Rob, Jack and Alex were treading water, watching them.
“Come on, laydeeez,” Jack said. “Don’t be shy.”
“Stop looking!” Emma yelled—half cross, half embarrassed—as her knickers, then her bra, became transparent.
The chill of the water was shocking. Alex’s legs numbed and his breath came in gasps but the swimming soon warmed him. Ducking and splashing, the handstands and forward rolls and backward flips; the bodysurfing; Donna clinging to his shoulders in a piggyback race with Jack and Emma; then all of them taking turns to swim through one another’s legs (and Rob surfacing with Jack’s boxer shorts). Alex’s wrist hurt with each stroke but he swam through the pain, enjoying himself too much to care. And he found that he could swim—strong, sure and fast. As Alex, he hadn’t learnt till he was twelve, and he had never been confident in the water. Now he was in his element, driving himself through the waves as though they offered no resistance.
When, one by one, the others returned to shore, Alex stayed out there. Twenty minutes, half an hour. Swimming back and forth, parallel to the beach—front crawl, breast-stroke, backstroke, butterfly—until his lungs burned and his shoulders ached and his skin tingled with the cold and with the coursing of his blood.
At last, he stopped. Trod water while he got his breath back.
Facing the beach, he saw that he had drifted quite a way out. Not dangerously so, but far enough to be unable to identify his four companions among the people who speckled the sand like figures in an impressionist painting. Children’s cries and laughter carried to him on the breeze. The dragon kite was still there, pinned to the sky like a badge on a bright blue shirt. The sun hung over the dunes, still high but beginning its long arc towards the day’s end, casting a liquid silver sheen over the surface of the sea.
Alex had never felt so alive. Right here, in this moment. But more generally, too. Since that first morning when he’d woken up as Flip—he realized now, with the force of a revelation—he had been more self-aware, more acutely sensitive to everything around him, than he had ever been before, as Alex. Each smell, taste, touch, sound, sight, each impression and sensation, each minute of each day was sharper and more intense. In his old existence, he’d pretty much trundled along, barely registering the detail of his life in all its fantastic minutiae, or taking it for granted. Now, as he lived inside Flip, each single, tiny, ordinary flicker of being fizzed through him.
If he ever managed to return to his own body, Alex promised himself he would try to live like that.
He swam back and rejoined the others. They were drying off in the sunshine—Jack attempting to juggle with three beer-bottle tops; Emma and Donna listening to an iPod, one earpiece each; Rob lying on his back, gazing up at the sky, hands behind his head. As Alex approached, they gave him a round of applause.
Jack put on an American accent. “He has the speed of a dolphin, the strength of a shark—”
“The reproductive organ of a whale,” Rob cut in, and the rest of them laughed. Alex, too. He shook his head, showering them all with water droplets.
“Good swim?” Rob asked.
Alex beamed, stretching out in the warm sand and shuttering his eyes against the sun. “The best,” he said. “The absolute best.”
At some point, he must’ve dozed off, because when he woke up, he and Donna were by themselves. She was leaning over him, kissing him.
“Sleeping beauty,” she said.
“Where’s Rob and the others?”
He tried to sit up but she put a hand on his chest and pressed him back down. Emma was suffering text withdrawal, Donna said, and had gone up into the dunes to try to find a mobile signal. Rob had bought a football from the kiosk and was having a kick-about with Jack.
“So it’s just the two of us.” She smiled. Kissed him some more.
When, at last, she let him come up for air, Alex looked at her face, studying it. Lovely. Flawless, really. If Penélope Cruz had a kid sister, she would look like Donna. Earlier, during Alex and Rob’s private moment, Rob told him he’d “won the bloody lottery” with Flip’s girlfriend. But he was talking about looks. Eyes. Face. Hair. Body. Boobs. The coffee-colored skin. The clothes she wore, the way she did her makeup. Those neat white teeth in that dazzling smile. The kiss-me lips. It was all surface.
