Flip (15 page)

“Who is this ‘someone’?” Rob asked. “Girlfriend?”

“Flip’s girlfriend, yeah.”

“Which means she’s yours now.”

Alex shook his head. “Not really.”

They listened to the band for a moment, each lost in his own thoughts. Alex reflected on what Rob had just said: different water, same river. Identity realignment, the psychic evacuees called it. The problem was he didn’t want to realign, or adapt, or adjust, or find some way of being this same-but-different version of himself.

“I can’t be Philip so long as there’s an Alex to go back to,” he said. “It’s easier for you.” Then, seeing Rob’s expression, thinking of Rob’s former self—that A-level student, Chris, stabbed to death, Alex added, “Sorry, that was a crap thing to say.”

“You know,” Rob said after a moment, “in some ways it
has
been easier—with no route back, you have to move on. You don’t have any choice.” Perhaps he meant it or maybe he was simply being kind, letting Alex off the hook for his insensitive remark. “Anyway, ‘Chris’ is history, my friend. That wound’s long since scarred over.”

“Onward, Christian Soldiers” finished and Rob added his enthusiastic clapping, his piercing whistles to the genteel patter of applause. It wasn’t done in mockery, Alex thought, but to jolt them out of the morbid turn their conversation had taken. “How far is Scarborough from here?” Rob asked suddenly. “Hour and a half? Two?”

“What?”

Rob checked his watch. “I’m parked just round the corner—we could be there by lunchtime.” He grinned. “Hey? Fancy that, a day at the seaside?”

“What about Donna?”

“What
about
me?”

And there she was, standing right in front of them, the sun behind her causing Alex to squint. Jack was with her, and Jack’s girlfriend, Emma—Donna’s best mate. Jack looked from Alex to Rob and back again. “Hey, Flip, what’s happening?” Before Alex could think what to say, Rob jumped in, introducing himself as Flip’s cousin, shaking hands with each of them in turn and asking their names.

“Jack, Emma,
Donna
, we have a choice here,” Rob said, smiling, arms spread like a messiah’s. “We can sit and listen to trombones and tambourines … or we can pile into my 1958 Chevy convertible and drive, at exhilarating speeds, to the coast.”

The 1958 Chevy convertible turned out to be a battered pale blue VW combi van with a top speed (downhill) of ninety kmph. Rob had clearly been living in it. It was almost cool enough to make up for the lie about the Chevy. In any case, by the time they’d walked to the side street where the vehicle was parked, Rob had won them over—to him, to the whole idea of taking off for a day on the beach. Bouncing around in the van—Alex and Donna up front, Jack and Emma in the back—with the radio blasting out music and the wind buffeting through the open windows and a thirty-six-pack of San Miguel being shared out was way more fun than Alex had anticipated when he’d somehow found himself saying yes to Rob’s crazy trip.

“This is like being in a road movie!” Jack yelled, his face appearing in the gap between the driver’s cabin and the back of the combi. He raised his bottle, clinked it against Alex’s and took a long slug.

Was Alex really here, doing this? With
Jack
. With
Emma
. With
Donna
, nestled against him on the passenger seat, her bare brown legs bathed in sunlight.

With a guy at the wheel who’d died and come back to life as someone else.

Rob caught Alex’s eye and winked, their secret crackling between them like static electricity. Alex had just found Rob (or had just been found by him), and the last thing he had wanted was to share him with anyone, least of all these three. And yet, bizarrely, Rob’s inviting them along for the ride had made it better still. Two psychic evacuees flaunting their otherness right under the noses of a bunch of soul virgins, as the PE Web site called them. Flip and his cool older cousin.

Even left-handed, Alex could spin a Frisbee further than any of them—apart from Rob. Sore and bruised, he could still sprint across the sand, leaping like a basketball pro to pluck the bright red disk from the air as though he’d been doing it all his life.

Ice-skating, cricket, bowling … he’d been useless, inheriting none of Flip’s natural ability. But with a Frisbee it was a different story. How come?

“You’re relaxed,” Rob said matter-of-factly. “The beer, the sunshine, the beach—you’re so busy enjoying yourself in Flip’s body you’ve forgotten it isn’t yours.”

Scarborough had been rammed, so they’d found this quieter beach just up the coast. They were taking a breather, flopped down on the drier sand above the tide line. It was their first chance to talk privately since leaving Litchbury. The girls had gone off to the toilets and Rob had given Jack a tenner to fetch ice creams. Rob and Alex were shirtless, barefoot, jeans rolled up their shins from messing about in the shallows a little earlier. Alex looked down at himself: the torso, the tan.

