It was all he could do not to hurl Philip’s bag against the nearest wall.
At least the smell was recognizable. School corridors. They had to be the same all over the country. This one brought him to a stairwell with two other corridors leading off it and, at last, some color-coded signs. Language department, first left. According to the timetable in Philip’s planner, he was in LA5. Alex found it and let himself into the room to a round of applause and ironic cheers.
“So, Flip,” said the teacher, “hat Man Deine Uhr gestohlen?”
“What was that all about?”
Alex gave the boy a sideways glance. Short blond hair, spotty chin; he wore his blazer over his shoulders like a cape. One of Philip’s mates, no doubt. He’d fallen in step with Alex outside LA5. “Nothing,” Alex said. “I was just goofing around.”
“No you weren’t.”
He was right: that shambles in there with Herr Löwenfeldt had been for real. Forty minutes of trying to pretend he could communicate in a language he’d never studied in his life. Alex had got off lightly, really: another note in Philip’s planner and banishment to an empty desk at the back of the room to copy out lists of vocab … to see if you can become as fluent in German as you are in sheer bloody stupidity, the teacher had said.
“I’ve never seen Löwenfeldt so angry,” the lad said. “I thought he was going to rip your planner in half.”
“Or me.”
They were on a twenty-minute break. Alex wondered where he would go if he was Philip. On a day like this, most people would head outside. He didn’t want to hang out with this boy. The lad wasn’t his mate; Alex didn’t even know his name. Another lad joined them as they walked along the corridor—surprising them from behind, one hand on Alex’s shoulder and one on the first boy’s, swinging himself through the gap.
“Hey, Luke. Flip-man.”
“A’right,” Alex said. Flip. The teacher had called him that, too. Philip-Flip. It made sense. He quite liked “Flip”; it was cooler than Philip, or Phil.
“Nice one, eh? Ich bin ein tosser.” The second boy laughed, gave Alex a shove. “And you skive off registration. You, my friend, are in the zone this morning.” He sniffed, hard and loud, dredging the contents of both nostrils and swallowing them. “So, you seen Spray Can?”
Alex laughed. They really did call her that.
“What’s funny?”
“No, nothing, it’s just … nothing. Yeah, I saw her. No biggie.”
“You coming round the back?” the second boy said, looking furtive. He raised two fingers to his lips. Alex couldn’t figure out what he meant at first; then he caught on. “Oh, no. I’ve got stuff to do.”
“Like what?”
“Donna, he means,” the first boy said.
“Oh, Donna.” Boy two gave Alex another shove. He was big and brawny and his clothes looked like they didn’t quite fit. Quietly, he said, “You got any on you?”
Alex produced the playing-cards box and passed it to him, a conjuror palming something he didn’t want the audience to see. The boy pocketed it. “There’s eight in there,” Alex said. “Have the lot. I don’t want them.”
“Serious?”
“I don’t smoke.”
The first boy laughed. “Yeah, right.”
Both boys were looking at Alex, watching his face as though waiting for the punch line to a joke.
“Look, I gotta take a leak,” Alex said. “I’ll catch you two later, yeah?”
* * *
Alex had to traipse round three ranks of lockers before he tracked Philip’s down. He opened it with the key on the boobs key ring, sorted the books he would need during the day, then shut himself away in a toilet cubicle for the rest of break. He hid there at lunchtime, too, even though he was ravenous. The thought of encountering any more of Flip’s mates—or worse, either of his girlfriends—was too much. He didn’t know how to be with them. Didn’t want to be there at all. He needed to keep a low profile, run down the clock until he got his hands on the phone. Once he spoke to Mum, things would be on their way to being straightened out. He turned up to Flip’s lessons, though, making sure he was marked on every register—no point drawing himself to the teachers’ attention any more than he had done already.
Finding the classroom wasn’t always easy. Likewise, knowing where to sit, and who to sit next to (or not to sit next to). Avoiding eye contact and conversation as much as possible. He got plenty of funny looks and comments, but he could live with that. If they thought Flip was acting weird, so what? Being six months behind in the curriculum didn’t help, but he managed to blag his way through; in any case, it seemed no one had high academic expectations of Philip Garamond for Alex Gray to live up to. As it happened, Alex was bright, but they would never get to discover that.
