Flip (22 page)

He hadn’t come this near to the edge last time. He could feel a faint updraft from the void below.

He peered over. Thirty meters? Maybe thirty-five. The drop wasn’t sheer, but it was close enough to vertical that any faller would be sure to die on impact at the foot of the cliff, or be so damaged on the way down that death wouldn’t be long coming. Alex wondered how many seconds the fall would take. Four or five. He had no idea, really. Barely enough time, anyway, to think your last thoughts before they were dashed from your brain.

Did people come here to commit suicide? They were bound to. Cliffs, bridges, tall buildings—they were like an invitation. Just to stand there looking down was to create an optical illusion of the ground rushing up to meet you. To make you imagine what that would be like. Vertigo, he supposed. A kind of thrilling, terrifying dread. Knowing that with one movement you could end your life, that death
—your
death—was just seconds away.

Alex edged closer. He was right there now, the tips of his trainers resting on nothing. The slightest shift of weight would take him, a sudden loss of balance, a gust of wind at his back. He wouldn’t even have to jump, just … lean … forward.

Would he scream? Would he cry out? Would his arms and legs flail as he fell? Would it be exhilarating, or would he be scared out of his mind?

Would he have his eyes open?

Alex raised his arms to the sides, Christlike. Stood on the balls of his feet, heels raised. Closed his eyes. There was no breeze, but even so, the air swathed him like silk, as though it was all that kept him from falling. And the thought—the stunning moment of revelation—came to him, as though it had been there all along, waiting for him to discover it:

If he died in Flip’s body, where would his soul go?

“You couldn’t do it, could you?” Rob said. Not unkindly.

Alex looked at him. He was sitting on the tailgate, smoking. “You
saw
me?”

“I heard you leave the van.” He shrugged. “You’re not hard to follow.”

“You saw me there, and you didn’t say anything? Didn’t try to
stop
me?”

Rob sucked at the cigarette, blew out the smoke. “I knew you wouldn’t jump. To jump,” he said, “would’ve been murder, not suicide. It would’ve meant killing Flip. I haven’t known you long, Alex, but I didn’t figure you could do that to him.”

He went inside the combi. Alex heard a kettle coming to the boil, water being poured. He rubbed at his face, heart still thumping from what he’d just done, even though he’d spent a few minutes sitting on the rocks, getting his head together, after stepping back from the edge.

Rob reappeared with two mugs of coffee and handed one to Alex.

“So what does that make me?” Alex said. “A coward?”

“When did you figure it all out?” Rob asked, ignoring Alex’s question.

“Figure what out?”

“How to trigger a switch.”

Alex drank some coffee. “It’s so obvious, once you think of it. You know? I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before.” He shook his head. “The one common factor in every known psychic evacuation: death.”

“Except in your case.”

“Yeah, well.”

“And yet, you still couldn’t bring yourself to kill Flip—even knowing it might save your life, or at least give you your own body back.” Rob finished his cigarette and flicked the stub away. “I wouldn’t say that was an act of cowardice. Would you?”

“Had
you
already figured it out?” Alex said accusingly.

“What, I’m supposed to say, ‘Hey, Alex, why don’t you try topping yourself.’ ”

Alex was too tired to argue; he’d walked back from the crags as exhausted as if he had just climbed them. He breathed in the coffee fumes. His favorite smell, before. And still, as Flip. “I was standing there,” he said, “and I … I could just picture them opening the door—his mum and dad, his sister—and there’s a cop on their doorstep, come to break the news about Philip’s suicide.”

Rob put his mug down. Came over and gave Alex’s shoulder a rub.

Alex shrugged him off. “What’s up, Rob? Don’t feel like grabbing me by the face this morning? Eh? Banging my head against the window?”

Rob didn’t say anything. Then, after a moment: “Let’s get in the van,” he said. His voice was gentle, kind. “I’m taking you home.”

“Home?”

“To Philip’s home. That’s the only home you have now.”

Rob dropped him at the corner, as usual. And as usual, he watched Alex head up Tyrol Place to number 20 before waving him off. His parting words: an apology and a promise. He was sorry for what had happened in the van the night before. And he would
be there
for Alex over the coming weeks and months and years as he adapted to his new life.

