favorite films,
Spider-Man
and
Spider-Man 2
, because me and Lucy had watched them together once, and under the Music section I put Fall Out Boy and Pennywise, because I knew that Lucy really liked them.

When it came to choosing a name for myself, I thought about it for quite a long time, and eventually — bearing in mind the name that Lucy used on her Facebook profile (aGirl), and the fact that I was, whether I liked it or not, part iPhone and part boy — I settled on the name that one of the Crows had called me earlier that day.

I called myself iBoy.

Lucy’s page was on the “recommended” privacy setting, which under normal circumstances meant that you could see her posts if you were looking, but only her friends could comment (if she’d had any friends). And that meant that if I wanted her to add iBoy as a friend, I’d have to send her a request, wait until she logged on again, hope that she wanted to add me . . . and I really didn’t want to do all that. And, besides, these
weren’t
normal circumstances . . . and I was iBoy, after all. All I had to do was
think
about adding myself to her friends,
think
about customizing the comment connection between us, making it totally private, totally instant, and totally restricted to aGirl and iBoy, and then
think
about sending her a message . . . and it was done.

hello aGirl
, I wrote/thought/sent,
i hope you don’t mind me sending you this message, but i saw your note and i know that you didn’t really mean anyone to read it, but i just wanted to let you know that if you ever feel like talking to someone, you could always talk to me. i know you don’t know me, and i could be anyone, but for what it’s worth i’m not anyone you shouldn’t talk to. i’m not anything really, just a 16-year-old boy who doesn’t understand what’s going on.

anyway, if you want to talk to me that’d be great. but if not, just don’t reply or tell me to go away, and i promise you’ll never hear from me again.

iBoy

At 04:17:01 I learned that my video function was on all the time, filming everything that I saw, and that all I had to do to play anything back was remember it, and then play it.

And between 04:48:22 and 06:51:16 I learned that it’s really hard to get to sleep when you know everything there is to know, and that superpowers — no matter
how
powerful they are — are no help at all when you’re crying on your own in the darkness.

Few things are simple in Gangland. Your day-to-day activities, your role, your future, the people with whom you work, the people with whom you fight — all are uncertain, transient. But, paradoxically, most gang members have a clearly defined perception of how the drug market is structured. The best way to understand the way that market works is to imagine the process by which fruit is sold in a supermarket. In this case the producers operate in Jamaica and South America. The top gang members to whom they sell, the Elders and Faces, are the supermarket’s head office. Below them are the Youngers: the branch managers. And working the supermarket’s tills and on the shop floor are the Shotters.

John Heale

One Blood
(2008)

I slept for precisely forty-one minutes and two seconds that night (or rather that morning), and it would have been really nice to stay in bed the next day and not do anything. But I was too tired to sleep by then. And, besides, I knew that if I stayed in bed, all I’d do was carry on thinking about things, and I’d just about had enough of thinking for now.

I needed to
do
something.

I went into the bathroom, turned on the shower, and then — standing naked in front of the mirror — I switched on my iSkin and watched as my whole body began glowing and shifting. It was an amazing sensation. The outline of my body — the defining
shape
of it — became blurred and indistinct, merging into the background, like some kind of weird super/cyber-chameleon, and when I moved, the movements left fleeting trails in the air, making everything seem even blurrier. I stood there for a minute or two, staring at myself, and then — when I couldn’t bear the weirdness anymore — I switched it all off and got into the shower.

Twenty minutes later, as I was rummaging around in the sitting room, looking for my shoes and my bag and stuff, Gram shuffled in, still wearing her dressing gown and slippers. From the bags under her eyes and the way that she couldn’t stop yawning, I guessed that she hadn’t slept much either.

“Morning, Tommy,” she mumbled, stifling another yawn. “What time is it?”

“About eight,” I told her. “Have you seen my bag anywhere?”

“What bag?” She rubbed her eyes and looked at me. “What are you doing?”

“My schoolbag,” I said. “I can’t find it anywhere.”

“School?” she said, starting to wake up now. “What are you talking about? You’re not going to school.”

“Why not?”

“Oh, come
on
, Tommy . . . you’ve only just got back from the hospital, for God’s sake. You were in a coma for seventeen days,
and
you had major surgery. Or have you forgotten all that?”

I smiled at her. “Forgotten all what?”

