Flip (21 page)

“Show me what?”

Alex eased himself off the bed, went over to the desk and switched on the PC. As it began to fire up, he said, “I have to let you see who I really am.”

When she’d finished reading, Cherry sat back in the chair and let out a long breath.

“Psychic evacuation,” she said.

“Uh-huh.”

“But … what are you saying, Philip?”

Alex was on the edge of the bed, watching her closely, her face reflecting the illumination from the computer screen. The whole time she’d been scrolling down the home page, following the link to the evacuees’ stories—
his
story—he hadn’t taken his eyes from her face, with its look of intense concentration. Now she had half turned in the chair to look at him, and still he couldn’t fathom her reaction.

“It’s me,” he said. “What happened to me. It’s who I am.”

“You’re—”

“A psychic evacuee. My name’s Alex Gray.”

She indicated the PC. “This is
you
, iamalex1? That boy in a coma?” He nodded. “But that’s … Philip, that’s just totally
insane
. ”

“I’ve wanted to tell you before,” he said. “I sort of did, once.”

She frowned. “When?”

“That time we walked down from school together and I was asking you out. ‘But you’re Flip Garamond,’ you said. And I’m like: ‘What if I told you I wasn’t?’ He gave a shrug. ‘You thought I was joking.’ ”

She laughed, a little oddly. “Of
course
I thought you were joking.”

Alex sat back against the wall, making the bed frame creak. What had he been
thinking
, showing her the Web site? He closed his eyes. Maybe when he opened them again, she wouldn’t be staring at him like he was a complete stranger, or mad, or both. What could he have expected, though—that Cherry would be cool with this? That it wouldn’t be a big deal for her? That she might, in a million years,
believe
him?

“That time in the car park,” he said, eyes open, gazing at a point on the wall where he didn’t have to see her expression, her body language, as she sat at the desk as though fossilized. “I’d just had a voice mail from a woman who works with my mum, calling me evil. Telling me not to try to call Mum again.”

“Not to call your
mum
?”

“My actual mum, down in London. The woman didn’t believe who I was.”

That quietened her for a moment. She was studying his face as though trying to memorize every last detail in case she was tested on it.

“It’s too weird, isn’t it?” Alex said when the silence started to get to him.

“You’re
serious
, then,” she said with a half shake of her head. “You actually believe—what?—that you’re
literally
someone else. I mean, come on, Philip—”

“
This
is Philip.” He gestured at his face, his body. Then, tapping his temple, he said, “In
here
, I’m Alex.”

“Your brain?”

“My mind. My psyche. My consciousness. My soul, if you like.”

That odd laugh again. Cherry shoved both hands into her thick frizz of hair and pushed it clear of her face. At that moment, Mrs. Jones called from downstairs. Cherry looked at the door, then back at Alex. “How can it even
happen
?” she said.

He started to explain psychic twinning but could tell it was making him seem more crazy, not less. Cherry cut across: “But, this Alex … you’re saying your psyche switched from his body to this one. To Philip’s. That’s what you’re saying?”

“Yes.”

“Your psyche switched bodies.”

Toneless, the words separated as though there were full stops between them. The bewilderment in her voice had been replaced by something Alex couldn’t name.

“Couldn’t you tell there was something
different
? About Flip, I mean,” Alex asked.

He counted them off on his fingers, the oddnesses: that time he’d got upset in the car park; the German lessons, when it was like he’d forgotten every word of the language and was starting over again; the things he’d said to her (“the house” instead of “my house”); his not knowing stuff he should’ve known (about school, teachers, other kids); his getting lost in the corridors; his asking her which lesson she had next when it was the same class he had; his asking her things about herself that “Philip” ought to have known; his not knowing things about himself, his life, his family. Beagle’s name. Leaving poetry in her locker. Playing the clarinet like he’d been doing it for years.

“Add all these together,” he said, “and there’s only one way it can make sense.” He spread his arms. “Cher, it’s the difference between ‘Philip’ and ‘Flip.’ ” But he saw that he had lost her.

“I was starting to really
like
you, Philip.”

“Same here.”

From downstairs: “Che-rry … time to go, hon.”

She shook her head, like a wasp was bothering her. There were tears in her eyes. Pushing the chair back, standing up, she gestured at the PC. “This … I’m sorry, but this is just …” Another shake of the head. “Look, I’m going.”

As she crossed the room, Alex said her name, moved to get up from the bed, reaching out for her hand. But she pulled it away.

