Flip

by Martyn Bedford

  “What do you think about that?” the mum asked, addressing Alex.

  “What?”

  “Seeing a counselor. Someone you can talk to about … all of this. What you said yesterday, about the way everything has been getting on top of you.”

  Alex watched her picking at the coaster beneath her coffee mug. Her thumbnail was etched with dirt from gardening. In some ways he wouldn’t have minded talking to someone—but about what had really happened: the switch, waking up one morning in another boy’s body. About PVS and the soul and whether he could hope to return to his own body and how to do that. That would be good to talk about. But start telling anyone any of this and you might just as well check into the nearest loony bin and let them pump you full of drugs.

  “There’s no stigma to seeing a therapist, you know, Philip,” Flip’s father said. “I had a few sessions of CBT when I got depressed after your grandma died.”

  “Is that where they give you electric shocks and stuff?” Teri said.

  Alex tried not to laugh. The dad looked at Teri. “Cognitive behavioral therapy,” he said as though nailing each word to the table. “It’s a form of counseling.”

  And so it went on. It took another long discussion to decide that he wouldn’t have counseling if he didn’t want to, but the option was there if ever he changed his mind, or if it “became necessary.” The important thing, the mother said, was that they should all try to talk more to one another, and to listen. If Philip got the support he needed right here, within his own family, it would be better than any number of hours talking to a stranger (at fifty quid a shot, the dad reckoned).

  Move on. Be positive. Look forward. They would draw a line under what had happened, she said, and focus on the challenges that lay ahead of them.

  The new Philip. The new Garamond family.

  The mum hugged him, kissed him, told him she loved him. The dad clapped his hands and said they should make a concerted effort to do more things together “as a family.” Picnics. Trips to the theater, to the art gallery. Country walks. “It was at this point,” Teri said in TV-documentary voice, “that Mr. and Mrs. Garamond’s daughter doused herself in petrol and reached for the matches.”

  Alex was in Flip’s room later that afternoon, officially catching up on homework. In fact, he was finally doing what he’d been too afraid to do before: Googling “Alex Gray.”

  Many results came up. Links to news Web sites, blogs and discussion groups that had spun off from the story of “coma boy.” It was tough, and more than a little freakish, to read about himself. See himself. The picture of him in that hospital bed. His face looked like a death mask with a feeding tube up its nose. His parents had agreed to its publication, the caption said, in the hope that someone would come forward with information about the accident. That was in January. The latest article, marking the six-month anniversary, reported that the driver still hadn’t been traced.

  That was it, then. A hit-and-run.

  Alex Gray, fourteen, of Monks Road, Crokeham Hill, was heading home from a friend’s house around ten p.m. on December 21 when he was struck from behind by a large white car (or yellow, or silver, or possibly not a car but a van) and left for dead at the roadside. He was less than two hundred meters from his house. One witness said the boy was running and had dashed across the road without looking.

  Then there was the video clip of Mum and Dad, sobbing at a press conference as they spoke of their son’s desperate fight for life. That was the one that got to him the most. Back then, near the beginning, Mr. and Mrs. Gray had taken turns to keep a round-the-clock watch at their son’s bedside. But it seemed that as the weeks went on—with no sign of change (for better or worse)—they’d scaled their vigil down to regular visiting hours. Alex didn’t blame them for that. You couldn’t spend every minute of every day for six months watching over someone who just lay there—not when you had jobs, another son to look after, your own lives to lead. Even so, the thought of being left alone for hours on end, every night, in that intensive care bed … Even so, he was their son. Their half-dead, possibly dying boy.

  A bright, likeable lad with a promising future, his head teacher had told the press. Our thoughts and prayers are with Alex’s family at this desperate time.

  Alex rubbed the tears from his face and clicked on another link.

