Flip

by Martyn Bedford

  Half grinning, half frowning, she said, “You could do that anyway.”

  “No, I meant …” But he wasn’t sure what he meant.

  In any case, Cherry was out of there, saying goodbye, turning away from him and heading off down the road.

  That evening, as usual, he took himself off to Flip’s room after tea to do “homework.” What he actually did, as usual, was go online—a piece of schoolwork on a tab so he could click it open in an instant if anyone came in. Since his return from London, Alex had carried on where he’d left off. His search. Scouring obscure Web sites, sending e-mails, firing off posts to one weird forum after another, in the hopes of finding an explanation for what had happened and of unearthing someone out there, among all those billions, who’d been through the same thing and lived to tell the tale.

  As usual, he drew a blank.

  The nightmare came again that night.

  In this one he was running across a road. No, not across but along. Downhill, plummeting down an ever-steepening slope way faster than seemed humanly possible. So fast the g-forces tugged at his face and his legs bucked furiously beneath him, as though his feet might shear off at any moment.

  And the road became steeper still. And he ran faster and faster.

  And the wind roared in his ears. Only it wasn’t the wind; it was the scream of an engine, louder and louder, as—don’t look over your shoulder, for God’s sake don’t look over your shoulder—a white van, its headlights dazzling, bore down on him from behind. Catching him, catching him, catching him. In the instant he turned to look, he stumbled, sprawling headlong into the side of the road. The last flash of an image as he struck the curb: the driver’s ghoulish face, framed by the windscreen.

  The face was his own.

  He must have cried out as he woke up. The mum came in to see if he was all right. “Bad dream,” he said. She sat on the edge of his bed, tidied his duvet. Stroked his damp brow. He was drifting back off, imagining the hand to be his own mother’s.

  “You tried to tell me, didn’t you?” Stroking, stroking. “That Monday morning when you … when I had to march you off to the bathroom to get ready for school.”

  “Tried to tell you what?”

  “ ‘I’m not Philip,’ you said. ‘I’m Alex. Alex Gray.’ Do you remember saying that?” When he went on lying there, silently, she said, “Do you hate it so much?”

  “Hate what?” His voice sounded muffled, even to him. Barely a whisper.

  “Being with us. Being Philip Garamond.”

  For one stunning moment, he thought she knew, thought she was addressing him as Alex, not Flip. But, no. She called him Philip. “Philip, don’t ever think you aren’t loved. Please don’t, darling. Please don’t hate your life.” She leaned over him, placing a clumsy kiss on the side of his face. He could smell it on her, hear it in her voice: Flip’s mum was still drunk from dinner. That was how she was dealing with this—with him—night after night, glass after glass of wine.

  Alex lay there, eyes closed, face turned away from her, towards the wall.

  Sleep wouldn’t come in the wake of the nightmare. It seldom did. In the end, he gave up, shuffled out of bed and into his dressing gown and fired up the PC. It had been only a couple of hours since he’d last checked his mail but there was no harm taking another look before he navigated to online chess.

  One new message.

  It would be rubbish, like all the others Alex had received so far. Usually, the replies were long and rambling, and if they weren’t totally mad or sad, they were just plain pervy.

  Not this one, though. This one seemed vaguely normal. So normal he had to read it several times before he allowed himself to move the cursor away from “delete” and reposition it directly over the link.

  Hey iamalex1

  What youre talking about is psychic evacuation.

  Try this:

  http://www.evacuationofthepsyche.com.au

  good luck, Rob (aka Corb1959)

  IF YOU ARE A PSYCHIC EVACUEE, you will know this: psychic evacuation is a fact. (It must be—it happened to you!) Not a scientific fact, of course. The psyche—or soul, if you like—is immaterial; it has no molecular substance. It cannot be forensically tested or proven to exist. Same goes for psychic evacuation.

  So while we know what we are—and who we were—no bugger believes us!

