Flip (8 page)

Ten minutes or so along the path, Beagle strayed off on a trail of investigative sniffs among the ferns and tree roots. Alex, who had unleashed him a while back, followed. They soon struck upon another track, treacherous with moss beneath the overhanging branches. It fetched them out into a clearing. A graveyard, in fact. The headstones, old and worn, blotched with lichen, poked out of the ground at odd angles. Many of the inscriptions were illegible. The ones which Alex could make out dated back to the 1800s. Buried here were mostly old folk, apart from one: William Edward Gelderd, four years old, “summoned unto sleep” on May 5, 1810.

Two centuries earlier, the boy’s parents would have wept by this graveside as his tiny coffin was lowered into the ground. Now he was no more than weathered letters on a block of stone. He was nothing. In the soil, after all this time, he would’ve rotted away completely. Dead too young to leave children, or grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, or great-great-grandchildren to carry his DNA into the future. The thought sent a chill through Alex.

And he understood then, if he hadn’t known it all along—if he hadn’t been too shocked, too petrified to admit it to himself—that there was only one sure reason that David couldn’t possibly believe the message was from him. One reason Alex hadn’t been able to click “go” when he’d typed his own name into the search box.

Because Alex Gray was dead.

That night’s nightmare was the worst yet.

Swarms of disembodied steel hands clawing at his legs as he ran up a slope of molten tar. Talonlike fingers flaying his legs to the bone, the sticky black beneath his feet slick with his own blood. Voices. And a relentless screech, as though the hands scraped the air with the metallic swipe-swipe-swipe of their nails.

When Alex woke, the images in his head snapped to black. But the screaming continued for a moment before it, too, ceased and all was still and silent.

Two a.m. He was way beyond sleep by now and, besides, terrified that if he so much as closed his eyes, the nightmare would start up again. But to lie there, awake, thinking of death—
his
death—was far worse.

In the morning, the yammering of the alarm clock dragged him, zombielike, out of bed. He didn’t remember going back to sleep, but he must’ve done. He got up and went through his morning routine, more or less on autopilot: shower, put on uniform, go downstairs, eat cereal, drink juice. The mum was in a rush to leave for work and Mr. Garamond was sleeping off his hangover from the departmental dinner. Alex almost bumped into Teri on the landing as she emerged from the bathroom in a billow of steam, wet haired, pink-fleshed, a green and white stripy towel wrapped round her like a sarong.

“You look awful,” she said. Disgusted more than concerned. “What happened to your face? One of your girlfriends give you a smack in the gob?”

Alex touched his lip, surprised to find it damaged. Then, “Oh, yeah. Cricket.”

“Surely the idea is to catch the ball with your
hands
, not your mouth?”

Later he would think of a comeback. Just then, spaced from sleep deprivation, he felt words fluttering around in his head like moths bashing against a light.

I’m dead
.

Could he possibly say that to her?
Teri, the thing is, I’m not the person you think I am. My name is Alex. And I’m dead
. Of course he couldn’t. Not to her, or to Flip’s mother, or to Ms. Sprake, or Jack or Donna or Billie, or to that girl at school Cherry. Not to anyone. Or to anyone back home, for that matter. Mum, Dad, Sam. David. David, who still hadn’t bothered to reply to Alex’s last message. Not that it mattered. He was cut off from them all, from everyone, utterly alone with his secret. Alex hadn’t realized he was doing it, but he must’ve been staring at Teri’s bare shoulders, speckled with water, and the bulge of the towel against her breasts.

“Okay, here’s the thing, Philip,” she said. “You’ve got two switches in your brain: one labeled ‘girl,’ and one that says ‘sister.’ When you see me with hardly any clothes on, the first switch should be in the off position, yeah? And the second should be in the on position. Do you think you could manage that?”

Then she was in her bedroom, with the door banged shut behind her.

Alex went downstairs, grabbed his keys and his schoolbag.

