Flip (4 page)

“Philip? Do you need to sit down?”

He shook his head. In the afternoon light, the room was rinsed a bright lemony color, and it smelled of chalk dust, drawing him away from the clutches of the dream. The teacher’s face was soft with concern. He noticed her earrings: a small silver guitar on each lobe. Maybe Ms. Sprake wasn’t as boring as she looked.

He hesitated. “Am I … am I all right, miss? Underneath.”

“Underneath?”

“Yeah, like,
inside
. As a person. Am I all right inside?”

What he really wanted to ask was
What’s Philip Garamond like?
Alex had no idea. He knew him physically—more intimately than he would’ve wished—but he didn’t
know
him. He couldn’t ask his teacher about that, though, without her thinking him completely mad. Even the question he
had
asked appeared to have flustered her.

“What a strange thing to say, Philip,” she said with a nervous half laugh.

“No, it’s fine. It’s nothing. I just … I want to do okay, that’s all. Better.”

“Good. That’s good, then.” She went on watching him. After a pause, she said, “Let’s see if we can get through this last month of term, shall we?”

He nodded.

“And I know it may not seem like it, at your age, but there really is more to life than cricket and girls.” She was teasing him, trying not to smile.

“I know, miss. There’s basketball as well.”

Ms. Sprake covered her mouth with her hand as she laughed. Alex was quite pleased with that: his first joke as Flip. The teacher put her glasses on, took them off again. “Right, you look done in, Philip. Go on, get yourself home.”

At the door, Alex remembered. “Oh, miss … my mobile?”

In the school car park, Alex switched on the phone. Most of the messages were from Donna or Billie. He scrolled down to the one that mattered and, hand shaking, keyed in the messaging service. Alex had expected his mother. It wasn’t her, though; it was the woman Mum worked with at the library. Kath? Kathy? He’d spoken to her on the phone a few times and had met her once. In the message, she talked quietly, as though she didn’t want to be overheard.

“Listen, I don’t know who you are or how you got hold of this number, but if this is your idea of a prank, then … you’re
sick
. Sick in the head to do something like this. How
could
you? How could
anyone
try to do this to her?” There was a pause, an unidentifiable background noise. He heard her breathing. “But I’ll tell you this, young man: if you phone Fran, Mrs. Gray, again or leave any more of your evil messages, I will go straight to the police and let them deal with you. Do you understand?”

Click.

Alex stood perfectly still in the middle of the car park. He had been holding his breath, he realized; he exhaled, releasing the air from his lungs in a ragged sob.

Shutting the phone off, he clenched it in his fist as though he was ready to fling it as far away as he could or as though he’d like to crush it to pieces. When at last he moved, he found he had no direction in mind and simply headed pointlessly towards the school entrance before circling back on himself.

“Mum,” he said under his breath. Then louder: “Mummummum.”

Crying so hard by now that it was more snot than tears. Only then did he notice her: a curly-haired girl, sitting on a wall ten meters away with a book open on her lap and what looked like a cello case propped beside her. Watching him.

At Flip’s house, truly weird music cascaded from an upstairs window. Alex kept his finger on the bell-push for an age before the sister, Teri, loomed in the front door’s smoked-glass panel. She yanked the door open. She was in the same black gear she’d worn at breakfast, but her face was made up in full goth mode and her hair looked as though it had been zapped by static. If they gave Oscars for scowling, her expression would’ve won the award in every category.

“It’s a simple concept,” she said, gesturing at the keyhole. “You put a key in here”—she crooked her index finger—“you turn it … And. The. Door. Opens.”

Alex didn’t have the energy for this. “I couldn’t find my key this morning.”

Flip’s sister ducked out of sight, then reappeared, holding up a key fob in the style of a miniature cricket ball. “That would be this key, yeah? The one hanging on its usual hook, right by the door, so that even a blind, amnesiac baboon with attention deficit disorder would be able to find it.”

With that, she dropped the fob on the mat, turned heel and stomped upstairs. Something smelled nice. Teri’s perfume. Probably she wasn’t always horrible. Just with him. That is, with her brother. The way Alex treated his own kid brother, he hated himself sometimes; he wondered if Teri ever felt like that.

Right now he would’ve given anything to see Sam’s dopey grin.

Alex thought about heading straight up to Flip’s room and shutting himself away, but the hunger wasn’t about to let him do that. So he went down to the kitchen, fixed himself a jam sandwich, a slab of cheese and a glass of milk and finished them off there at the counter. As he put the plate and glass into the dishwasher, the dog padded into the kitchen and went to the back door. He looked at Alex.

“You need a pee, Beagle?”

The dog growled at him as Alex found the key on a hook and unlocked the door. “Listen, fatso, I’m doing you a favor here. Pee all over the floor for all I care.”

