Just a week before the accident, this was. If Alex failed to emerge from PVS—if he died—these would be the last images of him.
They’d bought that clarinet for him when he was in primary school. The doctor reckoned it would help his asthma by opening up his bronchial tubes. It hadn’t. At the time he hadn’t even wanted a clarinet; if Mum and Dad were going to splash out on a musical instrument, he’d have preferred a guitar. As for going to lessons twice a week … But Alex had surprised everyone, including himself.
They might’ve played duets, he and Cherry. Lunchtimes, in the school music center: him on the clarinet, her on the cello.
Cherry should have been there, alongside him at the computer, looking at the images with him. Seeing who he really was.
But how could he ever have imagined that would happen?
He navigated away from David’s blog, back to the list of links. Page after page of them. It was a form of celebrity, he supposed. Coma boy. He was famous, this boy who was and was not him. And just as inaccessible to him as any other celebrity. Like a junkie, he clicked from one set of links to another, opening one or two, skim-reading, closing them—getting his fix, then going on to the next page to repeat the process.
He wasn’t paying all that much attention after a while, so by the time Alex came to the most recent link—one he hadn’t seen before—he almost missed it.
Coma boy’s parents hope for miracle as time runs out.…
It was a report, three days old, from the online edition of the local newspaper down in south London. The article consisted of an interview with Alex’s mum and dad, pegged on a renewed police appeal for help in identifying the hit-and-run driver. As their son’s persistent vegetative state entered its eighth month, Mr. and Mrs. Gray accepted—for the first time, publicly—that he might not regain consciousness.
“We haven’t given up hope,” said the boy’s father, “but, to be honest, he’s no different now from how he was the day after the accident. Unless something miraculous happens, it’s only a matter of time before the doctors want us to let him go.”
In such cases, Alex read, a decision to withdraw nutrition and hydration would be made by the courts if a patient had been in PVS for a year with no improvement.
He could be dead by Christmas.
The report ended with a quote from Mrs. Gray: “It’s tearing us to pieces—seeing him like that, day after day, week after week. There are times you almost believe he’s awake. Just this Monday, I was sitting at his bedside and I could’ve sworn Alex was looking right at me and trying to talk, to call out to me. But he wasn’t, I know that.”
He reached for Flip’s mobile, trying to steady his hand long enough to key in the text.
Rob, where are you? You have to get me out of here.
If Alex had his way, Rob would’ve driven him to London right there and then.
But Rob wasn’t about to do that. Alex was going nowhere until he had calmed down and they’d talked things through. Rob had been on his way to Manchester when he received the text. After an exchange of messages to find out why Alex was so upset, Rob made a U-turn and headed back to Litchbury. Alex was already waiting when he steered the combi into Tesco’s car park. From there, they drove to one of Rob’s overnight parking spots, picking up beer and pizza en route.
Alex was almost demented with impatience. “What is this, a picnic?”
“The day you’ve had, what you don’t need right now is to go charging off to that hospital—turning up at one or two in the morning, pretending to be a visitor. Hey? Have some food, a few beers. Sleep on it.”
It made sense, Alex could see that. “You know the worst thing,” he said as Rob nursed the combi up a steep climb into the wooded hills to the east of Litchbury.
“Yeah, I reckon I do.”
“What?”
“What your mum said, about you trying to call out to her.”
Alex didn’t reply; he didn’t have to. There were times when Rob seemed to know him as well as he knew himself. He studied Rob’s face as Rob concentrated on the road, hands relaxed on the wheel, flicking the headlamps to full beam. Insects danced in the light. He had texted Rob with little thought: his first impulse after seeing that online report had been to contact the only other person who understood. Who could get him away from Flip’s room, Flip’s house. Who could help. How Rob might help him, exactly, he hadn’t figured out, beyond a wild idea that they’d drive through the night to London. Rob, though, was offering beer and pizza and someone to talk to. A place to sleep that wasn’t Flip’s bed. For the moment, it would have to do.
Just this Monday, I was sitting at his bedside and I could’ve sworn …
The day he’d fainted. His vision. Alex had been right: that had been no hallucination as he’d lain spark out in the corridor outside the staff room. It had been real. Fleetingly, he’d been back inside his own body. Then snatched away.
But she’d known. Mum had seen something in his eyes, heard it in the sounds he’d made, and she’d almost allowed herself to believe what was happening. Almost.
“I told you,” Alex said to Rob. “Me and Flip, we switched back that time.”
Rob nodded, eyes on the road still. “Looks like you did.”
“Which means it can happen, doesn’t it? It makes it possible.”
They were slowing, turning, the van just making it beneath a height-restriction barrier and onto a rough parking area surrounded by woods. The place was deserted, unlit. Rob parked in the far corner, killed the headlamps and switched off the engine, plunging them into pitch-black silence.
“Knowing you can do it,” Rob said, “isn’t the same as knowing how. ”
They ate sitting side by side on the tailgate, in the pale gleam cast through the open door by the van’s interior lighting. It was too muggy inside, and in any case, there was something attractive about eating in the night air, with the sound of the trees shifting overhead and the fresh, sappy scent of pine. Alex went steady with the beer this time.