The last thing he wanted was to spend another day at Litchbury High as Flip—but as though in a daze, he was setting off to do just that. He was letting himself out of the house when he saw the dad’s wallet on the shelf in the hall. Mr. Garamond must have left it there when he came in drunk from his night out.

Alex stood there. Looked at the wallet. Listened.

The mum had already left, and by the sound of it, Teri was still in her bedroom, drying her hair. As for Flip’s dad, he hadn’t surfaced yet.

Alex picked up the wallet. Opened it. Took out the cash and counted it. Then he put the money back and clipped the wallet shut. Continued to stand there, eyes on the wallet. Continued listening. Hair dryer. Beagle, snuffling about in the basement. The slosh-slosh of the dishwasher. Nothing else. He opened the wallet once more, emptied it, stuffed the notes into his pocket, set the wallet back on the shelf and left the house—quietly, clicking the door shut and carefully turning the key.

Who cared about Flip’s PIN now?

In fifteen minutes, he’d be on the local train into Leeds. By lunchtime, he’d arrive at King’s Cross. By early afternoon, Alex would be home.

What he would do when he got there, he had no idea. What he’d say to anyone, or what they’d make of him. His parents. Would they “recognize” him, in the way Beagle sensed that Flip was no longer Flip? He’d once seen a TV program, about sheep farming, in which an orphaned lamb had another lamb’s fleece draped over it so the ewe mistook it for one of her own young and allowed it to suckle. Were human mothers so easily deceived? If he could just
see
Mum, would she know him for who he was—somehow, through some maternal intuition? If not, he could tell her things about himself, about his life, about the family, that only Alex could possibly know. He hadn’t convinced David that way, but David was his mate, not his mother—the woman who’d carried him in her womb, given birth to him, fed him from her breast, raised him for fourteen years. He had once lived inside her, as he now lived inside Flip. If anyone recognized him, in this strange boy’s body, with this strange boy’s face, it would be Mum.

And if she
couldn’t
, if none of them could, he would leave. Go on the run, into hiding. Live rough if he had to. Live wild in the woods. Stranded inside Philip but no longer compelled to
be
him, or to live as him, with his family, at his school. Instead, he would escape, take off on his own to exist however he could. As
himself
. He had to hold on to that: whatever had become of his body, he was still Alex inside. His soul, his spirit, his essence.

Whatever it was that had killed him hadn’t killed
that
.

It must’ve been sudden, without warning, or he would remember. Brain hemorrhage, accident, heart attack. Something like that. Maybe he had been blown up by a terrorist bomb (unlikely while he was running home from David’s or fast asleep in his own bed). Beaten up, then: jumped by a pack of hoodies, given a kicking, stabbed. But Alex had no recollection of a fight. It would’ve been simple, the simplest thing in the world, to find out what had happened. In Litchbury Library that first evening, when he’d taken Beagle for a walk; in the library at school, when he’d e-mailed David; at any point on Flip’s PC, once he’d set himself up with a password … A fourteen-year-old boy died, it was bound to make the news. And if it made the news, it’d be online, somewhere, somehow. In nought-point-something seconds, it would’ve been right there on the screen for him to read: the story of his own death.

But the fear of finding out for sure had been way, way worse than the anxiety of not knowing. To Google himself would’ve made it final.

Alex hadn’t been ready for finality.

He wasn’t ready for it now. He had to go home; that was all.

It was only when the train pulled out of Litchbury that Alex realized what he had done. Taking off like this,
stealing
from Flip’s father—he’d never done anything as reckless or impulsive in his life. His heart was thumping in his chest and he thought he might be sick. The other people in the compartment surely only had to look at him to see that he was on the run. That he was a thief.

He gazed out the window. Tried to compose himself.

It would devastate them, Mr. and Mrs. Garamond, his running away like this. The disappearance of their son. He imagined them waiting by the phone for news or making a tearful appeal in front of the cameras for Philip to come home. This thought shook him: the scale of what he was getting himself into and the upset he would cause two innocent people. Three, counting Teri. She might not
like
her brother, but he couldn’t believe she’d be glad for him to go missing.