Mum wouldn’t be home for another hour, once she’d collected Sam from after-school club. Lying on his back on Flip’s bed, Alex decided not to call till then—no message this time; he had to speak to her directly. He stared at the ceiling, trying to stay calm, considering what to say to her. The woman who worked with Mum, Kath-or-Kathy, had said she’d go to the police if he rang the library again. But no way could she stop him calling his own home and speaking to his own mother.

Alex replayed her voice mail. Sick, she’d called him. Sick in the head.
Evil
.

He tried to recall what he’d said in his original message. That he didn’t know what was happening or where he was, that he was scared and wanted to go home, wanted Mum to come and fetch him. What was so terrible about that?

Unless Mum’s colleague hadn’t recognized his voice.
I don’t know who you are or how you got hold of this number …
What if she thought he was pretending to be Alex, as some kind of cruel joke? Suppose the body-swap had only been one-way. Suppose Alex—the bodily, physical Alex—had been missing for six months, and then, out of the blue, a boy left a message on his mum’s work number, claiming to be her lost son.

But too much of this didn’t fit. The six-months thing, for a start; it was a like a jigsaw piece for the wrong puzzle. Where had “Alex”
been
in all that time? Flip, it seemed, had carried on as normal—playing sports, acquiring girlfriends, struggling at school. But what about
him
? What had he been doing in all those months before he suddenly found himself inhabiting another boy’s body, living another boy’s life?

The question put an idea into his head. He hauled himself off the bed and switched on the smart flat-screen PC on Philip’s desk. It took an age to fire up. And when it did, Alex found that access to the Internet and to Flip’s e-mails was password protected. He closed the computer down again, bashing the mouse against its mat in frustration. As the screen cleared, there it was again: his reflection, as though he was imprisoned inside the monitor, staring out at himself.

Not
his
reflection. Flip’s.

Who
was
“he,” in any case?

He still thought of himself as Alex Gray. The mental processes were the same as always—his memories, perceptions, emotions. His attitudes. His … 
will
. But if he looked in a mirror and said, “I’m Alex Gray,” out loud, he’d see those words spoken from the lips of a boy who wasn’t him.

At school that day Alex had been startled to discover that he wrote in Flip’s handwriting. The pen felt awkward in that large, unfamiliar hand, and the formation of words was laborious, as though the muscles in Flip’s fingers had to decode the signals from Alex’s mind. When Alex saw what he’d written, it looked totally different from his own style. Compared to Flip’s, though, on the previous pages of the exercise book, it was practically identical.

What if he
spoke
like Flip, too? He hadn’t sounded to himself as though he was speaking any differently, but he had Flip’s vocal cords, didn’t he? Flip’s mouth, tongue, larynx, throat muscles. Alex hadn’t heard Flip speak, of course, so he had no idea whether their voices were similar in tone or pitch, but even if they were, he reckoned the other boy would have a Yorkshire accent. At Litchbury High, even the plummy kids rhymed “laugh” with “naff.” If Alex had been talking like a Londoner all day, surely someone—Flip’s mother, sister, mates, teachers—would’ve said something.

So when he’d left that message on the answering machine at Mum’s work, and when he finally spoke to his mother …

Alex grabbed hold of Flip’s phone again and worked out how to rerecord the outgoing message. He spoke into the mike. “Hi, this is … me. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you.” Then, tweaking up the volume, he replayed his own words.

He sounded nothing like himself.

* * *

The phone was still in his hand when it buzzed with yet another text from one of the girlfriends. Billie. Why had Flip stood her up? Alex remembered: she’d said to meet after school in Smoothies, wherever that was. He deleted the message without reply. He couldn’t be dealing with this.

Funny, at Crokeham Hill he’d been desperate for a girlfriend and now he had two of them he just wished would leave him alone.

That girl in the car park, was she one of them … or maybe a third? No. From the way she’d looked at him, he could tell there was nothing like that going on between her and Flip. Yet there was
something
. A connection of some sort. Alex had been mortified to realize that she had been sitting on that wall the whole time, witnessing his reaction to the voice mail message. What had it been in her expression? Not disdain, or surprise, or the smugness of someone who had caught you in a moment of private weakness that they could use against you. Nor was it sympathy or compassion. Her gaze had remained steady, holding his, the girl seemingly unembarrassed by his embarrassment. A neutral curiosity. It had been like the girl was watching the opening scene of a TV drama, unsure whether to change channels.

He’d recognized her. Those mousey shoulder-length curls and the pale complexion and those too-thin arms. She’d been in English that morning. In a discussion about poetry, she’d said her family had been driving across Wales when they picked up a local radio station and heard a reading of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s verse in Welsh. Even though she hadn’t understood any of it, the poems had sounded beautiful. The rhythm, the lilt of the words, the
musicality
. Some of the class had laughed. Alex had glanced at her, expecting her to look flushed or upset, but their mockery seemed not to affect her at all. He’d been impressed by that. And by what she’d said about the poetry.

Cherry, Ms. Sprake had called her. Cherry Jones.

