Flip

by Martyn Bedford

  “Don’t cross any roads,” she says.

  I’m with her on that one. There’ll come a time when I have to cross a road, but it won’t be today.

  So along Monks Road as far as the corner, sit down for a bit on that bench outside the old folks’ flats, then walk back again. That’s the plan. Ten minutes. Fifteen, tops. I’m not expecting to fall over, but you never know. And if I do, so what? A grazed knee. A sprained wrist. I can live with that.

  Pain is okay, actually. Like a conversation between me and my body.

  How you doing up there, Mind?

  Yeah, great, thanks, Toe. How about you?

  Not so good. Just stubbed myself.

  I know, you already told me.

  I have these little chats with myself thousands of times a day. Not literally, of course (that would be crazy), but it’s like … imagine radio and TV and phone signals were visible—the sky would be full of them, a blizzard of sound and image swirling through the air. That’s what’s going on inside me: wave after wave of messages pinging back and forth, every minute of every hour of every day. Right this second, there’s the smell of bacon drifting up from the kitchen, the aftertaste of toothpaste in my mouth, the beep-beep of a lorry reversing in the precinct across the road, pins and needles in the backs of my thighs from sitting funny, these words appearing on the PC screen as if by magic. It’s brilliant!

  Is any of this making sense to you?

  David came round again yesterday. He beat me. Again.

  “You do realize I’m letting you win?” I said.

  “Yeah? I just thought you were crap.”

  It’s the concentration. Also, it doesn’t help when I’m in the middle of a game and I totally forget that a bishop moves diagonally! But it helps, chess. The physio is all for it. Reckons it’s an exercise regimen for the brain. Sudoku, crosswords, word searches. I can’t read for too long, cos my head aches and I start to go cross-eyed, but I’m getting there. Same with the clarinet. I did about twenty minutes this morning and I’m still not happy with the fingering or the embouchure, but the melody sounded all right. Kind of.

  But I could hear the notes; that’s the point. I could feel the holes with my fingertips. I could taste the reed. All the time, little conversations.

  I haven’t told David what really happened. I know I said I was going to, but I just can’t do it and I don’t know that I ever will.

  You were right: sometimes the truth is too much for people to take.

  What else?

  Oh, yeah, Sam and me had our first bust-up last night. There was something I wanted to watch on TV but he was playing one of his games and wouldn’t come off. Mum took my side, and so Sam lets rip about how I always get my own way these days and how he wishes I was still in hospital and how much he hates having a spaz for a brother.

  I thought Dad was going to knock Sam’s head off. “Don’t you ever …”

  And so on. Maybe I’d feel just the same if I was Sam. Five weeks he’s watched them make a fuss of their long-lost son. All those months before that, when Mum and Dad were in some kind of zombie limbo-land of AlexAlexAlex. What kid brother wouldn’t feel neglected?

  The fight might turn out to be a good thing, though. Like lancing a boil.

  Cos it was like we were a normal family again, in that moment, instead of everyone behaving as though we’re taking part in a reality-TV show where we win a million pounds if we can make it to the end of the series without any of us shouting or losing our temper or being horrible to each other.

  Sam starts at Crokeham Hill next Tuesday. That road I’m walking down today, that’ll be the one he’ll take a week from now, as he joins all the other kids heading off to school.

  Not me, though. Not yet. January, they reckon, if I “continue to make satisfactory progress.”

  Did I tell you I’m getting a private tutor? Just so I don’t fall behind. Five mornings a week, she’ll come here, and I’ll have physio or occupational therapy in the afternoons. I’m starting work in the pool soon—not proper swimming, at first, but we’ll build up to that.

  I can’t wait, actually. There are so many things I want to do and I want to do them all at once. Carpe diem, eh?! (Look it up.)

  I am definitely taking up swimming.

  And drama.

  And I heard a rumor that the Killers are looking for a clarinetist.

  When I came out of St. Dunstan’s, one of the reporters at the press conference asked me what it was like to have eight months of my life taken away. (Maybe you saw it on the Internet?) Anyway, I told him it didn’t feel like I’d lost anything. It felt like I’d been given something. The life I’ve come back to feels bigger than the one I had before. Bigger and brighter and better.