“I’d have had to plaster myself in sun cream before,” he said. “Factor sixty. Every year we go to Cornwall, yeah? And it’s like the whole point of the holiday is for me to make it back home without getting burnt.”

Rob cracked the caps off two more San Migs, passed one to Alex. “You know what I struggled with at first? Being so
tall.
” He took a sip of beer. “If I stood up too quickly, I’d come over dizzy. I mean, really, like I was about to faint.”

“What about taking a shower? You know—”

“Tell me about it.” Rob laughed. “I didn’t have one the first couple of weeks.”

And so they swapped tales of the before and after, Alex making patterns in the sand with his fingers, the beer bottle in his other hand icy wet from Rob’s cool-box. Gulls wheeled overhead, their cries rising and falling against the background whisper of the waves. A kite in the style of a Chinese dragon strained at the end of its cord, fierce-faced, as though snarling at the wind; the young boy controlling it looked slight enough to be lifted clean off his feet. Alex had never been into kites, but watching that dragon swoop and soar, he began to understand the appeal.

Jack and the girls returned together. The five of them ate ice cream, smoked (Jack, Rob, Donna), drank. People-watched. Told jokes. Reminisced about idyllic childhood holidays. That sort of thing.

Was Rob on holiday now? Emma asked. Or was he here for good?

“Aw, I don’t know,” Rob said. “I’ve been saving up for this trip for a while and I’ll just see how long the money lasts. I’ve got dual citizenship, so I can always pick up work here if I decide to give it a go.”

The others wanted to know what it was like living in a camper van.

“Isn’t it … 
small
?” Donna asked. “I’d get claustrophobic, in there all the time.”

“On the
inside
, yeah, of course it’s cramped,” Rob said. “But on the
outside
, you have all the space you want. You can go anywhere.” He gestured at the horizon. “You like a place, you stay awhile. You don’t like it, you move on.”

They were hanging on his words. In just a few hours he had become a kind of idol in their eyes. The free-living nomad. But Alex had read what Rob had posted as Corb1959 on the psychic evacuation Web site and it wasn’t as straight-forward as that. For one thing, he’d told them he was a mountain guide back in New Zealand, whereas Alex knew that Rob really worked in a bank. Being a PE, Alex was beginning to see, didn’t just mean having to be someone you weren’t—it also allowed you to pass yourself off as anyone you liked. When your life had been ripped up and remade from scratch, there was no limit to the ways you could reinvent yourself. Rob had an audience and was playing to them; that was all. He cut a romantic figure, but online, and in the moments Alex had been alone with him, he came across as more complex, more troubled.

Alex kept that version to himself, happy to watch the performance.

But one thing puzzled him: if Rob had made such a clean break from his past—from his life, and death, as Chris—why had he come back to this country at all?

They went into the sea—properly, not just splashing about. With no bathing costumes they had to swim in their underwear. Rob led the way, stripping to his boxer shorts and sprinting into the waves, launching himself headfirst with a joyous whoop. Jack was next, with Alex close behind as they raced each other. The girls were more reticent. They undressed close to the water, leaving their tops and skirts in a neat pile on a flattened carrier bag, and covered themselves as best they could with their hands as they inched into the sea, shrieking at the cold and giving a little skip each time a wave came in.

Rob, Jack and Alex were treading water, watching them.

“Come on,
laydeeez
,” Jack said. “Don’t be shy.”

“Stop
looking
!” Emma yelled—half cross, half embarrassed—as her knickers, then her bra, became transparent.

The chill of the water was shocking. Alex’s legs numbed and his breath came in gasps but the swimming soon warmed him. Ducking and splashing, the handstands and forward rolls and backward flips; the bodysurfing; Donna clinging to his shoulders in a piggyback race with Jack and Emma; then all of them taking turns to swim through one another’s legs (and Rob surfacing with Jack’s boxer shorts). Alex’s wrist hurt with each stroke but he swam through the pain, enjoying himself too much to care. And he found that he
could
swim—strong, sure and fast. As Alex, he hadn’t learnt till he was twelve, and he had never been confident in the water. Now he was in his element, driving himself through the waves as though they offered no resistance.

When, one by one, the others returned to shore, Alex stayed out there. Twenty minutes, half an hour. Swimming back and forth, parallel to the beach—front crawl, breast-stroke, backstroke, butterfly—until his lungs burned and his shoulders ached and his skin tingled with the cold and with the coursing of his blood.

At last, he stopped. Trod water while he got his breath back.

