Flip (2 page)

He set the paper on the table and laid a hand on each thigh, digging his fingers into them, in the hope that they would stop shaking. They didn’t.

There had to be a mistake. There
had
to be.

But when Alex picked up the paper again, the date was the same as before.

Monday. June 23.

The woman reappeared just then in a fury of bony limbs and swishing dress. “
There
you are.” Then, “Oh, I don’t
believe
it, you haven’t
moved
. ”

Alex looked at her, afraid to blink in case the tears brimming his eyes spilled down his face.

“For God’s sake,” she said, “get a
grip
, Philip.”

It was shocking enough to wake up in a strange house, to discover that he’d aged six months overnight, to have a woman he’d never met before mistake him for her son.

But all that was a breeze compared to seeing himself in the bathroom mirror.

The woman had more or less hauled him up the stairs by the scruff of his neck, each of his protestations seeming only to spur her on to greater levels of wrath.

I’m not Philip.… I don’t even know who Philip is.… What’s going on? … You’re not my mother.… Who are you? … Where am I? … Let go of me.… My name’s Alex, Alex Gray.… I want to call my mum and dad.…

I’M NOT PHILIP!

Then, bundled into the bathroom, with the door shut and the giraffe-woman keeping guard the other side, Alex caught sight of his reflection.

Or rather, he caught sight of someone else’s reflection.

A boy about his age. A boy without freckles, or gingery-blond hair, or blond eyebrows so faint you could hardly see them; a boy without a small mole to one side of his Adam’s apple, without blue eyes, a chipped front tooth; a boy without a dimple in his chin. The face gazing back at Alex from the mirror was brown-eyed and tanned, with the stubbly beginnings of a mustache and dark hair cropped in the stylishly unkempt way that he could never get his own hair to go. The only blemish was a slight kink in his nose where, he assumed, it had once been broken. Alex ran a fingertip down the bridge of his own nose. The boy in the mirror did the same. Sure enough, Alex could feel the unevenness of the bone beneath his skin.

He stooped over the toilet and retched, splashing the bowl with undigested milk and cornflakes.

From the landing: “Philip, come on.”
Philip
.

He looked at his hands properly. They were too big. His arms as well; he had muscles. Black hairs on his forearms instead of pale ginger. The fingers were thicker, the nails slightly ridged. The pattern of veins on the backs of his hands was wrong. They
weren’t
his hands. Yet when he filled the basin and immersed those alien hands, his brain registered the sensation of warm water. When he bent over to wash the face that wasn’t his face, he felt the water splash against skin that wasn’t his skin. He straightened up again, blinking, watching the droplets trickle down mirror boy’s face and onto his T-shirt, which was becoming damp, just as Alex’s was.

It wasn’t possible. It absolutely could not be possible.

But there it was, literally staring him in the face. This boy was Philip.
He
was Philip. And if this was Philip—if
this
was what Alex looked like now—no wonder the woman, Philip’s mother, had flipped her lid at him for claiming he was someone else. No wonder she’d told him he was behaving like a seven-year-old.

I’m not Philip! You’re not my mother!
No wonder she didn’t believe him. What chance was there of her believing him now if he emerged from the bathroom and told her he was trapped inside her son?

He wasn’t sure he believed it himself. Kept hoping that the next time he stole a peek at his reflection, Philip’s features would be gone, replaced by his own.

But each time, Philip was still there.

Alex dried himself clumsily, shaking so much he dropped the towel. His legs were hairier and more muscular, too, he noticed. When he went to pee, he had the next shock. Two shocks at once: a) pubes; b) size. No. No way. It’d be like holding another boy’s thing for him while he peed. He did it sitting down, like a girl, hurriedly brushed his teeth and left the bathroom as quickly as he could so that he wouldn’t have to look at himself in the mirror any longer.

But the image wasn’t easily erased from his mind. Nor could he get rid of the thought that if he had—somehow, impossibly, incomprehensibly—woken up inside another boy’s body, with another boy’s face, then what had happened to his own? And what had happened to “Philip”? In Alex’s house, right now, was this other boy, Philip, staring into a mirror, just as Alex had been, in numbed disbelief at the face staring back at him? Was a woman who wasn’t his mum chivvying him off to school?