“
Don’t
, Philip.” She was shaking. “Just … don’t.”

She let herself out of the room. He heard her on the landing, on the stairs. The goodbyes in the hallway, the front door opening and closing. Footsteps in the street. The beep-beep of an alarm being deactivated. Car doors. An engine. The sound of a vehicle driving away.

He sat at the desk. The Web site had given way to the familiar screen saver of endlessly interconnecting pipes. Alex stared at them as they formed their patterns like robotic snakes.

It was only a matter of time before the Garamonds came up. The postmortem into the exhibition he’d made of himself (of them); the unfinished business—Jack, school, the clarinet. Cherry’s looking upset when she left. Maybe they’d call another family meeting. Or they’d leave him alone for now, talk to him later, when everyone (he) had calmed down.

Whatever, he had nothing to say to them.

Alex moved the mouse and the screen saver disappeared. He closed the PE site and typed a new search into the box:
Alex Gray
.

He’d done this often, trawling the links to the information about him that had been strewn around the Internet since his accident. Online versions of newspaper articles, mostly. Blogs. Forums. Other bits and pieces. Alex read them in his blacker moods, as though they kept him in touch with himself or reaffirmed his existence in some way. In each link his name stood out, highlighted in bold type.

That’s me. That’s
me.

Just as often, though, it was like the sites referred to another person altogether. Or like he was looking at photographs of himself as a young child: recognizably him but an earlier, out-of-date model and, as such, not
him
at all.

On most of the links, the picture of him (released to the media by his parents, no doubt) was recent. Mum had taken it with her new digital camera on Alex’s fourteenth birthday, two months before the accident. He was posing in a pod on the London Eye, with the Houses of Parliament in the background.
Hey, here I am having a great time on my birthday!
Typically, his weaker eye, the left one, was squinting. It wasn’t especially sunny, but the pod’s transparent shell magnified the brightness, bleaching his complexion and making his hair seem more coppery than ever.

Him, nine months ago. Nine in real time, but only three to him.

He navigated to David’s blog. No matter how often he visited this site, Alex would be struck by how good his friend had made it. The look, the content, its user-friendliness. Web design was David’s thing, what he wanted to do when he was done with being a student. Alex clicked on one of the buttons down the left-hand side of the home page. “Alex Gray” was all it said. A portal to a virtual shrine. The first time Alex had come across it, it had been like standing at his own graveside.

That photo from the London Eye was there again. Alongside it, a video link. He clicked on it. His mum had filmed this once she’d figured out how to get her new camera to take moving pictures.

There he was—just like the last time he’d viewed this clip, and all the times before—caught in profile through a half-open bedroom door, wearing his Crokeham Hill High uniform and practicing the clarinet. Totally unaware that he was being filmed until, a little way into the piece (“Bridge Over Troubled Water”), his mum gave herself away by singing along to the chorus. The picture became a bit jumpy as Mum—laughing, telling him,
Hey, don’t stop!
—tried to keep Alex in frame.
Point that thing somewhere else
, he was saying, pushing the door shut. The footage continued with a shot of the door; then the camera swung round as his mum filmed herself, her features distorted in extreme close-up.
My elder son. When he’s a soloist with the Royal Philharmonic, this film will be worth a fortune
. There was a beep, the picture went blank and he could hear her swear as she tried to figure out what she’d pressed by mistake.

Just a week before the accident, this was. If Alex failed to emerge from PVS—if he
died
—these would be the last images of him.

They’d bought that clarinet for him when he was in primary school. The doctor reckoned it would help his asthma by opening up his bronchial tubes. It hadn’t. At the time he hadn’t even
wanted
a clarinet; if Mum and Dad were going to splash out on a musical instrument, he’d have preferred a guitar. As for going to
lessons
twice a week … But Alex had surprised everyone, including himself.

They might’ve played duets, he and Cherry. Lunchtimes, in the school music center: him on the clarinet, her on the cello.

Cherry should have been there, alongside him at the computer, looking at the images with him. Seeing who he really was.

But how could he ever have imagined
that
would happen?

He navigated away from David’s blog, back to the list of links. Page after page of them. It was a form of celebrity, he supposed. Coma boy. He was famous, this boy who was and was not him. And just as inaccessible to him as any other celebrity. Like a junkie, he clicked from one set of links to another, opening one or two, skim-reading, closing them—getting his fix, then going on to the next page to repeat the process.