  Doctors at St. Dunstan’s couldn’t predict when, or whether, he would emerge from his vegetative state. That was their line from December and what they were saying still. Statistically, children stood a better chance than adults of regaining consciousness. He held on to that. What he tried not to hold on to was the fact that the longer you remained in PVS, the less likely you were to come out. A lot depended on the extent of the injury to the brain; in Alex’s case, the damage wasn’t thought to be too severe. Indeed, the doctors were at a loss to explain why he hadn’t come round.

  His favorite music was being played to him through an iPod; his parents read to him: stories, poems, the whole of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy; his best friend, David Bell, popped in once a week with the latest gossip from school.

  Could Alex Gray hear any of this? No one seemed to know.

  He had no memory of hearing anything in the long months before the switch, when he was still there inside his own body. It set Alex wondering about what Mum had said in his bedroom at home the other evening—that she and Dad had sat with their son on the six-month anniversary, discussing whether to give up. To allow the doctors to let him die, she must’ve meant. Had his unconscious mind overheard that discussion? Was that why his soul, or whatever it was, had abandoned his body? Or had it simply given up on “Alex Gray” of its own accord, after so long in a vegetative state with no improvement—maybe even the first inward signs of the beginning of the end? A soul jumping ship, taking its chances in the ocean before the vessel sank. And, somehow, being washed ashore here, into the body of a boy who happened to have been born on the same day, in the same place, all those years before.

  The newly supportive, forward-looking Garamonds had the first of their family outings in the evening. Tenpin bowling, followed by dinner at Nando’s. (Philip’s two favorite treats, apparently.) If they were surprised at how rubbish he was at bowling, none of them said so. Not even Teri. Same when he hardly touched his food.

  Same around one a.m., when he trashed Flip’s room …

  Ripping the posters from the wall, tearing up his books, hurling his skateboard and cricket bat and the rest of his sports gear out the window, along with every last item of clothing from the wardrobe, then flipping every CD from its case and sending them spinning, one by one, into the garden.

  The family woke with the noise and gathered in the bedroom doorway. Still none of them spoke, or if they did, Alex was oblivious to it. He was aware only of this: Flip’s mother, ushering the others away, coming to him, enfolding him in her arms. Kisses and shush-shushes, locking him in her bony, wine-breath embrace until he gave up struggling and cried uncontrollably into her shoulder.

  There was no question of his returning to school right away, after what he’d done to Flip’s stuff. The plan had been to send him back on Monday morning—get him into a regular routine as soon as possible. A healthy dose of normality, as Mrs. G. put it. She didn’t want him at home for days on end, bored and brooding (about Alex Gray, she meant) or feeling sorry for himself. But the episode had shaken her—shaken all of them, including Alex. He’d lost it in those few minutes. Maybe he did need therapy after all. But to be sleeping in that bedroom again—Flip’s room—surrounded by Flip’s things, trapped in Flip’s life once more, when he’d gone to London with such hopes of breaking away for good … Now he was right back where he’d started—stranded, and powerless to do anything about it. A second trip to Crokeham Hill was out of the question, unless he wanted to wind up in a young offenders’ prison; as for just disappearing, starting a new life somewhere else—how practical was that, really? How long could someone his age go on the run before he u
sed up all his money, or he got caught, or something worse happened to him?

  A therapist would have a field day analyzing that outburst in the bedroom, but all Alex knew was how fantastic it felt to let rip like that. And how crap, how totally shit, he felt afterwards, when he realized it had changed nothing.

  Apart from getting him off school for a week.

  Alex spent those days at home—that is, at Tyrol Place—with Flip’s mother and father taking time off work, in shifts. Keeping him company, they said. Keeping tabs on him, more like. In an odd way, it mirrored what his own parents had done in the early weeks after the accident, when they had taken turns to maintain a vigil at their son’s bedside. The games of cards, Scrabble and Yahtzee he played that week with one or another of the Garamonds; the DIY jobs around the house that he helped the dad with; the gardening the mum roped him into; the trips out to lunch, or to see an afternoon film, or to hike over the moors. The talking they did, or didn’t do, as he tried to act like the Philip they wanted him to be. The one who was getting better.

