iBoy (20 page)

O’Neil groaned.

I looked at him and saw that his eyes were beginning to open. I waited a few seconds, just enough time to let him recognize me, then I leaned forward and spoke to him.

“Howard Ellman,” I said. “Where does he live?”

“Munh?”

“Howard Ellman,” I repeated. “I want to know where he lives.”

O’Neil just looked at me for a moment, not quite sure what was happening, and then — suddenly realizing that he was tied to the chair — he started struggling. Wriggling and writhing, cursing and spitting, trying to break free . . .

I touched his knee, giving him a short sharp shock. He yelped, stopped struggling, and stared wide-eyed at me.

“Listen to me,” I said to him. “Just tell me where Ellman is, and I’ll let you go.”

“What?”

“Ellman. I just want to know where he is.”

O’Neil shook his head. “Never heard of him. Now you’d better fucking —”

I zapped him on the knee again, harder this time, and once he’d stopped screaming and shaking, I said to him, “I’m going to keep doing this until you tell me what I want to know, and each time it’s going to get worse. Do you understand?”

He glared at me, trying to show me that he wasn’t scared, but I could see the fear in his eyes. I reached out toward him again. He jerked away, rocking from side to side in the chair.

“Just tell me where he lives,” I said.

He shook his head. “I don’t know . . . nobody knows.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t
know
,” he spat. “It’s the fucking
truth
.”

I didn’t
want
to believe him, but the way he said it — the passion in his voice, the fear in his eyes — I was pretty sure that he was telling me the truth.

“What about a phone number?” I said.

O’Neil shook his head. “He doesn’t give it out.”

“So how do you get in touch with him?”

“You don’t . . . if he wants something, he gets in touch with you.”

“How?”

“He’ll send someone . . . or maybe get someone to call. One of the kids, usually.”

“What kids?”

He shrugged. “The kids, you know . . . the little fuckers who want to be Crows.” O’Neil looked at me, a bit more confident again now. “You’ll never find him, you know. Not unless he wants you to. And then you’ll wish you hadn’t.”

“Yeah?”

He grinned. “You’ve got no fucking idea what you’re dealing with. When he finds out what you’ve done tonight —”

“How’s he going to find out?”

O’Neil hesitated for a moment, then he just shook his head and shrugged again. I raised my arm and moved my hand toward his face, palm first. I let the energy flow into my skin, feeling it pulse and burn, and I could see my hand glowing with heat as I moved it ever closer to O’Neil’s face. His skin was reddening now, his forehead dripping sweat, and he was starting to panic — straining backward, arching his neck, trying to get away from the heat.

“No!” he screamed. “No! Please, don’t . . .
please
. . .”

I paused, my hand a few inches from his face. “How’s Ellman going to find out I’ve been here?”

“He won’t . . . I won’t say
nothing
,” O’Neil spluttered. “I
promise
. . . I won’t tell him —”

“Yeah, you will. I
want
you to tell him.”

I heard the siren then. Faint at first, but rapidly getting louder. I got up, went over to the window, and looked out. Beyond the burning Golf, I could see the flashing blue lights of two police cars speeding down Crow Lane. I knew that no one in Crow Town would have called them, especially about something as trivial as a car on fire, so I guessed that they were on their way to somewhere else. But, just to be on the safe side, I tuned in to the police radio frequency and simultaneously hacked into the communications system at Southwark Borough Police Station to find out what was going on. And it took me less than a second to discover that I was wrong — they
weren’t
going somewhere else, they were answering a call from a passing motorist about a burning car outside Baldwin House.

“Shit,” I muttered as the two patrol cars turned off Crow Lane and started racing down toward the square with their lights and sirens blazing.

I knew that I was probably safe enough staying where I was, that the police were probably just going to check out the Golf, make sure it was nothing more serious than just another burning car . . . then they’d probably just wait for the fire department to arrive and leave it to them. The last thing the local police would want to do at four o’clock in the morn-ing was to go round Baldwin House knocking on doors, waking people up.

