iBoy

That kind of stuff.

And it was that kind of stuff that I thought I'd be thinking about as I got up from the picnic table and walked over to the edge of the roof with Lucy. Because I was crazy about her. I always had been crazy about her. And now here we were, finally on some kind of date together ... although, admittedly, it wasn't the most traditional of dates. But still, we'd had a meal together, and we'd talked and laughed and suffered about stuff together, and now we were going for a walk together ... and I'd dreamed of this moment so many times. I'd pictured it, imagined it, lived it ... worried about it. Should I hold her hand? Should I put my arm around her? Should I try to be cool about things? Should I do this, or do that, or try this, or try that...?

But the strange thing was, now that it was actually happening, none of this stupid stuff even entered my mind. I just got up and walked across the roof with Lucy, not worrying about anything, not caring about anything, just knowing that we both felt OK — walking side by side, as close to each other as we wanted to be ... it all felt perfectly natural.

'What are you smiling about?' Lucy asked me.

I looked at her. 'Was I smiling?'

'Yeah, like an idiot.'

I grinned at her.

She smiled back at me.

'Careful,' I said, reaching out and touching her arm.

She stopped, realizing that we were nearing the edge of the roof.

'Wow,' she said softly, 'It's a long way down.'

'Are you OK?' I asked her. 'Not dizzy or anything?'

She looked at me. 'Is that meant to be a joke?'

'No,' I grinned. 'Honestly ... I mean, some people don't like heights, do they? I was just checking that you were OK, that's all.'

'Yeah,' she said, smiling, 'I'm fine.' She looked down over the edge again, not saying anything, just looking and thinking.

'Shall we sit down?' I suggested.

'Why? Are you feeling dizzy?'

'You know me,' I said, lowering myself cross-legged to the ground. 'Tommy the Wimp.'

She smiled and sat down beside me, and then we just sat there in silence for a while, both of us gazing out over the estate at the distant lights of London. Streetlights, traffic lights, headlights ... office blocks, tower blocks, shops and theatres ...

It was all a long way away.

'Is that the London Eye?' Lucy said after a while.

'Where?'

She pointed into the distance. 'There ... by the river.'

I couldn't see it, and just for a moment I thought about logging on to Google Earth in my head to help me find it... but that was iStuff, and iStuff didn't belong here. So I didn't.

'I can't even see the river,' I told Lucy. 'Never mind the London Eye.'

She smiled, but I could tell that her mind was on some­thing else now. She'd stopped looking into the distance and had turned her attention to the more immediate surround­ings of the estate down below, gazing around at the streets, the towers, the low-rises, the kids' playground ...

'It's funny, isn't it?' she said quietly, her voice full of sadness.

'What's that?'

'Knowing that they're all out there somewhere ... you know, the boys who raped me. They're all out there ... living their lives, doing whatever it is they do ...' She breathed out wearily. 'I mean, they're all just out there ...'

'Some of them will be in cells now,' I said. 'Or in hospital.'

Lucy looked at me, her eyes wet with tears. 'You know, don't you?' she said. 'You know who they are.'

I nodded. 'Most of them, yeah.'

'How do you know?'

I shrugged. 'People talk, you know ... you hear rumours. It's not too difficult to work out the truth.'

'The truth ...?' she said, her voice barely audible, 'I'm the only one who knows the truth!

As she looked away from me and went back to gazing down at the estate, I could have kicked myself for being so stupid. Not that I'd meant to imply that I knew what she'd been through, but still... it was just so thoughtless, such a brainless thing to say.

I really was an idiot.

'Sorry, Tom,' Lucy said.

I looked at her, not sure I'd heard her right. 'What?'

'I know you didn't mean anything ... and I didn't mean to snap at you —'

'No, please,' I said, 'I'm the one who should be saying sorry. Not you. I just didn't think, you know ... I just opened my big stupid mouth and —'

'You haven't got a big stupid mouth.'

I stared at her. She was smiling again.

'It's OK,' she said. 'All right?'

'OK.'

'All right.'

We went back to our silent gazing for a while, watch­ing the lights, the sky, the stars in the darkness. I could hear the wind sighing in the night, and there were a few faint sounds drifting up from the estate — cars, voices, music — but, all in all, everything was still pretty quiet. And even the sounds that were breaking the silence didn't seem to have any menace to them.

They were just sounds.

'Does it make any difference?' I said quietly to Lucy.

She looked at me. 'Does what make any difference?'

'All this stuff that iBoy's done ... or whoever it is that's doing it. You know, making O'Neil and Adebajo and the rest of them suffer ... I mean, does it make you feel any better?'

She didn't answer for a while, she just stared at me, and for a moment or two I thought she was going to say — 'It's you, isn't it? It's you ... you're iBoy,' — and I started to wonder how that would make me feel. Good? Embar­rassed? Ashamed? Excited? And that made me wonder if perhaps, subconsciously, I wanted her to know that it was me, that I was iBoy, that I was her guardian angel...

'I don't know, Tom,' she said sadly. 'I really don't know if it makes any difference or not. I mean, yeah ... there's a bit of me that gets something good out of their suffer­ing ... you know, I really want them to feel pain ... I want them to fucking hurt ... because they deserve it ... God, they deserve everything they fucking get ...' Her voice had lowered to an ice-cold whisper. 'So, yeah, it makes a difference in that way. It gives me something that part of me really needs ...' She sighed. 'But it never lasts very long. I mean, it's just not enough ... it can't be enough. It can't take anything away.' She looked at me. 'Nothing can take anything away.'

'They'll always have done it...' I said quietly.

She nodded. 'And whatever happens, nobody can change that.'

As we sat there looking at each other, alone together in the boundless dark, I found myself thinking about an old Superman film that I'd seen on TV at Christmas. I'd only been half-watching the TV at the time, so I couldn't remember all that much about it, but there was a bit in the film where Superman's so busy saving the lives of other people that he doesn't have time to save the life of Lois Lane, the girl he loves. And when he finds out that she's dead, he gets so distraught that he flies up into the atmosphere and starts whizzing in circles around the Earth, and he flies so fast that somehow the Earth begins to slow down, and eventually it stops spinning altogether and begins