Flip

by Martyn Bedford

  And if she couldn’t, if none of them could, he would leave. Go on the run, into hiding. Live rough if he had to. Live wild in the woods. Stranded inside Philip but no longer compelled to be him, or to live as him, with his family, at his school. Instead, he would escape, take off on his own to exist however he could. As himself. He had to hold on to that: whatever had become of his body, he was still Alex inside. His soul, his spirit, his essence.

  Whatever it was that had killed him hadn’t killed that.

  It must’ve been sudden, without warning, or he would remember. Brain hemorrhage, accident, heart attack. Something like that. Maybe he had been blown up by a terrorist bomb (unlikely while he was running home from David’s or fast asleep in his own bed). Beaten up, then: jumped by a pack of hoodies, given a kicking, stabbed. But Alex had no recollection of a fight. It would’ve been simple, the simplest thing in the world, to find out what had happened. In Litchbury Library that first evening, when he’d taken Beagle for a walk; in the library at school, when he’d e-mailed David; at any point on Flip’s PC, once he’d set himself up with a password … A fourteen-year-old boy died, it was bound to make the news. And if it made the news, it’d be online, somewhere, somehow. In nought-point-something seconds, it would’ve been right there on the screen for him to read: the story of his own death.

  But the fear of finding out for sure had been way, way worse than the anxiety of not knowing. To Google himself would’ve made it final.

  Alex hadn’t been ready for finality.

  He wasn’t ready for it now. He had to go home; that was all.

  It was only when the train pulled out of Litchbury that Alex realized what he had done. Taking off like this, stealing from Flip’s father—he’d never done anything as reckless or impulsive in his life. His heart was thumping in his chest and he thought he might be sick. The other people in the compartment surely only had to look at him to see that he was on the run. That he was a thief.

  He gazed out the window. Tried to compose himself.

  It would devastate them, Mr. and Mrs. Garamond, his running away like this. The disappearance of their son. He imagined them waiting by the phone for news or making a tearful appeal in front of the cameras for Philip to come home. This thought shook him: the scale of what he was getting himself into and the upset he would cause two innocent people. Three, counting Teri. She might not like her brother, but he couldn’t believe she’d be glad for him to go missing.

  As the train carried him from Flip’s life, Alex was struck by the thought that whatever happened in London, he would never set foot inside 20 Tyrol Place again.

  It was nearly four o’clock by the time Alex reached the street where he lived. He had killed a couple of hours in a coffee shop at Crokeham Hill station before catching the bus for the final leg of his journey home. It would have looked odd, his turning up any earlier while kids his age were meant to be in school. Those two hours felt like ten, but he’d put the time to use, getting his story straight in his head. Readying himself for the moment when he would see his mother again.

  As he approached the house, Alex couldn’t help thinking that he might see himself. At a window, in the garden, walking along the road. Opening the door when Alex knocked. The living body he had left behind carrying on without him. Of course that wouldn’t happen. Couldn’t. There was no living body. He understood what Mum’s colleague at the library had been protecting her from. And why his call had sickened her.

  “Alex” wasn’t here. He wasn’t anywhere anymore.

  Monks Road looked so ordinary. So unchanged. It had been winter last time he was here, and it was summer now, but otherwise everything was much the same. The Cockers, at 157, were building an extension above the garage, and there was a For Sale board outside the old biddy’s, at 143. That was all. Would a neighbor spot him? No matter, they wouldn’t recognize him. He meant nothing to them as Flip. He wondered if he ever had as Alex. It seemed wrong for the place to look so little different, for life to carry on as normal. Same small shopping precinct across the way; same shops, too, although the baker’s had changed hands and one of Somerfield’s windows was patched up with chipboard. Same lads skateboarding down the access ramp for wheelchairs and buggies. Same queue at the fish-and-chips shop. This side of the road: same houses, garages, parked cars, same shrubs, flower borders and hedges. Same scraps of lawn. Same porches. Same doors and windows. Same curtains. And by association, the people inside those homes were the same, continuing with their lives just as before, as though Alex Gray’s absence was of no consequence, or as though he’d been quickly forgotten, or had never existed in the first place.

