iBoy

'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 first-hand 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.

Gram said to Johnson, 'I think that's enough for now, don't you? Tommy's tired. He's still very weak.'

'Yes, Mrs Harvey, I realize that, but —'

'It's Miss,' Gram said coldly.

'I'm sorry?'

'Miss Harvey. Or Ms. Not Mrs.'

'Right ...' Johnson muttered. 'Anyway, if Tom wouldn't mind —'

'He's told you everything he knows.'

'Well —'

'No,' Gram said firmly. 'No more. If you need to talk to him again, you'll just have to wait.'

'But —'

'Do you want me to start screaming?'

Johnson frowned at her. 'What?'

'One more word from you,' Gram told him calmly, 'and I'm going to start screaming and sobbing. And when the nurses and doctors come running in, they'll find a poor old grandmother crying her eyes out because the two nasty policemen have been virtually torturing her gravely ill grandson.' She smiled at DS Johnson. 'Do you understand?'

Johnson nodded. He understood.

'Good,' said Gram. 'Now, if you don't mind, I'd like you both to fuck off.'

100

'They [gang rapes] happen all the time, man. You hear about them in school... It's so common. You know that if you talk about it, they can do it again. If they want you to be quiet, that's all you gotta do, just bite your tongue and continue. It's a sad thing, but it's reality. Hard reality'

http://www.guardian , co.uk/world/2 004/ jun/oj/gender.ukcrime

The next seven days were a bewildering mixture of mind- boggling weirdness and mind-numbing boredom. I was kept in my private room for a couple of days so the doctors could keep a close eye on my progress, and then, once they were satisfied that I was doing OK, I was moved to a bed in the general ward. Although Gram wasn't with me all the time now, she still came to see me every day, and she always stayed for at least a couple of hours. I kept asking her about Lucy, but she refused to tell me anything else, insisting that I concentrate on getting better and getting plenty of rest.

'Lucy's being well looked after for now,' was all she'd tell me. 'And worrying about what happened to her isn't going to do either of you any good. Once we get you settled in back home ... well, we'll talk about things then. All right?'

It wasn't all right, of course. I wanted to know every- thing now. But when Gram sets her mind on something, there's no point arguing with her. So I just went along with it. I rested. I slept. I ate. I read countless stupid magazines. And I tried not to think about anything.

Lucy. Me.

The weirdness inside my head ...

Electric shocks.

Bees, non-bees.

Definitions.

Newspapers.

Billions of humming filaments ...

I really did try my best not to think about any of it, but it was almost impossible, because whenever anything came into my mind, things started happening. I kept seeing things inside my head — faintly flickering things that I didn't understand, like the vaguest after-images of transparent insects. And I could hear things too — dis­embodied voices, scraps of conversations. And although these things were too fuzzy and fragmented for me to see or hear them with any real clarity, I sensed that they were related to whatever it was that I was thinking about. It was like that half-dreamy experience you get when you're falling asleep with the TV on, and whatever's on the TV at the time, it all gets mixed up in your half-asleep head with whatever you're thinking or half-dreaming about. . . and you know that it's not really coming from inside your head, but that's how it feels.

That's how it felt.

I'd be half-thinking about Lucy, and I'd start seeing bits of newspaper reports about her attack. I'd hear broken voices talking to each other about these newspaper reports, and sometimes those voices would be laughing. I'd see fragments of texts and emails which at first sight didn't seem to have anything to do with Lucy at all, but