iBoy

As O'Neil called the car in front and passed on the directions to the driver (who I guessed was Marek), Ellman leaned back in his seat again and carried on smoking his cigarette.

I gazed out of the window for a while, trying to work out where we were going, but all I could tell was that we seemed to be going round in circles. I tuned in to the GPS signal inside my head, logged on to Google Map, and let my iBrain do its stuff.

'So, anyway,' Ellman said casually, turning back to me. 'You're Georgie Harvey's boy, yeah?'

I didn't say anything, I just stared at him, wondering how the hell he knew my mum's name.

He smiled. 'I don't suppose you remember her much, do you? You must have been about... what, six months old when she died?' He looked at me, smoking his cigar­ette, waiting for me to say something. When I didn't, he took another drag on his cigarette, flipped it out the window, and went on. 'Georgie was really something, you know. Did anyone ever tell you that? She was one hot piece of ass. Feisty too.' He grinned at me. 'Shit, man, that bitch could fight.'

I was so confused, so utterly stunned by what he was saying, I could barely breathe, let alone speak.

'What's the matter?' Ellman said, grinning at me. 'Didn't you know about me and your mummy?'

I heard O'Neil sniggering, but I didn't take my eyes off Ellman. I couldn't take my eyes off him. 'You knew my mum?' I whispered.

'Yeah,' he said, leering, 'I knew her ... in fact, I was the first guy that Georgie ever knew. Of course, there were plenty more after me —'

'You're lying,' I said.

He looked at me. 'You think so?'

I nodded. 'You never knew my mum.'

He laughed again. 'I'm just telling you the truth, that's all.'

'The truth?' I said, sneering at him. 'What do you know about the truth?'

He stopped laughing suddenly and stared at me, his eyes dead cold. 'I'll tell you what I know,' he said icily. 'Your mother was a fucked-up little whore who'd do anything for a line of coke, I know that. And I know how much effort it took me to break that bitch down and get her out on the streets where she belonged ... and then what does she do? After everything I've fucking done for her? She gets herself knocked up and says she wants out ... she wants out of the game ... she wants to get clean, for fuck's sake ...'

Ellman paused for a moment, his eyes drifting away from me, and all I could do was sit there, totally numbed, unable to digest what he was telling me ... or, at least, what I thought he was telling me. It was simply too pain­ful to believe.

'Yeah, well,' Ellman said, his voice quite casual again. 'She got what she deserved.'

'What?'

'She knew what'd happen if she left me. I mean, no one leaves me. No one. And she knew that. She knew what I had to do.'

'What...?' I said, my voice barely audible. 'What did you have to do?'

Ellman looked surprised, as if the answer was obvious. 'I had to kill her.'

'Kill her?'

He shrugged. 'What else could I do?'

I shook my head in disbelief. 'My mum died in a road accident —'

'It wasn't an accident.'

I stared at him. 'Are you seriously trying to tell me that you were the driver of the car that ran over my mum?'

He looked at me for a moment, his face deadly serious ... and then, all of a sudden, his face broke into a smile and he started laughing. 'I had you going for a while there, didn't I?' he said. 'I really had you going ...'

'I don't understand —'

'I didn't kill her,' he said, still laughing. 'I was just fucking with you, that's all.'

'You didn't kill my mum?'

He shook his head, grinning. 'Like you said, what do I know about the truth?'

O'Neil and Gunner were both laughing too now, snorting away at enjoying Ellman's excellent joke, and as the car filled with the sound of their stupid braying voices, I just looked out of the window and tried to think about things. Was Ellman lying or not? Had he really known my mother? Had anything he'd told me about her been anywhere near the truth?

I couldn't think about it.

It was too hard.

I blanked out my emotions for a while and concen­trated instead on trying to coordinate the cyber-map inside my head with what I could see through the car window. It didn't take me long to work out that we were on the west side of the towers now, heading back north towards the industrial estate ...

I looked at Ellman. He'd stopped laughing now and was just sitting there, smoking another cigarette, gazing indifferently at me.

'Why do you do it?' I said to him.

'Do what?'

'All this ... fucking people up, hurting people, raping, killing ... I mean, why do you do it?'

He shrugged. 'I told you before, it's just business.'

I stared at him. 'Business? How the hell is raping and killing people business?'

He sighed. 'You don't understand —'

'No, I don't.'

'It's all about power,' he said. 'Everything ... the whole fucking world, it's all about power. If you've got it, you survive. If you haven't, you don't. Simple as that. Power is the law. It rules the fucking world. You understand? And down here ...' He looked out of the window, indi­cating the passing streets, the towers in the distance, the world of Crow Town. 'The only law down here, the only means of acquiring and establishing and maintaining your power, is violence.' He stared hard at me. 'Rape, murder, whatever ... it's not personal. I don't do it for fun. I mean, I'm not saying that I don't enjoy it, because I do, but that's not why I do it. I do it because it shows everyone else who I am, what I can do ... it shows the world what I am.'

'And that's it?' I said. 'You kill and rape and brutalize people just to show the world what you are? That's your reason?'

He shrugged. 'It's as good a reason as any.'

I stared at him. 'But you must know it's wrong —

'Wrong?' he laughed. 'What the fuck's wrong got to do with anything?' He looked at me. 'D'you think it's wrong for a dog to kill a cat?'

'That's totally different.'

'Why?'

'Dogs are animals — they don't know any better.'

'What, and you think I do? You think any of us do? Fuck, man ... we're all fucking animals — none of us know any better.'

As we sat there staring at each other — a wimp and a devil, iBoy and Hell-Man, together in the back seat of a black Range Rover — I wondered for a moment if perhaps, in a twisted kind of way, he was right. Maybe neither of us did know any better. Maybe we were just animals. And maybe ...

I stopped thinking about it then. The car was begin­ning to slow down. I looked out of the window and saw that the Range Rover in front of us had turned right and was heading slowly up an unlit lane. We followed it. The lane was uneven, pitted with cracks and pot-holes, and as the car lumped and rolled its way upwards, the twin beams of the headlights illuminated the ghosted remains of the old industrial estate: rusted skips, vacant factories, empty industrial units, abandoned warehouses ...

The car in front was turning right again, this time into a square of wasteground that had probably once been