Flip (16 page)

Rob was waving in their direction, calling for them to join the game.

“It was nothing, anyway,” Donna said.

“I thought you were going to—”

Donna placed a finger against his lips. “It’s been fun today,” she said. “Don’t spoil it, eh?” Her eyes pleaded with him, searching his for some kind of reassurance. “I mean, this is great, isn’t it? Coming here like this, with Rob. It’s been such a brilliant, awesome day. And
us
, you know?
You
. The way you’ve been.”

“How’ve I been?” Alex said, frowning. His mouth tasted of salt, from when she’d touched him; his lips, the tip of his tongue were gritty with sand.

“Like … I dunno.” She shrugged. “It’s like I’ve got my old Flip back.”

By the time they got back to Litchbury, it was dusk, the van reeked of fish-and-chips and Alex was so drunk Rob had to help him down from the passenger seat. He was the last to be dropped off. Rob had pulled up at the corner of Tyrol Place.

“Probably best if your folks don’t see me,” he said.

Alex steadied himself. Focused on the front door of number 20. The keys were in his hand—how had that happened? Rob, it must’ve been Rob put them there—and all he had to do was place one foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other.

“Seeya,” he said, aiming a back slap but not all that sure he connected.

In the morning Alex would wonder where Rob had parked for the night, picturing him asleep in the back of that combi in some lay-by or caravan site or some dingy lorry park. In the morning Alex would have a hazy memory of the photograph he had glimpsed in Rob’s wallet when the guy had paid for everyone at the chip shop. Emma had seen it, too.

“Who’s the girl?” she’d asked.

For a nanosecond Rob had stiffened; then, relaxing again, he’d flashed her the saddest smile and said, “Lisa.” Just that.
Lisa
.

“The girl you left behind?”

“Yep.” He folded the wallet away. “The girl I left behind.”

In the morning all this would come to Alex, but just then, it was as much as he could do to stagger up the hill towards the house. He did recall
something
Rob had said to him, though, as the other three had slept off the booze on the long drive home. At the gate Alex turned to call it back to him, his voice echoey in the quiet.

“Seize the day, eh, mate—seize the bloody day.”

Rob was still there, at the end of the street, seeing Alex home safe. He raised a hand, gave Alex the thumbs-up. Then melted away into the gloom.

Alex was on his way to school the next morning when his mobile rang. It was Rob.

“So, Alex, my man, how you feeling?”

“Rough.”

“How rough, scale of one to ten?”

Alex groaned into the phone by way of an answer.

“Twelve, eh? Nice one.”

“I am in
so
much shit with Flip’s folks,” Alex said. “They thought I’d gone to London again … then I stagger in at whatever time and puke all down the hall.”

“Carpet or floorboards?”

“Floorboards.”

“So what’s their problem?”

Alex laughed despite himself. “Me. I’m their problem.”

“If you were their
son
, you’d be their problem—but you’re not, so you can do whatever you like.”

“Seize the day.”

“
Exactly
, seize the bloody day.”

“They’re nice people, Rob. They don’t deserve this.”

There was a moment’s silence at the other end of the line. Then Rob said, “My folks are nice, too. They had three and a bit years of their ‘son’ going strange on them and then he takes off to England, just like that. But the thing is, Alex, even if I
was
their son, they still wouldn’t
own
me.”

“You’re twenty-two. I’m not even fifteen till October.”

Alex had reached the school gates. He stood against the fence, away from the stream of pupils, yawned, wondered if he was about to be sick again. His head felt as though someone had tightened a belt around his brain. Rob was apologizing; he hadn’t called for a quarrel.

“It was a good day, though, wasn’t it?” he said.

Alex smiled. Said it was. Then, “Rob, did you ever have nightmares? After you switched, I mean.”

“What sort of nightmares?”

Alex told him about them. “I was starting to think they must be some kind of flashback to the hit-and-run accident, you know?” he said. “But I had one last night and it was different from all the others. Like, I know I was drunk and that, but …”

He described the latest dream. In this one he was imprisoned in a chamber or tomb of some kind. Floating, as though weightless. He saw nothing but utter darkness. Smelled nothing. Touched nothing. The only texture was the icy dampness of the air on his skin. But there was pain: countless sharp tugs at his insides as though hordes of mice trapped inside him were gnawing their way out, scrabbling away with their teeth and tiny claws. There was noise, too: appalling shrieks and howls that sounded as though they came from the air itself. If you leapt from the tallest skyscraper, this would be your mind’s last scream as you plummeted to the ground.

