iBoy (26 page)

“Mary Jane doesn’t know.”

“Who cares about Mary Jane?”

“I think you’ll find that a
lot
of people care about Mary Jane, especially when she’s kissing the aforementioned upside-down Spider-Man in the rain, and her shirt is all wet and clingy.”

Lucy laughed, shaking her head and wagging her finger at me. “
Now
who’s getting their characters and actors mixed up?”

“What?” I said innocently.

“It’s Kirsten Dunst’s rain-soaked shirt that you care about, not Mary Jane’s.”

I shrugged. “Same thing.”

We both started giggling then, and it felt really good — just sitting there, looking at each other, laughing and giggling like two little kids . . . but then, after a while, I think we both slowly realized that the stuff we’d just been talking and laughing about was the kind of stuff that maybe we
shouldn’t
have been talking and laughing about. Because although we’d only been messing around and enjoying ourselves, and although we’d only been talking about sex in a totally superficial and unsexual way, that still didn’t change the fact that we
had
been talking about sex. And now that she’d realized it, that, for Lucy, was just too much.

It was too close.

Too raw.

Too confusing.

And now she was just sitting there, not smiling anymore, just looking down sadly at her hands in her lap as she twisted and picked at a paper napkin.

“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “I should have realized . . .”

“It’s OK,” she said, trying to smile at me. “It’s not your fault. I just . . .” She shrugged. “Sometimes it goes away for a while, you know? I actually forget about it . . . at least, I’m not
aware
that I’m thinking about it. But then . . .” She shook her head. “It always comes back. It’s like it’s never
not
there. And even when I
do
forget about it for a few minutes, there’s always
some
thing that brings it back to me. Something on the TV, you know, a sex scene or something, or just some guy in a hood who reminds me of them . . . I mean, God, you wouldn’t
believe
how hard it is to watch TV without seeing a guy in a hood.” She smiled shakily at me. “They’re
every
where.”

I self-consciously pulled down my hood.

Lucy laughed. “What did I tell you?”

“Sorry . . .”

“Actually, I hadn’t even noticed yours until now.”

“Sorry,” I said again.

“No, it’s fine. Really.” She frowned to herself. “It’s weird that I didn’t notice it before, though . . .”

“It’s probably just the way that I wear it,” I suggested, smiling.

“What — on your head, you mean?”

We were starting to get back to each other again now. It didn’t quite feel the same as before — we were quieter now, less boisterous — but that was OK. In fact, I really quite liked it. It somehow made me feel as if we knew each other a lot better. And I think Lucy was OK with it, too.

“All right?” I said to her.

She smiled. “Yeah.”

“Do you want anything else to eat?”

She shook her head. “I’m stuffed.”

“Do you want to go for a walk?”

“Where to?”

“How about the edge of the roof?”

Lucy looked over at the edge, then back at me. “You sure it’s not too far?”

“I can call a taxi, if you want.”

“No,” she said. “It’s a nice enough night. Let’s walk.”

I’d never had a girlfriend before . . . well, not a proper girlfriend anyway. I mean, I’d been out with a few girls, you know, I’d gone on a few dates — to the movies, to see a band, that kind of thing. But although I’d quite liked the girls I’d been out with, I hadn’t been absolutely crazy about any of them or anything, and so I’d never really given all that much thought to what I was expected to do with them, or to what I
thought
I was expected to do . . . and, no, I don’t mean that in a sexy/sexual/sexist kind of way. I just mean the stupid stuff, you know . . . like knowing if it’s OK to hold hands or not, and whether it’s expected . . . and, if it
is
expected, when do you do it? And how? And what if you make the first move, but it turns out that it’s
not
OK . . . what do you do then?

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 Crow Lane at the distant lights of London. Streetlights, traffic lights, headlights . . . office blocks, tower blocks, shops and theaters . . .

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 the 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 rumors. 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 Crow Town, 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 to rotate in the opposite direction, making everything go back in time, allowing Superman to go back into the past and prevent Lois Lane from dying.