iBoy

'You have what we call a comminuted skull fracture,' he explained to me the day after I woke up. 'Basically, this means that the bone just here ...' He indicated the area around the stitched-up wound on the side of my head. 'This area is known as the pterion, by the way. Unfortunately, this is the weakest part of the skull, and for some reason yours seems to be particularly weak.'

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?' Mr 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 anyone 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.'

Mr 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.

Mr 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 any more. 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-grey 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. i 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 towards the right-hand side of my forehead, about ten centimetrs 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- electric 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 any more.

No shimmer.

I was tired, that's all it was.

Yeah? I asked myself. And what about the billion non- bees, and that