“What was that all about, back there?” Mr. Garamond said.
“Michael.” A note of warning in the mother’s voice.
Alex shrugged.
“We’re trying our best to understand,” the dad went on. “To help. And you treat the whole thing like one big—”
“I’ve lost confidence,” Alex said.
“In what? Ice-skating?”
“No, Dad. In myself.”
Alex stared Flip’s father down. He hadn’t meant to lean so heavily on the word “dad” but it appeared to have gone unnoticed in the general surprise at what he’d said. Or at the fact he’d said it: Philip, self-analyzing. Philip, unsure of himself and willing to admit it. He could see that the Garamonds were as stunned by this as they had been by his uncanny resemblance to someone skating for the first time in his life.
It stopped the conversation stone dead, each of them returning their attention to their cups of tea, their cherry flap-jacks, their Coke cans, as though in agreement that from then on they should communicate not in words but in sips of drink and mouthfuls of food. At a nearby table, a family of six got up to go amid a clatter of plates and the scraping of chairs. The children, excited, ran on ahead, dad mopping up a spilled drink with a tissue while mum, raising the skirts of her burka to avoid tripping, followed the young ones, calling after them.
“Urdu,” Mr. Garamond said.
His wife looked at him. “What?”
“That woman was speaking Urdu.”
“That’s the guy from the train,” Teri said.
Alex thought she was referring to the father of the Muslim family, who was unsure what to do with his Tango-sodden Kleenex. But he saw that she was looking beyond him, to a twenty-something bloke with spiky dyed-yellow hair and a leather jacket. He sat facing the Garamonds’ table and stared right at them. At Alex, to be precise.
“What guy?” the mum said. She hated the word “guy,” preferred “fellow” or “chap.”
“On the way into Bradford,” Teri said. “He was just along the carriage from us. I thought it was me he had the hots for … but looks like it’s Philip.”
“Teri, please, that’s disgusting.”
“What is, Mum? The gay thing or the underage thing?”
Alex looked properly at the yellow-haired guy, expecting him to avert his gaze now that he must have realized they were on to him. But he didn’t. He kept on staring directly at Alex, a half smile on his face.
Flip’s mum tugged her husband’s sleeve. “Michael.”
“Or Farsi,” Mr. Garamond said, frowning. “These Indo-Persian languages are quite tricky to tell apart.”
Teri and Alex caught one another’s eye and burst out laughing. The mother joined in, too, patting the dad affectionately on the back of the hand. “Priceless, dear. Priceless.” And in that moment the tension between the four of them disappeared.
So too, when Alex looked over his way again, had the guy with yellow hair.
Alex might’ve forgotten all about him if he hadn’t turned up again, the next day, by the bandstand in Litchbury. Alex had gone there to meet Donna. They needed to talk, she’d said. Probably she was planning to finish with him, the way he’d been treating her just lately. Billie already had done. By text. Which suited him fine, if the alternative was to meet face to face. Really, he should’ve been the one to bring it to an end—with both of them—but the one time he’d tried with Donna, the hurt in her eyes made it seem less cruel simply to let things drift, avoid her, make excuses not to hang out together. Hope the problem would go away of its own accord.
And yet … And yet, and yet, and yet … Donna was so pretty. So sexy. And so besotted with him. With Flip, anyway. On the occasions when they had been together, however difficult, she’d usually ended up with her arms around him, kissing him. Long, passionate face-suckers. Donna couldn’t have known what was wrong with Flip, but she realized that something was, and it was as though she was trying to draw this thing—this poison—out of him. Like an exorcism.
Did you need to like a girl to go out with her? Did you need to have anything in common? Or was it enough just to fancy her?
Alex didn’t know. This was Flip’s territory, not his.
So as he waited for Donna on that Sunday morning, he half wished he was about to be dumped. And half wished he wasn’t.
