Would he scream? Would he cry out? Would his arms and legs flail as he fell? Would it be exhilarating, or would he be scared out of his mind?
Would he have his eyes open?
Alex raised his arms to the sides, Christlike. Stood on the balls of his feet, heels raised. Closed his eyes. There was no breeze, but even so, the air swathed him like silk, as though it was all that kept him from falling. And the thought—the stunning moment of revelation—came to him, as though it had been there all along, waiting for him to discover it:
If he died in Flip’s body, where would his soul go?
“You couldn’t do it, could you?” Rob said. Not unkindly.
Alex looked at him. He was sitting on the tailgate, smoking. “You saw me?”
“I heard you leave the van.” He shrugged. “You’re not hard to follow.”
“You saw me there, and you didn’t say anything? Didn’t try to stop me?”
Rob sucked at the cigarette, blew out the smoke. “I knew you wouldn’t jump. To jump,” he said, “would’ve been murder, not suicide. It would’ve meant killing Flip. I haven’t known you long, Alex, but I didn’t figure you could do that to him.”
He went inside the combi. Alex heard a kettle coming to the boil, water being poured. He rubbed at his face, heart still thumping from what he’d just done, even though he’d spent a few minutes sitting on the rocks, getting his head together, after stepping back from the edge.
Rob reappeared with two mugs of coffee and handed one to Alex.
“So what does that make me?” Alex said. “A coward?”
“When did you figure it all out?” Rob asked, ignoring Alex’s question.
“Figure what out?”
“How to trigger a switch.”
Alex drank some coffee. “It’s so obvious, once you think of it. You know? I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before.” He shook his head. “The one common factor in every known psychic evacuation: death.”
“Except in your case.”
“Yeah, well.”
“And yet, you still couldn’t bring yourself to kill Flip—even knowing it might save your life, or at least give you your own body back.” Rob finished his cigarette and flicked the stub away. “I wouldn’t say that was an act of cowardice. Would you?”
“Had you already figured it out?” Alex said accusingly.
“What, I’m supposed to say, ‘Hey, Alex, why don’t you try topping yourself.’ ”
Alex was too tired to argue; he’d walked back from the crags as exhausted as if he had just climbed them. He breathed in the coffee fumes. His favorite smell, before. And still, as Flip. “I was standing there,” he said, “and I … I could just picture them opening the door—his mum and dad, his sister—and there’s a cop on their doorstep, come to break the news about Philip’s suicide.”
Rob put his mug down. Came over and gave Alex’s shoulder a rub.
Alex shrugged him off. “What’s up, Rob? Don’t feel like grabbing me by the face this morning? Eh? Banging my head against the window?”
Rob didn’t say anything. Then, after a moment: “Let’s get in the van,” he said. His voice was gentle, kind. “I’m taking you home.”
“Home?”
“To Philip’s home. That’s the only home you have now.”
Rob dropped him at the corner, as usual. And as usual, he watched Alex head up Tyrol Place to number 20 before waving him off. His parting words: an apology and a promise. He was sorry for what had happened in the van the night before. And he would be there for Alex over the coming weeks and months and years as he adapted to his new life.
“Who knows? Maybe we could be good for each other,” Rob said. “I’ll help you find a way of being Philip … and you can help me to let go of Chris.”
Alex had nodded. “Yeah, uh-huh. That’d be cool.”
They’d clasped hands in something between a handshake, an arm wrestle and a high five, like they were members of an L.A. gang. Then Alex went up to the house.
If he allowed himself, he could imagine things continuing like this. Merge his life with Flip’s. Accept the switch, adapt and move on—like the others of his kind had done. Carry on being Philip Garamond, or at least the new, modified Alex-as-Flip he was starting to turn into. He might even find a way of making things okay with Cherry. With Alex’s spirit in Flip’s body, he could stay in Litchbury—with a caring family, and Rob there if he needed him—complete his education at a good school, then head off to uni. After that, a long, healthy life to look forward to, another sixty, seventy years, maybe. He could be whatever, and whoever, he liked.