Facing the beach, he saw that he had drifted quite a way out. Not dangerously so, but far enough to be unable to identify his four companions among the people who speckled the sand like figures in an impressionist painting. Children’s cries and laughter carried to him on the breeze. The dragon kite was still there, pinned to the sky like a badge on a bright blue shirt. The sun hung over the dunes, still high but beginning its long arc towards the day’s end, casting a liquid silver sheen over the surface of the sea.

Alex had never felt so
alive
. Right here, in this moment. But more generally, too. Since that first morning when he’d woken up as Flip—he realized now, with the force of a revelation—he had been more self-aware, more acutely sensitive to everything around him, than he had ever been before, as Alex. Each smell, taste, touch, sound, sight, each impression and sensation, each minute of each day was sharper and more intense. In his old existence, he’d pretty much trundled along, barely registering the detail of his life in all its fantastic minutiae, or taking it for granted. Now, as he lived inside Flip, each single, tiny, ordinary flicker of being fizzed through him.

If he ever managed to return to his own body, Alex promised himself he would try to live like that.

He swam back and rejoined the others. They were drying off in the sunshine—Jack attempting to juggle with three beer-bottle tops; Emma and Donna listening to an iPod, one earpiece each; Rob lying on his back, gazing up at the sky, hands behind his head. As Alex approached, they gave him a round of applause.

Jack put on an American accent. “He has the speed of a dolphin, the strength of a shark—”

“The reproductive organ of a whale,” Rob cut in, and the rest of them laughed. Alex, too. He shook his head, showering them all with water droplets.

“Good swim?” Rob asked.

Alex beamed, stretching out in the warm sand and shuttering his eyes against the sun. “The best,” he said. “The absolute best.”

At some point, he must’ve dozed off, because when he woke up, he and Donna were by themselves. She was leaning over him, kissing him.

“Sleeping beauty,” she said.

“Where’s Rob and the others?”

He tried to sit up but she put a hand on his chest and pressed him back down. Emma was suffering text withdrawal, Donna said, and had gone up into the dunes to try to find a mobile signal. Rob had bought a football from the kiosk and was having a kick-about with Jack.

“So it’s just the two of us.” She smiled. Kissed him some more.

When, at last, she let him come up for air, Alex looked at her face, studying it. Lovely. Flawless, really. If Penélope Cruz had a kid sister, she would look like Donna. Earlier, during Alex and Rob’s private moment, Rob told him he’d “won the bloody lottery” with Flip’s girlfriend. But he was talking about looks. Eyes. Face. Hair. Body. Boobs. The coffee-colored skin. The clothes she wore, the way she did her makeup. Those neat white teeth in that dazzling smile. The kiss-me lips. It was all surface.

Two brains, one in each tit
.

That was unfair, actually, Teri’s comment. Now that Alex knew Donna better, he saw that she wasn’t unintelligent so much as lacking in curiosity. She learnt what was required of her at school but wasn’t all that interested in any of the subjects beyond their usefulness to her as a set of grades somewhere down the line. Same with people. When she’d asked Rob about the camper van, it was the first time Alex had seen her show an especial interest in someone else’s life, and even then, Donna had related it to herself.
I’d get claustrophobic
.

So when Rob had marveled at Alex’s luck, his lottery win, Alex had told him, “There’s a girl at school I like a lot better.”

“She’s not here, though, is she?” Rob said, with that grin.

“And Donna is.”

She was. They were kissing again; it was all they could do, because whenever they spoke, they had little to say to one another.

Two or three beers earlier, it might have bothered him enough to stop. But Alex couldn’t blame it all on the drink. He
liked
it, the kissing.

“I’m
starving
,” Donna said when they were kissed out and had sat up to watch Jack and Rob playing football down the beach, where the retreating tide had exposed a strip of flat sand. They’d been joined by half a dozen teenagers—male and female—and some younger kids. Rob was organizing them into teams, marking out the goals.

“He’s like the Pied Piper,” Alex said, smiling. “There’ll be thirty of us heading back in that van, if he carries on like this.”

Donna laughed. She had one arm round his shoulders, her other hand cradling his injured wrist. The bandages were grubby brown and damp and had worked loose. She pressed her lips to his ear, as she had done that time in the classroom on Alex’s second morning at Litchbury High.

“I do love you, Philip Garamond. You know that, don’t you?”

Barely more than a whisper. Barely words at all but soft warm breath.

Alex kept his gaze on the football. “This morning,” he said quietly, “what did we ‘need’ to talk about?”

She became still beside him. The hand that had been caressing his wrist fell away, into her own lap. It didn’t matter now, she told him. Bumping into Jack and Emma on the way into town to meet him, then with Rob being there, and heading off to Scarborough … well, the reason for seeing him had sort of got lost in all that.