The Red House Read Online Free PDF Page A

attack, aged forty-three. Granny’s funeral. There was a woman on the television who had anal cancer.
    He puts the paper down and begins exploring the house, entering every room in turn and making a mental map of escape routes and places where enemies might be hiding. He can’t go into the bedroom because Alex is having a migraine so he heads downstairs in search ofa knife to make a spear but Auntie Louisa is in the kitchen so he goes outside and finds a big stick in the log shed. He hacks off a zombie’s head and blood sprays from the neck stump and the head lies on the ground shouting in German until it is crushed under one of his horse’s hooves.
    Alex slid his legs over the edge of the bed and sat up slowly, shirt soaked in sweat. His head felt bruised and the color of everything was off-key, as if he were trapped inside a film from the sixties. At least Melissa hadn’t seen him like this. When it happened at school he had to actually go and lie down in the sick bay. He tried to pass it off as an aggressive adversary he overcame by being tough and stoical, but he knew that some kids thought it was a spazzy thing like epilepsy or really thick glasses. He rubbed his face. He could smell onion frying downstairs and hear Benjy battling imaginary foes outside. Oof…! Yah…!
    Melissa popped open the clattery little Rotring tin. Pencils, putty rubber, scalpel. She sharpened a 3B, letting the curly shavings fall into the wicker bin, then paused for a few seconds, finding a little place of stillness before starting to draw the flowers. Art didn’t count at school because it didn’t get you into law or banking or medicine. It was just a fluffy thing stuck to the side of design and technology, a free A Level for kids who could do it, like a second language, but she loved charcoal and really good gouache, she loved rolling sticky black ink onto a lino plate and heaving on the big black arm of the Cope press, the quiet and those big white walls.
    Daisy walked into the living room and found Alex sitting on the sofa drinking a pint of iced water and staring at the empty fireplace. How are you doing?
    Top of the world . He held up his glass in a fake toast. The ice jiggled and clinked.
    Always these stilted conversations, like strangers at a cocktail party. I went for a walk up the hill. It’s, like, Alex World up there .
    He seemed confused for a moment, as if trying to remember where he was. Yeh, I guess so .
    A couple of years back he’d been a puppy, unable to sit down for a whole meal, falling off the trampoline and using his plastered arm as a baseball bat. They’d played chase and snakes and ladders and hide-and-seek with Benjy and watched TV lying on top of one another like sleeping lions. He seemed like another species now, so unimpressed by life. Dad’s breakdown hardly touched him. She’d read one of his history essays once, something about the economic problems in Germany before the Second World War and the Jews being used as scapegoats, and she was amazed to realize that there was a person in there who thought and felt. What do you reckon to Melissa?
    She’s all right .
    He was talking rubbish. He obviously fancied her because boys couldn’t think about anything else. She wanted to laugh and grab his hair, start one of the play fights they used to have, but there was a force field, and the rules had changed. She reached out to touch the back of his neck but stopped a couple of centimeters short. See you at supper .
    You will indeed .
    Richard opened the squeaky iron door of the stove. Ash flakes rose and settled on the knees of his trousers. He scrunched a newspaper from the big basket. PORT-AU-PRINCE DEVASTATED . A grainy photo of a small boy being pulled from the rubble. No one really cared until there were cute children suffering. All those little blond girls with leukemia while black teenagers in London were being stabbed every day of the week. He flirted with the possibility of a firelighter but it seemed