He wasn’t paying all that much attention after a while, so by the time Alex came to the most recent link—one he hadn’t seen before—he almost missed it.

Coma boy’s parents hope for miracle as time runs out.…

It was a report, three days old, from the online edition of the local newspaper down in south London. The article consisted of an interview with Alex’s mum and dad, pegged on a renewed police appeal for help in identifying the hit-and-run driver. As their son’s persistent vegetative state entered its eighth month, Mr. and Mrs. Gray accepted—for the first time, publicly—that he might not regain consciousness.

“We haven’t given up hope,” said the boy’s father, “but, to be honest, he’s no different now from how he was the day after the accident. Unless something miraculous happens, it’s only a matter of time before the doctors want us to let him go.”

In such cases, Alex read, a decision to withdraw nutrition and hydration would be made by the courts if a patient had been in PVS for a year with no improvement.

He could be dead by Christmas.

The report ended with a quote from Mrs. Gray: “It’s tearing us to pieces—seeing him like that, day after day, week after week. There are times you almost believe he’s awake. Just this Monday, I was sitting at his bedside and I could’ve sworn Alex was looking right at me and trying to talk, to call out to me. But he wasn’t, I know that.”

He reached for Flip’s mobile, trying to steady his hand long enough to key in the text.

Rob, where are you? You have to get me out of here
.

If Alex had his way, Rob would’ve driven him to London right there and then.

But Rob wasn’t about to do that. Alex was going nowhere until he had calmed down and they’d talked things through. Rob had been on his way to Manchester when he received the text. After an exchange of messages to find out why Alex was so upset, Rob made a U-turn and headed back to Litchbury. Alex was already waiting when he steered the combi into Tesco’s car park. From there, they drove to one of Rob’s overnight parking spots, picking up beer and pizza en route.

Alex was almost demented with impatience. “What is this, a
picnic
?”

“The day you’ve had, what you
don’t
need right now is to go charging off to that hospital—turning up at one or two in the morning, pretending to be a visitor. Hey? Have some food, a few beers.
Sleep
on it.”

It made sense, Alex could see that. “You know the worst thing,” he said as Rob nursed the combi up a steep climb into the wooded hills to the east of Litchbury.

“Yeah, I reckon I do.”

“What?”

“What your mum said, about you trying to call out to her.”

Alex didn’t reply; he didn’t have to. There were times when Rob seemed to know him as well as he knew himself. He studied Rob’s face as Rob concentrated on the road, hands relaxed on the wheel, flicking the headlamps to full beam. Insects danced in the light. He had texted Rob with little thought: his first impulse after seeing that online report had been to contact the only other person who understood. Who could get him away from Flip’s room, Flip’s house. Who could help. How Rob might help him, exactly, he hadn’t figured out, beyond a wild idea that they’d drive through the night to London. Rob, though, was offering beer and pizza and someone to talk to. A place to sleep that wasn’t Flip’s bed. For the moment, it would have to do.

Just this Monday, I was sitting at his bedside and I could’ve sworn …

The day he’d fainted. His vision. Alex had been right: that had been no hallucination as he’d lain spark out in the corridor outside the staff room. It had been real. Fleetingly, he’d been back inside his own body. Then snatched away.

But she’d
known
. Mum had seen something in his eyes, heard it in the sounds he’d made, and she’d almost allowed herself to believe what was happening. Almost.

“I told you,” Alex said to Rob. “Me and Flip, we switched back that time.”

Rob nodded, eyes on the road still. “Looks like you did.”

“Which means it can
happen
, doesn’t it? It makes it possible.”

They were slowing, turning, the van just making it beneath a height-restriction barrier and onto a rough parking area surrounded by woods. The place was deserted, unlit. Rob parked in the far corner, killed the headlamps and switched off the engine, plunging them into pitch-black silence.

“Knowing you
can
do it,” Rob said, “isn’t the same as knowing
how
. ”

They ate sitting side by side on the tailgate, in the pale gleam cast through the open door by the van’s interior lighting. It was too muggy inside, and in any case, there was something attractive about eating in the night air, with the sound of the trees shifting overhead and the fresh, sappy scent of pine. Alex went steady with the beer this time.

“Bats,” Rob said, pointing at several small black creatures zigzagging about beneath the overhanging branches. “I’ve seen badgers up here, too. Foxes, owls.”