  Even in those first couple of weeks, when I used to piss myself, when I still needed help in the bath and with getting dressed and undressed.

  Even now, when I nod off in front of the telly like an old man.

  Even when I play the clarinet like a beginner and forget how a bishop moves. Even when a short walk down the road will feel like an achievement.

  It’s like everything fits together somehow, the good with the bad. Or like they’re not really separate at all.

  What I’m trying to say is … actually, what am I trying to say?!

  I’m not dead, I suppose. That’s the point: I could be dead … but I’m not. I could be living a different life … but I’m not. I didn’t have that way of looking at things before, but now I do—and that’s why it feels as though I’ve gained way more than a few “lost” months.

  They’ve lost interest in me now, the newspapers. The media.

  TRAGIC COMA BOY turned into HE’S AWAKE! turned into BRAVE ALEX STARTS TO REBUILD HIS LIFE turned into last month’s story. No doubt it’ll start up again when they hear that I’ve persuaded Mum and Dad to get the police to drop all charges against Flip.

  I wrote to them. The Garamonds. Told them if Philip hadn’t done what he did, I might still be lying there in that hospital bed, and so they shouldn’t be too hard on him. He wasn’t trying to kill me, I said; he was trying to jolt me out of PVS.

  His mum wrote back. Called me an “exceptional young man.” Said my “generosity of spirit” towards her son was really quite remarkable, in the circumstances.

  Spirit. I had to smile at that.

  What I wanted was for her to let slip something about Philip. How he is. What it’s like for him, being back in his life, his body, again. Reunited with his family. I know what it’s like for me but I can’t believe for one minute that it’s anywhere near the same for Flip … or that the Garamonds welcomed him home like some kind of conquering hero.

  But all Mrs. G. said about him was that he was “making progress” and that, no, she didn’t think it would be helpful or appropriate for her to pass on a note I’d written to him or for me and Philip to have any direct correspondence. She was sorry, but she hoped I understood.

  To put it bluntly, Alex, he needs to be allowed to forget all about you.

  My note to Philip was returned unopened. The e-mail I sent him bounced back as a bad address. So I guess they’ve shut down his account and probably his Internet access or maybe taken away his PC altogether.

  He’ll be in therapy now, for sure. And Team Garamond will be in full swing again. Or maybe not. Maybe this latest episode has been too much for them. The mum, the dad. Teri. What’s it like in that house right now?

  I went on Facebook and tracked down his sister’s page, but it hasn’t been updated in weeks. Not since the switch back. As for Jack and Donna, they only talk about what he did, not how he is. Or whether they have anything to do with him these days.

  I don’t like to think of the mess I’ve left behind.

  But I wish, I wish, I wish I knew whether Flip remembered anything. The nightmares, that time I fainted, the whole thing … does he have any conscious awareness of what happened? Are there any little memory flashes, like snatches of melody from a song you can’t quite na
me?

  According to the police, he denies everything: says he’s never heard of me, never went down to London that time before, has no idea how he came to be at my hospital bedside or what he was doing with that pillow.

  But then, he would say all that, wouldn’t he? Even if he knows the truth, it’s not a story that anyone is ever going to believe.

  I don’t know which would be toughest: remembering everything, remembering a little, or remembering nothing. Whichever, I don’t suppose there’s any way Flip can ever make sense of all this.

  I’m not sure I can.

  Sometimes I wake up in the morning and it’s like I’m back there, in that bedroom at 20 Tyrol Place. Like it’s happening all over again. And then I’ll see my curtains and it’s all right. That’s what I do now, first thing every morning—the moment I wake up, I open my eyes and look at those curtains.

  I like to imagine Flip doing the same, in his room. If I think of him doing that, I can almost believe he’s going to be okay.

  Right, time for that walk. EEK!! I’ll let you know how I get on.

  E-mail again soon with all your news, won’t you? And photos. Those ones of the hot springs were amazing—you looked like some sort of mud monster from the black lagoon!

  (Is there really a place called Rotorua down there? It sounds like something you’d use to dig the garden. And is that cabin really yours?)

  Take care,

  Alex

  p.s. Still no reply from Cherry. I know, I know, I know: you give me advice, and I ignore it. You tell me not to build myself up for a fall, and I just go right ahead and do it. The thing is, I miss her, Rob. And I wanted to tell her that.