He heard Rob exhale. “No, mate, I never had anything like that. I dreamt a lot before, as Chris, but I don’t at all now. No nightmares. No flashbacks to when I got stabbed. It’s like that part of my unconscious got erased.”

“I went through the archives on the PE Web site,” Alex said, “and none of the evacuees talk about having nightmares after they switched. So what is it about
me
?”

Before Rob could answer, the bell sounded.

“Listen, I have to go into school.”

“Oh, okay. I just wanted to check you were okay … apart from hangovers and puke-stained halls and terrible nightmares.”

Alex could hear a shushing noise in the background. “Where are you, anyway?”

“In a car park where overnight camping isn’t allowed.”

“It sounds like the sea.”

“That’ll be the wind in the trees. Or the sound of my brain rehydrating.”

“I can’t believe you drove back from Scarborough after all that beer.”

“Hey, Alex, when you’ve already died once and lived to tell the tale, you get a bit reckless about things like drink-driving.”

It was probably an aftereffect of the San Miguel, but Alex had woken up from the nightmare feeling weak,
drained
—as though the imaginary ripping at his insides was actually causing him to lose blood. He still felt woozy, heading into school.

The more he analyzed the dreams, the less sense they made. Of course, dreams hardly ever made sense. In fact, dreams didn’t really
exist
, as such; they were a product of the mind. Like a movie—just beams of light on a screen; switch off the projector and the images were gone. Dreams were like the mind itself, in a way: nothing to get hold of, to weigh, to measure, to record. You
knew
you dreamed, you
knew
you had consciousness, but only because your mind said so. To look at it like that, the
mind
was a product of the mind. Neurons.

That was Mrs. Reaney’s opinion. Science, first period. Once she’d overcome her surprise at being asked for a scientific definition of the mind (by Philip Garamond, of all people, and in the middle of a lesson on plant photosynthesis), the teacher got to grips with the question.

“If by ‘mind’ you mean the, um, seat of human consciousness,” she said, “then I would say that what makes us who we are is our neural activity: the messages passing back and forth between the brain’s nerve cells.”

“The mind is just a bunch of cells, then?” Alex said.

“Well, yes, cells and synapses and the chemical neurotransmitters that carry the information. And, Philip”—the teacher smiled—“when you say ‘just a bunch of cells,’ don’t forget there are more than one hundred
billion
neurons in the human brain.”

Mrs. Reaney was in one of the woven smock things that she always wore. For a science teacher, she did a good impression of an ageing hippie—right down to the dangly sun-pendant necklace. She knew her stuff, though. And when one or two of the other pupils sniggered in the background at the exchange between her and Alex, she silenced them with a look that could slam a door from ten meters.

Noting the frown on Alex’s face, she elaborated: “The patterns of thought and cognition and memory and, um,
self-awareness
and so on that go on inside your brain, and yours alone, are what make you the unique individual that you are.”

“Cells and chemicals,” Alex said.

“That would be my scientific definition, yes.” She shuffled the papers on her desk, as a hint, probably, that they ought to get back to photosynthesis.

“So what about the soul? Are the mind and the soul the same thing?”

“Ah, well, the soul—”

“Only I’m thinking that if they
are
just two ways of saying the same thing, then when we die, our souls must die, too. Mustn’t they, miss, if they’re just cells and chemicals? No heaven or hell or anything like that. No reincarnation.”

More sniggering. Mrs. Reaney ignored it. “Of course, if you’re after a more, um,
theological
explanation, Philip,” she said, smiling again, “you should speak to Mr. McQueen.” Then, turning to the others, she asked, “What do the rest of you think? Paul—yes
you
, Paul—how would you define your unique inner essence?”

Before the boy could answer, a voice called out, “Ninety percent Big Mac!”

Alex
did
speak to Mr. McQueen, after tracking the religious studies teacher down in the staff room at morning break. Standing there in the doorway—so tall he had to stoop beneath the frame, and with a mug of tea in one hand and a half-eaten digestive biscuit in the other—he seemed not to mind the interruption.

The soul and the mind were not the same thing at all, in his opinion. Although, he had to point out that different faiths had different ideas about the nature of the soul—and the mind, for that matter—and given that they were both
abstract concepts
, none of us could say with any certainty … and so on. As for where souls went at death and how they got there, Mr. McQueen set off on another global tour of belief systems, tying himself in knots in his attempt not to set one particular theory above any other.

“Mrs. Reaney reckons it’s just neurons,” Alex said.

“Reckons what is just neurons?”

“The soul.”

