“Back then” being the day before to Alex, or the past December to Philip.
He switched on the PC once more. E-mail and the Internet might be off-limits without a password, but he could at least trawl around My Documents, My Music, My Pictures and the memory stick from the schoolbag. Bits of schoolwork; a file containing a list of the Greatest Cricketers of All Time, divided into categories (bowlers, batsmen, wicket-keepers, allrounders); homework notes; a copy of a letter, dated more than a year earlier, from Flip to someone called Kevin Pietersen, asking which was the best guard to take: leg, middle-and-leg or middle. Alex had no idea what this meant. Flip’s My Pictures folder was empty, apart from the stock of desktop wallpapers. As for the music on his PC—and his iPod and the CDs in the rack on his desk—it was almost exclusively rap. Alex would’ve sooner punctured his eardrums with a kebab skewer than listen to any of it.
The diary section of Flip’s planner revealed nothing unusual in the days before June 23, or six months earlier, when Alex had spent the evening at David’s, then legged it home. Searching the room, he only found more evidence of the differences between him and Flip rather than similarities, let alone connections. The books (very few) were mostly nonfiction: sport, true crime, the Viz annual, Windows for Dummies, ex-SAS memoirs. In the bottom of the wardrobe were a new-looking pair of in-line skates, a cricket bat, golf clubs, a tennis racket, various balls, dumbbells and—please, no—a skateboard. The clothes were okay. Cool. Expensive. The right brands from the right shops. Alex stripped off the school uniform and tried on a few combinations. They fitted. Well, of course they did. They looked great, too, in the full-length mirror on the back of the wardrobe door. So did he, for once.
Alex ransacked various drawers but turned up nothing of any use. He felt a brief flare of optimism when he came across a card for a Halifax account, but almost as soon as he imagined raiding Flip’s savings to get home, Alex realized he’d need the PIN.
It did at least make him aware of what he wanted to do more than anything. More than solving the mystery of what had paired him with Flip in the first place. If Alex was unable to contact his mother, David or anyone from his “real” existence, then he must go to them. Go home. Make them see him for who he was. Beagle did. If a dog could tell this version of Flip from the genuine one, surely Alex’s parents, his brother, his best mate could sense that he was in there, behind this impostor’s facade.
Somehow, Alex had to see Mum and Dad, face to face.
This time he was underwater, running, feet sinking deeper and deeper into the seabed. The surface was within reach if he raised his arms, but he couldn’t get his head out of the water. He had to breathe. The compulsion to inhale was huge. But he couldn’t, mustn’t. Still he ran, getting nowhere, each frantic step burying his feet in the wet sand until he was no longer able to lift them. Finally, with one great gulp, he opened his mouth, his lungs to the flood of foul seawater.
Alex woke. Sat up in bed. His heart was racing and he gasped for air as though he’d actually been drowning.
Was this his asthma, back again? Twenty-four hours after the switch, had he returned to his own body? He fumbled for the bedside light, almost knocking it to the floor. The sudden brightness blinded him. But when he was able to open his eyes, one look at that forearm, the hand, the fingers, told him all he needed to know.
“Hey, it’s Cherry, isn’t it?”
“Ye-ees, same as always.”
“How’s things?”
The girl looked at Alex, then turned back to her locker and carried on putting stuff in, taking stuff out. “Philip, if it’s about yesterday—”
“No, it’s not that.”
She half turned towards him again, holding his gaze. Her eyes were gray, her expression unreadable. Close-up, Cherry looked even paler than before, in the car park, her hair even curlier. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not going to blab to anyone.”
“It’s not about that.” Anxious that she would finish at the locker and move off before he had a chance to say what he meant to, Alex began to gabble. “It’s what you said, in English. About Gerard Manley Hopkins.”
She almost smiled. “You want to talk to me about poetry.”
“No. Well, yes. I just—”
“Okay, Philip, I’ve no idea what this is—some kind of bet with Jack, probably—but, please, go play your games with some other girl, yeah?”