English was with Ms. Sprake. There was homework to hand in—an essay, which he’d found tucked inside an exercise book in Flip’s bag. So that was okay. Not very well written, if the first paragraph was anything to go by, but that didn’t matter. Hand it in. Tick the box. Another lesson survived. Another hour nearer to the end of the day. If nothing else, the schoolwork was a refuge, a foothold on the scary, insurmountable cliff face of what had happened to him. The more he did, the less time he had to think.
In art, period four, Flip’s cigarette-smoking mate reappeared, parking himself right next to Alex. While the teacher was setting up the interactive whiteboard, the boy leaned in close, whispering, reeking of stale tobacco and fresh sweat, raking his fingers through his just-woke-up brown hair.
Why hadn’t Flip been at basketball practice that lunchtime? Eh? And why was he being such an idiot?
“Oh, and, by the way, Donna is well mad at you, man.”
Jack, he was called. There was his name, in blocky green felt-tip on the cover of his art folder. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, past each elbow, folded tight into his biceps. There was a hyperactivity thing going on: the rocking back and forth on the stool, the thudding of a knee against the underside of the table. He reminded Alex of a lad at Crokeham Hill who popped his thumb into and out of its socket to impress girls and who’d ask questions like Would you rather slam your dick in a door or run across the M25? Looking at Jack, his gurning, dumber than Dumb & Dumber expression, Alex realized that this could well be Flip’s, and therefore his, best friend.
By the end of the day, Alex was faint with hunger. But Ms. Sprake wasn’t about to let him go without an explanation for his “little trip” to the station that morning. He gave a shrug. Apologized. Said it wouldn’t happen again. That sort of thing.
“Are you okay, Philip?”
She’d perched herself on the edge of her desk, fussing again with her reading glasses. Her clothes were creased and her dark blond hair had worked loose here and there. She looked like she was tired but making an effort not to be.
“I’m fine, miss. I’m just … you know.” Another shrug.
“This term’s been a struggle, I realize that, but after our chat …” She exhaled. Alex hoped he wouldn’t be expected to remember anything she and Flip had discussed in their chat, whenever that had been. “Look, skiving off isn’t going to help. Is it?”
“No, miss.”
“And the work won’t get any easier in Year Ten, I can promise you that.”
Alex steadied himself against the back of a chair. Quite apart from breakfast and lunch, Flip would’ve scoffed two or three Snickers by now. A struggle. How had Flip done in his Year Nine assessments? Alex had missed his altogether, he realized, along with choosing the next year’s GCSE options. Not to mention Christmas, Easter. The half-term holiday in Cornwall. The borough chess finals. He closed his eyes, woozy all of a sudden. In that instant, the nightmare of the previous night recurred, flashing through his mind. Then, snap, the image vanished as quickly as it had come.
“Philip? Do you need to sit down?”
He shook his head. In the afternoon light, the room was rinsed a bright lemony color, and it smelled of chalk dust, draw
ing him away from the clutches of the dream. The teacher’s face was soft with concern. He noticed her earrings: a small silver guitar on each lobe. Maybe Ms. Sprake wasn’t as boring as she looked.
He hesitated. “Am I … am I all right, miss? Underneath.”
“Underneath?”
“Yeah, like, inside. As a person. Am I all right inside?”
What he really wanted to ask was What’s Philip Garamond like? Alex had no idea. He knew him physically—more intimately than he would’ve wished—but he didn’t know him. He couldn’t ask his teacher about that, though, without her thinking him completely mad. Even the question he had asked appeared to have flustered her.
“What a strange thing to say, Philip,” she said with a nervous half laugh.
“No, it’s fine. It’s nothing. I just … I want to do okay, that’s all. Better.”
“Good. That’s good, then.” She went on watching him. After a pause, she said, “Let’s see if we can get through this last month of term, shall we?”