So, yeah, I was
probably
safe enough staying where I was . . .

In this stinking flat.

Surrounded by drugs and guns . . .

And drug dealers . . .

Electrocuted drug dealers.

One of whom was tied to a chair.

No, I realized,
probably
wasn’t good enough. If by any chance the police
did
find me in here, I’d have a lot of explaining to do.

I had to get out.

I moved away from the window and quickly went over to a table in the middle of the room. It was piled high with clear polyethylene bags filled with what I assumed was heroin and cocaine. I picked up two bags of each and put them in my pockets.

“Hey!” O’Neil called out. “What the fuck are you doing?”

Ignoring him, I reached out and picked up a small black automatic pistol from the table and put it in my pocket with the drugs.

Car doors were slamming outside now.

Police radios were squawking.

It was time to go.

I turned to O’Neil and said, “Tell Ellman I’m coming for him.” And before he could answer, I walked out of the room, went down the hallway, opened the flat door, and left.

As I headed down the corridor toward the fire exit, I called 999 from my iBrain.

It was answered almost immediately. “Emergency. Which service?”

“There’s been a murder,” I said, pushing open the fire door. “6 Baldwin House, Crow Lane —”

“Just a moment, sir. I need to know —”

“It’s on the ground floor, 6 Baldwin House,” I repeated. “The Crow Lane Estate. Someone’s been shot.”

I ended the call.

The fire door opened out to the rear of Baldwin House — a concrete jungle of weeds and wheelie bins and broken syringes and dog shit — and from there I headed south, away from the tower, scrabbling down a shallow grass slope to a makeshift path that led me along a dip in the fields all the way back to Compton.

By the time I’d crept back into the flat and tiptoed down to my room, the police officers dealing with the burning car had been alerted to a possible fatal shooting at 6 Baldwin House, and they’d sealed off the area and were waiting for additional officers and an armed response team to arrive.

As I got undressed and climbed into bed, tired and drained, I wondered what the police would think when they finally smashed O’Neil’s door down and found that there was no dead body, no murder, just three slightly battered drug dealers, all of them tied up, and a flat full of drugs and guns.

Would the cops care that they’d been wrongly tipped off?

Did I care whether they cared or not?

I didn’t know.

I didn’t care.

I lay down in the darkness and tried to think about myself and what I’d just done — my violence, my rage, my savagery — but I couldn’t seem to find anything in me to feel anything about it. I knew that I’d done it, and I knew that there was a reason for doing it, and I knew that — despite the validity of that reason — I still ought to be feeling
some
degree of shame or remorse or guilt or something . . .

But there was nothing there.

No feelings at all.

Just me and the darkness . . .

And iBoy.

Us.

Me.

And i.

We lay there in the silence and thought about ourselves. What were we doing? And why? What were we trying to achieve? And how? What was our goal, our plan, our aim, our desire?

What was our
reason
?

The heart has reasons

that reason cannot know.

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)

http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/1893.html

It was 04:48:07.

We closed our eyes and waited for the sun to rise.

A fugue state is a dissociative memory disorder characterized by an altered state of consciousness and an interruption of, or dissociation from, fundamental aspects of an individual’s everyday life, such as personal identity and personal history. Often triggered by a traumatic life event, the fugue state is usually short-lived (hours to days), but can last months or longer. Dissociative fugue usually involves unplanned travel or wandering, and is sometimes accompanied by the establishment of a new identity.

I know what happened over the next ten days or so. I know what I did, and at the time I was perfectly aware of what I was doing. I was there. It was me. I was myself. I knew
exactly
what I was doing and why.

But now, when I try to recall those days (without the aid of my iMemories), all I can remember are bits of things that don’t seem to belong to me.

Fragments.

Snapshots.

Disconnected moments.

. . . in my room, sitting on the floor beneath the open window. Rays of afternoon sunlight are streaming in over my head, lighting up motes of dust. My eyes are closed and my iBrain is buzzing with a thousand million words. It’s listening to phone calls. Reading emails and texts. It’s scanning Crow Town’s underworld for anything it can use, anything incriminating . . . names, places, times . . . anything at all.

