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 pr
omising, 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.
Ten minutes or so along the path, Beagle strayed off on a trail of investigative sniffs among the ferns and tree roots. Alex, who had unleashed him a while back, followed. They soon struck upon another track, treacherous with moss beneath the overhanging branches. It fetched them out into a clearing. A graveyard, in fact. The headstones, old and worn, blotched with lichen, poked out of the ground at odd angles. Many of the inscriptions were illegible. The ones which Alex could make out dated back to the 1800s. Buried here were mostly old folk, apart from one: William Edward Gelderd, four years old, “summoned unto sleep” on May 5, 1810.
Two centuries earlier, the boy’s parents would have wept by this graveside as his tiny coffin was lowered into the ground. Now he was no more than weathered letters on a block of stone. He was nothing. In the soil, after all this time, he would’ve rotted away completely. Dead too young to leave children, or grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, or great-great-grandchildren to carry his DNA into the future. The thought sent a chill through Alex.
And he understood then, if he hadn’t known it all along—if he hadn’t been too shocked, too petrified to admit it to himself—that there was only one sure reason that David couldn’t possibly believe the message was from him. One reason Alex hadn’t been able to click “go” when he’d typed his own name into the search box.
Because Alex Gray was dead.
That night’s nightmare was the worst yet.
Swarms of disembodied steel hands clawing at his legs as he ran up a slope of molten tar. Talonlike fingers flaying his legs to the bone, the sticky black beneath his feet slick with his own blood. Voices. And a relentless screech, as though the hands scraped the air with the metallic swipe-swipe-swipe of their nails.
When Alex woke, the images in his head snapped to black. But the screaming continued for a moment before it, too, ceased and all was still and silent.
Two a.m. He was way beyond sleep by now and, besides, terrified that if he so much as closed his eyes, the nightmare would start up again. But to lie there, awake, thinking of death—his death—was far worse.
In the morning, the yammering of the alarm clock dragged him, zombielike, out of bed. He didn’t remember going back to sleep, but he must’ve done. He got up and went through his morning routine, more or less on autopilot: shower, put on uniform, go downstairs, eat cereal, drink juice. The mum was in a rush to leave for work and Mr. Garamond was sleeping off his hangover from the departmental dinner. Alex almost bumped into Teri on the landing as she emerged from the bathroom in a billow of steam, wet haired, pink-fleshed, a green and white stripy towel wrapped round her like a sarong.
“You look awful,” she said. Disgusted more than concerned. “What happened to your face? One of your girlfriends give you a smack in the gob?”
Alex touched his lip, surprised to find it damaged. Then, “Oh, yeah. Cricket.”
“Surely the idea is to catch the ball with your hands, not your mouth?”
Later he would think of a comeback. Just then, spaced from sleep deprivation, he felt words fluttering around in his head like moths bashing against a light.
I’m dead.
Could he possibly say that to her? Teri, the thing is, I’m not the person you think I am. My name is Alex. And I’m dead. Of course he couldn’t. Not to her, or to Flip’s mother, or to Ms. Sprake, or Jack or Donna or Billie, or to that girl at school Cherry. Not to anyone. Or to anyone back home, for that matter. Mum, Dad, Sam. David. David, who still hadn’t bothered to reply to Alex’s last message. Not that it mattered. He was cut off from them all, from everyone, utterly alone with his secret. Alex hadn’t realized he was doing it, but he must’ve been staring at Teri’s bare shoulders, speckled with water, and the bulge of the towel against her breasts.
“Okay, here’s the thing, Philip,” she said. “You’ve got two switches in your
brain: one labeled ‘girl,’ and one that says ‘sister.’ When you see me with hardly any clothes on, the first switch should be in the off position, yeah? And the second should be in the on position. Do you think you could manage that?”
Then she was in her bedroom, with the door banged shut behind her.
Alex went downstairs, grabbed his keys and his schoolbag.
The last thing he wanted was to spend another day at Litchbury High as Flip—but as though in a daze, he was setting off to do just that. He was letting himself out of the house when he saw the dad’s wallet on the shelf in the hall. Mr. Garamond must have left it there when he came in drunk from his night out.
Alex stood there. Looked at the wallet. Listened.
The mum had already left, and by the sound of it, Teri was still in her bedroom, drying her hair. As for Flip’s dad, he hadn’t surfaced yet.
Alex picked up the wallet. Opened it. Took out the cash and counted it. Then he put the money back and clipped the wallet shut. Continued to stand there, eyes on the wallet. Continued listening. Hair dryer. Beagle, snuffling about in the basement. The slosh-slosh of the dishwasher. Nothing else. He opened the wallet once more, emptied it, stuffed the notes into his pocket, set the wallet back on the shelf and left the house—quietly, clicking the door shut and carefully turning the key.
Who cared about Flip’s PIN now?
In fifteen minutes, he’d be on the local train into Leeds. By lunchtime, he’d arrive at King’s Cross. By early afternoon, Alex would be home.
What he would do when he got there, he had no idea. What he’d say to anyone, or what they’d make of him. His parents. Would they “recognize” him, in the way Beagle sensed that Flip was no longer Flip? He’d once seen a TV program, about sheep farming, in which an orphaned lamb had another lamb’s fleece draped over it so the ewe mistook it for one of her own young and allowed it to suckle. Were human mothers so easily deceived? If he could just see Mum, would she know him for who he was—somehow, through some maternal intuition? If not, he could tell her things about himself, about his life, about the family, that only Alex could possibly know. He hadn’t convinced David that way, but David was his mate, not his mother—the woman who’d carried him in her womb, given birth to him, fed him from her breast, raised him for fourteen years. He had once lived inside her, as he now lived inside Flip. If anyone recognized him, in this strange boy’s body, with this strange boy’s face, it would be Mum.
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