She shook her head. “It’s not funny . . . you need to rest. The only reason Dr. Kirby let you come home was because I promised him that I’d make sure you got plenty of rest.” She looked at me. “You’ve got to take it easy for a while, love.”

“Yeah . . . but I’m fine, Gram. Really —”

“I know you are. And I mean to make sure that you stay that way.”

“But I was only going to school to pick up some textbooks and stuff,” I said. “I wasn’t going to stay there all day or anything.”

“Well . . . even so,” she said, hesitating slightly. “I really don’t think you should be out and about yet.”

It
was
only a slight hesitation, but it was enough to let me know that I was on the right track.

“I’ll only be about half an hour,” I told her. “I promise. Ten minutes there, ten minutes to get the books, ten minutes back.”

Gram shook her head. “I don’t know, Tommy . . . why do you need the books anyway? I mean, how come you’re so keen on
learning
all of a sudden?”

“Maybe it was the brain surgery,” I said, smiling at her. “Maybe it’s turned me into a budding genius.”

A faint smile flickered on her face. “It’d take more than major brain surgery to turn
you
into a genius.”

I pulled an idiot face.

She laughed.

I said, “So, can I go, then? I promise I won’t be long.”

She shook her head again, and sighed. “You exploit my better nature, Tom Harvey. You know that, don’t you?”

“Who me?”

“You’re evil, you are.”

“Thanks, Gram,” I said.

She sighed again. “Your bag’s in the kitchen.”

When I got out of the lift on the ground floor, the postman was just coming in through the main doors. I held the elevator doors open for him.

“Thanks, mate,” he said, getting into the lift. He looked at me. “Harvey, isn’t it?”

“Yeah . . .”

He rummaged through his bag and passed me a couple of letters. “Here you go.”

I looked at the envelopes. They were addressed to Gram — Ms. Connie Harvey.

“They’re not for me,” I started to say, passing them back to the postman. “They’re for my —”

But the lift doors were already closing.

“Cheers, mate,” the postman said.

It’s only a ten-minute walk to school, but it was cold and rainy that morning, with an icy wind blowing around the streets, so I headed for the bus stop opposite the tower and hoped that I wouldn’t have to wait too long. And I was lucky. A bus was pulling up just as I got there. I got on, showed the driver my pass, and shuffled up to the back.

The bus moved off.

It was 08:58:11 now, a bit late for going to school, so the bus was pretty empty, and I had the backseat all to myself.

I looked at the two letters the postman had given me.

If, like Gram and me, you don’t have much money, and you’re used to getting bills and final reminders, you soon get to know what they look like. And I knew straightaway that both of these letters were final demands.

I opened them up. It was no big deal, privacy-wise. I mean, I don’t open any of Gram’s personal letters, but she’s perfectly OK with me opening anything else that’s addressed to her. As she often says, most of it’s just rubbish anyway. But these letters weren’t rubbish. And they weren’t final demands either — they were
final
final demands. One of them was from the council, informing Gram that she was three months behind on the rent; the other was a summons to appear at the Magistrates’ Court to explain why she hadn’t paid her council tax.

The bus juddered to a stop. We were stuck in traffic, and we’d only moved about fifty feet from the bus stop. The traffic was jammed up all the way along Crow Lane, and I knew it would have been a lot quicker to get off and walk, but it was cold and wet out there, and warm in here . . . and it didn’t matter if I was late for school anyway. No one was expecting me.

I looked through the window for a moment, gazing out at the industrial wasteground that stretches between Crow Lane and the High Street. It was the same as ever: acres of cracked concrete, piles of gravel, the burned-out carcasses of stolen cars and abandoned dumpsters . . .

A dull gray desert under a dull gray sky.

The bus got moving again, and I closed my eyes and thought about Gram’s money problems, letting my iBrain do its stuff.

Gram didn’t have an online bank account, but that didn’t matter. My digitized neurons just hacked into her bank and accessed her account details, and I quickly found out that she was £6,432.77 overdrawn, her cash card had been canceled, and that she was no longer allowed to write checks for anything. I wondered how she’d been managing for the last few months. Credit cards, maybe? I hacked into her various credit card accounts and — yes — they were all maxed out. I checked the statements, which confirmed that all she’d been using the credit cards for was day-to-day living — cash withdrawals, food shopping, stuff like that — and when I went back to check her bank account again, I realized that the reason she was overdrawn was not that she’d been spending too much, she’d simply not been getting enough money in. She just wasn’t earning enough for us to live on.