Free Flip by Martyn Bedford

(“Body-Swapping” took him to a contact site for swingers; “Soul-to-Soul Transfer” linked to YouTube clips of skateboard tricks.) Many people bought into all this: from ancient Greeks to modern-day sects, from Wiccans and animists to Buddhists and Hindus, from past-life therapists to Hasidic Jews, from Kabbalists to some Christians and Muslims, to New Age mystics.… The belief in the migration of the soul was global and as old as mankind.
    From here on, Alex realized, he had to count himself among them. If these people were mad, then so was he. Souls did switch bodies. However incredible and incomprehensible it might be, he was living proof.
    But while it was reassuring to find people out in cyberspace who accepted the principle, or who claimed to have experienced the process, Alex had yet to turn up a case identical to his own. In reincarnation, a migrated soul was unaware that its life was “new” and had no memory of an earlier one. As for past-life regressionists, who claimed to remember previous lives, they’d usually been a Roman centurion, or a servant in the court of Henry VIII. They didn’t quit the body of a south London schoolboy and surface again six months later inside another boy in Yorkshire. One American blogger—a “soul transferee”—seemed promising, until Alex got to the part where he described himself as a Light Worker, one of a legion of souls from an advanced galaxy who had transplanted themselves into human beings to assist Earth’s evolution. Oh, please .
    Still, he searched, firing off e-mails, posting pleas for help on one message board, one forum, one chat room after another. Trawling the world for someone who’d had the same thing happen to him, who could tell him what had taken place, and what to do about it. Someone who could give him hope, who could erase David’s You cant be from his mind.
    Beagle was struggling to keep up, breathing like a set of bellows. Alex had set off with him after tea. It had been just him and the mother at the table. And a bottle of wine. The dad was dining out in Leeds with colleagues after spending all day at an exam board, and Teri—who he’d heard come in, shower, go out again—had gone to see a band. It was mushroom omelet and salad that night, with ciabatta warm from the oven. Not boil-in-the-bag cod, then. Or frozen kievs. Eating was tricky, given the state of his lip.
    “Mr. Yorath shouldn’t have made you carry on.”
    Alex shrugged. He figured Flip would shrug; in fact, Flip would most likely have insisted on continuing to bat with a smashed mouth whatever Mr. Yorath said.
    “What about your shirt?”
    “In the laundry basket.”
    “My God ,” the mum said, mock shocked. “You haven’t put anything in that basket in living memory.”
    At the kitchen sink, after tea, she got him to tilt his face into the light so that she could dab something on the cut. It stung like crazy and made his eyes water, all of which was fine compared to the intimacy of Flip’s mum massaging the stuff into his lip with the tip of her middle finger.
    “You okay, Philip?” she said. “You look a bit down in the dumps.” With her other hand she stroked his hair, the way his own mum sometimes would.
    “No, I’m fine. Really.”
    It was a relief to get out. A long walk this time. The longer Alex stayed out, the less time he’d have to spend in that house, being a son to someone else’s mother. And the less time he’d have to sit at that PC, checking for messages that wouldn’t come or, if they did, wouldn’t tell him anything he wanted to hear.
    He took Beags to the river that ran through the town. At the bridge, steps led down to a riverside park with a play area and, in the other direction, to a footpath that followed the river towards some woods. He took this route, away from the park, in case it was the one where Donna had asked to meet him. Even though she wouldn’t be expecting him, it might be somewhere she liked to hang out. He paused to