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Five weeks later …

Hey there
.

I’m going for a walk today!!

A proper one: outdoors, not inside; a pavement instead of a treadmill. No handrails, no physiotherapist watching over me, cheering me on, ready to hit the “stop” button if I get into difficulty. Mum wants me to wear my bike helmet. Yeah, right. What part of NO! doesn’t she understand? But then, if Mum had her way, the whole route would be ripped up and relaid with that rubbery stuff you get in playgrounds
.

“Don’t cross any roads,” she says
.

I’m with her on that one. There’ll come a time when I have to cross a road, but it won’t be today
.

So along Monks Road as far as the corner, sit down for a bit on that bench outside the old folks’ flats, then walk back again. That’s the plan. Ten minutes. Fifteen
,
tops. I’m not expecting to fall over, but you never know. And if I do, so what? A grazed knee. A sprained wrist. I can live with that
.

Pain is okay, actually. Like a conversation between me and my body
.

How you doing up there, Mind?

Yeah, great, thanks, Toe. How about you?

Not so good. Just stubbed myself
.

I know, you already told me
.

I have these little chats with myself thousands of times a day. Not literally, of course (that would be crazy), but it’s like … imagine radio and TV and phone signals were visible—the sky would be full of them, a blizzard of sound and image swirling through the air. That’s what’s going on inside me: wave after wave of messages pinging back and forth, every minute of every hour of every day. Right this second, there’s the smell of bacon drifting up from the kitchen, the aftertaste of toothpaste in my mouth, the beep-beep of a lorry reversing in the precinct across the road, pins and needles in the backs of my thighs from sitting funny, these words appearing on the PC screen as if by magic. It’s brilliant!

Is any of this making sense to you?

David came round again yesterday. He beat me. Again
.

“You do realize I’m letting you win?” I said
.

“Yeah? I just thought you were crap.”

It’s the concentration. Also, it doesn’t help when I’m in the middle of a game and I totally forget that a bishop moves diagonally! But it helps, chess. The physio is all
for it. Reckons it’s an exercise regimen for the brain. Sudoku, crosswords, word searches. I can’t read for too long, cos my head aches and I start to go cross-eyed, but I’m getting there. Same with the clarinet. I did about twenty minutes this morning and I’m still not happy with the fingering or the embouchure, but the melody sounded all right. Kind of
.

But I could hear the notes; that’s the point. I could feel the holes with my fingertips. I could taste the reed. All the time, little conversations
.

I haven’t told David what really happened. I know I said I was going to, but I just can’t do it and I don’t know that I ever will
.

You were right: sometimes the truth is too much for people to take
.

What else?

Oh, yeah, Sam and me had our first bust-up last night. There was something I wanted to watch on TV but he was playing one of his games and wouldn’t come off. Mum took my side, and so Sam lets rip about how I always get my own way these days and how he wishes I was still in hospital and how much he hates having a spaz for a brother
.

I thought Dad was going to knock Sam’s head off. “Don’t you ever …”

And so on. Maybe I’d feel just the same if I was Sam. Five weeks he’s watched them make a fuss of their long-lost son. All those months before that, when Mum and Dad were in some kind of zombie limbo-land of
AlexAlexAlex. What kid brother wouldn’t feel neglected?

The fight might turn out to be a good thing, though. Like lancing a boil
.

Cos it was like we were a normal family again, in that moment, instead of everyone behaving as though we’re taking part in a reality-TV show where we win a million pounds if we can make it to the end of the series without any of us shouting or losing our temper or being horrible to each other
.

Sam starts at Crokeham Hill next Tuesday. That road I’m walking down today, that’ll be the one he’ll take a week from now, as he joins all the other kids heading off to school
.

Not me, though. Not yet. January, they reckon, if I “continue to make satisfactory progress.”

Did I tell you I’m getting a private tutor? Just so I don’t fall behind. Five mornings a week, she’ll come here, and I’ll have physio or occupational therapy in the afternoons. I’m starting work in the pool soon—not proper swimming, at first, but we’ll build up to that
.

I can’t wait, actually. There are so many things I want to do and I want to do them all at once. Carpe diem, eh?! (Look it up.)

I am definitely taking up swimming
.

And drama
.

And I heard a rumor that the Killers are looking for a clarinetist.

When I came out of St. Dunstan’s, one of the reporters at the press conference asked me what it was
like to have eight months of my life taken away. (Maybe you saw it on the Internet?) Anyway, I told him it didn’t feel like I’d lost anything. It felt like I’d been given something. The life I’ve come back to feels bigger than the one I had before. Bigger and brighter and better
.

Even in those first couple of weeks, when I used to piss myself, when I still needed help in the bath and with getting dressed and undressed
.

Even now, when I nod off in front of the telly like an old man
.

Even when I play the clarinet like a beginner and forget how a bishop moves. Even when a short walk down the road will feel like an achievement
.

It’s like everything fits together somehow, the good with the bad. Or like they’re not really separate at all
.

What I’m trying to say is … actually, what am I trying to say?!

I’m not dead, I suppose. That’s the point: I could be dead … but I’m not. I could be living a different life … but I’m not. I didn’t have that way of looking at things before, but now I do—and that’s why it feels as though I’ve gained way more than a few “lost” months
.

They’ve lost interest in me now, the newspapers. The media
.

T
RAGIC
C
OMA
B
OY
turned into H
E’S
A
WAKE!
turned into B
RAVE
A
LEX
S
TARTS TO
R
EBUILD
H
IS
L
IFE
turned into last month’s story. No doubt it’ll start up again when they hear that I’ve persuaded Mum and Dad to get the police to drop all charges against Flip
.

I wrote to them. The Garamonds. Told them if Philip hadn’t done what he did, I might still be lying there in that hospital bed, and so they shouldn’t be too hard on him. He wasn’t trying to kill me, I said; he was trying to jolt me out of PVS
.

His mum wrote back. Called me an “exceptional young man.” Said my “generosity of spirit” towards her son was really quite remarkable, in the circumstances
.

Spirit. I had to smile at that
.

What I wanted was for her to let slip something about Philip. How he is. What it’s like for him, being back in his life, his body, again. Reunited with his family. I know what it’s like for me but I can’t believe for one minute that it’s anywhere near the same for Flip … or that the Garamonds welcomed him home like some kind of conquering hero
.

But all Mrs. G. said about him was that he was “making progress” and that, no, she didn’t think it would be helpful or appropriate for her to pass on a note I’d written to him or for me and Philip to have any direct correspondence. She was sorry, but she hoped I understood
.

To put it bluntly, Alex, he needs to be allowed to forget all about you
.

My note to Philip was returned unopened. The e-mail I sent him bounced back as a bad address. So I guess they’ve shut down his account and probably his Internet access or maybe taken away his PC altogether
.

He’ll be in therapy now, for sure. And Team Garamond will be in full swing again. Or maybe not. Maybe this latest episode has been too much for them
.
The mum, the dad. Teri. What’s it like in that house right now?

I went on Facebook and tracked down his sister’s page, but it hasn’t been updated in weeks. Not since the switch back. As for Jack and Donna, they only talk about what he did, not how he is. Or whether they have anything to do with him these days
.

I don’t like to think of the mess I’ve left behind
.

But I wish, I wish, I wish I knew whether Flip remembered anything. The nightmares, that time I fainted, the whole thing … does he have any conscious awareness of what happened? Are there any little memory flashes, like snatches of melody from a song you can’t quite name?