“Bats,” Rob said, pointing at several small black creatures zigzagging about beneath the overhanging branches. “I’ve seen badgers up here, too. Foxes, owls.”
Alex watched the bats, barely able to pick them out. He had been here before, he realized, on a Team Garamond excursion: a woodland hike, then out with the rugs, the food hamper and the boules. Outerside Crags, it was called, after the cliffs that towered over the dale. From a distance, they looked like a great gray scar in the forest. The Garamonds had picknicked in a grassy clearing above the rocks, where they could watch the climbers and abseilers.
It had been glorious that day. Tonight it was like a different place altogether.
They hadn’t deserved it, Flip’s folks—the way Alex had left them. The way he’d spoken to the mum in the garden and, again just now, on the mobile. None of this was their fault. Alex might not have been their son, but they’d loved him like he was.
It had been Rob’s idea to let them know he was safe. You need to get them off your case while you decide what to do. Alex told Mrs. Garamond he was at a friend’s—no, he wouldn’t tell her which one—and was going to stay overnight, and that was all there was to it. Without waiting to hear what she had to say, he ended the call and shut off the phone. But he’d heard enough to know how worried and upset she was.
“Did you feel bad,” he said, “walking out on Rob’s family back in Dunedin?”
“I was twenty-one. I hadn’t even been living with them while I was at uni. It’s not the same.” Rob took a bite of pizza, chewed, swallowed. Washed it down with beer. “But, yeah, I felt bad. Whichever way you look at it, I took their son from them.”
Twice, Alex thought. When they’d switched souls and, again, when “Rob” left New Zealand to come to the country where he, as Chris, had been born.
“Would you go back?” Alex asked.
“To Dunedin?”
“To Chris. If you could, I mean. If he was still there to go back to.”
&nbs
p; Rob thought for a moment. “I guess it’s what I am doing, kind of. Coming to the UK, hanging around Manchester, the folks. Lisa.” He wiped his hands, finger by finger, on a paper napkin. “It’s as close as I can get.” Then, “You finished with that?”
Alex handed him his pizza box and Rob took the rubbish to a bin, merging into the shadows. After a moment, Alex heard him urinating. When he returned, he was smoking a cigarette. They continued to sit on the tailgate, drinking, talking.
“Shall we make up the bed?” Rob said eventually.
Even with the seats pushed together, it was narrow. Alex used Rob’s sleeping bag while Rob huddled beneath a duvet. Rob had stripped to his boxers but Alex kept his top and jeans on, unsure why he felt self-conscious in front of his friend when they had swum in the sea together in their underwear. The cramped intimacy of the combi had something to do with it. As though sensing Alex’s awkwardness, Rob said, “Don’t worry, Chris and Rob are both straight.”
Alex laughed more than the joke merited, but it had released the tension. With the lights out, they lay side by side and talked in the dark like brothers sharing a bed on holiday. Alex was squiffy but not drunk. It felt good. Listening to Rob’s voice, hearing his own as he spoke of Cherry and Beagle and Jack and, most of all, Mum and Dad, he felt less overwhelmed by the day’s events. Like they’d happened to someone else.
Outside, the shushing of the trees. “My dad used to take me camping,” Alex said. Used to. Still would do, given the chance.
“Mine too,” Rob said, and Alex could tell he was smiling. “Up to Morecambe, or the Lakes.”
“Is that why you bought the combi, d’you think?”
“Aw, I don’t know. Maybe.” Then, with that smile-sound again, he said, “Probably, yeah. Like a tent you don’t have to put up in the rain or when you’re bladdered.”
They fell into the easy quiet of two people who didn’t need to talk.
“I … I have to see myself, Rob,” Alex said after a while. For some reason he was whispering. Rob didn’t answer right away; there was just the regular rhythm of his breathing and Alex wondered if he hadn’t heard him, or if he’d fallen asleep.
But finally, he said, “Uh-huh.”
“My body, yeah? I have to see it, in the flesh. When I read that article—”
“Someone will stop you,” Rob said. “A nurse, a doctor, someone. You know that, don’t you? They won’t let you just walk into an ICU room like that.”
Alex didn’t say anything. He hadn’t even considered the practicalities.
“Or suppose your mum and dad are there, visiting,” Rob went on. “They’re bound to recognize you from before. They’ll call security and have you arrested.”
This time the silence between them wasn’t so comfortable. Rob had sounded cross, more like a father than a cool older brother or cousin.
“When I went down to Crokeham Hill before, that’s where I was planning on going after I’d spoken to David. To St. Dunstan’s. But I never made it.”
“If you’re caught again, Alex, you’ll be in serious—”
“I thought you were supposed to be helping me.”
“I am helping you.”
“D’you have any idea what it’s like?” Alex said, irritated himself now. Why was Rob acting like this? “Being separated from yourself, from your own flesh and blood. You know where your body is, but you’re not allowed to go there. To touch it, to see it. Just to be with it, you know?”