* * *

Outside in the street, in Philip’s school uniform (black blazer, not green; plain gray tie, not green and gray diagonal stripes), Alex watched Philip’s mother set off in her bright blue Punto for wherever it was she worked. No lift, then. She’d done her bit, hurrying him out the house—the rest was down to him. No problem there, apart from his having no idea which school to go to. Or where it was.

Not that it mattered. Alex had no intention of going to school that morning.

He fished Philip’s mobile from the blazer pocket. He’d spotted the phone on a shelf in the bedroom along with a handful of change and an expensive-looking watch, which he checked now. Eight-twenty-five. If it
was
a Monday, Dad would’ve already left for work and Mum would be dropping Sam at breakfast club before heading to work herself. Alex sat on the wall at the front of the house and switched on the phone. It was a slimmer, flashier model than his, but simple enough to figure out. The trouble was he didn’t know his parents’ mobile numbers by heart—they were logged in his own phone’s “contacts.” Same with Mum’s work number; Dad’s, he’d never been given. (Phoning Dad at work was strictly forbidden.) Alex knew the home number, naturally, but no one would be there to answer and any message wasn’t going to be picked up until the evening. So he dialed directory inquiries and got the number for the college where his mum worked, called that number and asked to be put through to the library. She didn’t start till nine but Alex could at least be sure of getting a message to her soonest this way.

Hearing her voice on the tape caught him unawares and he was too choked up to speak at first. Then, “Mum, hi, it’s Alex. I … I don’t know what’s happening or where I am or anything, but … I’m here. I’m okay. Can you call me back? Can you come and fetch me?” He lost it again for a moment. Once he’d composed himself, he explained that he was using someone else’s mobile and read out the number, which he’d found under “ME!” in Philip’s contacts. “Mum, I don’t understand any of this. I’m scared. I want … I want to come home.”

Alex wiped his face, took several deep breaths. Now what?

He looked at the watch again. If she checked the machine as soon as she got there, he had about half an hour to wait for her to return the call. He felt conspicuous, sitting outside in the street, but going back indoors wasn’t an option—he didn’t have a key to the house. He searched the blazer pockets. Nothing. Just a tissue, a Snickers wrapper and a blue Biro with its cap missing.

At that moment the mobile buzzed and Alex almost dropped it in surprise. A text message, not a call, but even so, he clicked “view” in the hope that it was from his mother. It wasn’t. The name that came up in the display was Donna.

hey sxy where u at!? u skivin off!? :-)

He closed the message. So, Philip had a girlfriend. Good for him.

In a moment of inspiration, it occurred to Alex to call his own mobile number. If some kind of body-swap had taken place, then maybe Philip had ahold of Alex’s phone. Worth a shot, anyway. But when Alex dialed, a voice message said the number wasn’t recognized. He tried again. Same result. How could that be?

He stared at the phone for a moment, then slipped it into his pocket.

Right
. Just sitting there was pointless. Shouldering Philip’s schoolbag, Alex set off down the street, not at all sure where he was headed, but needing to be headed somewhere. If Mum was going to collect him, he had to work out where he was.

Philip’s family lived in a terrace of old-looking four-story houses. Built of stone, not brick. Leafy front gardens, posh cars parked outside. At the T-junction at the bottom of the street, Alex randomly took a left onto a busier road. The view opened out and he saw that beyond the rooftops lay countryside. Fields, hills, trees, sheep. Not London, then. Unless this was out on the edges. Did he have enough money to make it home by himself, if it came to that? He rummaged in his pocket for Philip’s change. It’d pay for a bus ride, or tube fare, just about. There was a Tesco across the road and, beyond, a railway line. Cars cruised by but he hadn’t spotted a pedestrian yet. No one to ask
Excuse me, can you tell me where I am, please?
Actually, it was nice here, wherever “here” was. The buildings, with the sunlight on the stone; in the distance, the tops of the hills, purple and green beneath a clear sky. He was too warm in Philip’s blazer. It pulled him up short again with the reminder that it was
summer
now—June—not the damp, gray winter he’d left behind less than eleven hours earlier.

Half a year gone, in the space of a night’s sleep. Alex wished he
could
call his father. His rational explanation for this would’ve been interesting.

