They fell quiet. The ducks began to drift away, realizing that there was no food for them. Alex found himself thinking about his vision, and about Flip. Not the physical Flip but the other one, the one who had been consigned to the body of a boy in PVS.
“Cherry, do you think you could ever … kill someone?”
She gave him a sidelong look. “D’you make a habit of this?” she said, half hiding a smile. “Luring girls to a secluded spot, then talking about murder?”
Alex watched the scribble of midges under the willow across the river. “Could you, though? If you really had to.”
“Yeah, I guess.” Cherry leaned forward to rub Beagle’s back; he shifted onto his side to let her at his belly. “If my life depended on it. Or, you know, if I was a mother and they were going to kill my baby.” Then, shrugging, she added, “But everyone says that, don’t they? Like killing’s there inside us and we just have to flick a switch.”
“You don’t think it’s that simple?” Really he wanted to ask Cherry about the difference between a conscious decision and an instinctive, unconscious act. Between killing someone’s soul and killing someone’s body. But how could he ask her things like that?
She sat back. Beagle twisted his head to look at her, as though to say, Hey, don’t stop. “Most things aren’t simple, are they?” she said. “Not if you think about them hard enough.”
This was too heavy a conversation for a first date. He saw that now, a little late. Was this a first date? She was here with him—that had to mean something.
“Hey,” Cherry said brightly—making an effort, it seemed, to lift the mood. “Have you ever done that thing where you sit and talk back to back?”
Alex shook his head. What they had to do, she said, was sit on the grass, cross-legged, facing away from one another, with their backs pressed together.
“Come on, it’s easier to show you.”
They sat, wriggling into position until they were in contact all the way down their spines. Beagle, mildly curious, lay there watching them. The warmth from Cherry’s back spread into Alex’s like a glow.
“Now what?” he said.
“We talk.”
“What about?”
“We have to find that out,” Cherry said. “What we say when we can’t see each other’s faces. Also, the way the words feel, yeah? The vibrations from my back to yours and yours to mine. Can you feel it now?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I can.” It was as though when Cherry spoke, the words passed from her body directly into his, like something physical—so that he felt them as well as heard them—or as though he would be able to absorb their meaning through his skin even if he covered his ears to block out the sounds they made.
So they sat like that, back to back. And they talked and talked and talked.
The time came for Cherry to catch the bus home. Alex and Beagle walked with her along the riverside path towards town. It was only as they approached the foot of the steps that Alex saw the vehicle parked on the bridge, its driver looking their way.
Rob, in his VW combi.
“How many girlfriends do you have, exactly?”
“She’s the one I told you about.”
“The one you like a lot better than Donna?”
Alex nodded. “Anyway, she’s not my g—”
“Well, Alex, my man, I have to hand it to you—you are seizing that day.” Rob laughed, gave Alex’s thigh a loud slap.
Beagle growled. Alex couldn’t tell if the dog was being protective; it seemed unlikely given that just a moment before, Beags had nipped him when he’d helped the fat old pooch up into the back of the camper van. Rob had brewed tea and set the mugs on a fold-down table between two narrow seats. At night, he said, they pushed together to make a bed. Cherry had passed on the offer of tea but had chatted easily with Rob before heading off to catch her bus and leaving Alex and his “cousin” to it.
“She seems nice,” Rob said.
“She is.” Alex took a sip. The tea bag was still in there.
“I could tell how you feel about her just by your body language out there.” He nodded out the window at the riverside path below. “You can’t hide things like that.”
“Rob, you’ve really got to stop stalking me.”
Alex was joking and Rob appeared to take it that way. “I see myself as your mentor in this post-evacuated psychic existence,” he said, like an actor deliberately overacting. “I am your guardian angel. As long as I am watching over you, no—”
“What am I meant to do with this?” Alex held the tea bag up by one corner.
Rob took the bag from him and dropped it into a small bin under the sink. As he sat back down, he said, “So, you’re back in the land of the living again?”