The corridor was busy. Alex was conscious that they were attracting attention, he and the girl. Cherry Jones. She shut her locker, snapped the padlock into place.
“There were some poems of his in an anthology at the house,” he said.
He didn’t tell her how it had come about. That, unable to sleep after the nightmare, he’d snuck downstairs to search the bookshelves in the back lounge for something to read. That because of her, he had homed in on Hopkins and read into the small hours. “At the house,” she repeated.
“At Flip’s house.”
“That would be your house, then.” Now she really was smiling, the way you smile at someone who’s wearing their top back to front without realizing. “Talking about yourself in the third person,” she said, “is that an ego or an id thing?”
She reminded him of Teri just then. “I really like him,” he said. “I mean, he’s a bit full-on about God, but you know, what you said yesterday … the rhythm.”
“I know what this is, Philip.” She stood there, schoolbag over her shoulder. Lowering her voice: “You’re embarrassed about what happened in the car park. What I saw. And you think you need to act all friendly with me—”
“I’m not embarrassed.”
As he spoke the words, he realized they were true. Alex wasn’t embarrassed to have been seen sobbing, talking to himself, pacing up and down and pleading for his mum. As himself, he would have been. But as Flip, he found—was startled to find—that he didn’t much care what anyone thought of him. It was like wearing fancy dress to a party: you could act however you liked without feeling foolish. Cherry had been so cool in the classroom the day before, when the others had laughed at her. He wanted to be like that. He was like that right here. Talking to a girl. A girl who had witnessed him in a moment of humiliating weakness. And he was unembarrassed. Unhumiliated.
“I won’t tell a soul,” she said. “So you don’t have to be nice to me. Okay?”
“That really wasn’t why I wanted to speak to you.”
She held his gaze again, as steadily as before, although her expression had softened a little. “You don’t talk to me, though. Do you? I’m so far off your radar I’m not even on the radar of the people on the outer reaches of your radar.”
He grinned. “There were way too many ‘radar’s’ in that sentence.”
Cherry adjusted the bag on her shoulder. Tilted her head, as though a different angle might give her a better look at him. “No, sorry, Philip, you’re creeping me out.”
For some reason, Alex liked that she didn’t call him Flip. He watched her turn away. When she was gone, he tore a page from an exercise book and wrote down a verse he remembered from Hopkins, folded the page and posted it in the crack beneath Cherry’s locker door.
School was less strange that day: the layout of the building was more familiar, and he knew some of the names and faces. Flip, he discovered, was popular. It was a new experience for Alex, but he found that being Flip—being liked and listened to—gave him a confidence he would have lacked as himself. Within Flip’s body, too, he was becoming more coordinated: getting used to these limbs, to walking, climbing stairs, sitting down, standing up. It was like breaking in a new pair of trainers that felt uncomfortable at first but molded themselves to the shape of your feet the more you wore them. He’d set off late again that morning and had to run the last hundred meters up the hill … and found that he could run. Fast. Without wheezing for ages afterwards. Being fit was something Alex could definitely get used to. Other aspects of Flip-ness would take a longer adjustment period. Showering, for one thing. It
was perverted.
Alex hadn’t reckoned on a second day at Litchbury High. But until he laid his hands on the cash to get home, he was stuck here. He had phoned the number on the back of Flip’s Halifax card, told them he’d forgotten his PIN and been told in return that a written reminder of the number would arrive within three days. It could be Friday, then, before he could hit an ATM. Almost a whole school week as Philip Garamond.
The school was similar in size to his own—around fifteen hundred pupils. Something like that. But while Crokeham Hill was about 40 percent black and Asian kids, there were hardly any here. It was weird, the corridors, classrooms, playground, dining hall being so white. So middle-class, too. And this was his second day and he hadn’t seen a fight yet, or heard anyone swear at a teacher, or come across a kid sniffing lighter fuel in the toilets. In class, they stood in silence at the beginning and end of each period; if they wanted to speak during a lesson, they raised a hand. They stuck to the dress code. As for the building, it was newer and smarter than his school, and better equipped (the science labs, the IT suite, the sports hall). There were no uniformed security guards or weapons searches. There was no perimeter fence that looked like something round a military base. Best of all, Litchbury High had a library. A proper one, with books—lots of them, good ones, new ones—and plenty of computer terminals and two librarians who were friendly and helpful. They wouldn’t let him play online chess, but you couldn’t have everything.
