Flip (23 page)

A bus pulled up at the stop. It let a passenger off, the doors hissed shut and it eased back into the traffic. St. Dunstan’s reemerged behind a veil of rain. Alex raised his hood and set off across the road, just like that, as though the departing bus had opened a portal that had to be entered immediately, or not at all.

Corridors, stairs, more corridors, more stairs: a labyrinth of neon-lit passages. But the route from the main entrance to ICU was so well marked there was little chance of getting lost. Having the card and bouquet to hold kept his hands steady. Now and then—brushing against a wall or a banister, or getting caught in the draft of an opening door—the flowers shed a petal, leaving a trail, Alex imagined, that would guide him back out again.

Except if things went to plan, there would be no going back out. Not for him. The thought dizzied him, turned his feet to dead weights at the ends of his legs.

All the way, he anticipated bumping into his mother or father at any moment. Or that one of the people he passed would suspect he was up to something and raise the alarm. There was no sign of his parents, though. And no one in those stairways and corridors paid him the slightest attention.

Entering the intensive care ward, he was sure his luck would run out. A nurse would challenge him. Dad would be on the other side of those doors, lying in wait.

The entry vestibule was empty, and so was the passage leading off of it.

Behind a door a little farther on, someone was running a tap. Alex hesitated, unsure whether to hang back—wait for them to come out—or press on and take the risk of being intercepted. He decided to keep going. To front it out. The door stayed shut, the tap still running. The next door was open to reveal a waiting room with soft chairs and a tea-and-coffee-making area. Someone was in there, reading the
Telegraph
. He held it wide open so that all Alex could see of him were his hands, the top of his head, his legs.

But it was enough to stop Alex in his tracks. The patches of eczema on those knuckles, the frayed cuffs of that leather jacket. The unnaturally yellow spiky hair.

“What the—”

“You took your time,” Rob said, lowering the newspaper.

Rob was out of his chair, yanking Alex into the visitors’ room and shutting the door. Along with the card, the bouquet went flying, scattering petals. Alex tried to break free, to pull the door open, but Rob had him in a bear hug, wrestling him into one of the chairs and clamping a hand over his mouth.

“Keep the noise down,” Rob hissed, his other hand in Alex’s chest, pressing him into the seat. He nodded towards the corridor. “D’you
want
them in here?”

Alex stopped resisting. After a moment, Rob let go. Stood up, straightened his clothing, examined a small cut on his hand where he’d scraped it on something. He went over to the door, opened it a crack, peeked outside, then shut it again. He sat down opposite Alex, separated from him by a low table spread with magazines and newspapers and a display of what looked like artificial flowers in a green vase.

Alex glared at him. “How did you
get
here?”

“Same as you. Same train to Leeds, same train to King’s Cross, same train to Crokeham Hill. Not the same
carriages
, obviously, but—”

“I waited for you to drive away.”

“Yeah, then I parked round the corner and waited for you to come back out.”

“How—”

“How did I know you would? How could I
not
know, Alex?” Rob leaned right forward in his seat, as though the vase was a microphone and he wanted to be sure his words were picked up. “You said you had to see yourself. I didn’t reckon anything that happened last night, or this morning, was likely to change that. Was it?”

Alex shook his head. He noticed the bouquet on the floor and bent to retrieve it and the card. The card was bent. He straightened it as best he could.

“Also, if it was me,” Rob said, “I’d have done exactly the same.”

“You must really resent me, Rob.” Alex studied his face, trying to match him to the Rob who’d spoken to him for the first time, at the bandstand, on the morning of the Scarborough trip. His new friend, or so he’d thought. His kindred spirit. “To go to all this trouble, just to keep me from—”

“The thing that made you come here,” Rob said, “is the same thing keeps on pulling me back to Manchester—we’re like junkies hooked on our old lives. Our old
selves.
” He gestured at the door. “Yours is just out there, Alex—thirty, forty paces away—and you
know
that. You’re up in Litchbury, you know your body is down here in a hospital bed—of
course
you’re going to come.”