After his illness, he meant. Alex had told him about that, and about how low he’d been brought by it and by the run of things that had happened to him that week. The typical, all-too-familiar mood swings of the new PE, was how Rob saw it.
“One day you feel great, like you’ve got a whole new lease on life—the next day you’re so far down you could top yourself.” Rob ran his fingers through his fake-yellow hair, causing it to spike up even more than usual.
“Did you ever think about that?” Alex asked. “Topping yourself.”
Rob held his gaze. “Alex, there isn’t a psychic evacuee who hasn’t.”
That shut them both up for a while. They sat opposite one another, drinking tea, listening to Beagle’s breathing. The combi was surprisingly clean and smart; Alex had only been in the driver’s cabin before and had imagined the living quarters to be a squalid bachelor-pad pit. It was immaculate. It smelled of air freshener. The curtains were tied back with bows. The only things which hadn’t been tidied away on shelves or in cupboards were that day’s Independent, its sections in a neat pile on the seat next to Alex, and an expensive-looking laptop (shut) that occupied one end of the table. Rob’s link to the world and to the PE forum. Odd to think that Alex had assumed that the first e-mail from Corb1959 had come from New Zealand when, in fact, it had been sent from the back of this camper van or some Internet café wherever Rob happened to have parked up during what he called his grand tour of the homeland.
“I’ve been thinking,” Alex said.
“Oh, now, that’s always a mistake.”
Alex ignored that. “About Flip,” he said. “And these … nightmares I’ve been having. I think they’re him.”
“You think the nightmares are Flip?”
“Yes.” He searched Rob’s expression to see if he was being taken seriously, and saw that he was. “I think they’re his soul, his psyche, tracking my soul—hunting me down. Grabbing at me, you know? Trying to rip me out of his body.”
Rob didn’t say anything. His eyes never left Alex’s face.
“And those screams,” Alex went on, “are Flip’s soul, howling. In pain, in rage. Terrified. Screaming to be released from my body and let back into his own.” The words came in a breathless rush now. “I’m killing him, Rob. I’m killing Flip’s soul.”
Rob rubbed his palms together. Lowered his gaze. “You can’t know that,” he said. “The nightmares … okay, you feel bad—you feel terrible—about what’s happened to Flip’s psyche. All PEs go through that.” He looked at Alex again. “But you’re projecting your guilt onto those dreams, making a story out of them.”
“That vision, when I fainted,” Alex said. “What if it was real? What if, for a second or two, Flip managed to reel me right back into my own body?”
“Alex—”
“I was there, on that bed, looking up at my mum.”
Rob shook his head. “You want to believe it. That’s what you want to believe.”
“Flip’s dying and he won’t go without a fight. It’s his last desperate attempt to save himself. To get back to his own body.” Alex jolted the table as he leaned forward, slopping tea from the two mugs. “We switched back, Rob. Just for a moment. That’s possible, isn’t it? Why isn’t that pos
sible?”
Rob got up, fetched a dishcloth. “It’s possible,” he said. “Of course it is.”
But Alex could tell he didn’t really believe it had happened. “It’s like I found a tunnel,” Alex said, “a—a—a secret passage back to my own body. Or Flip did, anyway.”
He watched Rob lift each mug in turn to wipe the table. Suddenly furious, Alex sent one of the mugs spinning across the van in a spiraling arc of tea. It hit a wall and clattered to a halt by the door, miraculously unbroken. Beagle stood and barked; then, as though kissing it better, began licking the tea-splattered wall.
“I don’t want a mentor, Rob! I don’t want a bloody guardian angel.… I want to go back. I want you to help me go back to being Alex.”
Rob sat down, his expression unreadable. The silence carried an echo of Alex’s outburst, like the aftershock of a bomb. Alex couldn’t believe what he’d just done. His hands shook with the excitement. When, at last, Rob spoke, his tone was unemotional.
“What are you doing tomorrow, Alex?”
“Tomorrow? Nothing.”
