Кевин Брукс - iBoy

"Yeah, I know. But I thought if I asked her mum first ... just ask her if Lucy wants to see me ... and then, if she says no, I'll just leave. I won't push it or anything."

"What about phoning her first?" Gram suggested.

I shook my head. "Yeah, I thought of that, but some­how it just doesn't feel right. I'd rather just go on up."

"Well, all right ... but be careful, Tommy."

"Yeah."

As she reached out to put her hand on my cheek, I concentrated hard on not giving her an electric shock. I'm not sure how I did it, but it seemed to work. She didn't yelp or snatch her hand away or anything.

"Are you sure you're all right?" she asked me.

"Yeah ..."

"Positive?"

"I'm fine, Gram."

"Well, like I said, be careful. All right?"

"Yeah," I told her, putting on my jacket. "I'll see you later. I won't be long."

"Have you got your phone with you?"

"Uh, yeah ... yeah, I've got my phone."

There were two boys in the lift when I got in. One of them was a youngish black kid from Baldwin House whose name I didn't know, the other one was a boy called Davey Carr. Davey lived on the twenty-seventh floor, and when we were at junior school he used to be my best friend. We were always hanging around together — at school, at the kids' playground, around the railway tracks and the wastegrounds. Davey used to be OK. But a couple of years ago he'd started hanging around with some of the Crows, older kids mostly, and although he'd kept trying to persuade me to join them, I really couldn't see the attraction of it, and after that we'd just kind of drifted apart.

"Hey, Tom," he said to me as I got into the lift. "Y'all right?"

"Yeah ... you?" I said, pressing the button for the thirtieth floor.

He nodded, smiling. But he looked a bit anxious.

I nodded at the other kid. He stared back at me, sniffed, then looked away.

The lift doors closed.

Davey grinned at me. "Where you going, Tom? Any­where exciting?"

"I'm going to see Lucy."

His grin faded. "Yeah?"

"Yeah ... any idea who did it?"

"What?"

"She was raped, Davey. Ben was beaten up. I was just wondering if you knew anything about it."

He shook his head. "Why would I know anything about it?"

I just stared at him.

"No," he said, shaking his head again. "No, I don't know anything ... honest. I wasn't even —"

"Hey," the black kid said to him. "You don't have to tell him anything. Tell him to fuck off."

I looked at the black kid.

The lift stopped.

Floor 27.

The black kid grinned at me. "Yeah? What you looking at?"

The doors opened.

I homed in on the mobile in the kid's back pocket, and in an instant an absolutely timeless instant — I'd downloaded and scanned everything on it. Names, phone numbers,, texts, photos, videos ... everything.

"You're Jayden Carrol, aren't you?" I said to him as he walked out of the lift with Davey.

"So?" he said.

"Have you answered that text you got from Leona last night?" I said casually, pressing the button to close the doors. "You know, the one where she asks you if you love her?" I smiled at him. "Better not keep her waiting too long for an answer."

"What the fuck —?" he started to say, but the lift doors closed on him, and I carried on up to the thirtieth floor.

I knew it was a stupid thing to do, egging him on like that. I knew it was pointless, and kind of pathetic. But I didn't really care. It made me feel good, and that was all that mattered just then.

Lucy's flat was right at the end of the corridor, and as I walked down towards it, I realized how nervous I was feeling. I always felt a little bit nervous when I was about to see Lucy, but this was different. This was an anxious kind of nervousness, a fear of the unknown. What would I say to her? What could I say? How would she be? Would she have any interest in seeing me at all? I mean, why should she? What was so special about me? What did I have to offer her?

I stopped at the door to her flat.

The word SLAG had been sprayed across the door in bright red aerosol paint. I stood there for a while, just staring at that ugly scrawl, and for a moment I felt angrier than I'd ever felt before. I wanted to hit someone, to really hurt someone ... I wanted to find out who'd done it and throw them off the tower ...

My head was aching.

My wound was throbbing.

I closed my eyes, breathed slowly, calmed myself ...

"Shit," I muttered to myself. "The bastards ..."

I waited until my head had stopped throbbing, then I took another calming breath and reached up and rang the doorbell.

Lucy's mum had a history of drink and drug problems. It was mostly all in the past now — apart from the odd little slip now and then — but when she opened the door and looked at me, I was pretty sure that she'd gone back to her bad old ways. She looked terrible. Her skin was dull and greyish, her eyes were bloodshot and slightly unfocused, and it looked as if she hadn't washed or combed her hair for a week.

"Hello, Mrs Walker," I said to her. "It's me ... Tom."

She squinted at me.

"Tom Harvey," I explained. "Lucy's friend ...?"

"Oh, right ... yeah. Of course, Tom ... sorry. I only just woke up. I was just... ahh ..." She rubbed her eyes. "How are you, Tom?" She suddenly noticed the wound on my head. "Oh, God ... of course ... your head ... you were in hospital. I'm so sorry, I forgot..."

"It's all right," I said. "Don't worry about it."

"No? Well, I mean ... I just ..." She blinked heavily. "So when did you get home, Tom?"

"Today. This morning , . ."

"Right, right..."

"I was just wondering — "

"Did you want to see Lucy?"

"Well, only if —"

"Come in, come in ... I'll go and see if she's awake. She was sleeping ... she gets really tired."

As I followed Mrs Walker into the hallway and shut the door behind me, I didn't feel very comfortable at all. My head was full of questions: maybe Lucy's mum wasn't in the right frame of mind to decide if I should come in or not? maybe I should have waited outside? maybe I shouldn't have come up here in the first place? But it was too late to turn back now. I'd already followed Mrs Walker into the front room.

"Just wait there a minute," she told me. "I'll go and see if she's awake."

I watched her go into her bedroom (wondering why she was going into her bedroom and not Lucy's), and then I looked over at Ben, who was sitting on the settee watching TV. Although the bruises on his face were fading, and the cuts were starting to heal, it was pretty obvious he'd taken a really bad beating. He was sitting kind of hunched up, which I guessed was on account of his broken ribs, and his left wrist was heavily bandaged.

"Hey, Ben," I said to him. "How're you doing?"

He stared at me. "How d'you think?"

I looked around. The flat was a mess. Empty pizza boxes on the floor, bottles, cans, dirty plates. There were piles of clothes on the dining table, piles of old newspapers on an ironing board. The curtains were closed. The light was dim.

I turned back to Ben. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"No."

"OK, fair enough ... but if you change your mind —"

"I said no , all right?"

"OK."

Mrs Walker came out of her bedroom then. She smiled at me — a fairly vague kind of smile — and said, "Don't be too long, Tom, all right? She's not used to seeing people yet... she gets really tired."

I looked at her.

She smiled again, indicating the open bedroom door with a slightly wobbly jerk of her head, and I guessed that meant that I was supposed to go in. I glanced back at Ben, saw that he was immersed in the TV, and I went on into the bedroom.

The curtains were closed, and the only light came from the pale orange glow of an electric heater standing on the floor. There was something about the room that made it feel like a sick person's room. The stuffy air, perhaps ... the low light, the lack of energy. I didn't know. It just felt like a room without any life.