“
Why
, then?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you here to stop me? Why can’t you just let me say my goodbyes?”

Rob frowned. Picked up the vase and gave it a little shake. “No water.”

“Those flowers are made of plastic.”

“Are they?” He tested the petals between his fingers. “They’re very realistic.”

“Rob, please. Just … let me do this.”

Rob set the vase back down. Rubbed his hands together as though the petals were real and had made his skin tacky. “I’m not here to stop you, Alex.”

“You’re not?”

“Been there and done that. Last night, this morning, ever since we met, really, I’ve been trying to stop you hanging on to Alex Gray. But”—he spread his hands in a gesture of resignation—“you won’t be stopped. Simple as that.” He smiled. “If I stopped you now, you’d just bide your time and come here again.”

“Yes, I would.”

“You remind me so much of myself. As Chris, I mean.”

Alex let that go.

“I don’t resent you, Alex. And I’ve got no right to stand in your way.”

“So?”

“So … if I can’t stop you, I’ll have to help you. Cos I tell you, no way will they let you into that room with whatever story you’ve cooked up.”

Alex couldn’t tell if Rob was serious about helping him, or if he trusted him anymore. Rob was reckless and unpredictable enough to do anything. But Alex had little choice but to play along with this: he was so close now.

So Rob outlined the plan.

As they stood, ready to head into the ward, Rob surprised Alex by giving him a hug—a proper, full-on hug, like they were saying their last farewell.

“What?” Alex said, puzzled, half smiling, as Rob released him.

“I hope it works out for you in there, Alex. I really do.”

Alex’s stomach lurched. “Hope what does?”

“Aw, look, we both know you’re not going in that room to say goodbye to yourself,” Rob said. “And if the
real
reason is what I think it is, then you are one off-the-scale, crazy, tripped-out, brave bastard … and I hope you know what the hell you’re doing.”

Did he know what he was doing?

The idea had come to him at the crags, after he’d moved away from the edge. Sitting on the rooks, recovering from what he had almost done, Alex tried to make sense of it. The urge to jump … and the decision not to. As much as he’d retreated from the precipice, he saw that he had also taken a step back from himself. Or at least from what he was capable of at his worst.

He might have killed Flip. But he didn’t.

That petrifying moment had shown him something else, too: death, with all its possibilities. Flip’s death. Also his own, because as he stood there on the brink—his mind in Flip’s body—murder and suicide were hard to tell apart. But death was key. Death, or its immediate probability. On that cliff top, peering into the void, he could taste fear—his soul like a horse in a burning stable, kicking and bucking, frantic to escape the smoke and flames. Alex was as sure as he could be that if he had let himself fall, his soul would have bolted from Flip’s body before it even hit the ground.

And if
his
soul could be driven out of a body by the terror of imminent death, then so could Flip’s.

Couldn’t it?

After all, Flip’s soul had already switched back once, briefly, and that from a body in PVS, balanced between life and death. The trick, then, was to tip the balance further death-wards. A lot further. Far enough to compel Flip’s psyche into one huge, last-ditch effort to free itself before it was too late.

A young nurse stood behind the reception counter, on the phone, scribbling notes, her arms unnaturally pink against the white uniform. As Alex hovered, a gray-haired porter passed by, whistling an unrecognizable tune as he wheeled two tall black bottles (oxygen?) on a sack barrow. He gave Alex a nod. Then he was gone and it was just the two of them: Alex and the nurse. She didn’t look much older than Teri. That was good, wasn’t it? Better some bright, cheerful junior nurse than a grumpy, no-bullshit matron or ward sister, or whatever they were called.

“Can I help you?” she said, clicking the phone back into its cradle.

Not bright or cheerful at all, in fact, but jaded. Bored. Worn out. He noticed the shadows under her eyes, her waxy pallor and blank, almost dazed expression. She was pretty, though, somewhere behind all that. Those brown eyes.