  If you’ll pardon the religious metaphor, this is the cross we PEs have to bear. But, hey, wasn’t Jesus Christ the most famous psychic evacuee in history?! Actually, no, his soul migrated (to heaven). We, on the other hand, are souls, or psyches, who have evacuated from one corporeal host (a body, to use the lay term) and taken refuge in another. The funny thing is, many millions of Christians—and Muslims, for that matter—are happy to believe that: (a) human beings have a soul, and (b) when we die, the soul leaves our body and ascends to heaven (or descends to that other place!). Yet these same people think you’re bonkers if you suggest that the soul can leave one body and enter another. Even Hindus and Buddhists, who believe in reincarnation or karmic rebirth, don’t buy into PE.

  But we do. Because we know better.

  Now I’ve got that off my chest, let me make it clear: this site doesn’t campaign for psychic evacuation to be accepted by the scientific or religious communities. Nor do we investigate individual cases. If you came here seeking definitive proof of PE, or verification of your own PE status, you’ll be disappointed. What we are is a virtual meeting place for psychic evacuees from around the globe. A safe haven where those of us with a shared experience can post our stories or talk to like-minded, sympathetic souls (pardon the pun) in the online forum.

  For evacuated psyches, it can be a hard, lonely world out there, where no one believes or understands what we’ve been through and will go through for the rest of our new existences. To live out your days in corporeal exile is a bewildering journey of loss and grief for what you’ve had to leave behind, combined with alienation from what you’ve become. You’ve been ripped from your body, your old life, your loved ones, and thrust into someone else’s. Not to mention the guilt you’re bound to feel over the soul that has been cast aside to make way for yours.

  And the appalling realization that there’s no going back.

  If any of this strikes a chord with you, then welcome. You’ve come to the right place. You no longer have to suffer alone, or in silence. Please listen to our stories and share yours with us. We may be the only true family and friends you have.

  No going back.

  Alex tried to shut them out, but the words wouldn’t be silenced. Was it true that he was imprisoned inside Philip Garamond for the rest of his (Flip’s) life?

  He navigated away from the home page, clicked on “What is PE?”

  In a nutshell, psychic evacuation is when a psyche or soul leaves its original body and transfers to another. In doing so, it replaces the psyche of its new body, or corporeal host. The circumstances vary, as the personal accounts in the Evacuees’ Stories section illustrate, but there are two common factors:

  1. Evacuation occurs at, or near, the time of death of the old body.

  2. Transfer occurs between “twinned,” or psychically connected, bodies (i.e., those born close to one another in date, time and location).

  What else can be said about PE from the cases we’re aware of?

  Well, it occurs among the young (youngest recorded evacuee, 12; oldest, 24), and usually in cases of sudden death. There are two known evacuations from hosts in a coma or PVS (persistent vegetative state), in both cases, following traumatic injury. As for gender, there’s a 57–43 split between male and female evacuees—although transfers always take place between same-sex “twins.” Also, distance is no barrier. While the twinned souls must be close to one another at birth (see point 2, above), their relative locations at the moment of transfer need not be; the longest switch on record is by Corb1959—from Manchester, UK, to Dunedin, New Zealand.

  While PE has some physical impact on the e
vacuee’s new body, the psychological effects of evacuation—as many of us know—can be much more significant; in several cases there have been mental health issues, and sadly, four evacuees (that we know of) have committed suicide.

  As for the replaced psyche, we simply don’t know where it goes. The most plausible theory is that it heads the other way, in a straight soul-for-soul swap, and so “dies” along with the evacuee’s original body. It’s a fair bet, then, that a psyche won’t be replaced without putting up a fight. Who knows how many transfers have failed because the would-be evacuee came off second best? But with two souls competing for one living body, there can be only one survivor. In your case, that’s you.

  I know what you’re thinking. “Why?” And “Why me?”

  As you’ll see from our stories, and the discussion threads archived on the forum, other evacuees have grappled with the same questions. My own view, for what it’s worth, is that a soul evacuates because it isn’t ready or willing to die just yet. It refuses to go to heaven or hell, or any other afterlife, or an eternity of nothingness, or whatever is in store for us. And so, faced with the death of its life-support system (i.e., its body), it takes flight, seeking refuge in a new host: its “twin.” No matter that these psyches, or soul mates, have lived separate lives since birth, or that they might be thousands of miles apart at the vital moment—the evacuee hauls itself along that rope of psychic connection and … wham!