“I’ll pick you up at the station at ten.” He stared at the mug, as though trying to figure out how it could’ve got all the way over there. “I have something to show you.”
The combi was already there, illegally parked in a bus bay, when Alex turned up. Rob set aside the newspaper he was reading and popped the passenger door to let him in.
“You aim to throw things around in here today,” Rob said, “please try not to do it while I’m driving.”
Alex pulled the seat belt across, clicked it into place. “Look, Rob, I’m sor—”
“You’re sorry about that. Yeah, yeah.” He started the engine, shifted the van into gear and pulled out of the station without indicating or looking. A horn sounded behind them. Rob ignored it. “Know one of the things I did, back in Dunedin—this was about two weeks post-switch?” He glanced at Alex, grinning. “I chucked Rob’s folks’ TV clean through the window. And I mean through the window.”
“Seriously?”
“Didn’t even bother to unplug it first.”
Alex laughed, then clung on to the door handle as Rob lurched into a turn. There were drinks (nonalcoholic) and packs of sandwiches, Rob told him, patting the cool-box on the seat between them. “Where are you, officially?” he asked.
“I’ve gone to the cricket at Headingley, with Jack.”
Rob nodded. That was good, gave them plenty of time. “Mind if I smoke?” he said, lighting up anyway. He opened the driver’s-side window and Alex had to raise his voice above the noise of the breeze and the traffic.
“So, where are we going?”
Rob gave him another grin. “Manchester, my friend. We’re off to Manchester.”
They parked in a leafy neighborhood to the south of the city. Rob had said no more about the trip. With music on the radio and the volume cranked up, they’d not talked much at all on the way over. Manchester was where Rob had lived as Chris. Where he had died, too. Alex knew that much. Why he’d been taken there, he had no idea.
Rob shut the engine off. Sat there, looking out the windscreen.
“What now?” Alex said.
“We wait.”
“What for?”
“We wait for what we’re waiting for.”
Rob had parked under a tree, its branches hanging so low the van was almost hidden. He opened the cool-box and shared out the picnic. They ate. Listened to the radio. Rob smoked. Alex started conversations which didn’t really get anywhere. An hour or so passed in this way. It was a quiet residential street, semidetached houses facing one another across front gardens that looked like entries in a flower-growing contest. Few cars came by and even fewer pedestrians. One or two people were out in their gardens: mowing a lawn, trimming a hedge. The usual. It was one of those dead summer Sundays.
Then Rob sat up a little straighter in the driver’s seat. Leaned forward over the steering wheel. Turned off the radio. Alex followed his gaze.
At one of the houses, a hundred meters or more away, a man in a checked short-sleeved shirt, shorts and sandals had come out to the driveway and was setting himself up to wash the car that stood there. A silver Passat. They watched him in silence. He did a thorough job, breaking off only to disappear inside to refill the red plastic bucket. His white legs looked thin in those baggy shorts. By the time he produced a hose to rinse off the suds, a woman had appeared. She’d brought him a cup of tea or coffee. She was plump, shortish. She spoke to him for a moment, then waved and called out to a woman in the garden next door. The two women laughed. The man shut the water off. Set the end of the hose on the ground. Stood, sipping his tea.
“That’s your mum and dad, isn’t it?” Alex said.
“Not mine. Chris’s.”
“That’s what I meant.”
“Is it?” He was wearing sunglasses, although it was overcast. He needed a shave. Like his elbow, the area around his stubble looked sore and flaky. “Bill and Jane,” Rob said, returning his attention to the couple up the road. “He runs his own business making and selling pine furniture; she works part-time as a legal secretary. They have two daughters, both at university.”
“I didn’t know you had—”
“They also had a son. But he died, stabbed while he was out with his girlfriend, celebrating their A-level results. That was four years ago. Now look at them.” Rob pointed in their direction. The man had resumed hosing down the car; the woman had gone to the fence to talk to the neighbor. “They wash their car. Drink tea. Chat with the folk next door. In a bit, they’ll go inside for Sunday dinner. A roast. Then Bill will sit in his armchair and do the Observer crossword and Jane will watch an old film on TV or e-mail her sister in Canada or read a novel for her book group.”