He felt the bed shift. There was a click and the light came on. Rob was sitting up, looking at him. “You’re seriously asking if I know what it’s like to be separated—”
“You don’t, though—your body was dead. Well, mine isn’t.” It felt unreal to be arguing while lying down, although the argument was real enough. “Mine isn’t dead,” he repeated. “You might know a lot, Rob, but you can never know what that’s like.”
Rob stared at him. At last, he switched the light off and lay down.
“Rob—”
“Drop it, will you?”
“You don’t want me to go, do you? To London.”
“Alex, we’re tired, we’ve been drinking—let’s talk in the morning.”
“You can’t deal with the fact that I can see myself, my own body.” Now Alex was the one sitting up, furious all of a sudden. He gave Rob’s shoulder a shove. “All that crap in Manchester about wanting to save me from turning out like you … What it is, you don’t want me to have what you can’t. Because you’re just—”
In the dark, Alex didn’t see him move but Rob sprang at him, grabbed him by the jaw and banged his head against the window, making the combi rock to one side.
“What can you have that I can’t, Alex!” His grip tightened as he pressed Alex’s head so hard against the glass Alex thought it might break. “Hey? What can you have?”
“My life,” Alex yelled, the words distorted by Rob’s hold on his face. He tried to free himself but Rob was too strong. “I can have my old life back.”
“Yeah? And how’re you gonna do that?”
Bang. Bang. “You’re hurting me.”
“How, Alex? How are you going to do that?” Rob let go. Alex slumped back against the wall, rubbing his jaw at the points of pain where it felt as though Rob’s fingers and thumb were still digging into him. Rob spoke again, quieter: “Tell me how you’re going to switch back, Alex.”
“I don’t know,” he said. IdontknowIdontknow. “I … DON’T … KNOW!”
“Then you have nothing,” Rob said. His face was like a moon, looming in the dark, close enough for Alex to smell the stale smoke on his breath and the tomatoey odor of pizza. “If you don’t know how to return to your own body, you don’t have anything that I don’t have. Okay, your body’s alive … but it might as well be dead.”
Eventually, Alex slept. Rob had lain back down, drawn the duvet round himself and gone to sleep. Not right away, maybe, but certainly before Alex, who lay staring into the gloom. An hour, two? No idea, he just went on being awake. Then he wasn’t.
The nightmare came just before dawn. Not that he could call it a nightmare anymore: just the blackness, the shrieking, the ripping at his insides.
No switch this time.
How he had longed for the dream to return, however appalling, in the hope it would trigger another body-swap between him and Flip. But it didn’t. And when Alex woke—shaken, sweating—he could have wept with frustration to find himself still in that body, in that makeshift bed, with a frail first light seeping into the combi and Rob snoring softly beside him.
He lay there for a while, dejected. Hating Rob. Hating himself. Rob was right: with no way back, his old life was closed off to him forever. The flare of hope raised by that one fleeting switch had turned into a taunt, tormenting him with what might’ve been. But no. In the tug-of-war between two psyches, his was staying put—clinging to Flip’s body, literally for dear life.
Quietly, Alex eased the sleeping bag off like a snake shedding its skin. Shuffled to the end of the bed and stood, carefully. Where were his trainers? There, near the door. He stepped into them and stooped to fasten the laces. His head ached and his face was still tender and he had the fiercest thirst, but the tap would be sure to disturb Rob. The latch turned with the smallest of clicks and the door made no creak as Alex let himself out into the chalky-gray chill of the early morning.
The crags were easy to find. Well-defined trails and signposts brought him there in a few minutes. It had been cold under the trees, but as he emerged into the clearing where he’d picnicked with the Garamonds, the sky opened in a wash of sunlight. The day would be warm once the early haze had burned off. Already it had thinned, unfurling a view across the dales that stretched to the horizon. Beautiful, if you were in the mood for beauty.
Alex made his way to the rocks.
Folklore had it, so Flip’s father said, that these boulders strewn about the place had been missiles used in ancient times by a giant to bombard intruders who dared to scale
the cliff. Now several of them were stapled with pitons, the boulders serving as the very anchoring points that enabled climbers to reach the top. Alex tugged one but it was as fixed as if it had been part of the rock itself.
He hadn’t come this near to the edge last time. He could feel a faint updraft from the void below.
He peered over. Thirty meters? Maybe thirty-five. The drop wasn’t sheer, but it was close enough to vertical that any faller would be sure to die on impact at the foot of the cliff, or be so damaged on the way down that death wouldn’t be long coming. Alex wondered how many seconds the fall would take. Four or five. He had no idea, really. Barely enough time, anyway, to think your last thoughts before they were dashed from your brain.
Did people come here to commit suicide? They were bound to. Cliffs, bridges, tall buildings—they were like an invitation. Just to stand there looking down was to create an optical illusion of the ground rushing up to meet you. To make you imagine what that would be like. Vertigo, he supposed. A kind of thrilling, terrifying dread. Knowing that with one movement you could end your life, that death—your death—was just seconds away.
Alex edged closer. He was right there now, the tips of his trainers resting on nothing. The slightest shift of weight would take him, a sudden loss of balance, a gust of wind at his back. He wouldn’t even have to jump, just … lean … forward.
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