  All the while, Alex thought of his other self: the Alex in that hospital bed three hundred kilometers (and a thousand light-years) away.

  He was awake, technically, that boy who was and wasn’t him. Awake, but with no detectable cognitive function. Some Web sites explained it better than others, but as far as he could make out, your brain didn’t shut down altogether in PVS. The lower part, the brain stem—which controlled involuntary functions (breathing, heartbeat, sleep-wake cycles, digestion)—kept on going. What switched off was the upper brain—the part you thought with, the part that enabled you to speak, that told you to move, that was aware of, responded to, interacted with your surroundings. The part that made you a conscious being. In PVS, you literally lost your consciousness.

  That other Alex, in St. Dunstan’s Hospital, would open his eyes now and then. He would sleep and not sleep, sleep and not sleep.

  He would mess himself, because he’d have no bladder or bowel control.

  He wouldn’t be able to swallow food or drink, so he’d require a feeding tube. (The one Alex had seen coming out of his nose in that photo. The other Alex’s nose.) But his heart and lungs would continue working normally, so—apart from that tube—he wouldn’t need any life-support equipment.

  It was possible that he would smile from time to time, or grind his teeth, shed tears, twitch, grunt, moan, scream … but all this would be involuntary.

  Alex imagined his other self doing those things.

  He imagined Mum and Dad at his bedside, listening to him groan in his sleep. Watching him cry. Watching him smile. Seeing his eyes, open, staring at nothing. How could they bear that? How could they witness it and stop themselves from shaking him by the shoulders and yelling at him to please, please just wake up!

  First day back, he went in early, accompanied by the parents, for a meeting in the head teacher’s office to discuss Philip’s “rehabilitation.” Sitting around Mr. Madeley’s desk with them were Flip’s form tutor and the Key Stage Three pastoral support worker. For the rest of term, Ms. Sprake and Mrs. Belfitt would be Philip’s “lifeboat on the choppy sea of academic life.” Philip was a valued member of the school community, and no effort would be spared to … and so on. Eventually, the Garamonds departed and Alex was released once more into the corridors of Litchbury High. He survived the day without too much hassle. There was the DonnaBillie traffic to negotiate, lies to be told in response to questions about the viral infection that had supposedly kept him off school, and a did-you-know? riff from Jack about a virus (in Africa, or somewhere) that caused your brain to swell so much it forced your eyeballs out of their sockets. In lessons, Alex did the bare minimum, which was in character for Flip anyway.

  By the end of last period, it was as though he’d never been away.

  All day, though—and all that week—the burden of being back there had weighed him down. He wasn’t resigned to living this life (not quite, not yet), but he was trapped in Flip’s world, with no idea how to escape, and the sheer effort of pretending to be someone he wasn’t was exhausting. Dispiriting, too. If the reckless optimism of his trip to Crokeham Hill had given way to frustration, that had now morphed into something worse: a kind of sullen self-pity. His mum would’ve said he was sulking. She’d have told him to grow up, to snap out of it, to count his blessings. All those things parents said to you that really, really helped. But there was one blessing, one flicker of light in the dark that had descended after Alex’s return from London:

  There was a living body—his body—waiting for him. And if a consciousness could switch bodies in one direction, it must be able to switch back again.

  * * *

  He had snuck himself away in the library after last period on Friday, as on every afternoon that first week back, using the backlog of homework as an excuse to avoid Flip’s girlfriends, and Flip’s mates, and to delay his return to the new caring-sharing Team Garamond household. At closing time, he stowed the books in his bag and headed for the exit. Holding the door open for him was Cherry Jones.

  “Oh … hi,” he said.

  “Hello,” she said back. Smiling, sort of, in that inscrutable way of hers.

  They headed out together, into the corridor. There’d been an awkwardness between them since he’d left the poetry in her locker—not that either of them had so much as mentioned it. “You going for a grade?” Alex said, watching Cherry slip a sheaf of sheet music into the bag.

