Flip (7 page)

David would respond to the message. He
had
to.

Alex pictured him at his under-the-bunk-bed desk in the tiny bedroom of that house he shared with his two sisters and brother and a dad but no mum. That duvet cover in the design of the Jamaican flag. The Killers, or the Fratellis, or the Arctic Monkeys, or the Kaiser Chiefs would be blaring out. A can of Tango within reach, and a pack of salt-and-vinegar Monster Munch. Crumbs on the keyboard. His eyes blinking away behind his glasses, his obsessively clean glasses.

At the thought of his friend, Alex’s eyes filled up.

Three-fifty-two, no message. Three-fifty-five, no message. One of the librarians announced that the library would be closing in five minutes. The handful of other students began to gather up their belongings and head for the door.

Alex checked his mail again. Three-fifty-seven, one message.

David’s Hotmail address in the “sender” box.

His breathing quickened; his hand lay clammy over the mouse. With a double-click, the message opened.

Who are you??

Hurriedly, Alex typed a reply.
Who do you think I am?

This time David’s response was instant.
You cant be
.

Being Flip was like playing the lead in a film about a special agent assigned to work undercover. It was a life of subterfuge, the outer pretense of Alex’s daily existence concealing the inner secret of his true identity.

Exciting, really, if you looked at it like that.

Except he couldn’t. Couldn’t make believe this into an adventure story. It wasn’t fiction. It was for real. And he was way out of his depth.

In a movie or a TV drama, the agent would be thoroughly prepared for the operation. Provided with a dossier of information, told to memorize every detail of the false ID which had been created for him. Subjected to weeks of training—briefings, tests, role-play—until he knew his adopted persona as intimately as he knew himself. Only then would he be sent out into the field, once he was ready to handle any awkward questions or tricky situations without arousing suspicion or blowing his cover.

Alex hadn’t had any of that preparation. He’d just woken up one morning transplanted into a life that wasn’t his. Forced to learn as he went along how to be, or not to be, Philip Garamond. Blagging his way through Flip’s home life and school life in a high-wire sequence of ad-libs and improvisations, bluffs and lies. If he had got away with it so far, it was only because the truth was too bizarre for any of the people in Flip’s world to figure out in a million years. They might not always know what to make of this version of Flip, but to them, he was still Flip. A weird, puzzling Flip, but Flip even so. They only had to look at him to see that.

All the same, Alex wouldn’t have minded a bit of warning. Time to prepare for the role, to get himself into character.

And some cricket skills would have been useful. Because there he was, in the nets, waiting for the first ball to come hurtling at him. At least he knew what nets
were
now. They were that fishing-netty stuff fastened over a framework of metal poles at the edge of the school field. Like a fairground sideshow, with boys for targets.

How he had come to be there: On his way out of school, Alex had followed the shortcut between the field and the sports hall. That was his first mistake. Not quite aware of what was going on around him—not thinking about much at all apart from that exchange of e-mails with David—he had taken a moment to register the calling of his name. Well, Flip’s name. He looked up. That was his second mistake. Waving to him from the nets was a teacher, in cricket kit. Alex noticed the others and heard (although the sound must’ve been there all along) the plock, plock of balls being struck. Two boys batting, two bowling, the rest milling around waiting their turn or practicing catches. In the afternoon light, their kit was creamy white against the green backdrop. The air smelled of pollen and newly cut grass. The teacher jogged over.

“Where’ve you
been
?” he said. He had that you-should’ve-seen-me-ten-years-and-fifteen-kilos-ago look. His hair, eyebrows, the thick pelt on his forearms were bleached summer blond. He sounded South African. “And where the hell’s your kit?”

“I, er … I left it in my locker, sir.”

He didn’t need this. Another complication. Another role to play. In his head, there was only room for David. For that e-mail, repeating itself like a mantra.

You cant be
.

Cant
. So emphatic.

“Right, you’ll have to play in your school clothes. D’you have any trainers?”

“No, sir.”

“For crying out loud, Flip.” He pronounced it “Flup.” “Okay, let’s see if one of the others has a pair you can borrow, eh?” The teacher strode off towards the nets, calling over his shoulder to Alex, “What size are you?”

“I don’t know, sir. These aren’t my feet.”