  What had he expected? That his street, this neighborhood, would be reduced to a wasteland of grief? That the erased left a visible, tangible trail in their wake?

  Inside 151, it would be different. The exterior might look the same—that wonky wall beside the steps, where the pointing had gone (it had been on Dad’s to-do list for years); that mustard-colored door with its exposed stripe of undercoat; that Christmas tree they’d planted however long ago, which now reached the guttering. But indoors, his absence would have left its mark. In the preservation of his bedroom, maybe, kept just as it had been the day he died. Or in Mum, Dad, even Sam—the sadness in their eyes, still, after all these months. Something. Some trace of him.

  Anticipating this moment, his homecoming, Alex had imagined lurking nearby, a shadowy figure in the dark. Monitoring who came and went, or spotting someone at a lit-up window. Observing. Gathering himself, choosing his moment to go up to the door. But of course, it wasn’t dark, or even dusk, and there were no shadows where he might conceal himself; it was the last week of June, a too-bright, too-lovely summer’s afternoon. So he stood there, in the street, conspicuous and self-conscious, crushed by hesitation. It was his home. Inside were his family. To him, it had been only days since he had been here. Yet Alex might have been a time-traveling stranger, an alien beamed down from a spacecraft. The very idea that his mother might recognize her dead son’s spirit inside this impostor’s body suddenly seemed ridiculous.

  The car wasn’t on the hardstanding. He hadn’t registered that right away. Dad would still be at work, of course. Someone was home, though—a window was open in Mum and Dad’s bedroom, the curtain shifting in the breeze, and he’d heard the flush of a toilet. Sam’s scooter lay abandoned on the front steps, like a robot’s mislaid limb. Alex found himself wanting to retrieve the scooter and trundle it up the side passage, out of sight, so it wouldn’t get nicked. Before, he couldn’t have cared less if Sam lost his scooter. Now he did. Being Flip for a few days, being kid brother to Teri … had that done this to him? Either way, the thought of Sam’s not recognizing him was almost as dismaying as the prospect of Mum’s blank look when she opened the door.

  “Mrs. Gray?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hi. You don’t know me, but I’m … Philip. A friend of Alex’s, from school.”

  “Oh, yes. Hello.”

  “Sorry to just call round like this.” He waited for her to say it was okay, but she didn’t. She didn’t say anything. He’d forgotten how green her eyes were. “Only … I wanted to speak to you about something.”

  “To do with Alex?”

  “Yeah. Yes.”

  “Oh. Well, you … Come in. Come in, won’t you?”

  Alex followed her inside. The smell was the first thing he noticed. Living here, he hadn’t ever realized that the house had its own distinct odor. He couldn’t have said what it was exactly but as soon as he stepped over the threshold, it hit him: the smell of home.

  He set his schoolbag down, as he’d always done, at the foot of the coat stand. The bag was bulging where he’d stuffed his Litchbury High blazer and tie inside. In the hallway, Mum became awkward, as though she’d already forgotten who he was and how he’d come to be there. Collecting herself, she offered him a frail kind of smile and led him through to the lounge. Out on the doorstep, she had been similarly distracted. Confu
sed. She’d seemed to gaze through rather than at him, and when she’d spoken, it was as though she was being prompted via an earpiece. The one time her attention had sharpened was at the mention of Alex. She’d almost flinched.

  “This is the living room,” she said, like she was showing the house to a buyer.

  Sam was there, cross-legged on the floor, directly in front of the TV, playing a video game. Motor racing. Back in December, Sam had been into some Tomb Raider-type thing. Even though Sam had his back to Alex, the sight of his brother got to Alex. The short-cropped reddish hair, like suede, the knobbly bump of his uppermost vertebrae, which he was so self-conscious about. Likewise, the sticky-out ears. Sam’s birthday had been and gone, he realized; he was eleven years old now, and after the summer, he would be starting at Crokeham Hill High. His little brother, growing up without him.