  “No, we’ve got a concert on Monday. I need to get some practice in over the weekend.” She zipped the bag shut. “I play the cello.”

  “I know. You had it with you that time, in the car park.”

  “Anyway, what do you know about grades?” she said. Not nastily. It seemed more out of amused curiosity, like she was teasing him.

  He wanted to tell her he played the clarinet, but she was likely to know it wasn’t true, for Flip. Alex could picture Cherry playing, her skinny arm drawing the bow back and forth, chin dipped in concentration. “Do you enjoy it?” he asked, ignoring her question.

  “What, cello? Yeah, I do. I love it, actually.”

  He thought of his clarinet, on its stand in that bedroom in Crokeham Hill. “Is your mum picking you up?” he said as they headed outside, passing the wall where he’d seen her waiting before.

  “No, I’m busing it tonight.”

  Alex realized he had no idea where she lived. Or where her bus stop might be. But she appeared to be drifting in the same general direction as him, and they fell into step on the road that ran down towards the town center.

  “That was a laugh on Wednesday, in drama,” he said after a moment.

  “The improv? Yeah.” Cherry smiled. A proper one, this time.

  Drama hadn’t been his thing before—but as Flip, performing in front of others didn’t bother him. Was fun, in fact. The teacher had divided the class into twos, and each pair had taken turns to role-play using only gestures and facial expressions.

  “Carolyn was hilarious,” Alex said. Then, miming, he added, “It was meant to be ‘anger,’ wasn’t it? And Nick Trevor shouts out, ‘Constipation!’ ”

  “What about Reuben, though? How is this ever ‘grieving husband’?”

  So the impersonations continued as they walked down the hill, making each other laugh, until the ringing of Flip’s mobile intruded. It was the mum, checking up on him. She’d taken to phoning him from work around that time every afternoon, to ask after his day at school. Really she was establishing where he was. Reassuring herself that her son wasn’t on a train to London or dangling by his neck from a roof beam. Alex gave her the answers she needed. As he slipped the mobile back into his blazer pocket, he said, “How was that: Boy on Phone to Mum?”

  Cherry frowned. “Were you playing the boy or the mum?”

  He laughed. He thought the call might’ve broken the spell and everything would become clumsy again, but it hadn’t. It didn’t. “You’re funny,” he said.

  “Pecul
iar or ha-ha?”

  “Both.”

  “Oh, great. Thanks.” But she was amused more than offended, he could tell.

  “Peculiar, interesting,” he said. “Peculiar as in not dull or predictable.”

  “Peculiar as in weird, you mean.”

  “I didn’t say weird.”

  “I have a thesaurus in my bag,” she said. “Don’t make me get it out.”

  They’d almost reached the turning into Tyrol Place. He hadn’t planned what he said next; it just came out. “Do you … um.” He looked along the road, towards Flip’s house. “We could, I dunno, listen to music. If you like. Unless you have to get home.”

  “Philip—”

  “Or I could fetch the dog and we could walk him somewhere. Yeah?”

  “Philip, don’t.”

  “What?”

  “It’s been fun, walking home with you.…”

  “I can hear a ‘but’ coming.”

  “But you’re Flip Garamond. And Flip Garamond doesn’t date girls like me.”

  “What d’you mean, girls like you. What are you ‘like’?”

  “I’m not like Donna, am I? I’m not like Billie.”

  “I know you’re not. That’s the point.”

  She looked at him. Then she said, “I’m going, okay? My bus is in five minutes.”

  “Didn’t you feel it?” he said. “That time in the car park. And since?”

  “Does this work with the others?” she asked, clearly amused. “God, are girls so—”

  “What if I told you I wasn’t?”

  “Wasn’t what?”

  “Philip Garamond.”

  His heart felt like it had stopped beating. Cherry, though, just laughed. “Oh, what, like this is another piece of improv? Boy in Identity Crisis.”

  Alex backtracked, alarmed to have blurted it out like that. “Wouldn’t it be cool, though, if you could be someone different? You could act however you wanted.”