Free White Lies by Jo Gatford

pulled him out of the water by his armpits and sat him on the side. He started crying in the same hyperventilating, screechy tone that he used when he would still occasionally shit himself. Rage and humiliation. He spat water in my face and attempted a few weak slaps which were ignored by Lydia and Dad as they marched over furiously.
    His mum swept him up into a ready towel and shushed and placated and sweet-nothinged him quiet. Dad loomed over, casting me in shadow. “You will
never
do that again,” he said, deadly quiet. No finger pointing, no rough grabbing of my upper arm, no spank. He just turned away and went to buy Alex an ice cream.
    I swam all the way to the deep end and stayed there until it was time to go home, even though I was afraid that the shark that lived beneath the filter grates at the dark bottom of the pool was going to burst free and bite my legs off. At that moment, I would have chosen a watery, sharky death over having to sit on the damp grass with my dad and his other family.
    #
    It was two-thirty in the morning. We dressed hastily, clumsily, haphazardly, as if there was a rush. “I should call someone,” I said. “Angela. Clare. Dad… Oh Jesus, Dad.”
    Sabine passed me a pair of socks and shook her head, “Worry about him later.” She’d stared like a gutted fish when I told her what Jamie had told me, but shock gave way to uncertainty at the fact that I wasn’t crying because my brother was dead. The pressure to cry was almost worse than trying to process the information.
    “Are you sure?” she kept repeating, as if I’d heard him wrong, as if I were an idiot. Every “yes” I was forced to say made me feel less and less, until I was so numb I couldn’t even put on my own shoes.
    Sabine knelt on the floor and tied my shoelaces for me. Then she dialled Angela’s number and put the phone in my hand. I couldn’t remember if she was on a shift or not. I left some sort of vague message on her answer machine that didn’t say what had happened but must have scared the shit out of her nonetheless. Sabine went into the living room and started taking quick, squeaky intakes of breath.
    At the hospital she led me by the hand through rubber floored corridors as if I were blind. We squeezed into a lift full of glazed middle-of-the-night visitors and mourners and worriers. An automated announcement repeatedly told us to use the sanitiser gel to minimise infection and I couldn’t tell if we were moving up to a ward or down to a morgue. My fists clenched around the hem of my coat until my nails began to burn. There could be no worse vision than Alex’s body on a slab.
    He was always into all of that shit - gore and horror and those gruesome bits at the back of lads’ magazines about people managing to mutilate themselves or break bones in disgusting ways, or those programmes about teenagers riding their BMXs down flights of concrete steps and smashing their faces in, or skaters shattering their kneecaps, or dumb DIYers nail-gunning their feet to the floor, or a kid who shot himself in the head with his dad’s shotgun and survived with half a skull. Alex laughed and I cringed. He boasted a wrist-to-elbow scar from trying to jump between the roof of the bike shelter and the prefab toilet block when he was thirteen. Maybe I could identify him from that jagged mark, without having to look at his face. They’d called me into the school office to stay with him until the ambulance arrived and his eyes seemed full of the blood that had drained out of his face. Splintered and unblinking. He wouldn’t look at me but the moment I sat next to him he clutched onto my arm with his good hand and wouldn’t let go until the sirens were turning and the paramedics sent me back to class.
    He counted his stitches like a miser hoarding pennies, tortured me with descriptions of the way the skin was starting to fuse back together. He took pictures of the wound so he could recreate it with face paint to turn himself