After a moment’s hesitation, he launched into his spiel.

“No flowers,” the nurse told him when he was done. “They affect his asthma.”

Of course. He looked at the bouquet, stalled by a reply he hadn’t anticipated. “Can I leave them for his mum, d’you think?” Alex said, improvising.

“Pop them on there for now.”

Alex laid the bouquet where she’d indicated, at one end of the counter, along with the oversized card in its red envelope. “We got
loads
of signatures,” Alex said, handing it to her, trying to keep his voice steady, to stay calm.

What was Rob up to? When was he going to start his “performance”?

Alex glanced at the sign on the wall, with its direction arrows and room numbers. Room 6 was the one, according to Rob.

The old boy returned, still whistling; the sack barrow was empty now. He noticed the flowers. “Bit young for you, isn’t he?” he said, giving the nurse a wink. With that, he was gone again. The nurse’s expression was unreadable. If she was bothered by what the guy had said, she wasn’t going to let Alex see.

Another nurse—older, more senior-looking—came out of a room opposite the reception area, went behind the desk and placed a folder of paperwork into a wire tray.

“What time d’you finish?” she said.

“Four,” the younger nurse said.

“I thought you were doing a double.”

“ ’Fraid not.”

The older nurse muttered something, took a swig from a can of Coke, set it back down and headed off somewhere else. “Has she been in today?” Alex asked the first nurse. “Mrs. Gray, I mean.”

She looked up as though surprised to find him still there. “Mr. Gray was here this morning. One of them’ll pop in again soon, I expect, now ward round’s over.” She almost smiled. “Don’t worry, I’ll make sure she gets the flowers and the card.”

Just then a buzzer sounded, raising a flare of irritation in her eyes. Alex wasn’t sure what to do. He’d run out of things to say, of reasons to remain standing there at the counter. The buzzer again, with prolonged insistence, followed by a shout. “Nurse, nurse!” The gray-haired porter reappeared, out of breath.

“There’s a young feller on the floor in the visitors’ room,” he said, gesturing along one of the corridors. “Looks like he’s having some sort of fit.”

Rob
.

The nurse came out from behind the counter and followed him, breaking into a trot. Alex—forgotten, last minute’s claim on her attention—watched her go. Gave her time to disappear from view. Then turned and followed the sign to room 6.

It was just a room. Not like off a soap or one of those TV hospital dramas, in which anyone in intensive care is wired up to bleeping machines and doctors and nurses flit about, waiting for the patient to flatline at any moment. Here it was quiet and still. Low-tech. An art print on the wall, a pair of IKEA-style armchairs and, in one corner, a table with a radio/CD player and a portable telly. All it needed was carpet instead of easy-clean flooring, and room 6 could’ve passed for a hotel bedroom. If you ignored the reek of antiseptic. The curtains were partially drawn, and a bluey-green gloom was cast over everything. The color of the sea in a child’s painting.

In this half-light, he thought the bed was empty. But as his eyes adjusted, he made out a human form beneath the blanket. Like a dummy. Something you’d use to fool someone into thinking you were in bed when really you weren’t.

Then the head on the pillow.

Alex approached the bedside. Stood there, making himself look at the face.
His
face. Waxy, pallid. Even though he knew that the boy—
Alex
—was alive, it was like staring at the features of a corpse. Like seeing himself dead. The eyes were shut, at least. He was grateful for that. To see his own eyes staring back at him … that would’ve been too much.

A tube disappeared into the right nostril, for the fluids and liquidized food that kept him alive. That was the only piece of medical kit. If he placed his ear to that chest, he would hear the heart beating away as though everything was normal in there. Doing its job, regardless. The lungs, too. The breaths were shallow but he could see the rise and fall of the ribs. Hear the air being inhaled and exhaled through the parted lips. In his long hours at the PC, reading about the soul and the mind, Alex had come across the origins of “psyche”—the German translation of a Greek word for “life” or “spirit” or “consciousness,” rooted in a verb that meant “to blow.” To the ancient Greeks, the psyche was the vital breath that made human beings what they were.

