Flip by Martyn Bedford Read Free Book Online Page A

homework?”
    “Donna?” the dad said. “Who’s Donna?”
    “This month’s eye candy. He’s gone for an intelligent one this time: she has two brains … one in each tit.”
    “ Teri , language.”
    “Is Donna the redhead?”
    “No, Dad, that was Abby. She is so last month.”
    “I quite liked her.”
    “ Dad , in her Bebo profile she says her ambition is to be a ‘ glammer model.’ That’s ‘glamour,’ double m, e-r. ”
    “Well, she was certainly—”
    “Are we going to get to meet this Donna?” the mum said, smiling warmly at Alex. She was already one glass of wine ahead of the dad.
    “I don’t know,” Alex said. “I haven’t met her myself yet.”
    None of them seemed to know what he meant by this, or whether it was a joke. In the awkwardness that followed, the mum and dad drifted to other topics and it was only Teri who continued to watch Alex, like someone who’s added a column of figures twice and come up with different totals. She’d have been about three when Flip was born, and had probably been excited at the arrival of a baby brother. Hard to imagine that now. Or Mrs. Garamond in a hospital bed somewhere, giving birth to Philip on the same day that Alex’s own mum was having him.
    Two brains, one in each tit . Alex liked that. She was quite funny, Flip’s sister. If she didn’t detest him, they might get along okay.
    For the rest of the meal, Alex said as little as possible. Pudding, which they called dessert, was fresh-fruit salad. Very nice it was, too. You’d get your five a day here, no problem. At home, he’d factored in tomato ketchup and was still four short.
    Afterwards, Alex raised eyebrows again by helping, unprompted, to clear the table. Teri made a display of standing there dumbfounded. Flip’s mum warned him that if this was a ploy to delay his homework … But he pressed on, fetching plates, bowls, glasses, cutlery, scraping and rinsing, passing things to the dad for loading into the dishwasher. The women left them to it. The men talked—at least, Mr. Garamond did—a monologue about one of his undergraduates (so, he was a lecturer) whose essay on “the relationship between tyranny and republicanism in ancient Rome” was almost entirely cut-and-pasted from Wikipedia. Alex half listened, half watched. What was it with dads and dishwashers? His own father was the same: acting like the future of humankind depended on the exact arrangement of each item in the racks.
    “Can I ask you something?” Alex said. He’d managed not to address him as Mr. Garamond but couldn’t bring himself to call him Dad, so he didn’t call him anything at all. “Do you believe in the soul?”
    “The soul ?” Flip’s dad paused in mid-stack, looked at Alex. “Is this something you’re doing at school?”
    “For religious studies, yeah. Like, a project.”
    He knew what his own father would’ve said: The soul! They’ll be teaching you about tooth fairies next. GCSEs in Father Christmas studies . But Flip’s dad seemed to be giving the question serious consideration. The university lecturer, being asked to apply his intelligence to a complex subject.
    “Hmm, the soul ,” he said, frowning, the plate in his hand dripping gunk onto the floor. “Well, it depends whether you look at it as a concept or as an actual, physical—” Which was as far as he got before being distracted by his wife’s reappearance in the kitchen. She went to the back door, opened it and peered into the garden.
    “Have either of you seen Beagle?”
    “Shit,” Alex said. “I’ve left him tied up outside the library.”
    From their expressions, it wasn’t clear what had startled Flip’s parents: that he’d sworn, that he’d forgotten the dog, or that he’d been to the library.
    Alex was banished to the bedroom to do his homework. Once he’d retrieved Beagle, of course, who had fallen asleep where he’d been left and who—not unreasonably, in the circumstances—gave Alex another nip when he