One or two of the boys within earshot laughed. The teacher didn’t.
“Hey,”
he said, snapping the word out, “you’re late, you forget to bring your kit … what you do
not
do, at this point, eh, is turn into a bloody stand-up comedian.”

So in borrowed trainers, and pads, gloves and a protective box from the communal kit bag, there he was. Unsure how to stand or hold the bat properly. The last time he’d swung a cricket bat, he’d have been about nine or ten, on the beach at Porthleven. The ball was a tennis ball. The bowler would’ve been Dad, or Mum, or Sam. Bowling underarm. Alex remembered being rubbish even then.

Maybe Flip’s body would take over. These muscles, these limbs, functioning on reflex, regardless of any signals from Alex’s brain. Or maybe not.

Didn’t batsmen wear helmets? Not at Year Nine nets, apparently.

The bowler was a lanky ginger lad with arms like an ape. The first ball ended up in the folds of netting behind the wicket. The stumps were intact, though. So that was good. Less good was where the bat ended up. As Alex had taken a wild swipe at the ball, his grip on the handle had slipped and he’d released the bat into the roof of the net like a hammer thrower. The next ball clattered the stumps. The third ricocheted off the shoulder of the bat and whacked Alex in the mouth.

The house seemed to be empty, apart from Beagle. Alex switched on the TV and left him to watch the tennis. Upstairs, in the bathroom, he inspected the damage. His top lip was split, one side of his mouth swollen up like botched plastic surgery and already starting to bruise. His teeth were intact, at least. He cleaned up as best he could, careful not to reopen the cut. The shirt was done for. He stripped it off and dropped it into the laundry basket. Standing before the mirror, the sight of himself as Flip was no less strange for two days of getting used to it. Alex wondered if that kink in his nose was the result of a sporting injury, too. Cricket or basketball. Maybe a fight. Was Flip the type to get into fights? He had the build. Being big and strong wasn’t the same as being hard, though. But what did Alex know about any of that?

This was Flip’s face, Flip’s body. But it was
his
now. When that cricket ball had hit him, when Beagle had nipped him, it was Alex’s mind that registered the pain.

In the bedroom, he fired up the computer. The business with the Halifax card had given him an idea. Alex went into Flip’s Internet log-on, navigated to the help section and clicked on “forgotten your password?” Three security questions: post code, e-mail address, date of birth. The first two were noted down in Flip’s planner; the third, of course, he knew already. He typed them in. After a moment, a dialog box opened, inviting him to enter a new password. He thought for a moment. Then he typed,
iamalex1
.

There. Done. He could access the Internet and Flip’s home e-mail account.

None of the e-mails in the in-box predated the night of the switch. Mostly they were messages from the two girlfriends—which he deleted, without reply—and there was one from Jack, Flip’s smoking buddy, wanting to know if he was going to the skate park that evening.
Yeah, right
. Delete. The rest were spam. Alex opened up the “sent,” “trash” and “archive” folders but there was nothing out of the ordinary in the days prior to Flip’s last night as Flip. The Web settings drew a blank, too. The “favorites” and history cache were predictable: YouTube, sport, porn, music, games. No sign of Flip being on Facebook or the like.

Alex stared at the screen, dejected. He hadn’t known what he’d expected to find, but after he’d at last broken into Flip’s virtual locker, his raised hopes had been lowered with a thud. If there’d been anything in Flip’s life to foreshadow the switch, Flip had been oblivious to it. Just as Alex had received no warning that he would wake up in another boy’s body, so had Philip—the
inner
Philip—simply vanished in his sleep.

So what had triggered it? And what had become of him, of Alex Gray?

He navigated from e-mail to an Internet search page and typed his own name in the search box. It was only in that instant, as he sat with his hand poised over the mouse, that the enormity of what he might be about to discover struck home. He’d been putting this off, he realized. Pinning his hopes on David, on hearing from his friend that everything was going to be okay, that he would help Alex sort this mess out, whatever this mess was. But that hadn’t happened. Instead, David had filled him with dread. Now, when Alex was one click away from seeing the truth of that night in December spewed out onto the screen, his nerve failed him. He deleted his name from the search box. In its place he typed
I woke up in someone else’s body
.