  If you are a psychic evacuee, then you are blessed (or cursed) with a soul whose will to live knows no limits.

  By the time Alex finished reading the evacuees’ stories, it was two a.m. There were just thirteen. But he had finally found what he’d been looking for: people like him.

  The guy running the Web site was an Aussie—NT Pete, a tour operator from Darwin who’d switched bodies eleven years earlier; before that he’d been Brian, an IT graduate in Ballarat killed in a car crash. The rest were from all over the world: the United States, Canada, South Africa, Japan, Indonesia, Germany, Iceland, Brazil …

  They were the survivors. Alex, too.

  But if NT Pete was right, then for each winner there was a loser—a psyche condemned to die out of time and out of place. He hadn’t thought of Philip in those terms before. His psychic “twin.” It seemed they’d been born not just on the same day in the same hospital but perhaps within minutes of each other, two souls coming into existence more or less simultaneously—to different mothers, in different delivery rooms, but with the sort of unconscious connection you heard about in some actual twins. A connection that had offered Alex’s soul an escape route when his body was struck down by that hit-and-run driver and left in PVS. Okay, so he was stranded here now, living a life that wasn’t his. But if he hated being Philip Garamond, how much more terrible was it for Flip? Banished to the vegetative, possibly dying body of a boy whose soul had come out on top in a psychic tug-of-war.

  He’d always considered Philip to be the stronger. Physically, that was true, and for some reason Alex had assumed the other boy to be stronger on the inside, as well. More confident, assertive, aggressive. More sure of himself and his place in the world. It seemed not. It seemed as though Alex’s psyche, his inner spirit—his soul, with its limitless will to live—was more tenacious than he’d imagined.

  A will to live. But also a readiness to send another soul to its death.

  Alex registered with the site and, once his password and user name had been set up, logged on to the forum. No one else was online, so he typed a personal account of his switch for the Evacuees’ Stories section. He wrote about Alex Gray and Philip Garamond, about waking up one morning in another boy’s body, and about everything that had happened since, including the trip to Crokeham Hill. He even typed in links to some of the online articles about the accident and the tragic “coma boy.”

  Since Alex had had no one to talk to about any of this, it came pouring out. Page after page. I’m Alex, it began. I’m inside Philip. I evacuated nineteen days ago. My original body has been in a coma, then PVS, for more than six months. It is still alive.

  As he slept (which he did, at last) all hell broke out on evacuationofthepsyche.com.

  First thing Alex did when he woke was go online and check the forum—and there it was: a new thread, trailing a long string of posts. Probably any new member would’ve provoked excitement, but Alex’s story had sent them into meltdown. Some challenged his “claim” that the body he had evacuated from was still alive, and one accused him of trying to pull a hoax. Others were less hostile but still skeptical. In every known case, soul transfer had coincided more or less exactly with death. Even with the two previous coma/PVS patients, both evacuations followed the withdrawal of medical intervention. If a body wasn’t about to die, why would a psyche evacuate? Alex’s initial contact—Rob, or Corb1959—was one of just two members urging the rest to keep an open mind until the new guy came back online to defend himself.

  Alex checked his e-mails. There was one—sure enough, from Rob.

  Hey there again, Alex.

  I see youve checked out the site and made your first post—talk about poking a stick in a hornets nest!! Id apply plenty of insect repellent if I was you! Seriously, though, I cant imagine what its like for you, knowing your original host isnt dead. Im not sure I could handle it.

  Anyways welcome aboard … and take care of yourself.

  Rob

  p.s. “Corb1959” is my pre-evac initials (CO) and post-evac initials (RB), plus the recorded time of death. One minute to eight, on a rainy night in Manchester (is there another kind!?) five years ago. I was Chris back then but these days Im Rob.

