She shrugged. "Same as ever."
Gram writes romance novels, love stories ... Mills & Boon kind of stuff. Books with titles like The Lord and the Mistress, or Angels in Blue. She hates them. Hates what they are, hates writing them. She'd much rather write poetry. But poetry doesn't pay the rent, and love stories do ... just about.
"Is this a new one?" I asked her, looking at the screen again.
She smiled. "It's supposed to be."
"What's it about?"
"You don't want to know."
"Yeah, I do."
"Well..." she said, hitting the save button. "It's about a woman who falls in love with two brothers. They're twins, these brothers, so they look exactly the same, but their characters are totally different. One of them's a soldier, an all-action kind of guy. The other one's a musician. He's the really sensitive one ... you know, he writes love songs and beautiful poems for her, that sort of thing."
"And the other one beats up the bad guys?"
Gram smiled. "Yeah ... which, of course, she finds irresistible."
"Which one does she end up with?"
"I don't know yet."
"I bet it's the wimp."
"You think so?"
I nodded. "She'll think she's in love with the tough guy, but eventually she'll realize that her only true love is the wimp. That's always how it happens in books, isn't it?"
Gram smiled. "But not in real life?"
"No," I said. "In real life, the girl always ends up with the tough guy, and the wimp stays at home and writes wimpy poems about how bad he feels."
The eight tower blocks of Crow Town are spread out in an uneven line along Crow Lane over a distance of about a mile. There are five towers on the north side (Addington, Baldwin, Compton, Disraeli, and Eden), and three towers to the south (Fitzroy, Gladstone, and Heath). In between, about two-thirds of the way along Crow Lane, there's a mini-roundabout, a scattering of low-rise flats, and the kids' playground. An industrial estate takes up most of the west side — warehouses, car-repair places, railway tracks and tunnels — and the High Street is about half a mile to the east.
The taxi driver pulled up at the side of the road, near the far end of the High Street.
"Uh, yeah ..." he said, fiddling with his meter. That'll be £9.50, thanks."
"Sorry," said Gram, thinking he'd got the address wrong. "We wanted Crow Town, please. Compton House."
"This is as far as I go."
"What?"
"This is as far I go ... it's £9.50."
"No, you don't understand —"
"I'm not going into Crow Town, OK?"
"Oh, don't be ridiculous," Gram sighed. "It's perfectly safe, for Christ's sake."
"Yeah, well... whatever. You can either get out here, or I'll take you back to the hospital. It's up to you."
"But it's raining," Gram pleaded. "And my grandson's just got out of hospital ..."
The taxi driver shrugged. "Sorry, love."
Gram sighed again, but she knew there was no point arguing. She paid the taxi driver, closed her laptop and put it in her bag, and we got out and started walking.
It didn't take long to walk back, but I hadn't done a lot of walking in the last few weeks — I hadn't done a lot of anything in the last few weeks — and by the time we reached Compton House, I was starting to feel really tired.
"Do you want to stop for a minute?" Gram asked me as we crossed the square towards the entrance. "You look a bit pale."
"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.