In the car park, no words had passed between them. Just that brief eye contact. Then a car had turned in and drawn to a halt in front of the wall where she was sitting. The girl, Cherry, hopped down, loaded her cello case into the boot and let herself into the passenger seat beside a woman Alex assumed to be her mother. The woman shot a look in his direction as she drove off, but the girl kept her gaze dead ahead.

At five-thirty, Alex phoned home.

Number unobtainable.

First his mobile number wasn’t recognized, now this. Alex dialed directory inquiries, gave the details to the operator. After a pause she came back on the line. That number had been changed, she said. And the new one was ex-directory. Sorry, but she couldn’t let him have it.

Down the stairs two at a time. Thump, thump. He had to get out of the house. Flip’s house. Had to be on the move, somewhere, anywhere. If he could have run home, to
his
home, he would’ve done, however many hundreds of kilometers. Jumped on a train, with no money for the fare, and hidden in the toilet all the way to London. Hitchhiked. Whatever. He grabbed his shoes—Flip’s shoes—from the stand in the hall and sat on the bottom stair to pull them on. As soon as he was out that door, he would just keep going, walk the streets all night if he must. He didn’t care.

Which was when Flip’s mum appeared at the end of the hallway. “Ah, there you are.” She was wearing a kimono—scarlet, with a gold dragon motif. “Tea’s about half an hour away, so don’t take Beags too far, will you?”

“Sorry?”

“I’ll fetch you a sandwich bag.”

She disappeared down the basement stairs to the kitchen. A lead dangled from one of the key hooks by the front door. Was this what Flip did each evening, walk the dog? The woman returned with a plastic bag (for poo?).

He didn’t have to do this. He wasn’t Flip. Beagle wasn’t his dog. If he chose to, Alex could simply walk out without a word and go where he pleased.

“Your
sister
,” the woman said, eyes raised ceilingwards. That music was still playing, pulsing through the house like some monstrous heartbeat. “I’m surprised she has any eardrums left.” Then, turning a smile on Alex. “How was school?”

“Oh, er, you know. Same as always.”

“Have you done your homework?”

“Yeah, yeah. Yeah.” Alex gestured upstairs. “That’s what I’ve been—”

That smile again. She wasn’t having any of it. “After tea, Philip.
Okay
?”

She was in a better mood than she’d been in that morning. She smelled of onions and faintly of something else. Wine. Again, it occurred to him to turn and go. Just walk out. But he couldn’t. He looked into her face, and he couldn’t do it. She might not have been
his
mother, but she was
a
mother.

“I’m …” He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry.”

The woman frowned. “For what?”

“This morning.”

“Oh.” She appeared taken aback. “Oh, well, it’s all a bit fraught first thing.”

“No,” Alex said. “You didn’t deserve it. The way I behaved. The stuff I said.”

He thought Flip’s mum was about to cry. But she didn’t. She gave his arm a squeeze, pecked him on the cheek. Wine, definitely. Red wine. “Go on,” she said, “or you’ll hardly get him out the front door before it’s time to bring him in again.”

Alex took the lead from the hook. “Where
is
Beagle?”

“In the lounge, I expect. Watching the tennis.”

“Tennis?”

“First day of Wimbledon,” the woman said, as though the answer was obvious.

Sure enough, the dog was curled up on a chair, gaze fixed on the TV screen. As the ball pinged back and forth, his eyes followed it. One of the players put a backhand into the net and Beagle let out a sigh, as though disappointed.

Alex dangled the lead to make it jingle. “Come on, walkies.” The dog lifted his head from the cushion, did the growl thing again. “Are you going to bite me if I try to put this on you?”

In fact, Beagle did give him a nip, but Alex clipped the lead to his collar all the same and half walked, half dragged him out of the house. The dog kept up a low grumble as they headed side by side down the street.

You know, don’t you? You’re the only one who knows I’m not Flip
.

* * *

“Where does he normally take you, Beags?”

The dog gave him a sidelong look, as though to say,
What’s it to you?

Alex led him randomly around the network of streets in Flip’s neighborhood. After fifteen minutes or so, they emerged onto the main road opposite the station. A cluster of teenagers, male and female, occupied the area around the seat where he’d been collared that morning by Johannsen. Nine hours earlier. It seemed more like nine days, so much had happened in that time. Alex wondered if he ought to know any of the others across the way, or whether they’d call out to him. They didn’t. They observed him; that was all. He made sure to catch no one’s eye. In Crokeham Hill there was always the chance of something kicking off in a situation like this, but Litchbury didn’t strike him as that kind of place.

They passed the town hall, tourist information, the library. Beagle slowed to a halt, sniffing for somewhere to do his business. Alex’s attention was snagged by a man emerging from the library. He glimpsed the interior: a woman was restocking leaflets in a display stand. She looked nothing like his mum—she was older, her silver hair in a ponytail unlike his mum’s auburn bob—but the sight of a librarian at work got to him. Beyond her, as the door swung shut, Alex saw something else: a row of computer terminals.