"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?"
"Well, you never know ..."
We looked at each other, both of us knowing that I was right. There wasn't a chance in hell of anyone ever being charged with cracking open my skull. And even if there was, even if someone was arrested, charged, and convicted ... what good would it do? It wouldn't change anything, would it? I'd still have bits of iPhone stuck in my brain. Ben would still have been beaten up. And Lucy ...
Nothing was ever going to make Lucy feel better.
After Gram had asked me at least a dozen times if I minded if she went into her room to carry on working on her new book, and after I'd assured her that I didn't mind at all, and that I was fine, and that she didn't have to keep worrying about me all the time ... after all that, I finally went into my room, lay down on my bed, and tried to get to grips with the growing realization that I knew what was happening inside my head ... and that although it had to be impossible, it wasn't.
101
The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use.
Imagine you're trying to remember something... anything — the last time you cried, someone's telephone number, the names of the seven dwarves — it doesn't matter what it is. Just search your memory, try to remember something ... and when you've done it, try to imagine how you did it. How did you find what you were looking for? What did you search with? Where exactly in your brain did you search? How did you know where to look, and how did you recognize what you were looking for?
If someone asked me those questions, I couldn't answer them. All I could say was — well, I just did it. The things inside my head, inside my brain ... they just did what they do. I told myself to remember something, and the stuff in my brain did the rest.
It's my head, my brain, and it makes me what I am — but I don't have a clue how it works.
And as I lay on my bed that day, listening to the distant babble of soundless sounds in my head, that was the only way I could think of it: it was my head, my brain, it made me what I was ... but now there was something else in there, something that had somehow become part of me, and it was doing what it did — reaching out, finding things, an infinite number of things — and I didn't have a clue how it worked ...
But it did.
It was working right now.
It was showing me bits of websites, random pages from random sites — words, sounds, images, data. It was scanning a world of emails, a world of texts, a world full of phone calls ... it was connecting, calculating, photographing, filming, downloading, searching, storing, locating ... it was doing everything that an iPhone could do. And that's what it had to be — the iPhone. The fragments of iPhone that were lodged in my brain ... somehow they must have fused with bits of my brain, bits of my mind ... bits of me. And somehow, in the process of that fusion, the powers and capabilities of the iPhone must have mutated, they must have evolved ... because as well as doing everything that an iPhone could do, I could also do a whole lot more. I could hear phone calls, I could read emails and texts, I could hack into databases ... I could access everything.
All from inside my head.
I was connected.
I knew it now. I knew it, I knew it, I knew it... but I still didn't know anything about it. I didn't know how it was happening. I had no control over it. It just happened ... and, like I said, it had to be impossible.
But it wasn't.
It was happening.
Other things were happening too. As I lay there, trying to digest this impossible truth, I could feel a glow of heat in my head, a warm tingle around my scar. It felt really weird, kind of shimmery, and I didn't like it.
I got up off the bed and went over to the mirror on my wall.
I didn't believe what I saw at first. It had to be something else, a trick of the light, a distorted reflection ... but when I leaned in closer and stared intently at my face in the mirror, I knew that it was real. The skin around the wound was shimmering, vibrating almost, as if it was alive. It was radiating, glowing with countless colours, shapes, words, symbols ... all of them constantly changing, merging into each other, floating and drifting, sinking and rising, pulsating like minute shoals of multicoloured fish.