Free White Lies by Jo Gatford Page A

into a zombie for Halloween. He’d borrowed
Night of the Living Dead
off Jamie’s cousin when he was eight and I was twelve, persuaded me to watch it with him one Sunday night while Dad and Lydia slept.
    We sat six inches from the screen with the volume on the lowest notch, eating cold roast chicken from the fridge, straining to hear every groan and scream. I cried silent tears behind his back, unable to move my cramping, shivering legs; my buttocks riddled with pins and needles, my veins thrilling with terror and exhilaration.
    When the tape rewound itself we watched black static until an unspoken, unheard signal sent us running for our room. I lay awake until the morning, snivelling into the dark because I’d never realised how easy it would be for zombies to unlatch the garden gate and force open the dodgy window in the back porch. They could have been making their shuffling, moaning way up the stairs at that very moment and every creak and ding of the plumbing confirmed it.
    The undead forged a brief truce between us. We devised a plan for zombie-proofing, an escape plan and Armageddon survival strategy that we would continue to develop in intense detail over the following few months. The only time we didn’t want to kill each other was when there were zombies to kill instead.
    Now it’s his reanimated body that chases me through our old house in my nightmares. These days I let him bite me, just to get it over with. I know I won’t wake up. I need to feel the bite; canines glancing off bone, hot saliva mixed with blood dribbling down my skin, rabid eyes inches away from mine.
    “Matt… ”
    My eyes were closed. A palm came to rest against my cheek, the vinegar sting of hand sanitiser seeping into my pores. Someone coughed.
    “Matt, this is our floor,” Sabine said. “There are people waiting.”
    It was safe in the lift. Leaving meant seeing my brother. I looked down at my shoes, tied in a double bow, too tight, not the right kind at all for running from the undead. The lift went bong and the doors tried to close but Sabine stuck out an arm to stop them. “Please,” she said. Her voice broke like rotted wood, jagged and weak. She looked scared, and Sabine is never scared. She had shrunk – pale and sickly and aged and skinnier than she should be – shivering in her pyjamas with only a coat on top. She made me wonder what my face looked like, to make her face look like that.

Chapter Eight
    I follow Angela up to the outpatients building, dragging my toes with each step. My lethargic brain is intrigued by the scraping noise it creates and I can’t help but enjoy the subtle irritation it provokes in my stepdaughter.
    We’ve been coming to the memory clinic since before The Farm House and with a wash of irony I can remember exactly what happened at each appointment. It used to be a way to assuage Angela’s anxiety after my first stroke, a distraction from her forceful attentiveness - the visits and spot checks and medicine deliveries and unannounced drive-bys, hoping to catch me combing my hair with a fork or trying to water the plastic plant in the hall or talking to the doorbell. But now, with three little strokes under my belt and an inmate’s blank eyes, it is all pointlessly detestable. There is no recovery.
    A receptionist greets us unenthusiastically and directs us to wait in a room with soft, rounded edges and a vile pink carpet stained with grey. A low coffee table covered with leaflets divides two lines of screwed-down chairs. I can’t focus well enough to read the titles.
How to Deal with Your Demented Stepfather,
possibly. Angela plucks one up, opens out the folds and tosses it back on the pile. She looks sideways at me with a smile, that all-enduring flat grin that shows just how hard it is to pretend I’m not going insane.
    The receptionist picks her nose behind a glass screen that she perhaps believes to be opaque. Perhaps she just doesn’t care, liberated by an audience who won’t