Flip

by Martyn Bedford

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Martyn Bedford

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Wendy Lamb Books, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Wendy Lamb Books and the colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/teens

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at

  www.randomhouse.com/teachers

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bedford, Martyn.

  Flip / Martyn Bedford. —1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: A teenager wakes up inside another boy’s body and faces a life-or-death quest to return to his true self or be trapped forever in the wrong existence.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89855-6

  [1. Identity—Fiction. 2. Supernatural—Fiction. 3. England—Fiction.]

  I. Title.

  PZ7.B3817996Fl 2011

  [Fic]—dc22

  2010013158

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  For the loves of my life:

  Damaris, Josie and Polly,

  and in memory of Keith Croxall

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Five weeks later …

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Alex couldn’t have said what woke him that morning. It might have been the weird dream, or Mum calling up the stairs, or the sunlight streaming into the room. He lay in bed with that leftover adrenaline feeling of having been jolted out of a nightmare—it was forgotten the instant you woke up, but it vibrated in your mind like the aftershock of a slammed door. His legs were tangled in the duvet and his right arm was trapped beneath him, useless with pins and needles. He eased onto his back.

  Another shout: “Come on, you’re going to be late.”

  Late for what? It was a Saturday; he didn’t have to be anywhere. She sounded odd, his mum—she had that familiar tone (I’m really losing my patience now), but there was something that he couldn’t put his finger on. Probably she was just in one of her strops. Had Mum been cross with him when he’d come home the night before? Alex couldn’t recall. As it happened, he had no recollection of coming in at all, but obviously, he must’ve done. The last thing he remembered was leaving David’s at five to ten and running to beat his curfew. They’d spent the evening playing chess (he’d won), surfing YouTube, listening to the Killers. The usual.

  He made a fist, then unclenched it. The pins and needles were gone but his arm still felt clumsy; all his limbs and joints seemed heavy. His mouth tasted foul. If he was coming down with something on the first weekend of the Christmas holiday, that would be so typical. But he didn’t feel ill. He … well, Alex wasn’t sure how he felt, exactly. Just out of sorts. A fragment of his nightmare resurfaced: a ladder, or a staircase, or a hill—something steep, anyway—and he was scrambling up it as fast as he could, with some creature grabbing at his feet, and Alex trying to kick himself free. What happened next, he didn’t know. That must’ve been when he woke up. Maybe it was all to do with his legs being twisted in the bedding. “Philip! It’s five to eight!”

  No way could it be five to eight, with all this sunshine. More like ten or eleven. Alex turned to look at the alarm clock on his bedside table.

  The clock wasn’t there. Nor was the table.

  Instead, there was a wall, and the wall wasn’t blue and silver stripes anymore; it was a plain pale yellow. Now he thought about it, the daylight was coming in from the wrong angle. Alex sat up. The window wasn’t where it should’ve been. Those weren’t his curtains, either. That wasn’t his wardrobe; those weren’t his shelves; that wasn’t his CD player; those weren’t his posters (Basketball? Cricket?); and the carpet had been replaced by bare floorboards and a huge red and gold rug that looked like something out of Aladdin. Where were his clarinet stand, his music stand? How come his desk (which wasn’t his desk and wasn’t where it should have been) had a flat-screen PC on it? Why was his room so big?

  Alex tried to figure out whose room this might be—whose house—and what on earth he was doing here. Why he was wearing another boy’s T-shirt instead of his own pajamas. Why, in December, there was a thin summer duvet on the bed. And if that woman hollering up the stairs (again) wasn’t his mother, whose was she? Philip’s, presumably. Philip! she had shouted. Yes, it was Philip she was cross with, not Alex. In another bedroom, Philip was failing to get up in time for something. Philip was the key to this. The rational explanation. Dad reckoned there was a rational explanation for everything, even things that made no sense at all. UFOs, ghosts, God—they’re just the names people have come up with for stuff they haven’t worked out yet.

  So the rational explanation: on his way home from David’s, Alex had dropped by Philip’s place and ended up crashing there for the night. Now he’d woken up too dopey, too confused to remember having done so. Like when you go on holiday and the first morning, you wake up surprised to find yourself in an unfamiliar bedroom. The part of his brain that expected him to be in his own room, his own home, was disoriented, failing to compute the messages his eyes were sending. Any moment now, it would all come back to him. That was it: the logical, reasonable, rational explanation.

  Which would’ve been fine if he’d known anyone called Philip.

  This was a big house. Off the landing outside the bedroom in which he’d woken up, there were three other doors (all closed), one set of stairs leading down and a narrow staircase ascending to what he supposed must be a converted attic. He tried each of the doors in turn: two bedrooms and a bathroom. Called up the stairs. Nothing. No people. No sign of “Philip,” although one of the bedrooms looked recently slept in. A girl’s room, not a boy’s. A gothic teenage-angst thing was going on in there. He went down to the ground floor, to a high-ceilinged hallway that gave on to a sitting room, with another room off that. Both empty. Radio sounds drifted up through the floor. The kitchen had to be down in the basement, which was where he’d find the woman who had been yelling up the stairs. Philip’s mum. When he found her, Alex would discover the solution to the puzzle of where he was, and why.