“
Does
she?” Mr. McQueen laughed. Raised the remaining half of his biscuit. “In that case, I no longer feel guilty about stealing one of her digestives.”

Whether it was the smell of the tea or the biscuit, or the reek of overheated school corridor, or the previous day’s drinking binge coming back to haunt him, Alex wasn’t sure, but he suddenly broke out in a hot-and-cold sweat.

“Thank you, sir,” he managed to say. Trembling. Nauseous. His vision blurred, pulling the teacher in and out of focus.

“Are you all right, Philip?” Mr. McQueen formed a frown of concern. “You look very panda-eyed this morning. You look awful, actually.”

“No, I’m okay. I’m … fine.”

But as Alex turned away, his head felt like it had been split by an ax; a searing pain brought with it the cold black screech of his nightmare.

Alex was lying on his side with someone squatting beside him. From that angle it looked like the figure had three gigantic knees, one with a face mask attached to it. The face’s expression said
anxious
.

The mouth moved, smiled. “Back with us again?”

How long had he lain there? An hour, for all he knew. A day. That would have been good, to curl up and sleep for twenty-four hours. The mouth spoke again and Alex registered that the voice, the knees, the face belonged to Mr. McQueen.

By the time the teacher got him to the sick bay, Alex was less groggy, less spaced altogether. That nauseous feeling again, though. Had he thrown up? No, Mr. McQueen assured him; he’d fainted, that was all.

“You went down like a felled tree.”

No bones broken, the school nurse told him. No bump on the head. When she had finished frisking him with her pointy fingers, she sat him up on the bed, propped a pillow at his back and got him to take a few sips of water. Her forearms, he noticed, were as hairy as a man’s.

“Are you prone to fainting, Philip?” she asked. When he told her he wasn’t, she asked how long it had been since he’d last eaten.

“Breakfast.” Technically true, although he’d left most of it.

“How long was he out?” she asked Mr. McQueen.

“A minute or so. No more than that.”

The religious studies teacher was holding Alex’s day pack by the scruff of the neck; it looked like a toy at the end of his long arm, like it belonged to a primary school kid. The nurse was peering into Alex’s eyes, shining a light into them with a torch as thin as a pencil. Her blue uniform made papery sounds whenever she moved. Was he diabetic? No. Then the inevitable question about drugs. Alex shook his head.

“Solvents? Alcohol?”

“Yes, please—if you have any going spare.”

The nurse fixed him a look. “Your sense of humor’s intact, then.”

She wanted to pack him off home, but Mrs. Garamond had the day off—one of her gardening days—and Alex couldn’t face another inquisition, or a resumption of the one from the night before (and again at the breakfast table). He was fine, he insisted.

He didn’t mention the sudden splitting headache that had struck him down, or the shrieking, or the blinding lights that had flashed behind his eyelids.

Alex’s vision was back to normal now, and the pain in his head had eased to a dull throbbing. But he was still shaky. And scared. The leakage between him and Philip had rarely been so palpable:
he
had been the one to pass out, but every part of Flip’s body, inside and out, was tremulous with the aftereffects. As for his head, the ache was real enough. At that moment the thinking and nonthinking parts seemed indistinguishable. There was brain tissue and what went on inside it, and Alex couldn’t have said just then where one ended and the other began.

He wasn’t about to mention any of this to the nurse. He was tired, he repeated. It was stuffy in the staff-room corridor. He’d fainted. He was okay again,
honest
. She looked unconvinced but, in the end, agreed to let him return to his lessons.

As Mr. McQueen escorted him along the corridor, Alex tried to make sense of what had happened: the nightmare, or fainting fit, or whatever it was that had left him in a heap at the religious studies teacher’s feet. Like a rupture. Like how he imagined a brain hemorrhage might be. In its wake had come some kind of a hallucination. He’d shared a spliff at a party one time, with David, and the effect had been similar: things going on all around him as though in slow motion—music playing; conversations; the snap and hiss of a beer can; kids laughing, dancing, drinking; David making moose antlers with his hands above his head … real stuff that appeared not to be real at all.

Even though he’d been passed out at the time, the vision he’d had while he’d lain on the floor outside the staff room had been just as “real”: green curtain, shifting in a breeze. A plastic tube attached to a bag of fluid. His mother’s face peering down at him. Talking. Her lips out of sync with the words, like in a badly dubbed film. He was speaking, too—crying out to her, again and again—but there was no sign in Mum’s expression that she could hear him.

“Philip?”

Alex stopped. Mr. McQueen had come to a halt outside the art room, but Alex had just carried on walking, in a world of his own.