What he did have was a school e-mail account (in Flip’s name) and a password written on the first page of his planner.
Alex had composed the e-mail in his head on the way to school. Now all he had to do was type it up and send it. Bumping into Cherry at the lockers had delayed him a little but he still had a few minutes before registration. In the library, he nabbed one of the PCs, logged on, opened up a new message.
Hi, David, he began. That night at your place …
David. His best mate. His chess buddy. The last person he remembered seeing before all this. That night in December was the key, he felt sure, and David the key holder. It was the trickiest, most important e-mail he’d ever had to write. For one thing, there was every chance David wouldn’t believe it was from him. If Mum’s colleague at work had good reason to doubt who he was, then so might David. It wasn’t just that Kath-or-Kathy hadn’t recognized his voice; it was the sense he got that something else was going on. Perhaps “Alex” had been abducted and subjected to some weird psychological experiment. Or maybe that other Alex, the one he’d left behind, had suffered a mental breakdown; when they’d switched bodies, Flip had woken up as Alex and freaked out. Literally lost his mind and was, right now, sitting in a padded cell somewhere. Or maybe … But there could be any number of explanations, each as crazy as the other.
Whatever, knowing the way David’s mind worked, he had to be subtle. To lure his friend in. Above all, Alex had to word the message so the probability that the e-mail was from him was greater than the probability that it wasn’t.
So for now, no blundering in with tales of body-swapping or wandering souls, no account of where or who he was now, no plea for help, no request for information about “Alex” and those six missing months, no message to be passed on to his parents. David was way too rational to believe that a person could wake up as someone else. Who wouldn’t be?
All that could wait until he had gained David’s confidence.
What he wrote instead was this: a summary of the chess game they’d played in David’s bedroom that Friday evening six months before, but just a couple of days old in Alex’s memory. Also, an exact notation of the sequences of opening and closing moves. That was all, just the chess.
Only one person in the world, apart from David himself, could possibly have written this e-mail.
Alex reread it. Clicked “send.”
His mind was still preoccupied with the e-mail when he shambled into the 9b tutor room for morning registration. He was late but Ms. Sprake hadn’t arrived yet. Alex headed for the first vacant chair and had barely sat down when a girl materialized alongside his desk. Donna? Billie? Voice lowered, mouth close to his ear.
“Yesterday, you avoid me, you don’t answer my texts, you don’t call. Today, you just stroll in, totally ignore me, and sit with Ulf the bloody finger eater.”
Alex glanced at the lad next to him. The resemblance to a Nordic troll was so uncanny he almost burst out laughing. The girl, whoever she was, was far from troll-like. Dewy-eyed and dusky, in a Mediterranean kind of way. She smelled of coconut. At Crokeham Hill, a girl like her wouldn’t have registered his existence, let alone talked to him.
But this wasn’t Crokeham Hill. And he wasn’t Alex.
Whether he felt more assertive as Flip, or more reckless, or whether he just took his chance, it was hard to be sure. Whatever it was, the girl’s face just breathing distance away, so Alex kissed her. A real, proper kiss.
The start of one, anyway, because at that moment Ms. Sprake entered the room and the girl disappeared from his side as though wafted away by a sudden draft from the door.
“Time and a place, Donna, Philip,” the teacher said. “Time and a place.”
Donna finished with him at morning break (You think you can mess me around and then just kiss me like that …), then texted him at lunchtime to say she hadn’t meant it, and could they meet in the park after school? Please. They needed to talk (i feel like i dont no u anymore Flip). Which park, or where it was, Alex had no idea. He texted back to say he had cricket practice. Not that he intended going to it.