Two brains, one in each tit.
That was unfair, actually, Teri’s comment. Now that Alex knew Donna better, he saw that she wasn’t unintelligent so much as lacking in curiosity. She learnt what was required of her at school but wasn’t all that interested in any of the subjects beyond their usefulness to her as a set of grades somewhere down the line. Same with people. When she’d asked Rob about the camper van, it was the first time Alex had seen her show an especial interest in someone else’s life, and even then, Donna had related it to herself. I’d get claustrophobic.
So when Rob had marveled at Alex’s luck, his lottery win, Alex had told him, “There’s a girl at school I like a lot better.”
“She’s not here, though, is she?” Rob said, with that grin.
“And Donna is.”
She was. They were kissing again; it was all they could do, because whenever they spoke, they had little to say to one another.
Two or three beers earlier, it might have bothered him enough to stop. But Alex couldn’t blame it all on the drink. He liked it, the kissing.
“I’m starving,” Donna said when they were kissed out and had sat up to watch Jack and Rob playing football down the beach, where the retreating tide had exposed a strip of flat sand. They’d been joined by half a dozen teenagers—male and female—and some younger kids. Rob was organizing them into teams, marking out the goals.
“He’s like the Pied Piper,” Alex said, smiling. “There’ll be thirty of us heading back in that van, if he carries on like this.”
Donna laughed. She had one arm round his shoulders, her other hand cradling his injured wrist. The bandages were grubby brown and damp and had worked loose. She pressed her lips to his ear, as she had done that time in the classroom on Alex’s second morning at Litchbury High.
“I do love you, Philip Garamond. You know that, don’t you?”
Barely more than a whisper. Barely words at all but soft warm breath.
Alex kept his gaze on the football. “This morning,” he said quietly, “what did we ‘need’ to talk about?”
She became still beside him. The hand that had been caressing his wrist fell away, into her own lap. It didn’t matter now, she told him. Bumping into Jack and Emma on the way into town to meet him, then with Rob being there, and heading off to Scarborough … well, the reason for seeing him had sort of got lost in all that.
Rob was waving in their direction, calling for them to join the game.
“It was nothing, anyway,” Donna said.
“I thought you were going to—”
Donna placed a finger against his lips. “It’s been fun today,” she said. “Don’t spoil it, eh?” Her eyes pleaded with him, searching his for some kind of reassurance. “I mean, this is great, isn’t it? Coming here like this, with Rob. It’s been such a brilliant, awesome day. And us, you know? You. The way you’ve been.”
“How’ve I been?” Alex said, frowning. His mouth tasted of salt, from when she’d touched him; his lips, the tip of his tongue were gritty with sand.
“Like … I dunno.” She shrugged. “It’s like I’ve got my old Flip back.”
By the time they got back to Litchbury, it was dusk, the van reeked of fish-and-chips and Alex was so drunk Rob had to help him down from the passenger seat. He was the last to be dropped off. Rob had pulled up at the corner of Tyrol Place.
“Probably best if your folks don’t see me,” he said.
Alex steadied himself. Focused on the front door of number 20. The keys were in his hand—how had that happened? Rob, it must’ve been Rob put them there—and all he had to do was place one foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other.
“Seey
a,” he said, aiming a back slap but not all that sure he connected.
In the morning Alex would wonder where Rob had parked for the night, picturing him asleep in the back of that combi in some lay-by or caravan site or some dingy lorry park. In the morning Alex would have a hazy memory of the photograph he had glimpsed in Rob’s wallet when the guy had paid for everyone at the chip shop. Emma had seen it, too.
“Who’s the girl?” she’d asked.
For a nanosecond Rob had stiffened; then, relaxing again, he’d flashed her the saddest smile and said, “Lisa.” Just that. Lisa.
“The girl you left behind?”
“Yep.” He folded the wallet away. “The girl I left behind.”
