They let him sleep in. It had been a little more than forty-eight hours since he’d left; it felt more like forty-eight days, but also like he hadn’t been away at all.
So much for never setting foot in this house again.
When Alex went downstairs, Flip’s father was in the living room with Beagle, watching tennis. Alex stood in the doorway, unsure of the reception he would get. The dog lifted his chin from the armrest, barked once, then lowered it again and carried on wheezing. The dad, newspapers strewn about him on the sofa, sat up like he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t. He was baggy-eyed and unkempt after the long drive to south London the previous morning, the long drive back again; Alex reckoned that Mr. Garamond (Mrs., too) hadn’t slept much the past two nights. All on account of him.
“Morning,” Alex said.
“Afternoon.” Flip’s dad muted the TV. “What’s with the growling?” he asked, addressing Beagle. “You can’t understand the commentary anyway.”
“He likes the sound of their voices,” Alex said. “And when the crowd claps.”
He stayed where he was, neither inside the room nor outside. He didn’t know if it was true, what he’d said about the dog. It was something to say; that was all. Better that than a silence, straining under the weight of Your Trip to London. There hadn’t been much said on the journey north the night before, just occasional exchanges that didn’t really lead anywhere, mixed in with periods of stunned silence. By the time they got back to Tyrol Place, it was too late; they were all too bushed.
The talking would come that day. Not right then, though.
“Remember that holiday in Norfolk—the cottage with the tennis court?” the dad said. “Beagle, sitting there by the net like he was the umpire.”
Of course Alex had no such memory, but smiled all the same. Flip’s dad was perched forward on the sofa, hands clasped. Trying so hard to keep it “normal.” It was as though Alex—that is, Philip—was a soldier invalided home from war with some terrible psychological trauma.
“Where … where’s Mum?” Mum. He’d managed to say it.
“In the back garden, I think. Weeding.”
They stared at the television screen, at the players moving silently about. “I’ll go down,” Alex said. “Make myself some breakfast. Lunch, whatever.”
“Okay. Okay, then.” Mr. Garamond looked almost relieved.
Alex lingered in the doorway. The urge to apologize surfaced, but he had said sorry so often he was sick of hearing himself say it. Instead, he said thank you.
A frown. “What for?”
The dad laughed awkwardly. “We couldn’t exactly leave you there, could we?”
That had swung it for him, the Garamonds’ pitching up the way they had.
Alex had been in the Crokeham Hill police station for hours by then and the cops’ tough line was showing no sign of softening. When Flip’s folks arrived, smartly turned out, well spoken and parentally concerned—profusely apologetic, deeply ashamed on their son’s behalf—the police became less hard-nosed. The Garamonds were decent people; anyone could see that. Middle-class professionals. Bewildered by what Philip had done, mortified by it—to think that a child of theirs … and so on. By association with them, Alex became a little less loathsome. Before, he’d just been some no-mark northern teenage hoodie (minus the hood) who had a bashed-up mouth and looked like he’d been sleeping rough. A piece of scum who’d pestered—stalked—the family and friends of that poor lad. That answering machine message at Mrs. Gray’s work (the cops had found out about it by then); those e-mails to David Bell, then Alex’s confronting him on the way to school; Alex’s tricking his way into the Grays’ home. What kind of boy did that? He hadn’t even cooperated at first—said he couldn’t remember his parents’ names, their phone numbers or where they worked. They’d wanted to nail him for something—harassment, gaining entry by deception, malicious falsehood, anything.
Then the report came through from West Yorkshire that the cops up there had never had trouble with Philip Garamond; he went to a reputable school, was generally well thought of by staff and popular with other kids—star of the cricket team—and had a good disciplinary record. The head teacher vouched for him unreservedly. While Crokeham Hill police were still trying to match that version of the boy to the one in the holding room, the Garamonds turned up. And the clincher: the family liaison officer in the Gray case passed on the message that to avoid unwanted publicity, Alex’s parents had decided not to press charges.
“You’re a very lucky lad,” was how one cop put it.
After crossing a seemingly endless minefield of interrogation and not feeling lucky at all (more wrung out, despicable and about ten years old), Alex was released. They issued a “reprimand”—a formal caution, read by a senior officer and witnessed by the Garamonds; any further offenses in relation to Alex Gray would land him court. Flip’s folks talked over one another in their rush to thank the officer for his leniency, assuring him there would be no repeat of this behavior. They would see to that.
Naturally, Alex had lied. To the police, to the Garamonds.
The only way they could begin to make sense of what he’d done was to assume he had developed an unhealthy fascination with Alex Gray from the media coverage of the case. Going on fifteen, Philip was at a difficult age (hormones in a mess, no longer a child but not yet an adult, increased freedom colliding with greater responsibility, etc.). He’d been struggling at school, under pressure from assessments and two years of GCSEs looming; was a moderate achiever at a high-achieving school; had girlfriend trouble; and was losing form at cricket when he was set to break into the county juniors.… It’d been a period of stress, confusion, insecurity. To be honest, he’d been floundering these past weeks and months.