  Hopefully, she’d fix him up with some breakfast as well.

  As he was making his way to the basement, two thoughts struck him: firstly, he’d never been in this house in his life; secondly, he definitely had something wrong with his arms and legs. His coordination. Going up and down the stairs, in and out of rooms, he’d lumbered around like a drunk. He was at it again, colliding with the doorframe as he let himself into the kitchen and sending the door juddering against its stopper.

  “For Dr. Frankenstein’s creation,” a female voice said in the style of a TV-documentar
y narration, “even straightforward motor functions—passing through a doorway, for example—could prove problematic.”

  Alex found himself in a large dining kitchen, oven-warmed and smelling of croissants. The voice had come from the direction of a table at one end of the room. It belonged to a girl who looked about seventeen and whose long, straight black hair was streaked with purple. He felt self-conscious in just a T-shirt and boxers. She seemed unfazed, though, distractedly scouring the insides of a halved grapefruit with a teaspoon as she sat sideways on her chair, one black-legginged leg crossed over the other. The motif on her (black) T-shirt said “Serpent” in jagged lime-green letters. Her foot tapped the air, as though in time to a tune playing in her head. Having greeted Alex with sarcasm, she now ignored him totally.

  Before he could think of anything to say to her, there were footsteps outside and a woman bustled in through the open back door. Beyond her, Alex could see part of a garden, and a fat old golden retriever snuffling around for somewhere to pee. No sign of anyone who might be Philip.

  “At last,” the woman said, her dark eyes flaring. Then, with a flurry of hand signals: “And you’re not even dressed. Sit down and eat—the croissants will be stone cold by now, but whose fault’s that?”

  The woman was tall and bony, wearing a filmy dress that swished when she moved. She snapped off the radio, tugged open a drawer and busied herself ripping a bin-liner from a roll and fitting it inside a stainless steel flip-top bin. Her dress was beige, patterned with irregular brown blotches, and her spindly suntanned limbs stuck out like oversized Twiglets. If they ever genetically engineered a giraffe crossed with a human, Alex thought, it would look something like this. He stood there, gawping at her.

  “As for its mental facility, the simplest instructions—‘sit,’ ‘eat’—seemed to confound the creature.” That TV voice-over again, from the girl at the breakfast table. Her accent sounded vaguely northern. “It was a source of consternation and dismay to Dr. Frankenstein that his genius should have produced a being so innately stupid.”

  “Oh, don’t provoke him,” the woman said. “We haven’t got time for you two to start bickering.”

  “I don’t bicker,” the girl said. “I scathe. ”

  “Enough, Teri.” Then, gesturing him towards the other end of the room. “Will you please sit down and eat your breakfast.”

  If the morning had started at a 7 (where 0 is totally normal and 10 is totally weird), it had now skipped past 8 and was heading for 9.5.

  Maybe someone had drugged him. This was a hallucination and he hadn’t woken up at all but was still at his own home, in his own bed, dreaming of croissants and giraffes and sarcastic goths. If it was a dream, though, it wasn’t showing any signs of coming to an end. Unsure what else to do, Alex sat down opposite the girl. There was a wicker basket with a cloth draped over it; the croissants, he figured. Alex didn’t like croissants. In the center of the table stood several cereal boxes. He reached for the cornflakes and began tipping them into a bowl.

  “Mum.” The girl pointed at Alex, who paused in mid-tip.

  “You asked for croissants,” the woman said. “I made you croissants.”

  He set the cereal down. It made no sense, You asked for croissants. A) he hated them; B) he hadn’t asked for anything or even spoken to her before now. “I—”

  “You specifically asked for them.”

  “But—”

  Now it was the girl’s turn to interrupt. Glaring at him across the table: “You don’t even like cornflakes, turd-brain.”

  “Teri. Language.”

  Any moment now, this would stop freaking him out. Any moment now, a TV presenter and camera crew would burst into the room and everyone would fall about laughing at the practical joke they’d played on Alex. Instead, the woman whipped away the basket, strode across the kitchen and, with a flourish, tipped the croissants into the bin. Teri gave him an are-you-satisfied-now? look. Edged with kohl, her eyes were an amazing color, almost violet. Alex glared back, trying to stare her down, but the depth of her dislike for him was so stunning he had to look away. He topped up the cornflakes, added milk and sugar and started eating.

  “Right, I’m off,” Teri said, getting up from the table.

  The woman looked up from the dishwasher, where she was loading some of the breakfast things. “I thought you had a free period first thing.”

  “I’m meeting Luce and Karina at Costa before school.”

  “Oh, okay. Well, have fun.”

  “Yeah, bye, Mum.” With that, the girl was gone.