In the morning all this would come to Alex, but just then, it was as much as he could do to stagger up the hill towards the house. He did recall something Rob had said to him, though, as the other three had slept off the booze on the long drive home. At the gate Alex turned to call it back to him, his voice echoey in the quiet.
“Seize the day, eh, mate—seize the bloody day.”
Rob was still there, at the end of the street, seeing Alex home safe. He raised a hand, gave Alex the thumbs-up. Then melted away into the gloom.
Alex was on his way to school the next morning when his mobile rang. It was Rob.
“So, Alex, my man, how you feeling?”
“Rough.”
“How rough, scale of one to ten?”
Alex groaned into the phone by way of an answer.
“Twelve, eh? Nice one.”
“I am in so much shit with Flip’s folks,” Alex said. “They thought I’d gone to London again … then I stagger in at whatever time and puke all down the hall.”
“Carpet or floorboards?”
“Floorboards.”
“So what’s their problem?”
Alex laughed despite himself. “Me. I’m their problem.”
“If you were their son, you’d be their problem—but you’re not, so you can do whatever you like.”
“Seize the day.”
“Exactly, seize the bloody day.”
“They’re nice people, Rob. They don’t deserve this.”
There was a moment’s silence at the other end of the line. Then Rob said, “My folks are nice, too. They had three and a bit years of their ‘son’ going strange on them and then he takes off to England, just like that. But the thing is, Alex, even if I was their son, they still wouldn’t own me.”
“You’re twenty-two. I’m not even fifteen till October.”
Alex had reached the school gates. He stood against the fence, away from the stream of pupils, yawned, wondered if he was about to be sick again. His head felt as though someone had tightened a belt around his brain. Rob was apologizing; he hadn’t called for a quarrel.
“It was a good day, though, wasn’t it?” he said.
Alex smiled. Said it was. Then, “Rob, did you ever have nightmares? After you switched, I mean.”
“What sort of nightmares?”
Alex told him about them. “I was starting to think they must be some kind of flashback to the hit-and-run accident, you know?” he said. “But I had one last night and it was different from all the others. Like, I know I was drunk and that, but …”
He described the latest dream. In this one he was imprisoned in a chamber or tomb of some kind. Floating, as though weightless. He saw nothing but utter darkness. Smelled nothing. Touched nothing. The only texture was the icy dampness of the air on his skin. But there was pain: countless sharp tugs at his insides as though hordes of mice trapped inside him were gnawing their way out, scrabbling away with their teeth and tiny claws. There was noise, too: appalling shrieks and howls that sounded as though they came from the air itself. If you leapt from the tallest skyscraper, this would be your mind’s last scream as you plummeted to the ground.
He heard Rob exhale. “No, mate, I never had anything like that. I dreamt a lot before, as Chris, but I don’t at all now. No nightmares. No flashbacks to when I got stabbed. It’s like that part of my unconscious got erased.”
“I went through the archives on the PE Web site,” Alex said, “and none of the evacuees talk about having nightmares after they switched. So what is it about me?”
Before Rob could answer, the bell sounded.
“Listen, I have to go into school.”
“Oh, okay. I just wanted to check you were okay … apart from hangovers and puke-stained halls and terrible nightmares.”
Alex could hear a shushing noise in the background. “Where are you, anyway?”
“In a car park where overnight camping isn’t allowed.”
“It sounds like the sea.”
“That’ll be the wind in the trees. Or the sound of my brain rehydrating.”
“I can’t believe you drove back from Scarborough after all that beer.”
“Hey, Alex, when you’ve already died once and lived to tell the tale, you get a bit reckless about things like drink-driving.”
It was probably an aftereffect of the San Miguel, but Alex had woken up from the nightmare feeling weak, drained—as though the imaginary ripping at his insides was actually causing him to lose blood. He still felt woozy, heading into school.
