iBoy (3 page)

As he said the word
pterion
, something flashed through my head — a series of symbols, letters, and numbers (non-symbols, non-letters, non-numbers), and although I didn’t recognize or understand them, they somehow made sense.

Pterion
, I found myself thinking,
pronounced
teery-on
, the suture where the frontal, squamosal, and parietal bones meet the wing of the sphenoid.

Very strange.

“Are you all right?” Dr. Kirby asked me.

“Yeah . . . yeah, I’m fine,” I assured him.

“Well, as I was saying,” he continued, “the iPhone was apparently thrown from the top floor of the tower block, and when it hit your head, this area here — around the pterion — was shattered, and your brain was lacerated and bruised by a number of broken skull fragments and smashed pieces of the phone. There was damage to some of your blood vessels, too. We managed to remove all of the bone fragments and most of the phone debris, and the bleeding from your ruptured blood vessels doesn’t seem to have done any permanent harm. However . . .”

I’d kind of guessed there was a
however
coming.

“I’m afraid we’ve been unable to remove several pieces of the shattered phone that were driven into your brain at the time of your accident. These fragments, most of which are incredibly small, have lodged themselves into areas of your brain that are simply too delicate to withstand surgery. We have, of course, been closely monitoring these fragments, and, as far as we can tell, they’re currently not moving and they don’t seem to be having any injurious effect on your brain.”

I looked at him. “As far as you can tell?”

He smiled. “Well, the brain’s a highly complex organ. To be honest, we’re only just beginning to understand how it works. Here, let me show you . . .”

He spent the next twenty minutes or so showing me X-rays, CT and MRI scans, showing me where the tiny fragments of iPhone were lodged in my brain, explaining the surgery I’d undergone, and why the fragments couldn’t be removed, telling me what to expect over the next few months — headaches, dizziness, tiredness . . .

“Of course,” he added, “the truth of the matter is we have no way of knowing how
any
one is going to recuperate after this type of injury, especially someone who’s spent a considerable amount of time in a coma . . . and I must stress how important it is for you to let us know
immediately
if you start feeling anything . . . ah . . . unusual.”

“What kind of
unusual
?”

He smiled again. “Any kind.” His smile faded. “It’s very unlikely that the remaining fragments will move any further, but we can’t rule it out.” He looked at me. “We’ve been monitoring your brain activity continuously since you were admitted, and most of the time everything’s been fine. But there was a period of a couple of days — this was just over a week ago — when we noticed a series of somewhat unexpected brain patterns, and it’s just possible that these may have been caused by an adverse reaction to the fragments. Now, while these slight abnormalities didn’t last very long, and there’s been no noticeable repetition since, the readings that concerned us were rather . . .” He paused, trying to think of the right word.

“Unusual?” I suggested.

He nodded. “Yes . . . unusual.” Another brief smile. “I’m fairly sure that this isn’t anything you need to worry about too much . . . but it’s always best to be on the safe side. So, as I said, if you
do
start experiencing any problems, anything at all, you must tell someone immediately. We’ll be keeping you in here for another week or so, just to make sure everything’s all right, so all you have to do if you do feel anything unusual is let someone know — me, one of the nurses . . . anyone really. And when you go home, if anything happens, you can either tell your grandmother or call the hospital yourself.” He paused, looking at me. “It’s just you and your grandmother at home, I believe?”

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.