  School? He was trying to get his head round this when he became aware of a low growling. It was the golden retriever, which had come in from the garden and was standing a short distance from Alex’s chair, giving him the works: the growl, the bared teeth, the raised hackles. Bloody hell, even the dog hated him. Not that Alex was that keen on dogs, either. He didn’t mind them, as such, and would actually have quite liked one, but—with his asthma—that had never been an option. Talking of which, where was his inhaler? Upstairs, probably, in that bedroom. Usually he took a couple of puffs when he woke up but he hadn’t that morning, in all the confusion. His breathing was fine, though. Better than normal, despite a night spent in a house full of doggy allergens. The dog was still growling at him.

  “Beagle, stop that,” the woman said. She sounded cross but also surprised. The dog didn’t stop. “Oh, come away, you dozy pooch. What on earth has got into you?” She took hold of his collar and dragged him across the kitchen and out through the back door. “If that’s the mood you’re in, you can jolly well go back outside.”

  “What’s with the name?” Alex said.

  “What?” The woman shut the door.

  “Beagle.” He smiled, trying to be friendly, to make conversation. “Only, it’s a funny name for a golden retriever.”

  She stared at him. Then, letting out a long breath. “I haven’t time for this. I have to be out of the house in ten minutes. So do you.” She indicated his bowl. “Finish that, get yourself upstairs—”

  “Look—”

  “And if you can possibly bring yourself to wash your face and brush your teeth, that would be so marvelous.”

  “I’m sorry,” Alex said, “but do you mind telling me what’s going on here?”

  The woman’s expression could’ve frozen the face off a polar bear. “I want you at the front door, dressed, and ready to leave when I am. Okay?”

  Before he had a chance to reply, she left the room. He listened to the thump of her footsteps on the stairs. He sat there, bewildered, gazing at the breakfast clutter and at the unfamiliar room, its rich red walls bathed in sunlight that slanted in through the semibasement windows. He had half a mind to sweep everything from the table in a fit of temper. Outside, the dog was barking to be let back in.

  Alex spotted a newspaper, its sections spread beside a plate sprinkled with toast crumbs. The Guardian. He pulled out the main news bit. The school thing was bugging him. There shouldn’t be any school that day, or for the next two weeks, yet that was where the girl said she was going after she’d met her friends. But it was Saturday, for crying out loud. December 22. School had broken up the day before. That afternoon, Dad would pick up Gran from the station and bring her home for Christmas. Unfolding the newspaper, Alex searched for the dateline at the top of the front page.

  He set the paper on the table and laid a hand on each thigh, digging his fingers into them, in the hope that they would stop shaking. They didn’t.

  There had to be a mistake. There had to be.

  But when Alex picked up the paper again, the date was the same as before.

  Monday. June 23.

  The woman reappeared just then in a fury of bony limbs and swishing dress. “There you are.” Then, “Oh, I don’t believe it, you haven’t moved. ”

  Alex looked at her, afraid to blink in case the tears brimming his eyes spilled down his face.

  “For God’s sake,” she said, “get a grip, P
hilip.”

  It was shocking enough to wake up in a strange house, to discover that he’d aged six months overnight, to have a woman he’d never met before mistake him for her son.

  But all that was a breeze compared to seeing himself in the bathroom mirror.

  The woman had more or less hauled him up the stairs by the scruff of his neck, each of his protestations seeming only to spur her on to greater levels of wrath.

  I’m not Philip.… I don’t even know who Philip is.… What’s going on? … You’re not my mother.… Who are you? … Where am I? … Let go of me.… My name’s Alex, Alex Gray.… I want to call my mum and dad.…

  I’M NOT PHILIP!

  Then, bundled into the bathroom, with the door shut and the giraffe-woman keeping guard the other side, Alex caught sight of his reflection.

  Or rather, he caught sight of someone else’s reflection.

  A boy about his age. A boy without freckles, or gingery-blond hair, or blond eyebrows so faint you could hardly see them; a boy without a small mole to one side of his Adam’s apple, without blue eyes, a chipped front tooth; a boy without a dimple in his chin. The face gazing back at Alex from the mirror was brown-eyed and tanned, with the stubbly beginnings of a mustache and dark hair cropped in the stylishly unkempt way that he could never get his own hair to go. The only blemish was a slight kink in his nose where, he assumed, it had once been broken. Alex ran a fingertip down the bridge of his own nose. The boy in the mirror did the same. Sure enough, Alex could feel the unevenness of the bone beneath his skin.

  He stooped over the toilet and retched, splashing the bowl with undigested milk and cornflakes.

  From the landing: “Philip, come on.” Philip.

  He looked at his hands properly. They were too big. His arms as well; he had muscles. Black hairs on his forearms instead of pale ginger. The fingers were thicker, the nails slightly ridged. The pattern of veins on the backs of his hands was wrong. They weren’t his hands. Yet when he filled the basin and immersed those alien hands, his brain registered the sensation of warm water. When he bent over to wash the face that wasn’t his face, he felt the water splash against skin that wasn’t his skin. He straightened up again, blinking, watching the droplets trickle down mirror boy’s face and onto his T-shirt, which was becoming damp, just as Alex’s was.