The more he analyzed the dreams, the less sense they made. Of course, dreams hardly ever made sense. In fact, dreams didn’t really exist, as such; they were a product of the mind. Like a movie—just beams of light on a screen; switch off the projector and the images were gone. Dreams were like the mind itself, in a way: nothing to get hold of, to weigh, to measure, to record. You knew you dreamed, you knew you had consciousness, but only because your mind said so. To look at it like that, the mind was a product of the mind. Neurons.
That was Mrs. Reaney’s opinion. Science, first period. Once she’d overcome her surprise at being asked for a scientific definition of the mind (by Philip Garamond, of all people, and in the middle of a lesson on plant photosynthesis), the teacher got to grips with the question.
“If by ‘mind’ you mean the, um, seat of human consciousness,” she said, “then I would say that what makes us who we are is our neural activity: the messages passing back and forth between the brain’s nerve cells.”
“The mind is just a bunch of cells, then?” Alex said.
“Well, yes, cells and synapses and the chemical neurotransmitters that carry the information. And, Philip”—the teacher smiled—“when you say ‘just a bunch of cells,’ don’t forget there are more than one hundred billion neurons in the human brain.”
Mrs. Reaney was in one of the woven smock things that she always wore. For a science teacher, she did a good impression of an ageing hippie—right down to the dangly sun-pendant necklace. She knew her stuff, though. And when one or two of the other pupils sniggered in the background at the exchange between her and Alex, she silenced them with a look that could slam a door from ten meters.
Noting the frown on Alex’s face, she elaborated: “The patterns of thought and cognition and memory and, um, self-awareness and so on that go on inside your brain, and yours alone, are what make you the unique individual that you are.”
“Cells and chemicals,” Alex said.
“That would be my scientific definition, yes.” She shuffled the papers on her desk, as a hint, probably, that they ought to get back to photosynthesis.
“So what about the soul? Are the mind and the soul the same thing?”
“Ah, well, the soul—”
“Only I’m thinking that if they are just two ways of saying the same thing, then when we die, our souls must die, too. Mustn’t they, miss, if they’re just cells and chemicals? No heaven or hell or anything like that. No reincarnation.”
More sniggering. Mrs. Reaney ignored it. “Of course, if you’re after a more, um, theological explanation, Philip,” she said, smiling again, “you should speak to Mr. McQueen.” Then, turning to the others, she asked, “What do the rest of you think? Paul—yes you, Paul—how would you define your unique inner
essence?”
Before the boy could answer, a voice called out, “Ninety percent Big Mac!”
Alex did speak to Mr. McQueen, after tracking the religious studies teacher down in the staff room at morning break. Standing there in the doorway—so tall he had to stoop beneath the frame, and with a mug of tea in one hand and a half-eaten digestive biscuit in the other—he seemed not to mind the interruption.
The soul and the mind were not the same thing at all, in his opinion. Although, he had to point out that different faiths had different ideas about the nature of the soul—and the mind, for that matter—and given that they were both abstract concepts, none of us could say with any certainty … and so on. As for where souls went at death and how they got there, Mr. McQueen set off on another global tour of belief systems, tying himself in knots in his attempt not to set one particular theory above any other.
“Mrs. Reaney reckons it’s just neurons,” Alex said.
“Reckons what is just neurons?”
“The soul.”
“Does she?” Mr. McQueen laughed. Raised the remaining half of his biscuit. “In that case, I no longer feel guilty about stealing one of her digestives.”
Whether it was the smell of the tea or the biscuit, or the reek of overheated school corridor, or the previous day’s drinking binge coming back to haunt him, Alex wasn’t sure, but he suddenly broke out in a hot-and-cold sweat.
“Thank you, sir,” he managed to say. Trembling. Nauseous. His vision blurred, pulling the teacher in and out of focus.
“Are you all right, Philip?” Mr. McQueen formed a frown of concern. “You look very panda-eyed this morning. You look awful, actually.”
“No, I’m okay. I’m … fine.”
But as Alex turned away, his head felt like it had been split by an ax; a searing pain brought with it the cold black screech of his nightmare.
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