  “Sam,” Mum said, “this is one of Alex’s friends.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  No hi, no turn of the head to see who it was. Just the jerking of his elbows as his car screeched into a chicane. At one of Sam’s birthday parties—the fifth or the sixth—the balloon man (Uncle Pete) asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. “A Jedi warrior,” Sam said, deadly serious. They mightn’t have been brothers at all, their personalities were so dissimilar; but they were brothers, and Alex longed for Sam to turn round. To look at him. Just so he could see Sam’s freckly face again.

  “Sam,” their mother said. “Say hello.”

  He answered robotically, attention fixed on the screen. “Hello, friend of Alex.”

  Mum looked at Alex apologetically. “Why don’t we go through to the kitchen?”

  She made tea, in the red and white stripy pot with the chipped lid. He figured it was to give herself something to do, because Alex said he’d be fine with water and, anyway, the tea remained unpoured the whole time they were talking. She was wearing a familiar lime green top and that frayed denim skirt, faded almost white; her ginger hair, as ever, was cut into a bob. Usually, she wore beige moccasins, trodden down at the heel, but that day she was barefoot. It threw Alex, the oddness. Her insteps were pale as chalk, and as she moved around the kitchen, the soles of her feet made a kissing sound on the laminate floor. She looked older. More than six months older. Tired. Her body had sagged. She was thinner than he’d recalled—gaunt, really—but more than that, and for all her bustle, she was less of a presence. A partially erased drawing was how he thought of it.

  “Are you in Alex’s class?” she asked, handing him a glass of water. It was too full and some spilled down the outside, but she didn’t seem to notice.

  “No, I’m in 9JH.”

  Having started with a lie about being a friend of Alex’s, he had to go through with it. So much of what he would say depended on what she said to him. One thing was certain: he couldn’t just pitch up and declare himself to be Alex. For now, it was enough to establish contact with his family—befriend them, gain their trust—while he sussed out how best to play it from there.

  “JH?” his mum said. “Is that—”

  “Mrs. Harewood.”

  “Old Hair Ball?”

  Alex smiled at the nickname. “Yeah, that’s her. Teaches science.”

  Mum paused, swilling the teapot under the tap as she waited for the kettle to boil. “She sent us a very nice card. Jennifer. Jenny Harewood.” She set the pot down, popped in a couple of tea bags. “Got Alex earmarked as a budding chemist.”

  He thought about that: his teachers sending condolences to his mother.

  Right here in this kitchen, at breakfast one morning back in October, Mum had tested him on the periodic table—calling out symbols from a homework sheet while he, between mouthfuls of cornflakes, named each element and its atomic number. Or tried to. By the end, she knew them as well as he did. From then on, Special K (Mum’s cereal) was always referred to as Special Potassium.

  “Sorry, what did you say your name was?”

  “Philip.” He hated lying to her. Before she could say she didn’t remember Alex mentioning him, or wonder why they hadn’t met him before, he said, “I only started at Crokeham Hill in September. We moved down from Yorkshire for my Dad’s work.”

  “I thought there was a whatsit. A northern twang.”

  Alex realized as she said this that her familiar south London accent was oddly comforting. One of the sounds of home. You heard Mum speak and you could tell where she came from, not like Mr. and Mrs. Garamond, whose speech was so neutral they could have come from anywhere. Where did they come from? He knew, from something he’d heard the mum saying on the phone one time, that they’d moved up to Litchbury for the dad’s job at the university, but that was all.

  Any time now, they would be starting to wonder where Philip was.

  The kitchen, the house itself, seemed so much smaller and shabbier than the Garamonds’. Mum filled the pot, then slipped on the grubby, never-washed knitted cozy that Dad had long threatened to burn as a health hazard. “So, was it the chess?” she asked.

  “Sorry?”

  “How you became friends with Alex.”

  “Oh, yeah. Yeah, the chess club.”

  “His grandfather taught him to play.” She smiled. “Their games lasted for hours. I used to take them sandwiches and drinks.”