But that wasn’t being himself. Being properly himself. That life would mean living a lie. Lying to himself every hour of every day, for as long as it took Flip’s body to die. Lying to the Garamonds. To everyone he met or worked with or became friends with in the many years to come. To those he loved and who loved “him” back.
It meant lying to Cherry if they got back together. Or to any girl or woman he might meet and fall in love with. Because who would she love? Not him. Not Alex, or Flip, or Philip, but some kind of mutant hybrid. If any relationship he ever had was to mean anything, she would have to love the true Alex, not some fake, some freakish impostor. Same for him: he had to live properly, as Alex, in body and soul.
Or not at all.
So Alex went inside number 20 long enough to allow Rob to get back into the combi and drive away. It was still early, not even seven a.m., and no one was up yet. He had gone in as quietly as possible and stood in the hallway, hardly daring to breathe.
He waited. No stirrings upstairs. No Beagle padding along the hall to growl at him, although he half expected him to, even now. Then, the familiar sound, from down the road, of the camper van’s engine clearing its throat, hacking and coughing into life and driving away. Still, Alex waited.
Finally, he let himself out of the house as carefully as he’d entered and made his way to the station.
If standing on that cliff top had shown him what he was not prepared to do to restore himself to his own body, it had also revealed an alternative route back. Less obvious, less certain of success and just as fraught with danger. But one that he was ready to try. Alex would go to London and bring an end to this.
A shout. The beep of the automatic doors, a raised arm, a whistle. With barely a jolt, the train set off and in a few minutes the outskirts of Leeds were streaming past.
Was Flip’s soul aware that the distance between them was closing with each passing minute? He pictured the thread between his psyche and Flip’s, shortening, shortening, shortening as one “twin” reached out for the other.
Alex leaned his head into the headrest and shut his eyes. Let himself sink into the seat, into the subtle pitch and roll of the high-speed train. He could almost dream his body out of existence like this—reduce himself to nothing more than a mind between wakefulness and sleep, held in the hum of motion.
Maybe this was how it would be when Alex broke free from this body for real, not just in his imagination. A gentle slipping away. He doubted it. This was pleasant, painless. The switch, when it came—if it came—might not be like that at all. It might hurt. It might be more terrifying than the worst of his nightmares.
Or it might feel like nothing.
After all, when they’d switched the first time, Alex hadn’t felt much; he’d just woken up inside someone else with no idea what had happened. Groggy and out of sorts, but no more than that. As though he’d come round after an operation.
Alex didn’t know what to expect. He couldn’t even be sure that, if the reversal occurred, he would have any awareness of having been in Flip’s body, having lived Flip’s life. Suppose his psyche lost all recollection of going “walkabout”? He’d be back in PVS, for a start. Would that wipe everything? As it was, he remembered nothing of Alex’s life since leaving David’s the night of the accident. Six months in a coma and in PVS as Alex, the weeks living as Flip … Could this be erased by his brain’s corrupted hard drive?
Would he be like a child with no memory of his time in the womb. Like it had never happened. Was that possible? He had no idea.
There was so much Alex didn’t know about what to expect if he went through with this. Not least of which was whether he could go through with it, or whether it would work even if he did. Or which souls and bodies might still be alive afterwards and which might be dead.
Someone was talking to him, shaking his shoulder. As he surfaced, he imagined—fleetingly, bizarrely—that it was Cherry. But it wasn’t; it was the ticket inspector.
There was no Cherry anymore. There couldn’t be.
When the inspector had gone, Alex opened the book he’d bought at the station and tore out one of the blank pages at the back.
Cherry,
By the time you read this, it will be done, one way or another. If it works, Philip will be Flip again and I will be Alex. I may be in PVS, or dead, but I’ll be where I belong.
I know you think I’m off my head, but it’s the truth.