He was sitting on one of the benches around the perimeter of a small square, watching a Salvation Army band unpacking their instruments and setting up beneath the bandstand’s canopy. Alex hadn’t known they would be here, but it was too late now. A handful of people had taken their seats for the performance; others were sitting eating ice creams or drinking carry-out coffee and reading the Sunday papers. Children played on the slope behind the square, the grass unnaturally green in the sunshine. Alex was distracted by one of the band wrestling a tuba out of its case and didn’t notice the yellow-haired guy until he’d sat down at the other end of the bench.
“That’s one fit sister you’ve got,” he said.
Alex tried not to show how startled he was. The guy wore a plain white T-shirt and ripped jeans and had the same leather jacket as the previous day, only this time he was carrying it. He draped it over the back of the bench.
“Teri, isn’t it?” He took off his sunglasses. “She needs to ditch the goth thing, though. Why do they do that, make themselves up like corpses?” Then, grinning at Alex, he said, “Do they think death is cool?”
He sounded Australian. His hair was the color of banana milk shake. He stretched, put his hands behind his head. Alex could see the dark hairs in his armpit.
“Who are you?” Alex asked, holding his voice steady.
He ought to have been afraid, but for all that the guy was older, bigger, brasher than Alex—and despite the fact that, apparently, he’d been following him all weekend—he gave off no sense of menace. He acted like he wanted to be friends. Or as though they already were. All the same, Alex’s breath came fast and hot through his throat.
“Who am I? Perfectly reasonable question in the circumstances,” the guy said, nodding. He extended his long legs, crossed them at the ankles, one foot tapping against the other as though the band had already begun playing and he was keeping time with the music. “But surely the really interesting question, Alex, is who are you?”
Alex. He’d called him Alex.
And then it came to him. The use of his real name. The accent. He shifted in his seat to look properly at the guy.
“Rob?”
“Well done,” Rob said, a smile taking the edge off the sarcasm. “And I thought you were the bright one and Flip was the dumbo.”
Alex laughed, the pent-up anxiety of the last couple of minutes released like air from a balloon. Then, “But, what … you’ve come over from New Zealand?”
“No, mate, I’m back here in the UK now.” He pronounced it “Yook.” “Have been for months. Do you have any idea how dull it is in En Zed?” He offered his hand. Alex, hesitant, shook it. Winced. “What’ve you done?” Rob asked, indicating the bandage Mrs. Garamond had wrapped round his wrist that morning.
“Ice-skating injury,” Alex said. “You should see my bum. ”
“Oh, thanks, but usually I like to get to know someone a bit better first, yeah?”
Alex burst out laughing; they both did. This was way, way better than going on the psychic evacuation forum—at last he had his own PE to talk to, right here beside him on a bench in Litchbury. Someone just like him. “So, what are you doing here?” he asked. “I mean, it’s great to meet you, but why the cloak-and-dagger stuff?”
“You think I should’ve made an appointment?”
Alex gave a nervous laugh. “Teri reckoned you were stalking me.”
Rob’s smile didn’t slip. “Hey, if I was a stalker, you couldn’t have made it easier for me, posting so much personal info on the Web site.” He was sitting sideways to Alex, looking him full in the face, one arm resting on the back of the bench. His elbow, Alex noticed, was scu
zzy with eczema. Serious now, he said quietly, “I had to see for myself. See if you were for real … or just some hoaxer, like the others said.”
“And you think I am? For real, I mean.”
Rob nodded. “You can always recognize another PE.”
“How?”
“Mate, you just look so bloody lonely in there.”
They talked. There was so much to say—so many questions—Alex hardly knew where to begin, but it was easy talking to Rob. He’d been there. He understood what Alex was going through. Despite the age difference (Rob was twenty-two) it was more like being with a mate or an older brother than a guy he’d just met. A wise, funny older brother who listened to him and who took him seriously. Who made him feel grownup, too.
“How come you’re so together?” Alex said.
“I’ve had four years to get used to it. You’ve had, what, three weeks?”
“Do you, though? Get used to it?”
“Aw, look, try to think of it like a river.” Rob made a wavy line in the air with his hand. “All the time, the water evaporates into the air or flows out to sea, and all the time new water comes from the rain or from the little streams … but it’s still the same river.” He looked at Alex. Smiled. “You get what I’m saying?”