He nodded.
“And I know it may not seem like it, at your age, but there really is more to life than cricket and girls.” She was teasing him, trying not to smile.
“I know, miss. There’s basketball as well.”
Ms. Sprake covered her mouth with her hand as she laughed. Alex was quite pleased with that: his first joke as Flip. The teacher put her glasses on, took them off again. “Right, you look done in, Philip. Go on, get yourself home.”
At the door, Alex remembered. “Oh, miss … my mobile?”
In the school car park, Alex switched on the phone. Most of the messages were from Donna or Billie. He scrolled down to the one that mattered and, hand shaking, keyed in the messaging service. Alex had expected his mother. It wasn’t her, though; it was the woman Mum worked with at the library. Kath? Kathy? He’d spoken to her on the phone a few times and had met her once. In the message, she talked quietly, as though she didn’t want to be overheard.
“Listen, I don’t know who you are or how you got hold of this number, but if this is your idea of a prank, then … you’re sick. Sick in the head to do something like this. How could you? How could anyone try to do this to her?” There was a pause, an unidentifiable background noise. He heard her breathing. “But I’ll tell you this, young man: if you phone Fran, Mrs. Gray, again or leave any more of your evil messages, I will go straight to the police and let them deal with you. Do you understand?”
Click.
Alex stood perfectly still in the middle of the car park. He had been holding his breath, he realized; he exhaled, releasing the air from his lungs in a ragged sob.
Shutting the phone off, he clenched it in his fist as though he was ready to fling it as far away as he could or as though he’d like to crush it to pieces. When at last he moved, he found he had no direction in mind and simply headed pointlessly towards the school entrance before circling back on himself.
“Mum,” he said under his breath. Then louder: “Mummummum.”
Crying so hard by now that it was more snot than tears. Only then did he notice her: a curly-haired girl, sitting on a wall ten meters away with a book open on her lap and what looked like a cello case propped beside her. Watching him.
At Flip’s house, truly weird music cascaded from an upstairs window. Alex kept his finger on the bell-push for an age before the sister, Teri, loomed in the front door’s smoked-glass panel. She yanked the door open. She was in the same black gear she’d worn at breakfast, but her face was made up in full goth mode and her hair looked as though it had been zapped by static. If they gave Oscars for scowling, her expression would’ve won the award in every category.
“It’s a simple concept,” she said, gesturing at the keyhole. “You put a key in here”—she crooked her index finger—“you turn it … And. The. Door. Opens.”
Alex didn’t have the energy for this. “I couldn’t find my key this morning.”
Flip’s sister ducked out of sight, then reappeared, holding up a key fob in the style of a miniature cricket ball. “That would be this key, yeah? The one hanging on its usual hook, right by the door, so that even a blind, amnesiac baboon with attention deficit disorder would be able to find it.”
With that, she dropped the fob on the mat, turned heel and stomped upstairs. Something smelled nice. Teri’s perfume. Probably she wasn’t always horrible. Just with him. That is, with her brother. The way Alex treated his own kid brother, he hated himself sometimes; he wondered if Teri ever felt like that.
Right now he would’ve given anything to see Sam’s dopey grin.
Alex thought about heading straight up to Flip’s room and shutting himself away, but the hunger wasn’t about to let him do that. So he went down to the kitchen, fixed himself a jam sandwich, a slab of cheese and a glass of milk and finished them off there at the counter. As he put the plate and glass into the dishwasher, the dog padded into the kitchen and went to the back door. He looked at Alex.
“You need a pee, Beagle?”
The dog growled at him as Alex found the key on a hook and unlocked the door. “Listen, fatso, I’m doing you a favor here. Pee all over the floor for all I care.”
Mum wouldn’t be home for another hour, once she’d collected Sam from after-school club. Lying on his back on Flip’s bed, Alex decided not to call till then—no message this time; he had to speak to her directly. He stared at the ceiling, trying to stay calm, considering what to say to her. The woman who worked with Mum, Kath-or-Kathy, had said she’d go to the police if he rang the library again. But no way could she stop him calling his own home and speaking to his own mother.