  According to his evacuee’s story, Chris and his girlfriend, Lisa, had been on their way to a bar to celebrate their A-level results. A group of scallies passed them in the street. One of them gave Lisa’s arse a grab. Chris said something. A fight broke out. A knife was produced. By the time the ambulance got him to hospital, Chris was dead and his soul was twelve thousand miles away, inside Rob.

  Alex clicked “reply.”

  You believe me, then?

  Listen, Alex, when I made my first post, no one believed Id evacced halfway round the world. “Impossible,” they said. Now its like Im some kind of PE legend!

  Why do they hate me?

  They don’t. Their problem is: if your birth host hasnt died yet, theres a theoretical possibility of your psyche going “home.” Thats the Holy Grail of psychic evacuation—the reverse transfer. In two of the PE suicides, they both said that ending their new corporeal lives was the only way to be their true selves. In heaven, they meant. But, well, you might just be able to return to your true bodily self!! None of the rest of us can do that. Ever. Thats whats doing their heads in. Thats why the forums gone ballistic. So dont take it personally, old chap!

  Rob, do you really think I can go back?

  Hey, a “theoretical possibility” is what I said.

  There was a knock. Alex had just brought a sandwich upstairs and was waiting for the PC to fire up. He opened the bedroom door.

  It was the sister. “We’re going into Bradford,” she said.

  “We?”

  “All of us. Ice-skating. Happy families, eh?”

  “Oh, okay.” Skating. Sweet Jesus.

  “We have you to thank for this, Psycho.” Then, distracted by the music coming from the CD player, she said, “This is the Killers, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. Sam’s Town.” One of several CDs Alex had bought since he’d found Flip’s Halifax PIN waiting for him when he returned from London.

  “Since when are you into the Killers?” she said. Alex shrugged. Teri went on. “Are we witnessing the death of gangsta here? I mean, it’s not my thing … but is this the moment when Philip Garamond finally develops something resembling taste?”

  “Ter, listen, you don’t have to come ice-skating. Not if you don’t want to.”

  She stared at him. Her lipstick (blue today) appeared almost black in the shadow of the doorway, her face
ghost white. She was in her weekend gear and looked about five years older. Her voice softened a little. “Philip, how come you’re not horrible to me these days? Actually, you’re even nice to me.”

  “Sorry,” he said, deadpan, “but the voices in my head are telling me to like you.”

  If she’d looked at him strangely before, it was nothing compared to her expression now. “You said something … funny? And … clever? No, no, nooo.” She shook her head. “The mouth says ‘Smile’ but the brain says, ‘Be afraid, Teri, be very afraid.’ ”

  After the skating, Alex wasn’t sure which hurt more: the sprained wrist or the bruised arse. Mr. Garamond was clearly furious. When you’d forked out for four people to go skating, and one of them—the one who went regularly, the one who’d had lessons—spoiled it for everyone by treating it like an audition for You’ve Been Framed … But he couldn’t show his anger. Not to Philip. Not after his trip to London. Not when this outing to the ice rink was meant to be part of his son’s healing process. So Flip’s dad made do with scowling and keeping his thoughts to himself. Teri was more up-front (Newton would’ve discovered gravity way sooner if he’d watched you skate, Psycho), but the mother shut her up with a look sharp enough to take out an eye.

  They had drinks and buns round the corner, in the café at the National Media Museum. It was swarming with kids, families. The sort of place Philip would’ve come to on school trips. All those years Flip had been growing up, living his life, while Alex was living his at the other end of the country. They’d been oblivious to one another’s existence.

  Suddenly, he longed to be back at Tyrol Place, online, among the psychic evacuees. They might be dubious about him, but at least with them he didn’t have to pretend to be someone else.

  The Garamonds’ was a silent, sullen table. The seat of Alex’s jeans was still damp from the ice. He ate and drank left-handed and had to sit lopsidedly, with his weight on his unbruised buttock. His own body was already out of action, and if he carried on injuring himself—first the cricket, now this—he would wreck Flip’s as well. The thought made him smile. Smiling was a bad idea, the mood the dad was in.