The band struck up. Rob suggested they go somewhere else but Alex told him he was meeting someone. He’d forgotten all about Donna; she was late, and he found himself desperately hoping she wouldn’t turn up at all.
“Who is this ‘someone’?” Rob asked. “Girlfriend?”
“Flip’s girlfriend, yeah.”
“Which means she’s yours now.”
Alex shook his head. “Not really.”
They listened to the band for a moment, each lost in his own thoughts. Alex reflected on what Rob had just said: different water, same river. Identity realignment, the psychic evacuees called it. The problem was he didn’t want to realign, or adapt, or adjust, or find some way of being this same-but-different version of himself.
“I can’t be Philip so long as there’s an Alex to go back to,” he said. “It’s easier for you.” Then, seeing Rob’s expression, thinking of Rob’s former self—that A-level student, Chris, stabbed to death, Alex added, “Sorry, that was a crap thing to say.”
“You know,” Rob said after a moment, “in some ways it has been easier—with no route back, you have to move on. You don’t have any choice.” Perhaps he meant it or maybe he was simply being kind, letting Alex off the hook for his insensitive remark. “Anyway, ‘Chris’ is history, my friend. That wound’s long since scarred over.”
“Onward, Christian Soldiers” finished and Rob added his enthusiastic clapping, his piercing whistles to the genteel patter of applause. It wasn’t done in mockery, Alex thought, but to jolt them out of the morbid turn their conversation had taken. “How far is Scarborough from here?” Rob asked suddenly. “Hour and a half? Two?”
“What?”
Rob checked his watch. “I’m parked just round the corner—we could be there by lunchtime.” He grinned. “Hey? Fancy that, a day at the seaside?”
“What about Donna?”
“What about me?”
And there she was, standing right in front of them, the sun behind her causing Alex to squint. Jack was with her, and Jack’s girlfriend, Emma—Donna’s best mate. Jack looked from Alex to Rob and back again. “Hey, Flip, what’s happening?” Before Alex could think what to say, Rob jumped in, introducing himself as Flip’s cousin, shaking hands with each of them in turn and asking their names.
“Jack, Emma, Donna, we have a choice here,” Rob said, smiling, arms spread like a messiah’s. “We can sit and listen to trombones and tambourines … or we can pile into my 1958 Chevy convertible and drive, at exhilarating speeds, to the coast.”
The 1958 Chevy convertible turned out to be a battered pale blue VW combi van with a top speed (downhill) of ninety kmph. Rob had clearly been living in it. It was almost cool enough to make up for the lie about the Chevy. In any case, by the time they’d walked to the side street where the vehicle was parked, Rob had won them over—to him, to the whole idea of taking off for a day on the beach. Bouncing around in the van—Alex and Donna up front, Jack and Emma in the back—with the radio blasting out music and the wind buffeting through the open windows and a thirty-six-pack of San Miguel being shared out was way more fun than Alex had anticipated when he’d somehow found himself saying yes to Rob’s crazy trip.
“This is like being in a road movie!” Jack yelled, his face appearing in the gap between the driver’s cabin and the back of the combi. He raised his bottle, clinked it against Alex’s and took a long slug.
Was Alex really here, doing this? With Jack. With Emma. With Donna, nestled against him on the passenger seat, her bare brown legs bathed in sunlight.
With a guy at the wheel who’d died and come back to life as someone else.
Rob caught Alex’s eye and winked, their secret crackling between them like static electricity. Alex had just found Rob (or had just been found by him), and the last thing he had wanted was to share him with anyone, least of all these three. And yet, bizarrely, Rob’s inviting them along for the ride had made it better still. Two psychic evacuees flaunting their otherness right under the noses of a bunch of soul virgins, as the PE Web site called them. Flip and his cool older cousin.
Even left-handed, Alex could spin a Frisbee further than any of them—apart from Rob. Sore and bruised, he could still sprint across the sand, leaping like a basketball pro to pluck the bright red disk from the air as though he’d been doing it all his life.