  Cheese, sliced thick, with rings of red onion that made your nose sting. White bread. Milk for him, cocoa for Granddad. He took a slug of water to distract himself from the memory, to stop himself from blubbing. If he blubbed, he might just throw his arms round her and call her Mum. Alex had been doing okay until then. Even here, in his own home, with his own mother, he’d managed to hold it together. But this talk of marathon chess sessions with Granddad, and the realization that Mum had lost them both—her father, her son—and the thought of what Alex himself had lost, or been torn away from … all of this came close to overwhelming him. It was suddenly way too freaky to be standing in this kitchen he knew so well, a stranger to his own mother.

  He’d imagined a moment of epiphany: an incredulous look in her eyes, her hand reaching tentatively for his cheek, exploring the contours—like she was a blind person reading his face like Braille—and her asking the hushed question, not daring to believe it herself: Alex … is that you?

  She hadn’t shown the slightest hint of knowing him, of course. He was just Philip, a boy she’d never met, Alex’s friend, in whose company she could reminisce about her dead son.

  “That looks like a nasty bump,” she said.

  His lip, she meant. “Bump” was Mum’s word for just about any kind of injury, from a grazed knee to a broken arm (that time he’d taken a tumble off the trampoline). “I got hit by a cricket ball.” Alex touched the scab with his fingertips. “In the park,” he added before she thought to say that they didn’t play cricket at Crokeham Hill.

  They talked about how lucky he had been not to lose a tooth. Then, with another of those frail smiles, Mum said, “Now, what did you want to talk about?”

  So he took her through it: the plan to set up a fund at the school—with donations, sponsored events—to pay for an annual interschools chess trophy in Alex’s name. The Year Nine Council wanted to check if it was okay with her before going ahead. On the train, it had seemed like a good cover story—explaining why he’d called round, while enabling them to talk about “Alex.” Face to face, it sounded cheap and nasty. A scam. He felt like a door-to-door con man trying to trick this woman—his own mother—into buying something she didn’t need.

  That she seemed genuinely touched by the idea only made it worse.

  “This whole business—” She stood at the sink, gazing out into the back garden. So choked up she had to check herself. She took a deep breath, blinked back the tears. “I … sorry … I suppose I didn’t realize he was so well liked. ”

  Alex didn’t say a word. He wished he could unsay everything he’d already said.

  “To be honest with you, Philip”—she turned towards him, her eyes red-rimmed—“we’ve always
worried that Alex was a bit too much of a swot to make friends at that school. Apart from David Bell, you know, he hardly ever brought anyone home.”

  “It’s just an idea, really. I don’t—”

  “But it makes people realize, doesn’t it? When something like this happens.”

  He waited for her to continue.

  “It makes them think ‘That could be me,’ or ‘That could be my son.’ ” He started to speak, but she talked over him. “And please don’t think I’m ungrateful—because I’m not, truly I’m not. It’s a lovely … gesture.” She pressed her palms to the sides of her face, then lowered them. “But the timing. The timing isn’t wonderful.”

  The washing machine clicked into a new phase in its cycle; up till then, Alex hadn’t registered that it was on. He wasn’t sure what she meant by “timing.” In chess, whenever you made a move, you had a fair idea of the other player’s response, but he couldn’t read Mum at all. A moment earlier she’d been pleased to the point of tears. Now his mother seemed altogether less happy.

  “It’s the six-month anniversary this week, did you know that?”

  “Oh, okay. No. I mean, yeah, I kind of knew it must be around now.”

  “Sometimes it seems like yesterday. Other times, it’s …” She turned back to the window, not looking out, though; her head was bowed, the fingers of both hands gripping the edge of the stainless steel sink. The kitchen smelled faintly of cooked food—meaty, like sausages. Sam’s tea, probably. Did they eat the same meals? Your son died, but you still had a husband and another son. You had to go on. Cooking, eating. Making pots of tea. Doing the laundry. After a pause, Mum said, “Could you go back to the year council, Philip, and thank them for me? For us. Tell them we’ll think about it again when … when it’s more appropriate.”