Alex watched the bats, barely able to pick them out. He had been here before, he realized, on a Team Garamond excursion: a woodland hike, then out with the rugs, the food hamper and the boules. Outerside Crags, it was called, after the cliffs that towered over the dale. From a distance, they looked like a great gray scar in the forest. The Garamonds had picknicked in a grassy clearing above the rocks, where they could watch the climbers and abseilers.

It had been glorious that day. Tonight it was like a different place altogether.

They hadn’t deserved it, Flip’s folks—the way Alex had left them. The way he’d spoken to the mum in the garden and, again just now, on the mobile. None of this was their fault. Alex might not have been their son, but they’d loved him like he was.

It had been Rob’s idea to let them know he was safe.
You need to get them off your case while you decide what to do
. Alex told Mrs. Garamond he was at a friend’s—no, he wouldn’t tell her which one—and was going to stay overnight, and that was all there was to it. Without waiting to hear what she had to say, he ended the call and shut off the phone. But he’d heard enough to know how worried and upset she was.

“Did you feel bad,” he said, “walking out on Rob’s family back in Dunedin?”

“I was twenty-one. I hadn’t even been living with them while I was at uni. It’s not the same.” Rob took a bite of pizza, chewed, swallowed. Washed it down with beer. “But, yeah, I felt bad. Whichever way you look at it, I took their son from them.”

Twice
, Alex thought. When they’d switched souls and, again, when “Rob” left New Zealand to come to the country where he, as Chris, had been born.

“Would you go back?” Alex asked.

“To Dunedin?”

“To Chris. If you could, I mean. If he was still there to go back to.”

Rob thought for a moment. “I guess it’s what I
am
doing, kind of. Coming to the UK, hanging around Manchester, the folks. Lisa.” He wiped his hands, finger by finger, on a paper napkin. “It’s as close as I can get.” Then, “You finished with that?”

Alex handed him his pizza box and Rob took the rubbish to a bin, merging into the shadows. After a moment, Alex heard him urinating. When he returned, he was smoking a cigarette. They continued to sit on the tailgate, drinking, talking.

“Shall we make up the bed?” Rob said eventually.

Even with the seats pushed together, it was narrow. Alex used Rob’s sleeping bag while Rob huddled beneath a duvet. Rob had stripped to his boxers but Alex kept his top and jeans on, unsure why he felt self-conscious in front of his friend when they had swum in the sea together in their underwear. The cramped intimacy of the combi had something to do with it. As though sensing Alex’s awkwardness, Rob said, “Don’t worry, Chris and Rob are both straight.”

Alex laughed more than the joke merited, but it had released the tension. With the lights out, they lay side by side and talked in the dark like brothers sharing a bed on holiday. Alex was squiffy but not drunk. It felt good. Listening to Rob’s voice, hearing his own as he spoke of Cherry and Beagle and Jack and, most of all, Mum and Dad, he felt less overwhelmed by the day’s events. Like they’d happened to someone else.

Outside, the shushing of the trees. “My dad used to take me camping,” Alex said.
Used to
. Still would do, given the chance.

“Mine too,” Rob said, and Alex could tell he was smiling. “Up to Morecambe, or the Lakes.”

“Is that why you bought the combi, d’you think?”

“Aw, I don’t know. Maybe.” Then, with that smile-sound again, he said, “Probably, yeah. Like a tent you don’t have to put up in the rain or when you’re bladdered.”

They fell into the easy quiet of two people who didn’t need to talk.

“I … I have to see myself, Rob,” Alex said after a while. For some reason he was whispering. Rob didn’t answer right away; there was just the regular rhythm of his breathing and Alex wondered if he hadn’t heard him, or if he’d fallen asleep.

But finally, he said, “Uh-huh.”

“My body, yeah? I have to see it, in the flesh. When I read that article—”

“Someone will stop you,” Rob said. “A nurse, a doctor, someone. You know that, don’t you? They won’t let you just walk into an ICU room like that.”

Alex didn’t say anything. He hadn’t even considered the practicalities.

“Or suppose your mum and dad are there, visiting,” Rob went on. “They’re bound to recognize you from before. They’ll call security and have you arrested.”

This time the silence between them wasn’t so comfortable. Rob had sounded cross, more like a father than a cool older brother or cousin.

“When I went down to Crokeham Hill before, that’s where I was planning on going after I’d spoken to David. To St. Dunstan’s. But I never made it.”

“If you’re caught again, Alex, you’ll be in serious—”

“I thought you were supposed to be helping me.”

“I am helping you.”

