iBoy

'No, I'm all right, thanks,' I told her.'We're nearly there anyway.'

As we approached the entrance, the glass doors swung open and a bunch of kids came strolling out. There were half a dozen of them, all dressed in the usual black hood­ies and tracks. One of them had a brown Staffordshire bull terrier on a thick chain lead. I recognized most of them — Eugene O'Neil, DeWayne Firman, Yusef Hashim, Carl Patrick. They were all gang kids, Crows, and right now they were all nudging each other and pointing at me, grinning and laughing.

'Hey, Harvey,' O'Neil called out. 'How's your head?'

The others laughed.

'Yo, look at that scar, man,' someone said.

'Yeah, shit, it's Harry fucking Potter ...'

'Just ignore them,' Gram said quietly to me. 'Come on ...'

As we carried on walking towards the doors, the six boys moved aside to let us pass, but they didn't stop making their comments.

'Nice fucking haircut.'

'Lend us your phone.'

'Yeah, I heard you got an iPhone —'

'He bust it.'

'Fucking iHead, more like ...'

'iBrain ...'

We were going through the doors when something hot flicked against the back of my h2ead, and when I turned round I saw a burning cigarette end rolling on the ground. I looked back at the boys. I couldn't tell which one had flicked the cigarette end at me, but it didn't really matter. I mean, I wasn't going to do anything about it, was I? I looked at them all for a moment, then I turned round and carried on into the tower. Just as the glass doors were swinging shut behind me, I heard a couple of parting shouts.

'See you, fuck head.'

'Yeah, see you later, iBoy.'

I couldn't help smiling to myself as I crossed over to the lift with Gram.

'What?' Gram asked me. 'What's so funny?'

'Nothing ...' I looked at her, grinning. 'It's just... well, iBoy ... I mean, that's actually pretty good, isn't it?'

Gram shrugged. 'It's better than fuck head.'

Each of the towers in Crow Town has thirty floors, and each of the floors has six flats. That's 180 flats to a block, 1,440 flats in all. Each of the floors in each of the towers is pretty much the same. There's a central corridor on each floor, with a row of flats on either side, and there's a lift at one end of the corridor and a stairwell at the other.

The lift in Compton is usually OK.

Well, it's not OK — it stinks, it's filthy, and it moves really slowly — but at least it usually works. This is because most of the people you'd normally expect to vandalize a lift actually live here, and they don't want to walk up the stairs every day, so they generally leave the lift alone. So most of the time it works. Leaving the stairwells free for other purposes — taking drugs, having sex, beating people up ... the usual stairwell- based activities.

I was so tired by now that if the lift hadn't been work­ing, I would have had to lie down on the floor and wait for it to get fixed. But it was working, and a few minutes after we'd entered the tower, Gram and I were getting out at the twenty-third floor and making our way down the corridor to Flat 4.

Home at last.

It was really nice to be back, and I spent a while just wandering slowly around the flat — the front room, the hallway, my room, Gram's room. I wasn't really doing anything, or even looking at anything, I was just enjoy­ing being there, being back with the things I knew.

It felt good.

After that, I slept for a while, and when I woke up I had a long hot bath. Then Gram made me a huge plate of cheese on toast, and then, finally, she got round to telling me about Lucy and Ben.

'I don't really know any details,' she explained. 'All I can tell you is what I've been hearing around the estate, and you know what it's like round here. Rumours, gossip, someone heard this, someone heard that...' She looked at me. 'I haven't actually talked to Michelle about it yet.' I nodded. Michelle was Mrs Walker, Lucy's mum. 'I thought it best to leave it for a while,' Gram continued. 'You know, let Michelle come to me when she's ready. If she's ever ready, that is ... I don't know ...' Gram sighed. 'Anyway, the story going round is that Ben was having some kind of problem with some of the boys in one of the gangs ... the Crows, most people think. That Friday, a group of them waited for him to get back from school, knocked on his door, made sure his mum wasn't in ... and then they just started beating him up. Lucy ... well, Lucy was in her room, apparently. She heard all the noise, came out to see what was going on ...' Gram paused, looking hesitantly at me.

'Go on,' I said quietly.

She sighed again. 'There's no easy way of putting it, Tommy. They raped her. They beat up Ben, broke some of his ribs, cut his face up a bit... and then they started on Lucy.'

'Christ,' I whispered. 'How many of them were there?'

'Six or seven ... maybe more.'

'And did they all...? You know, with Lucy ...?'

'I don't know.'

'Shit,' I said quietly, shaking my head with disbelief. There were tears in my eyes now ... it was just such a terrible thing to imagine. So sickening, so awful ... so utterly unbelievable. But the trouble was ... it wasn't unbelievable. It was the kind of thing that happened. It had happened before, just a few months ago. A young girl had been attacked and gang-raped in a lock-up garage at the back of Eden House.

It happened.

'Do the police know who did it?' I asked Gram.

She shook her head. 'No one's talking, as usual. There are lots of rumours, and the same names keep cropping up I think most of the gang kids know who it was. But no one's going to say anything, especially not to the police.'

'What about Ben? He must know who they were.'

'According to him, they were wearing hoods, bala­clavas ... he couldn't see their faces.'

'What about Lucy?'

'I don't know, Tommy. Like I said, I haven't seen Michelle yet, so I don't know if Lucy's been able to iden­tify her attackers or not.' Gram looked at me. 'No one's been arrested though ... I mean, you know how it is.'

'Yeah ...'

I knew how it was, all right. The number one rule in Crow Town is — you never talk to the police. You never admit to anything. You never grass. Because if you do, and you get found out, you might as well be dead.

Gram said, 'The police haven't been able to get any information from the mobile phone that hit you either. Most of what was left of it had been trampled into the ground by the time they finally realized it was evidence, and the bits that were left were too badly smashed up to retrieve any information. But they think that one of Lucy's attackers must have just thrown it out of the window, and you just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.'

'No,' I said. 'Whoever threw it, they called out my name. They knew I was there. I don't suppose they expected it to actually hit me, but I'm pretty sure they threw it at me.'

'You'll have to tell the police, Tommy. Tell them that it wasn't an accident.'

I shrugged. 'What's the point? They're not going to find out who it was, are they?'