The breath of life.

Well, Alex—the bodily Alex on that bed—might be missing his rightful psyche, and he might be unconscious, but he was breathing, breathing, breathing.

What was with the TV and the radio/CD, though? He would hardly be sitting up in bed watching
The Simpsons
or using the remote to switch CD tracks. They were for visitors, he supposed. Mum and Dad. Alex imagined his parents listening to music or watching television in there. It must be boring, waiting for someone to die. Or to wake up. Maybe they played
Hot Fuss
or
Sam’s Town
on a continuous loop, in the hope that it would penetrate their son’s shut-down brain and lure him out of PVS.

Could
he hear anything? If Alex spoke to himself now, would the sounds—the words themselves—register somewhere deep in his unconscious?

But then it wouldn’t be Alex who heard them. It would be Flip. That might be Alex’s head, Alex’s brain, but it was Flip’s unconscious in there.

Alex looked at himself more closely. The face was thinner and more drawn than usual, and the hair had grown longer. Not a lot; someone—his mother?—must have been keeping it trim. He pictured her doing that. When he was little, she used to cut his hair rather than pay for it to be done at a barber’s. She still did cut Sam’s. The eyelids looked fragile, like scraps of tissue paper had been laid over the eyes. Perhaps it was his imagination but they appeared to be flickering.

They
were
. Was Flip dreaming? Did he have nightmares, just like Alex?

He wondered whether Flip had detected the presence of his
own
body, and of Alex’s soul. Proximity wasn’t a factor in psychic evacuation, but all the same he couldn’t help thinking that a psyche would show some kind of response to the nearness of its “twin.” But if Flip’s did, Alex picked up no hint of it.

He took hold of the right hand in his left. The skin was warm. He didn’t know why, but he hadn’t expected it to be. Long fingernails, he noticed. Unbitten. They looked false, he was so used to seeing them chewed right down. With his free hand, he smoothed the fringe back. The hair felt coarse, a little greasy. The forehead was cool, at least. Now he was touching that face: running his fingers across the eyebrows, the cheek, the jaw, the chin. That mouth. Tracing his thumb along the parted lips.

No. Too strange. Too freaky. He took his hand away.

If the physical contact affected the boy on the bed, he seemed oblivious. So calm. So peaceful. Alex could almost believe he was merely asleep and at any moment he’d wake up and everything would be fine.

Leaning over the bed, Alex became aware of the smell. Not unpleasant, as such, but there was a slightly sweet whiff of stale sweat and body odor and old pajamas. Of musty armpits and unwashed hair. His
own
smell, although it seemed unfamiliar; he hadn’t even realized he had a
scent
before.

There wasn’t time for this. He didn’t know how long Rob could delay the nurse, or when she or another of the staff might come in here to check on Alex. Or when his mum or dad might appear. Perhaps they’d gone to the café while the doctors did their ward round and were, at that very minute, heading back through the maze of corridors towards ICU to sit with their son once more.

If Alex was going to do this, he had to do it now.

It was wrong. Dangerous, reckless, fraught with the risk of disaster. Crazy, really. But mostly just plain wrong. The greater wrong, though, was that the body on the bed
—his
body—was stripped of its true inner essence. What was wrong, as well, was that
this
body, the one Alex occupied,
Flip
’s body, with its own soul ripped out, was exiled to a place it didn’t belong.

That face. That head. He had to touch it again now.

The question was, would it work? And if it did, would the switch occur just
before
, or just
after
, the point of no return?

As he slipped a hand beneath the head, raising it gently from the pillow, as he felt the moist, warm skin at the back of the neck, the scalp, the sweat-matted hair, as he heard the small sigh with the shift in position, as the eyelids fluttered, as he used his free hand to ease the pillow out from under that head, then lowered that head again … as each of these things happened, Alex’s sureness about the rights and wrongs began to blur and slip and break apart.