Ice-skating, cricket, bowling … he’d been useless, inheriting none of Flip’s natural ability. But with a Frisbee it was a different story. How come?
“You’re relaxed,” Rob said matter-of-factly. “The beer, the sunshine, the beach—you’re so busy enjoying yourself in Flip’s body you’ve forgotten it isn’t yours.”
Scarborough had been rammed, so they’d found this quieter beach just up the coast. They were taking a breather, flopped down on the drier sand above the tide line. It was their first chance to talk privately since leaving Litchbury. The girls had gone off to the toilets and Rob had given Jack a tenner to fetch ice creams. Rob and Alex were shirtless, barefoot, jeans rolled up their shins from messing about in the shallows a little earlier. Alex looked down at himself: the torso, the tan.
“I’d have had to plaster myself in sun cream before,” he said. “Factor sixty. Every year we go to Cornwall, yeah? And it’s like the whole point of the holiday is for me to make it back home without getting burnt.”
Rob cracked the caps off two more San Migs, passed one to Alex. “You know what I struggled with at first? Being so tall.” He took a sip of beer. “If I stood up too quickly, I’d come over dizzy. I mean, really, like I was about to faint.”
“What about taking a shower? You know—”
“Tell me about it.” Rob laughed. “I didn’t have one the first couple of weeks.”
And so they swapped tales of the before and after, Alex making patterns in the sand with his fingers, the beer bottle in his other hand icy wet from Rob’s cool-box. Gulls wheeled overhead, their cries rising and falling against the background whisper of the waves. A kite in the style of a Chinese dragon strained at the end of its cord, fierce-faced, as though snarling at the wind; the young boy controlling it looked slight enough to be lifted clean off his feet. Alex had never been into kites, but watching that dragon swoop and soar, he began to understand the appeal.
Jack and the girls returned together. The five of them ate ice cream, smoked (Jack, Rob, Donna), drank. People-watched. Told jokes. Reminisced about idyllic childhood holidays. That sort of thing.
Was Rob on holiday now? Emma asked. Or was he here for good?
“Aw, I don’t know,” Rob said. “I’ve been saving up for this trip for a while and I’ll just see how long the money lasts. I’ve got dual citizenship, so I can always pick up work here if I decide to give
it a go.”
The others wanted to know what it was like living in a camper van.
“Isn’t it … small?” Donna asked. “I’d get claustrophobic, in there all the time.”
“On the inside, yeah, of course it’s cramped,” Rob said. “But on the outside, you have all the space you want. You can go anywhere.” He gestured at the horizon. “You like a place, you stay awhile. You don’t like it, you move on.”
They were hanging on his words. In just a few hours he had become a kind of idol in their eyes. The free-living nomad. But Alex had read what Rob had posted as Corb1959 on the psychic evacuation Web site and it wasn’t as straight-forward as that. For one thing, he’d told them he was a mountain guide back in New Zealand, whereas Alex knew that Rob really worked in a bank. Being a PE, Alex was beginning to see, didn’t just mean having to be someone you weren’t—it also allowed you to pass yourself off as anyone you liked. When your life had been ripped up and remade from scratch, there was no limit to the ways you could reinvent yourself. Rob had an audience and was playing to them; that was all. He cut a romantic figure, but online, and in the moments Alex had been alone with him, he came across as more complex, more troubled.
Alex kept that version to himself, happy to watch the performance.
But one thing puzzled him: if Rob had made such a clean break from his past—from his life, and death, as Chris—why had he come back to this country at all?
They went into the sea—properly, not just splashing about. With no bathing costumes they had to swim in their underwear. Rob led the way, stripping to his boxer shorts and sprinting into the waves, launching himself headfirst with a joyous whoop. Jack was next, with Alex close behind as they raced each other. The girls were more reticent. They undressed close to the water, leaving their tops and skirts in a neat pile on a flattened carrier bag, and covered themselves as best they could with their hands as they inched into the sea, shrieking at the cold and giving a little skip each time a wave came in.
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