I’m so sorry the way things worked out—or didn’t—between us. But I want to be myself again, or be nothing. If that means I’ve lost you, then I’m sorrier about that than I’ve ever been about anything.
X
Alex
When he arrived in London he bought an envelope and stamp, addressed it to Cherry Jones, c/o Strings ’n’ Things, Litchbury, and dropped it into a postbox. He wanted to say goodbye to Rob, too, but it wasn’t possible. He had no postal address and texting him wasn’t an option without giving a clue to what he was about to do.
And if Rob knew, he would try to stop him.
It was late morning by the time he reached the hospital. St. Dunstan’s. To think that his life had begun in this building, fourteen years and nine months earlier, and that “he” was in there right now, somewhere, his life hanging by a thread …
His life? A life, anyway. Lives. A body that was his and a soul that wasn’t, trapped together, waiting for death. Or for something, or someone, to save them. Like two miners, stranded deep underground, their air supply running out as they listened for the clink-clink of a rescue party’s pickaxes.
Alex was across the road from the main entrance, lying low, taking refuge in a bus shelter from the drizzle that fell steadily on south London. It had surprised him when he’d emerged from the station. It had been sunny in Leeds; even at King’s Cross there’d been no hint of rain. That was like another lifetime. He might have imagined the journey, so little of it had left an impression. He watched the building through the rain. The hospital was dreary enough without any help from the weather. A redbrick block with gothic turrets, and newer bits tacked on here and there, like a Victorian lunatic asylum with 1970s comprehensive school annexes. Facing a busy road, St. Dunstan’s was grimed by pollution, its windows resembling rows of eyes whose makeup had streaked from too much weeping.
As far as Alex could recall, he hadn’t been back since his birth. The hospital’s unfamiliarity, along with its ugliness, was somehow upsetting.
I was born here. It should mean something to me. It shouldn’t be so horrible.
He tried to believe he was hiding out across the road to compose himself, to think through his tactics one last time, and that it had nothing to do with being scared shitless of going into that building. He’d already spent half an hour in a coffee shop at Crokeham Hill station, summoning the courage to come to the hospital at all.
He couldn’t do this. He would be stopped before he even got the chance.
With each car that entered or left the car park, each person who walked into or out of the main doors, Alex’s breath tightened at the possibility of seeing Mum or Dad, or his brother, or David. According to the St. Dunstan’s Web site, visiting hours in the intensive care unit were unrestricted, except during doctors’ rounds, when family and friends had to make themselves scarce. For all Alex knew, his parents were sitting at their son’s bedside at that very moment. Or might arrive at any time. Or leave just as he was going in.
The plan was to find his way to ICU. Ask if it was okay to see Alex Gray. He was a school friend. They’d had an end-of-term collection and he had been delegated to bring in these flowers, this big card that loads of people had signed. Oh, and which room was Alex in? This was his first visit. And did the nurse happen to know if anyone was with him just now, because he wouldn’t want to intrude. He had a false name (Jack). He’d gone over his lines so many times, pictured the scene in his mind so often, it was like a memory of something that had already happened.
Not the most foolproof strategy, but it was the best he’d come up with.
Would the nurses have his description? After Philip Garamond had turned up at the house that time, Mum and Dad, or the police, might’ve warned the ward staff in ICU to be on the lookout for a tall, dark-haired lad with a northern accent. And what if the Garamonds had reported him missing when he hadn’t shown his face at home, or school, that morning? What if they’d figured out where he might be heading?
It was ridiculous, hiding away like this. Worrying himself stupid with all the ifs and buts and maybes between him and what he had to do.
A bus pulled up at the stop. It let a passenger off, the doors hissed shut and it eased back into the traffic. St. Dunstan’s reemerged behind a veil of rain. Alex raised his hood and set off across the road, just like that, as though the departing bus had opened a portal that had to be entered immediately, or not at all.