It’s a god, seeing everything, hearing everything.

It’s not me.

It’s an automatic police informant application: searching the airwaves, scanning the words, finding the bad guys — the thieves, the dealers, the muggers, the runners, the sol- diers, the shooters, the shotters. It finds them all and auto-matically rats them out to the cops.

All of them.

The application in my iBrain doesn’t care who they are or what they’re doing — it targets them all: eleven-year-old wannabe gangsters, delivering drugs and guns on bikes; gang kids — Crows and FGH — fighting each other just for the hell of it; and the older kids, the ones who
used
to be wannabe gangsters, the ones who
used
to be gang kids and muggers, the ones who now spend their lives doing what they’ve always wanted to do — dealing drugs, making lots of money, living the life . . . beating and killing and shooting and raping . . .

The application in my iBrain doesn’t care why they do it. It doesn’t care if they’re poor or uneducated or bored or addicted or troubled or lonely or if they simply don’t know any better. It doesn’t care if they come from dysfunctional families, if they have no one to guide them, no one to help them, no one to show them what life can really be like. Nor does it care if they’re none of these things, if they’re rich and well educated and they
do
know better.

It doesn’t give a shit.

But it doesn’t dislike them or blame them for anything either. It doesn’t make judgments. They’re just
things
to it.

It has no feelings.

It just does what it does.

And I just let it. Because I’m just doing what I feel I have to do: for Lucy, for Gram, for me . . .

For all of us.

I’m just doing it.

. . . iBoy at night, patrolling Crow Town with his iSkin on. He’s breaking up drug deals and fights. He’s burning cars and melting bikes and scaring the shit out of little Crow kids. He’s mugging the muggers, stealing their guns and their knives and machetes . . .

. . creeping into a flat in Eden. It’s 03:15:44. A drunken mother is asleep in her bedroom, her two boys sleeping in the room next door. I move through the darkness, a palely glowing ghost, and I find a rucksack in the kitchen. I take Troy O’Neil’s automatic pistol from my pocket, wipe it clean, and slip it into the rucksack.

Walking away from Eden House, I call the police.

“Flat three, fourteenth floor, Eden House,” I tell them. “Yusef Hashim. He’s got a gun. It’s in a rucksack in the kitchen.”

. . . and other flats, other nights, other sounds of sleeping. The pale ghost plants a bag of heroin here, a bag of cocaine there . . .

. . . timeless iHours spent working on the computer in my head: sending false texts and photoshopped pictures, posting videos on YouTube, spreading malicious lies in chat rooms and blogs. Lies become rumors, rumors become facts: Nathan Craig’s a grass; Big and Little Jones are terrorists; DeWayne Firman twittered that Howard Ellman is a queer . . .

. . . Sunday, 11 April, 19:47:51. Tom Harvey is sitting on a bench at the kids’ playground, thinking about Lucy. He hasn’t been to see her for nearly a week . . . and he knows that it’s iBoy’s fault. iBoy and Lucy have got into a routine of sending each other at least a couple of Facebook messages every day, and Tom keeps forgetting that
he’s
not iBoy, that
he’s
not talking to Lucy all the time, but that she doesn’t know that. So she’ll be wondering why Tom hasn’t been round to see her.

Or maybe she won’t . . . ?

It’s really confusing for Tom, flipping from iBoy to himself all the time, trying to remember who he is and what he’s supposed to be. And when he thinks about Lucy, it almost feels as if he’s cheating on her with himself . . . or maybe it’s the other way round? As if she’s cheating on him, but she doesn’t know that the other boy she’s seeing (or at least talking to on Facebook) isn’t actually another boy at all, it’s Tom.

He closes his eyes.