Alex let him finish.
“They move on, Alex,” he said, turning to him. “They live their lives, without their son. He’s dead. Gone.” His knuckles were white from gripping the steering wheel. “The thing that left Chris that night, the thing that ended up in Rob … it’s not Chris. It’s not their son. It’s something, someone else.”
Rob was always so laid back that his sudden intensity startled Alex. He seemed angry, the anger all the more disturbing for being so contained—just words, punched out one after another like nails from a nail gun. He didn’t even raise his voice. If Alex hadn’t been afraid of Rob before, when he was that strange guy in a leather jacket, he was finding him scary now, for all that they’d become friends.
“Why do you hate them so much?” Alex asked after a moment.
The question seemed to release Rob’s tension. He let go of the wheel and slumped back in his seat. “I don’t,” he said quietly. “I hate what I’ve become to them.”
Up the road, Chris’s parents had both disappeared back indoors, the Passat gleaming on the driveway. The man, Alex noticed, had left his mug on the doorstep.
“There’s a pub a few miles from here,” Rob said, flicking his cigarette stub out the window. “We could go there, if you like. Nice. Beer garden, good food. There’s this girl works there at weekends. Twenty-two. Attractive. It’s only part-time, to bring in some cash while she completes her MA, but she works hard, you know? Scurrying around those outside tables, collecting glasses and plates, taking down orders, bringing out food and drink. She’s friendly. Always smiling. The punters like her.” He lights up another cigarette, draws the smoke in deep and breathes it out. “Then, at the end of her shift, her boyfriend picks her up in his little blue Peugeot. She jumps in, gives him a kiss and a hug—I don’t know how long they’ve been dating, but they’ve moved in together and you can tell they’re in love. It’s in their eyes, the way they touch.” He turned to Alex. “What d’you reckon, Alex? Shall we go and watch her at the pub? Or maybe we could park up across the road from their flat and wait for them to come home?”
Alex didn’t say anything. He had a sick feeling in his stomach.
Rob reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out h
is wallet, flipped it open. “This is her,” he said, showing Alex the photograph he’d caught a glimpse of before, that time in the chip shop on the way home from Scarborough. “Lisa, she’s called. I took this with a telephoto lens, but you can’t really tell.”
“You said she was the girl you left behind,” Alex said, trying to keep his voice steady. “In New Zealand, I thought you meant.”
“I did leave her behind. That night in Manchester, in the back of an ambulance, while I was bleeding to death. She’s holding my hand, my blood all over her. Sobbing her heart out. The paramedic is doing his best but there must be something in his body language that tells her the score. Hang on, Chris, she’s saying. I love you so much. Please hang on.” Rob closed the wallet, put it back into his pocket. “But I didn’t hang on, did I?”
Rob let himself out, walked round to the rear of the combi. Alex felt the vehicle shift on its suspension as he climbed aboard. In a moment, Rob was back in the driver’s seat with an orange folder on his lap. He took out a sheaf of newspaper cuttings.
“Here,” he said, handing them to Alex.
There was the word, in the headlines: “Stalker.” There was a photograph of Rob. Other pictures: of the girl, Lisa; of Bill and Jane.
Alex read the articles.
“I’m in breach of the restraining order just by being here,” Rob said when Alex had finished. “If they saw me”—he indicated the house they’d been watching—“and called the police, I’d be locked away for sure this time.”
Alex handed the cuttings back to Rob, who filed them away again. “Why did you bring me here, Rob?” He nodded at the folder. “Why did you show me those?”
“You still don’t get it?”
“I’m not dead, Rob. ‘Alex’ is still alive. My mum and dad haven’t moved on with their lives. I am hanging on.” Then, hesitating to say it: “I’m not like you.”
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