Corridors, stairs, more corridors, more stairs: a labyrinth of neon-lit passages. But the route from the main entrance to ICU was so well marked there was little chance of getting lost. Having the card and bouquet to hold kept his hands steady. Now and then—brushing against a wall or a banister, or getting caught in the draft of an opening door—the flowers shed a petal, leaving a trail, Alex imagined, that would guide him back out again.
Except if things went to plan, there would be no going back out. Not for him. The thought dizzied him, turned his feet to dead weights at the ends of his legs.
All the way, he anticipated bumping into his mother or father at any moment. Or that one of the people he passed would suspect he was up to something and raise the alarm. There was no sign of his parents, though. And no one in those stairways and corridors paid him the slightest attention.
Entering the intensive care ward, he was sure his luck would run out. A nurse would challenge him. Dad would be on the other side of those doors, lying in wait.
The entry vestibule was empty, and so was the passage leading off of it.
Behind a door a little farther on, someone was running a tap. Alex hesitated, unsure whether to hang back—wait for them to come out—or press on and take the risk of being intercepted. He decided to keep going. To front it out. The door stayed shut, the tap still running. The next door was open to reveal a waiting room with soft chairs and a tea-and-coffee-making area. Someone was in there, reading the Telegraph. He held it wide open so that all Alex could see of him were his hands, the top of his head, his legs.
But it was enough to stop Alex in his tracks. The patches of eczema on those knuckles, the frayed cuffs of that leather jacket. The unnaturally yellow spiky hair.
“What the—”
“You took your time,” Rob said, lowering the newspaper.
Rob was out of his chair, yanking Alex into the visitors’ room and shutting the door. Along with the card, the bouquet went flying, scattering petals. Alex tried to break free, to pull the door open, but Rob had him in a bear hug, wrestling him into one of the chairs and clamping a hand over his mouth.
“Keep the noise down,” Rob hissed, his other hand in Alex’s chest, pressing him into the seat. He nodded towards the corridor. “D’you want them in here?”
Alex stopped resisting. After a moment, Rob let go. Stood up, straightened his clothing, examined a small cut on his hand where he’d scraped it on something. He went over to the door, opened it a crack, peeked outside, then shut it again. He sat down opposite Alex, separated from him
by a low table spread with magazines and newspapers and a display of what looked like artificial flowers in a green vase.
Alex glared at him. “How did you get here?”
“Same as you. Same train to Leeds, same train to King’s Cross, same train to Crokeham Hill. Not the same carriages, obviously, but—”
“I waited for you to drive away.”
“Yeah, then I parked round the corner and waited for you to come back out.”
“How—”
“How did I know you would? How could I not know, Alex?” Rob leaned right forward in his seat, as though the vase was a microphone and he wanted to be sure his words were picked up. “You said you had to see yourself. I didn’t reckon anything that happened last night, or this morning, was likely to change that. Was it?”
Alex shook his head. He noticed the bouquet on the floor and bent to retrieve it and the card. The card was bent. He straightened it as best he could.
“Also, if it was me,” Rob said, “I’d have done exactly the same.”
“You must really resent me, Rob.” Alex studied his face, trying to match him to the Rob who’d spoken to him for the first time, at the bandstand, on the morning of the Scarborough trip. His new friend, or so he’d thought. His kindred spirit. “To go to all this trouble, just to keep me from—”
“The thing that made you come here,” Rob said, “is the same thing keeps on pulling me back to Manchester—we’re like junkies hooked on our old lives. Our old selves.” He gestured at the door. “Yours is just out there, Alex—thirty, forty paces away—and you know that. You’re up in Litchbury, you know your body is down here in a hospital bed—of course you’re going to come.”
“Why, then?”
“Why what?”
“Why are you here to stop me? Why can’t you just let me say my goodbyes?”
Rob frowned. Picked up the vase and gave it a little shake. “No water.”
“Those flowers are made of plastic.”
“Are they?” He tested the petals between his fingers. “They’re very realistic.”
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