It was the pass code to a maze of related, and not-so-related, links to a weird, weird world. Reincarnation. Metempsychosis. Body-soul dualism. Transmigration. Spirit walk-ins. Possession. Soul transference. Soul transplant. Soul migration. Soul switching. Soul exchange. Interpersonal consciousness anomaly. Substantial transcendence. Psychic evacuation. Body-swapping. Disembodiment. Palingenesis. And on, and on. If Alex had spent all day, every day, for a week following the links, scrolling through the sites, reading, downloading information, he would still have taken only the first few turns in this vast labyrinth. In the time he had before Flip’s mum summoned him downstairs to eat, he found nothing to match his situation, although one or two sites came close. Others, which sounded promising, turned out to be duds. (“Body-Swapping” took him to a contact site for swingers; “Soul-to-Soul Transfer” linked to YouTube clips of skateboard tricks.) Many people bought into all this: from ancient Greeks to modern-day sects, from Wiccans and animists to Buddhists and Hindus, from past-life therapists to Hasidic Jews, from Kabbalists to some Christians and Muslims, to New Age mystics.… The belief in the migration of the soul was global and as old as mankind.

From here on, Alex realized, he had to count himself among them. If these people were mad, then so was he. Souls
did
switch bodies. However incredible and incomprehensible it might be, he was living proof.

But while it was reassuring to find people out in cyberspace who accepted the principle, or who claimed to have experienced the process, Alex had yet to turn up a case identical to his own. In reincarnation, a migrated soul was unaware that its life was “new” and had no memory of an earlier one. As for past-life regressionists, who claimed to remember previous lives, they’d usually been a Roman centurion, or a servant in the court of Henry VIII. They didn’t quit the body of a south London schoolboy and surface again six months later inside another boy in Yorkshire. One American blogger—a “soul transferee”—seemed promising, until Alex got to the part where he described himself as a Light Worker, one of a legion of souls from an advanced galaxy who had transplanted themselves into human beings to assist Earth’s evolution.
Oh, please
.

Still, he searched, firing off e-mails, posting pleas for help on one message board, one forum, one chat room after another. Trawling the world for someone who’d had the same thing happen to him, who could tell him what had taken place, and what to do about it. Someone who could give him hope, who could erase David’s
You cant be
from his mind.

Beagle was struggling to keep up, breathing like a set of bellows. Alex had set off with him after tea. It had been just him and the mother at the table. And a bottle of wine. The dad was dining out in Leeds with colleagues after spending all day at an exam board, and Teri—who he’d heard come in, shower, go out again—had gone to see a band. It was mushroom omelet and salad that night, with ciabatta warm from the oven. Not boil-in-the-bag cod, then. Or frozen kievs. Eating was tricky, given the state of his lip.

“Mr. Yorath shouldn’t have made you carry on.”

Alex shrugged. He figured Flip would shrug; in fact, Flip would most likely have insisted on continuing to bat with a smashed mouth whatever Mr. Yorath said.

“What about your shirt?”

“In the laundry basket.”

“My
God
,” the mum said, mock shocked. “You haven’t put anything in that basket in living memory.”

At the kitchen sink, after tea, she got him to tilt his face into the light so that she could dab something on the cut. It stung like crazy and made his eyes water, all of which was fine compared to the intimacy of Flip’s mum massaging the stuff into his lip with the tip of her middle finger.

“You okay, Philip?” she said. “You look a bit down in the dumps.” With her other hand she stroked his hair, the way his own mum sometimes would.

“No, I’m fine. Really.”

It was a relief to get out. A long walk this time. The longer Alex stayed out, the less time he’d have to spend in that house, being a son to someone else’s mother. And the less time he’d have to sit at that PC, checking for messages that wouldn’t come or, if they did, wouldn’t tell him anything he wanted to hear.

He took Beags to the river that ran through the town. At the bridge, steps led down to a riverside park with a play area and, in the other direction, to a footpath that followed the river towards some woods. He took this route, away from the park, in case it was the one where Donna had asked to meet him. Even though she wouldn’t be expecting him, it might be somewhere she liked to hang out. He paused to let Beagle pee, then pressed on. The houses fell away until there were just trees and river. They had the path to themselves apart from an occasional jogger or another dog walker. And a thousand midges. It was still light, the evening sun spilling splinters of brightness through the leaves, and the only sounds were the breeze and birdsong and the shingly whisper of the current.