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I’d told Dr. Kirby about all this crazy stuff going on in my head, he would have wanted to keep me in the hospital for more tests, more examinations, more questions. And I didn’t want that. I just wanted to get away from it all and get back to the place I knew.
    Not that Crow Town was a particularly nice place to get back to . . . in fact, as the taxi trundled along the familiar South London streets, and the eight high-rise tower blocks came into view, I began to wonder why I was so pleased to be coming back here. What was there to be pleased about? The shitty tower blocks, the cramped little flats, the ever-present and overriding sense of emptiness and violence?
    Ah, home sweet home . . .
    The gang kids were going to be there, too, I realized, and I was pretty sure that whatever had happened to Lucy and Ben — and me — it was bound to have something to do with the local gangs, and that meant that there were going to be repercussions. Because gang stuff always has repercussions. It never goes away — it always just hangs around, staining the air, like the stink of a vast and ever-present fart.
    I thought about that for a while, wondering which of the gangs was more likely to have been involved in Lucy’s assault — the Crows or the FGH — but, in a way, it didn’t really make any difference. They were all just Crow Town kids. The Crows were generally from the north-side towers, while the FGH were mainly from the three towers to the south (Fitzroy House, Gladstone House, Heath House — hence the name, FGH), and although the two gangs were supposed to hate each other’s guts, it didn’t always work that way. Sometimes they hated each other, sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they tried to kill each other, sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they got together and tried to kill kids from other gangs . . .
    Sometimes this, sometimes that . . .
    It didn’t make any difference at all.
    Lucy had been raped. Whoever had done it, they’d done it. Everything else was irrelevant.
    I stopped thinking about it then and looked at Gram. She was sitting beside me, tapping away at the open laptop resting on her knees.
    “How’s it going?” I asked her, glancing at the screen.
    She shrugged. “Same as ever.”
    Gram writes romance novels, love stories . . . “bodice ripper” 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,