As the train carried him from Flip’s life, Alex was struck by the thought that whatever happened in London, he would never set foot inside 20 Tyrol Place again.

It was nearly four o’clock by the time Alex reached the street where he lived. He had killed a couple of hours in a coffee shop at Crokeham Hill station before catching the bus for the final leg of his journey home. It would have looked odd, his turning up any earlier while kids his age were meant to be in school. Those two hours felt like ten, but he’d put the time to use, getting his story straight in his head. Readying himself for the moment when he would see his mother again.

As he approached the house, Alex couldn’t help thinking that he might see
himself
. At a window, in the garden, walking along the road. Opening the door when Alex knocked. The living body he had left behind carrying on without him. Of course that wouldn’t happen.
Couldn’t
. There was no living body. He understood what Mum’s colleague at the library had been protecting her from. And why his call had sickened her.

“Alex” wasn’t here. He wasn’t anywhere anymore.

Monks Road looked so ordinary. So unchanged. It had been winter last time he was here, and it was summer now, but otherwise everything was much the same. The Cockers, at 157, were building an extension above the garage, and there was a For Sale board outside the old biddy’s, at 143. That was all. Would a neighbor spot him? No matter, they wouldn’t recognize him. He meant nothing to them as Flip. He wondered if he ever had as Alex. It seemed wrong for the place to look so little different, for life to carry on as normal. Same small shopping precinct across the way; same shops, too, although the baker’s had changed hands and one of Somerfield’s windows was patched up with chipboard. Same lads skateboarding down the access ramp for wheelchairs and buggies. Same queue at the fish-and-chips shop. This side of the road: same houses, garages, parked cars, same shrubs, flower borders and hedges. Same scraps of lawn. Same porches. Same doors and windows. Same curtains. And by association, the people inside those homes were the same, continuing with their lives just as before, as though Alex Gray’s absence was of no consequence, or as though he’d been quickly forgotten, or had never existed in the first place.

What had he expected? That his street, this neighborhood, would be reduced to a wasteland of grief? That the erased left a visible, tangible trail in their wake?

Inside 151, it would be different. The exterior might look the same—that wonky wall beside the steps, where the pointing had gone (it had been on Dad’s to-do list for years); that mustard-colored door with its exposed stripe of undercoat; that Christmas tree they’d planted however long ago, which now reached the guttering. But indoors, his absence would have left its mark. In the preservation of his bedroom, maybe, kept just as it had been the day he died. Or in Mum, Dad, even Sam—the sadness in their eyes, still, after all these months.
Something
. Some trace of him.

Anticipating this moment, his homecoming, Alex had imagined lurking nearby, a shadowy figure in the dark. Monitoring who came and went, or spotting someone at a lit-up window. Observing. Gathering himself, choosing his moment to go up to the door. But of course, it wasn’t dark, or even dusk, and there were no shadows where he might conceal himself; it was the last week of June, a too-bright, too-lovely summer’s afternoon. So he stood there, in the street, conspicuous and self-conscious, crushed by hesitation. It was his home. Inside were his family. To him, it had been only days since he had been here. Yet Alex might have been a time-traveling stranger, an alien beamed down from a spacecraft. The very idea that his mother might recognize her dead son’s spirit inside this impostor’s body suddenly seemed ridiculous.

The car wasn’t on the hardstanding. He hadn’t registered that right away. Dad would still be at work, of course. Someone was home, though—a window was open in Mum and Dad’s bedroom, the curtain shifting in the breeze, and he’d heard the flush of a toilet. Sam’s scooter lay abandoned on the front steps, like a robot’s mislaid limb. Alex found himself wanting to retrieve the scooter and trundle it up the side passage, out of sight, so it wouldn’t get nicked. Before, he couldn’t have cared less if Sam lost his scooter. Now he did. Being Flip for a few days, being kid brother to Teri … had that done this to him? Either way, the thought of Sam’s not recognizing him was almost as dismaying as the prospect of Mum’s blank look when she opened the door.