“Who knows? Maybe we could be good for each other,” Rob said. “I’ll help you find a way of being Philip … and you can help me to let go of Chris.”

Alex had nodded. “Yeah, uh-huh. That’d be cool.”

They’d clasped hands in something between a handshake, an arm wrestle and a high five, like they were members of an L.A. gang. Then Alex went up to the house.

If he allowed himself, he could imagine things continuing like this. Merge his life with Flip’s. Accept the switch, adapt and move on—like the others of his kind had done. Carry on being Philip Garamond, or at least the new, modified Alex-as-Flip he was starting to turn into. He might even find a way of making things okay with Cherry. With Alex’s spirit in Flip’s body, he could stay in Litchbury—with a caring family, and Rob there if he needed him—complete his education at a good school, then head off to uni. After that, a long, healthy life to look forward to, another sixty, seventy years, maybe. He could be whatever, and whoever, he liked.

But that wasn’t
being himself
. Being
properly
himself. That life would mean living a lie. Lying to himself every hour of every day, for as long as it took Flip’s body to die. Lying to the Garamonds. To everyone he met or worked with or became friends with in the many years to come. To those he loved and who loved “him” back.

It meant lying to Cherry if they got back together. Or to any girl or woman he might meet and fall in love with. Because who would
she
love? Not him. Not Alex, or Flip, or Philip, but some kind of mutant hybrid. If any relationship he ever had was to mean anything, she would have to love the true Alex, not some fake, some freakish impostor. Same for him: he had to live properly, as Alex, in body
and
soul.

Or not at all.

So Alex went inside number 20 long enough to allow Rob to get back into the combi and drive away. It was still early, not even seven a.m., and no one was up yet. He had gone in as quietly as possible and stood in the hallway, hardly daring to breathe.

He waited. No stirrings upstairs. No Beagle padding along the hall to growl at him, although he half expected him to, even now. Then, the familiar sound, from down the road, of the camper van’s engine clearing its throat, hacking and coughing into life and driving away. Still, Alex waited.

Finally, he let himself out of the house as carefully as he’d entered and made his way to the station.

If standing on that cliff top had shown him what he was
not
prepared to do to restore himself to his own body, it had also revealed an alternative route back. Less obvious, less certain of success and just as fraught with danger. But one that he
was
ready to try. Alex would go to London and bring an end to this.

A shout. The beep of the automatic doors, a raised arm, a whistle. With barely a jolt, the train set off and in a few minutes the outskirts of Leeds were streaming past.

Was Flip’s soul aware that the distance between them was closing with each passing minute? He pictured the thread between his psyche and Flip’s, shortening, shortening, shortening as one “twin” reached out for the other.

Alex leaned his head into the headrest and shut his eyes. Let himself sink into the seat, into the subtle pitch and roll of the high-speed train. He could almost dream his body out of existence like this—reduce himself to nothing more than a mind between wakefulness and sleep, held in the hum of motion.

Maybe this was how it would be when Alex broke free from this body for real, not just in his imagination. A gentle slipping away. He doubted it. This was pleasant, painless. The switch, when it came—if it came—might not be like that at all. It might hurt. It might be more terrifying than the worst of his nightmares.

Or it might feel like nothing.

After all, when they’d switched the first time, Alex hadn’t felt much; he’d just woken up inside someone else with no idea what had happened. Groggy and out of sorts, but no more than that. As though he’d come round after an operation.

Alex didn’t know
what
to expect. He couldn’t even be sure that, if the reversal occurred, he would have any awareness of having been in Flip’s body, having lived Flip’s life. Suppose his psyche lost all recollection of going “walkabout”? He’d be back in PVS, for a start. Would that
wipe
everything? As it was, he remembered nothing of Alex’s life since leaving David’s the night of the accident. Six months in a coma and in PVS as Alex, the weeks living as Flip … Could this be erased by his brain’s corrupted hard drive? Would he be like a child with no memory of his time in the womb. Like it had never happened. Was that possible? He had no idea.

There was so much Alex didn’t know about what to expect if he went through with this. Not least of which was whether he
could
go through with it, or whether it would work even if he did. Or which souls and bodies might still be alive afterwards and which might be dead.