As for Flip’s other girlfriend, Billie cornered him in a corridor, en route from French to maths, looking like a blue-eyed adolescent Shakira. An angry Shakira. One who demanded an apology for being stood up at Smoothies. Alex said sorry, invented an excuse, dug himself out of a hole.
“Well,” Billie said, smirking, drawing him towards her by his tie, “you’d better make it up to me, hadn’t you?” Once again, the kiss didn’t last long. “What’s up with you?” she said, breaking contact.
“What d’you mean?”
“Your mouth, it’s all … sloppy. You’re kissing like a Year Seven.”
Truth was, he hadn’t kissed a girl before that morning. Not properly. Not with Flip’s lips. Or with his own, for that matter. Now he’d kissed two. Kind of.
“And your hair,” she said, pushing her fingers into it. “It’s rubbish like this.”
The hair. Flip’s wonderful, scruffily cool and stylish sticky-up hair. It had been a problem for Alex once he’d toweled it dry after his shower. How to comb it, or brush it, or whatever Flip usually did to make it look the way it did. How to apply the gel. Alex had never used hair gel before. Clearly, it showed.
Billie wanted to know if he’d got round to finishing with Donna yet. No, he told her. Not yet. “In which case,” she said, “I’ll just have to break the news to her myself, won’t I?”
“I have her number,” Alex said, indicating his mobile, “if you want to text her.”
She glared at him. “You really are a smug bastard, Philip Garamond.”
Was this how it was to be Flip? To be good-looking and popular. To be fit. To have sexy girls trip over one another to go out with you. To treat them how you liked and still have them come back for more. At Crokeham Hill, Alex had always envied the Flips; now he wasn’t so sure. As for two-timing … the hassle, the lies … He failed to see why girls put up with it, or how Flip could put up with himself.
At morning break and again at lunchtime, Alex returned to the library to check his e-mail. Nothing from David.
He’d sent the message to David’s school and Hotmail addresses, and even though he knew that his friend tended not to check his mail during the school day, Alex couldn’t help his impatience for a reply. After last period, he went to the library once more. It closed at four but David ought to be home by three-forty-five-ish. He waited. Checked his in-box every few minutes. Did some more waiting. Nothing. Each time, nothing.
David would respond to the message. He had to.
Alex pictured him at his under-the-bunk-bed desk in the tiny bedroom of that house he shared with his two sisters and brother and a dad but no mum. That duvet cover in the design of the Jamaican flag. The Killers, or the Fratellis, or the Arctic Monkeys, or the Kaiser Chiefs would be blaring out. A can of Tango within reach, and a pack of salt-and-vinegar Monster Munch. Crumbs on the keyboard. His eyes blinking away behind his glasses, his obsessively clean glasses.
At the thought of his friend, Alex’s eyes filled up.
Three-fifty-two, no message. Three-fifty-five, no message. One of the librarians announced that the library would be closing in five minutes. The handful of other students began to gather up their belongings and head for the door.
Alex checked his mail again. Three-fifty-seven, one message.
David’s Hotmail address in the “sender” box.
His breathing quickened; his hand lay clammy over the mouse. With a double-click, the message opened.
Who are you??
Hurriedly, Alex typed a reply. Who do you think I am?
This time David’s response was instant. You cant be.
Being Flip was like playing the lead in a film about a special agent assigned to work undercover. It was a life of subterfuge, the outer pretense of Alex’s daily existence concealing the inner secret of his true identity.
Exciting, really, if you looked at it like that.
Except he couldn’t. Couldn’t make believe this into an adventure story. It wasn’t fiction. It was for real. And he was way out of his depth.
In a movie or a TV drama, the agent would be thoroughly prepared for the operation. Provided with a dossier of information, told to memorize every detail of the false ID which had been created for him. Subjected to weeks of training—briefings, tests, role-play—until he knew his adopted persona as intimately as he knew himself. Only then would he be sent out into the field, once he was ready to handle any awkward questions or tricky situations without arousing suspicion or blowing his cover.
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