Thinking about Dad, he came close to tears again. If it was June here, it had to be June back home as well, which meant—didn’t it?—that he’d been “missing” for six months. Or in a time warp. For all he knew, his parents not only had no idea where he was but had been grieving for him since December.

Their lost son. Or was “Philip” their son now?

Alex thought he might break down right there in the street, but he didn’t. He held it together. Just. He’d been doing okay since he’d left the house. By concentrating on the practicalities of sorting this out—trying to ignore how he looked and the fact that it felt so
wrong
to walk around in this unfamiliar body—he’d managed to distract himself from whatever had happened. Managed to
be
Alex again, if only briefly. His thoughts were the same as always.
Alex
thoughts. The body might have been Philip’s but the mind was still his. On the inside, he didn’t feel any different at all. Except for the knowledge that something freakish and terrible had occurred. No matter how hard he tried to suppress that thought, it was there, nagging away at him.

After a few minutes, he came to a row of shops, then a car park and more shops, a post office, an Indian restaurant. A train station, with bays out front for buses. The sign outside the station said Litchbury.

Alex hadn’t heard of the place. He went over to the timetable board, where there was map of the local rail network. A few people were about, going into and out of the station or M&S Simply Food, or waiting for buses. Among these strangers, in this strange town, he was conscious of being an outsider, of acting suspiciously somehow, as though he was a spy in their midst. Not that anyone paid him much attention. To them, he was probably just a schoolboy bunking off. He studied the map. Litchbury was at the end of a line that ran into—he traced the route with his, with
Philip’s
, finger—Leeds.
Leeds
. Where was that? Somewhere up north. A long way from south London, anyway. His spirits dipped. He could have ended up anywhere, really, he supposed. Tokyo, Mumbai, Buenos Aires. Litchbury wasn’t too bad when you considered it like that. Even so, he thought of being this far from Mum, Dad and Sam, from where he belonged, and of how long it would take his mum to reach him.

And when she did …

He tried not to think about how he would convince her it really was him inside this body. Behind this face. Or even if she believed him, what she would be able to do to rescue him. To
reverse
this. How could she? How could anyone help him? Never mind
hours
, he might be stuck like this for days, weeks, months, years.

Forever.

The phone buzzed again. Fumbling it from his blazer, he opened the message.

Meet in Smoothies after skl? cu there Bx
.

This one was from Billie.
Two
girlfriends.

To pass the time until Mum returned his call, he parked himself on a bench outside the station and opened Philip’s schoolbag. In the rush to leave the house, the bag had been shoved into his hands by the giraffe-woman as she had bundled him out the door. What was in there? Keys to the house, maybe. Money. Packed lunch (having brought up his breakfast, Alex was hungry). Some clues, perhaps, to who Philip was. Of all the billions of people in the world, Alex had wound up as
him
. He couldn’t help thinking it wasn’t just down to chance—that there had to be a reason, some connection that had paired them together like this.

Alex opened the various compartments and set the contents down beside him on the bench. The results were disappointing. A waterproof coat, rolled up tight; schoolbooks (maths, history, French); a school planner; another Snickers wrapper; pens, pencils, ruler, eraser, sharpener; a calculator; an iPod; a fixture list for Yorkshire County Cricket Club; a lighter; a pack of playing cards; a one-gigabyte memory stick; deodorant (Lynx); hair gel; breath-freshener spray; a twopence coin; a dried-out apple core; a half-finished tube of Polos; a young person’s travel pass; four elastic bands; two paper clips; a mobile phone top-up card; another Snickers wrapper; and finally, a small key (for his locker?) on a key ring in the shape of a pair of breasts.

Alex popped a mint, binned the apple core and wrappers and methodically put everything else back into the bag except for the planner, the iPod and the playing cards. There was something odd about the box; it was too light to contain a deck of cards. He flipped the lid. Cigarettes. Well, that explained the foul taste in his mouth when he’d woken up. It also explained the lighter, the Polos and the breath freshener. He’d never smoked, apart from half a cigarette at a party, just to give it a try. But even if he’d liked it (which he hadn’t), smoking wasn’t a good idea for an asthmatic. It occurred to Alex that he didn’t
have
asthma now. He inhaled—deeply, no hint of a wheeze—and let the air back out in one long blow.