Someone was talking to him, shaking his shoulder. As he surfaced, he imagined—fleetingly, bizarrely—that it was Cherry. But it wasn’t; it was the ticket inspector.

There was no Cherry anymore. There couldn’t be.

When the inspector had gone, Alex opened the book he’d bought at the station and tore out one of the blank pages at the back.

Cherry
,

By the time you read this, it will be done, one way or another. If it works, Philip will be Flip again and I will be Alex. I may be in PVS, or dead, but I’ll be where I belong
.

I know you think I’m off my head, but it’s the truth
.

I’m so sorry the way things worked out—or didn’t—between us. But I want to be myself again, or be nothing. If that means I’ve lost you, then I’m sorrier about that than I’ve ever been about anything
.

X
Alex

When he arrived in London he bought an envelope and stamp, addressed it to
Cherry Jones, c/o Strings ’n’ Things, Litchbury
, and dropped it into a postbox. He wanted to say goodbye to Rob, too, but it wasn’t possible. He had no postal address and texting him wasn’t an option without giving a clue to what he was about to do.

And if Rob knew, he would try to stop him.

It was late morning by the time he reached the hospital. St. Dunstan’s. To think that his life had begun in this building, fourteen years and nine months earlier, and that “he” was in there right now, somewhere, his life hanging by a thread …

His
life? A life, anyway. Lives. A body that was his and a soul that wasn’t, trapped together, waiting for death. Or for something, or someone, to save them. Like two miners, stranded deep underground, their air supply running out as they listened for the clink-clink of a rescue party’s pickaxes.

Alex was across the road from the main entrance, lying low, taking refuge in a bus shelter from the drizzle that fell steadily on south London. It had surprised him when he’d emerged from the station. It had been sunny in Leeds; even at King’s Cross there’d been no hint of rain. That was like another lifetime. He might have imagined the journey, so little of it had left an impression. He watched the building through the rain. The hospital was dreary enough without any help from the weather. A redbrick block with gothic turrets, and newer bits tacked on here and there, like a Victorian lunatic asylum with 1970s comprehensive school annexes. Facing a busy road, St. Dunstan’s was grimed by pollution, its windows resembling rows of eyes whose makeup had streaked from too much weeping.

As far as Alex could recall, he hadn’t been back since his birth. The hospital’s unfamiliarity, along with its ugliness, was somehow upsetting.

I was
born
here. It should
mean
something to me. It shouldn’t be so horrible
.

He tried to believe he was hiding out across the road to compose himself, to think through his tactics one last time, and that it had nothing to do with being scared shitless of going into that building. He’d already spent half an hour in a coffee shop at Crokeham Hill station, summoning the courage to come to the hospital at all.

He couldn’t do this. He would be stopped before he even got the chance.

With each car that entered or left the car park, each person who walked into or out of the main doors, Alex’s breath tightened at the possibility of seeing Mum or Dad, or his brother, or David. According to the St. Dunstan’s Web site, visiting hours in the intensive care unit were unrestricted, except during doctors’ rounds, when family and friends had to make themselves scarce. For all Alex knew, his parents were sitting at their son’s bedside at that very moment. Or might arrive at any time. Or leave just as he was going in.

The plan was to find his way to ICU. Ask if it was okay to see Alex Gray. He was a school friend. They’d had an end-of-term collection and he had been delegated to bring in these flowers, this big card that loads of people had signed. Oh, and which room was Alex in? This was his first visit. And did the nurse happen to know if anyone was with him just now, because he wouldn’t want to intrude. He had a false name (Jack). He’d gone over his lines so many times, pictured the scene in his mind so often, it was like a memory of something that had already happened.

Not the most foolproof strategy, but it was the best he’d come up with.

Would the nurses have his description? After Philip Garamond had turned up at the house that time, Mum and Dad, or the police, might’ve warned the ward staff in ICU to be on the lookout for a tall, dark-haired lad with a northern accent. And what if the Garamonds had reported him missing when he hadn’t shown his face at home, or school, that morning? What if they’d figured out where he might be heading?

It was ridiculous, hiding away like this. Worrying himself stupid with all the ifs and buts and maybes between him and what he had to do.