Alex replayed her voice mail. Sick, she’d called him. Sick in the head. Evil.
He tried to recall what he’d said in his original message. That he didn’t know what was happening or where he was, that he was scared and wanted to go home, wanted Mum to come and fetch him. What was so terrible about that?
Unless Mum’s colleague hadn’t recognized his voice. I don’t know who you are or how you got hold of this number … What if she thought he was pretending to be Alex, as some kind of cruel joke? Suppose the body-swap had only been one-way. Suppose Alex—the bodily, physical Alex—had been missing for six months, and then, out of the blue, a boy left a message on his mum’s work number, claiming to be her lost son.
But too much of this didn’t fit. The six-months thing, for a start; it was a like a jigsaw piece for the wrong puzzle. Where had “Alex” been in all that time? Flip, it seemed, had carried on as normal—playing sports, acquiring girlfriends, struggling at school. But what about him? What had he been doing in all those months before he suddenly found himself inhabiting another boy’s body, living another boy’s life?
The question put an idea into his head. He hauled himself off the bed and switched on the smart flat-screen PC on Philip’s desk. It took an age to fire up. And when it did, Alex found that access to the Internet and to Flip’s e-mails was password protected. He closed the computer down again, bashing the mouse against its mat in frustration. As the screen cleared, there it was again: his reflection, as though he was imprisoned inside the monitor, staring out at himself.
Not his reflection. Flip’s.
Who was “he,” in any case?
He still thought of himself as Alex Gray. The mental processes were the same as always—his memories, perceptions, emotions. His attitudes. His … will. But if he looked in a mirror and said, “I’m Alex Gray,” out loud, he’d see those words spoken from the lips of a boy who wasn’t him.
At school that day Alex had been startled to discover that he wrote in Flip’s handwriting. The pen felt awkward in that large, unfamiliar hand, and the formation of words was laborious, as though the muscles in Flip’s fingers had to decode the signals from Alex’s mind. When Alex saw what he’d written, it looked totally different from his own style. Compared to Flip’s, though, on the previous pages of the exercise book, it was practically identical.
What if he spoke l
ike Flip, too? He hadn’t sounded to himself as though he was speaking any differently, but he had Flip’s vocal cords, didn’t he? Flip’s mouth, tongue, larynx, throat muscles. Alex hadn’t heard Flip speak, of course, so he had no idea whether their voices were similar in tone or pitch, but even if they were, he reckoned the other boy would have a Yorkshire accent. At Litchbury High, even the plummy kids rhymed “laugh” with “naff.” If Alex had been talking like a Londoner all day, surely someone—Flip’s mother, sister, mates, teachers—would’ve said something.
So when he’d left that message on the answering machine at Mum’s work, and when he finally spoke to his mother …
Alex grabbed hold of Flip’s phone again and worked out how to rerecord the outgoing message. He spoke into the mike. “Hi, this is … me. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you.” Then, tweaking up the volume, he replayed his own words.
He sounded nothing like himself.
* * *
The phone was still in his hand when it buzzed with yet another text from one of the girlfriends. Billie. Why had Flip stood her up? Alex remembered: she’d said to meet after school in Smoothies, wherever that was. He deleted the message without reply. He couldn’t be dealing with this.
Funny, at Crokeham Hill he’d been desperate for a girlfriend and now he had two of them he just wished would leave him alone.
That girl in the car park, was she one of them … or maybe a third? No. From the way she’d looked at him, he could tell there was nothing like that going on between her and Flip. Yet there was something. A connection of some sort. Alex had been mortified to realize that she had been sitting on that wall the whole time, witnessing his reaction to the voice mail message. What had it been in her expression? Not disdain, or surprise, or the smugness of someone who had caught you in a moment of private weakness that they could use against you. Nor was it sympathy or compassion. Her gaze had remained steady, holding his, the girl seemingly unembarrassed by his embarrassment. A neutral curiosity. It had been like the girl was watching the opening scene of a TV drama, unsure whether to change channels.
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