There’s a new Facebook message from Lucy.

hey iBoy, have you heard about all this stuff going on round the tower blocks?

what stuff?

you know, all the gang kids getting arrested and beating each other up and everything. it’s been in the local papers. all the dealers are getting busted and there’s rumors about some kind of superman going round kicking the shit out of the crows and fgh. do you know anything about that?

me? why would i know anything?

yeah, ha ha! why would you? btw ben told me nathan craig got beaten up yesterday. it was pretty bad, apparently. some of the older kids found out he narced on a deal and they beat the crap out of him.

yeah?

yeah. and the cops caught yusef hashim with a gun. and dewayne’s disappeared, no one’s seen him for days. funny. it seems like everyone who had anything to do with what happened to me is running into a lot of bad luck.

really? must be some kind of karma.

yeah, well . . . just be careful, OK?

aGirl xxx

i’m always careful. see you later.

iBoy xxx

It’s just then, after iBoy has logged out of Facebook, that Tom looks up and sees a bunch of FGH kids walking along Crow Lane. He knows they’re FGH because most of them are wearing Adidas gear, which is an FGH thing. There’s about eight or nine of them, and they’re heading south, away from the playground and down toward Fitzroy House. Most of them are around sixteen or seventeen, but there’s a few younger kids, too, and there’s also a couple of girls.

It’s the girls that draw Tom’s attention.

They’re both about thirteen or fourteen, both dressed in short skirts and skinny little tops, and they’re both trying very hard to look as if they’re enjoying themselves — shouting and laughing, messing around with the boys — but there’s something about them that doesn’t seem right to Tom. He isn’t sure what it is, but he can sense something wrong about the whole situation. The way the boys are looking at the girls, their eyes cold and empty, even when they’re smiling at them. The way the girls keep looking at each other, looking for reassurance, as if to say — this
is
just a bit of fun, isn’t it? And the way some of the boys keep looking back down the road, while the others are keeping the girls surrounded, blocking them in as they walk along . . .

It just isn’t right.

Tom gets up off the bench and starts following them.

He doesn’t recognize any of them, and he’s pretty sure that none of them know him — they’re FGH, and the FGH don’t usually mix with the kids from his end of Crow Town — so he doesn’t bother turning on his iSkin for the moment, he just follows them as Tom.

Nothing much happens for a while.

The boys and girls keep walking, and as they get closer to Fitzroy House, the girls start getting a bit more anxious. They try stopping and turning back once or twice, but the boys just grab them and pull them along. They’re all still laughing and smiling, even the girls, and Tom starts to wonder if he’s made a mistake. Maybe it
is
just a bit of fun? Maybe the girls are just playing hard to get, and the boys are just playing hard?
Or maybe
, he suddenly thinks to himself,
maybe it’s just you. Maybe you’re just a hopeless and pathetic romantic who believes in treating people with respect. I mean, you
were
brought up by a single grandmother who writes old-fashioned love stories for a living, weren’t you? And she did used to read you those love stories at bedtime . . .

Christ
, he thinks, pausing for a moment,
is that what this is all about? The whole knight in shining armor/superhero thing — putting wrongs to right, saving fair maidens, slaying evil dragons — is that what I’m trying to do?

It isn’t a comfortable thought. In fact, it’s kind of embarrassing. And for a moment or two, Tom seriously considers turning round and going home. Why not? Just forget about the two girls, they’ll be perfectly all right. Just forget about them. Forget about everything. Just turn round, go home, and spend the night with Gram watching crappy TV.

And he’s just about to do it, he’s just about to turn round and start heading back home . . .

But then he sees the van.

It’s a white Transit, and it’s speeding down Crow Lane from the north side. As it approaches the FGH boys, four of them suddenly grab the two girls and start dragging them over to the side of the road. At first, the girls just think that the boys are messing around again — just playing rough, having a laugh. So the girls screech and curse a bit, and they struggle and fight against the four boys, but they don’t do it with any real sense of urgency. They still think that it’s all just a game. But Tom knows that this isn’t a game anymore. He can tell by the sudden change in the boys’ demeanor — their mouths set tight, their movements quick and furtive, their eyes darting around, looking for witnesses . . .