This was the picture that built up in the interview room. Some of it came from them (the cops, Flip’s folks, the social worker who sat in on the questioning); most of it came from him. There was this boy down in London, Alex Gray, same age as him—same birthday, in fact—who’d been in a coma all this time. When Philip had seen the stuff about Alex in the papers and on TV … he couldn’t explain it, but it had got to him. Like the boy was a celebrity, and Philip the obsessive fan. He found himself drawn to this Alex, identifying with him, imagining what it was like to be unconscious for so long. He even started to wish he could do the same, just drop out of life for a while. A year earlier he’d formed a similar obsession with the cricketer Kevin Pietersen.
There was no malice. It wasn’t really about the object of the fixation; it was about Philip himself. These inappropriate attachments were a cry for help, in a way. They were attention-seeking. It was delusional, of course. Philip saw that now. He had been acting out a bizarre fantasy—one which he’d taken way too far this time, and which had caused nuisance and distress. Being arrested was just the shock, the reality check, he needed to jolt him out of it. He was so sorry for what he’d done. More sorry than he could say. He encouraged them to think along these lines, to believe it. Played the part required of him, supplied the answers to fit the story. Lie after lie after lie.
The alternative, which was no alternative at all, was to tell the truth.
He did make one amazing discovery, though, amid all the lying. As they quizzed him about his fascination with Alex, Mr. G. chipped in with his theory.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s something to do with the hospital,” he said.
Blank looks around the table. Flip’s mum glaring at her husband like he’d just broken wind; then a change in her expression as she caught on. “Yes, of course,” she said. Turning to one of the cops, she added, “We lived down here, years ago, when Michael held a lectureship at Goldsmiths.” She named a neighborhood only a couple of kilometers further out than Crokeham Hill. “Philip,” Mrs. Garamond continued, placing a hand on Alex’s arm, “was born in St. Dunstan’s—the hospital where that poor boy is.”
So was I! Alex thought but just managed not to blurt out. So was I.
Back at Tyrol Place the next day, the inquiry resumed. A “family meeting.” It had been going nearly an hour already but Flip’s mum was like a dog with a bone. “What I can’t shake out of my head,” she said, “is that you were going through all of this and not once—not once—did you feel you could come and talk to us.”
“What boy his age talks to his parents about anything?”
“About this, though, Michael. Something like this.”
Mr. Garamond shook his head. “ ‘Mum, Dad, I’m obsessed with a boy in a coma living two hundred miles away.’ I can see why he wouldn’t tell us that.”
“So, Dad,” Teri said, “is it the boy who lives two hundred miles away … or the coma?”
The mother gave her a look. “Teri, you’re really, really not helping.”
“It’s not a coma; it’s PVS,” Alex said. “That’s what the social worker said. A persistent vegetative state.”
“Whoa, Psycho—you should know. You’ve been in one of those yourself for fourteen and a half years.”
“You will not call your brother Psycho.”
Flip’s sister shrugged. “Hey, I’m all for care in the community, but you know, I’m thinking: do we have a backup plan here, in case he starts fitting?”
“That’s it. Get out of the room.”
“Alanna, please. This is a family meeting. Teri needs to be here.”
“I do? Shit.”
“Language, Teri.” Mrs. Garamond sank back in her chair. “Oh, God, can we please all just try to discuss this sensibly? For Philip’s sake.”
They were gathered around the dining table, because the mum thought it would be more “businesslike” (and because the lounge reeked of Beagle’s farts). Flip’s father had suggested sitting in the garden, with it being such a nice day, but his wife just looked at him and said, “Neighbors.” They were on their second cafetiere and most of the HobNobs were gone. A hush had fallen after Mrs. Garamond’s plea. Coffee was sipped, eye contact avoided. Teri slotted another biscuit between her purple lips.
At last, Flip’s mother said, “You know, Philip, the police think you ought to have counseling.”
Alex looked at her. Counseling. “Do they?”
“The one who read out the caution—I can’t remember his name—he took your father and me to one side while you were fetching your things. Said we might want to look into ‘getting some help’ for you. He seemed quite worried about you, actually.”
“That’s the trouble with the cops,” the sister said, “they’re too kind.”
“Sarcasm, Teri. Thank you. That’s just what we need.”
The previous day, at the police station, the mother had been weepy on and off; today she was much more together. Shock and dismay had given way to practicality: There’s a problem to be solved; okay, let’s identify the problem, then solve it. Her son would come through this. Her family would come through this. She was an osteopath, Alex had learned when Mrs. Garamond and the social worker were chatting during a break in the interrogation. The neck and spine were her specialty areas, apparently. He pictured her dealing with this problem as though it was one of her patients: laying it facedown on the treatment table, so to speak, and clicking the bones back into place. As for the dad, he’d been the steady one the day before, in front of the cops. This morning, back on home territory, he seemed content to let his wife take the lead.
Alex looked at them in turn. He was still trying to get his head round the fact that they’d lived near Crokeham Hill at one time—that he and Flip had been born not just on the same day, but in the same hospital. Another vital link, surely, in the chain of connections between them.
“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.