  The walk is harder and easier than Alex anticipated. Harder physically—his legs, his lungs, his stamina—but mentally, he draws on reserves of strength and determination he didn’t know he possessed in what he thinks of as the Time Before Flip.

  It hurts, it’s exhausting, he longs to stop … but he keeps on walking.

  One foot, then the other; one foot, then the other. He counts the steps in tens, the way the physio has taught him when she has supervised him on the running machine (walking machine, in his case). If people look at him a bit funny, he pays no notice—stays focused; even Dad, cruising behind him in the car, like the support vehicle for a long-distance charity trek, fails to distract him from what he has to do.

  He makes it to the retirement flats and sits down on the bench, as planned.

  Dad pulls up, lowers the window with an electronic hum. “You don’t need me, do you?” he says, smiling.

  Alex shakes his head. Smiles back.

  His father carries on looking at him for a moment. Starts to say something, then changes his mind. It doesn’t matter. That smile, the sparkle in those eyes, tells Alex all he needs to know about what Dad thinks of him.

  When Dad drives off, Alex sits awhile longer. It has started to rain—a few spits and spots which might become heavier—but he doesn’t mind.

  It’s raining steadily by the time he reaches the house. His clothes, his hair are sodden. Alex imagines a long, hot soak in the bath.

  He half expected Mum to be standing on the doorstep, waiting for him, giving him a round of applause or something as he came up the drive. But she isn’t. As he lets himself in, he hears her talking on the phone. Alex peels off his wet top and drapes it over the banister post. Treads off his trainers.

  Stands there, knackered. Feeling ridiculously pleased with himself.

  Even though he’s been back home awhile, he can never enter the hallway without being reminded of that time he stood here as Philip Garamond, tricking his way into the house. The smell of home. How shrunken and confused his mum seemed then, and how much like her old self she has become. Not completely, though. A little of the mother—the woman—she was before has been lost, he thinks. Like a part of her died when she believed that death had come for him.

  It occurs to Alex out of nowhere that if his mother and Mrs. Garamond ever met, they would probably become close friends.

  Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking on his part.

  Alex is about to head upstairs when Mum appears in the hallway. “There’s a call for you,” she says, gesturing towards the lounge.

  He frowns at her as though to ask who it is. “A friend,” she says with a shrug. It might be Rob, he thinks. He’s read the e-mail and is phoning from New Zealand to see how the walk went. Alex goes through and picks up the handset.

  “Hello?” There’s a pause which lasts so long he wonders if the caller is still there. But he can hear breathing. “Hello,” he repeats.

  “Is that you?”

  Her words are quietly spoken, tentative. But they are enough for him to know right away who she is. Alex swallows, steadies his breath, which is still ragged from his trip down the road and back.

  “Yes,” he says. “It’s me.”

  I am grateful to the teenage readers who gave me valuable feedback on an early draft of Flip: Jessica and Nicholas Smith, and my niece, Meghan Hodgson, whose intelligent critique was matched by her courage in telling me why the original ending didn’t work. I would also like to thank Beth Woodley, at Guiseley School, West Yorkshire, for the loan of her planner from when she was in Year Nine.

  A later draft benefited from comments by Alice Lutyens and my agents, Jonny Geller and Stephanie Thwaites at the Curtis Brown literary agency. Steph, especially, made a telling contribution or two to the final rewrite (quite apart from the terrific job she did in bringing the book to the attention of publishers). Thanks, too, to my U.S. agent, Tina Wexler, at ICM Talent; to my editors, Mara Bergman at Walker Books in London and Wendy Lamb at Random House in New York; and to Jennifer Black, the excellent copy editor of the U.S. edition.

  For financial support during the writing of Flip, I am indebted to the Royal Literary Fund’s Fellowship Scheme, superbly managed by Steve Cook.

  Finally, the greatest thanks of all to my wife, Damaris—always my first reader and truest supporter.

  MARTYN BEDFORD has written five novels for adults. A former journalist, he now teaches in the English and Writing program at Leeds Trinity University College. He lives in West Yorkshire, England, with his wife and two daughters. Flip is his first novel for young adults. Learn more about him at martynbedford.com.