He had to close his eyes. Had not to see his own face turned blankly towards him in that final moment before it was lost from view beneath the pillow.

Outside room 6, voices.

Alex froze. Listened. The voices echoed along the corridor—two women, talking (he couldn’t make out what about)—then footsteps, the squeak and rattle of a trolley being wheeled along. Drawing closer. Passing. Fading away. From the direction of the nurses’ station came the sound of a telephone ringing, unanswered.

He breathed slowly, deeply. Got a proper hold of the pillow and positioned it over the face without allowing himself to hesitate or even to think, placing his hands over the center of the pillow and pressing down. Firmly, then more firmly still.

The harder he pressed, the less that lump beneath the layers of cotton and foam felt like a human head, and the more it became just that: a lump. He had considered removing the feeding tube from the nostril but decided it would make no difference; in any case, he had no idea how to do that. As he continued to place his weight on the pillow, he stopped himself thinking about the tube. The nostril. The nose. The mouth. Those slightly parted lips. Blotted out the mental image of that face altogether. He was pressing a pillow down over an inanimate object; that was all.

There was no struggle. No sounds of frantic gagging for breath.

With no struggle, there was no gradual cessation of a struggle, no end-of-struggle stillness … nothing to indicate whether he’d kept the pillow in place for long enough, or for too long. So all Alex could do was hold the pillow and press down and down and down. Just go on pressing until something happened. Or until nothing did. Perhaps after all, the only thing to happen would be that he’d eventually lift the pillow to find that “Alex” was dead. Truly dead. And he’d put the pillow back beneath that head and leave the room, still inside Flip’s body.

He pressed down. He went on pressing down.

A statue’s skull, its sculpted features impressing themselves

on his flesh so that if he turned his hands palm-upwards, the marks would be etched there. The whorlsandcreases of a partially sketched face.

He pressedandpressed until his wrists began to

throb and his
Stop

forearms, his shoulders. Aching with the effort. Every shred of strength, channeled into that point of contact.

Eyes closed. You weren’t to look. To think. To look at, to think of, what you were doing to that headfaceyou to him the boy the skull the stone bust

the mouth of that

decapitated suffocating sculpted head

under the weight of everything you bring to bear and still it won’tcan’tdoesn’t struggle or breathe or seem to breathe if it’s made of stone it can’t breathe

Stop!

it’s your own head beneath the pillow and if only you could breathe ininin through your nose your mouth your mouth that cannot open because it’s made of flesh of blocked

stopped

flesh

the suffocated opening in flesh

and you arekilling, murderingyourselfhow can you

in the green gloomy gray light but your eyes are closed and even through the lids of your closed eyes the light is black

not black, green

not green, white like when you

STOP!
But you dontyoudontyoucantyou

like when you push the heels of your hands hard into your eyes and the lids fizz with colored lights

and the headache, the splitting intolerable headache.

But the thing is to breathe if you stop breathing if you don’t breathe you

die

you blackgreenwhitered black out and you die

You are a fish. In the bluey green, a fish in a tank only the tank is drained and your gills his gills those gills flap open and closed open and for

want of water you are drowning in air
StopStop!

with pain screaming inside your stone skull, the air screeching, shrieking inside your head. His head. Searing. Clawing, ripping the stitches of your brain the lungs your lungs your lungs will burst through your ribs

if

you

don’t

breatheyou will

STOPSTOPSTOPSTOP!

The jolt of a door being pushed open. A voice, yelling.

There was no falling, only floating. No standing up. Had he been standing up? No. Lying, that was all. Lying, afloat on flat nothingness.

The weight became light, the hard became soft, the dark became bright … and best of all, there was air. Sweet sips of cold air between his lips. There’d been no air before. But now there was. Lots of it. All the air he could wish for.

Glorious air that Alex breathed and breathed, deep into his lungs, and with each breath came the slightest but unmistakable trace of a wheeze.