“D’you have any idea what it’s
like
?” Alex said, irritated himself now. Why was Rob acting like this? “Being separated from yourself, from your own flesh and blood. You know where your body is, but you’re not allowed to go there. To touch it, to see it. Just to be with it, you know?”

He felt the bed shift. There was a click and the light came on. Rob was sitting up, looking at him. “You’re
seriously
asking if I know what it’s like to be separated—”

“You don’t, though—your body was dead. Well, mine
isn’t.
” It felt unreal to be arguing while lying down, although the argument was real enough. “Mine isn’t dead,” he repeated. “You might know a lot, Rob, but you can never know what that’s like.”

Rob stared at him. At last, he switched the light off and lay down.

“Rob—”

“Drop it, will you?”

“You don’t want me to go, do you? To London.”

“Alex, we’re tired, we’ve been drinking—let’s talk in the morning.”

“You can’t deal with the fact that I can
see
myself, my own body.” Now Alex was the one sitting up, furious all of a sudden. He gave Rob’s shoulder a shove. “All that crap in Manchester about wanting to save me from turning out like you … What it is, you don’t want me to have what you can’t. Because you’re just—”

In the dark, Alex didn’t see him move but Rob sprang at him, grabbed him by the jaw and banged his head against the window, making the combi rock to one side.

“What can you have that I can’t, Alex!” His grip tightened as he pressed Alex’s head so hard against the glass Alex thought it might break. “Hey? What can you have?”

“My
life
,” Alex yelled, the words distorted by Rob’s hold on his face. He tried to free himself but Rob was too strong. “I can have my old life back.”

“Yeah? And how’re you gonna do that?”

Bang. Bang. “You’re
hurting
me.”

“How, Alex? How are you going to do that?” Rob let go. Alex slumped back against the wall, rubbing his jaw at the points of pain where it felt as though Rob’s fingers and thumb were still digging into him. Rob spoke again, quieter: “Tell me how you’re going to switch back, Alex.”

“I don’t know,” he said.
IdontknowIdontknow
. “I … DON’T … KNOW!”

“Then you have nothing,” Rob said. His face was like a moon, looming in the dark, close enough for Alex to smell the stale smoke on his breath and the tomatoey odor of pizza. “If you don’t know how to return to your own body, you don’t have anything that I don’t have. Okay, your body’s alive … but it might as well be dead.”

Eventually, Alex slept. Rob had lain back down, drawn the duvet round himself and gone to sleep. Not right away, maybe, but certainly before Alex, who lay staring into the gloom. An hour, two? No idea, he just went on being awake. Then he wasn’t.

The nightmare came just before dawn. Not that he could call it a nightmare anymore: just the blackness, the shrieking, the ripping at his insides.

No switch this time.

How he had longed for the dream to return, however appalling, in the hope it would trigger another body-swap between him and Flip. But it didn’t. And when Alex woke—shaken, sweating—he could have wept with frustration to find himself still in that body, in that makeshift bed, with a frail first light seeping into the combi and Rob snoring softly beside him.

He lay there for a while, dejected. Hating Rob. Hating himself. Rob was right: with no way back, his old life was closed off to him forever. The flare of hope raised by that one fleeting switch had turned into a taunt, tormenting him with what might’ve been. But no. In the tug-of-war between two psyches, his was staying put—clinging to Flip’s body, literally for dear life.

Quietly, Alex eased the sleeping bag off like a snake shedding its skin. Shuffled to the end of the bed and stood, carefully. Where were his trainers? There, near the door. He stepped into them and stooped to fasten the laces. His head ached and his face was still tender and he had the fiercest thirst, but the tap would be sure to disturb Rob. The latch turned with the smallest of clicks and the door made no creak as Alex let himself out into the chalky-gray chill of the early morning.

The crags were easy to find. Well-defined trails and signposts brought him there in a few minutes. It had been cold under the trees, but as he emerged into the clearing where he’d picnicked with the Garamonds, the sky opened in a wash of sunlight. The day would be warm once the early haze had burned off. Already it had thinned, unfurling a view across the dales that stretched to the horizon. Beautiful, if you were in the mood for beauty.

Alex made his way to the rocks.

Folklore had it, so Flip’s father said, that these boulders strewn about the place had been missiles used in ancient times by a giant to bombard intruders who dared to scale the cliff. Now several of them were stapled with pitons, the boulders serving as the very anchoring points that enabled climbers to reach the top. Alex tugged one but it was as fixed as if it had been part of the rock itself.