The Cement Garden by Ian Mcewan
“You stink,” she would say whenever there was disagreement between us. “You really do stink. Why don’t you ever change your clothes?” Remarks like these made me loutish.
“Fuck you,” I would snarl, and go for her ankles, determined to tickle her until she died of exhaustion.
“Mum,” she would shriek, “Mum, tell Jack!”
And my mother would call tiredly from wherever she happened to be, “Jack….”
The last time I tickled Julie I waited till Mother was at the doctor’s; then I slipped on a huge, filthy pair of gardening gloves, last worn by my father, and followed Julie up to her bedroom. She was sitting at the small desk she used for doing homework on. I stood in the doorway with my hands behind my back.
“What do you want?” she said in full disgust. We had been quarreling downstairs.
“Come to get you,” I said simply, and spread my enormous hands toward her, fingers outstretched. The sight alone of these advancing on her made her weak. She tried to stand up, but she fell back in her chair.
“You dare,” she kept saying through her rising giggles. “You just dare.”
The big hands were still inches from her, and she was writhing in her chair, squealing. “No … no … no.”
“Yes,” I said, “your time has come.” I dragged her by the arm onto her bed. She lay with her knees drawn up, her hands raised to protect her throat. She dared not take her eyes off the great hands which I held above her, ready to swoop down.
“Get away from me,” she whispered. It struck me as funny at the time that she addressed the gloves and not me.
“They’re coming for you,” I said, and lowered my hands a few inches. “But no one knows where they will strike first.”
Feebly she tried to catch at my wrists. I slid my hands under hers, and the gloves clamped firmly round her rib cage, right into the armpits. As Julie laughed and laughed, and fought for air, I laughed too, delighted with my power. Now there was an edge of panic in her thrashing about. She could not breathe in. She was trying to say “please,” but in my exhilaration I could not stop. Air still left her lungs in little birdlike clucks. One hand plucked at the coarse material of the glove. As I moved forward to be in a better position to hold her down, I felt hot liquid spreading over my knee. Horrified, I leaped from the bed and shook the gloves from my hands. Julie’s last laughs tailed away into tired weeping. She lay on her back, tears spilling over the trough of her cheekbones and losing themselves in her hair. The room smelled only faintly of urine. I picked up the gloves from the floor.
Julie turned her head. “Get out,” she said dully.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Get … out.”
Tom and Sue were in the doorway, watching.
“What happened?” Sue asked me as I came out.
“Nothing,” I said, and closed the door very quietly.
It was about this time that Mother more and more frequently went to bed in the early evening. She said she could barely keep awake.
“A few early nights in a row,” she would say, “and I’ll be myself again.”
This left Julie in charge of supper and bedtime. Sue and I were in the living room listening to the radio. Julie came in and snapped it off.
“Empty the rubbish bucket will you,” she said to me, “and carry the dustbins round to the front.”
“Piss off,” I shouted, “I was listening to that,” and reached for the control knob.
Julie covered it with her hand. I still felt too shamed by my assault on her to struggle with her. A few words of token resistance and I was outside carrying the dustbins. When I returned Sue was at the kitchen sink peeling potatoes. Later, when we sat down to eat, there was strained silence instead of the usual row. When I looked across at Sue she giggled. Julie would not look at us, and when she spoke it was in a low voice to Tom. When she left the room for a minute to take a tray of food upstairs, Sue and I kicked each other under the table and laughed. But we stopped when we heard her coming back down.
Tom did not like these evenings without his mother. Julie made him eat everything on his plate, and he was not permitted to crawl under the table or make funny noises. What outraged him most was that Julie would not let him in Mother’s bedroom while she was sleeping. He liked to climb in beside her with all his clothes on. Julie caught him by his wrist on his way upstairs.
“Not up there,” she said quietly. “Mum’s asleep.”
Tom set up a terrible howl, but he did not resist when Julie dragged him back into the kitchen. He too was a little afraid of her. She was suddenly so remote from us, quiet, certain of her authority. I wanted to say to her, “Come on Julie, stop pretending. We know who you are really.” And I kept looking her way. But there was no answering look. She kept busy and her eyes met mine only briefly.
I avoided being alone with my mother in case she spoke to me again. I knew from school she had got it wrong. But every time I set to now, once or twice a day, there passed through my mind the image of two pint milk bottles filled with blood and capped with silver foil. I was spending more time with Sue. She seemed to like me, or at least was prepared to ignore me. She passed much of her time at home reading in her bedroom, and she never objected to me lying around in there. She read novels about girls her own age, thirteen or so, who had adventures at their boarding schools. From the local library she borrowed large, illustrated books about dinosaurs or volcanoes or the fish of tropical seas. Sometimes I thumbed through them, looking at the pictures. None of the information interested me. I was suspicious of the paintings of dinosaurs, and I told Sue that no one could really know what they looked like. She told me about skeletons and all the clues there were to help in a reconstruction. We argued all afternoon. She knew far more than I, but I was determined not to let her win. Finally, bored and exasperated, we became sulky and left each other alone. But most often we talked like conspirators, about the family and all the other people we knew, careful scrutinies of their behavior and appearance, what they were “really like.” We wondered how ill our mother was. Sue had overheard her tell Julie that she was changing her doctor again. We agreed that our older sister was getting above herself. I did not really think of Sue as a girl now. She was, unlike Julie, merely a sister, a person. One long Sunday afternoon Julie came in during a conversation we were having about our parents. I had been saying that secretly they had hated each other and that Mother was relieved when Father died. Julie sat on the bed next to Sue, crossed her legs and yawned. I paused and cleared my throat.
“Go on,” Julie said, “it sounds interesting.”
I said, “It wasn’t anything.”
“Oh,” said Julie. She flushed a little and looked down. Now Sue cleared her throat, and we all waited.
I said foolishly, “I was just saying I don’t think Mum ever really liked Dad.”
“Didn’t she?” Julie said with mock interest. She was angry.
“I don’t know,” I muttered. “Perhaps you know.”
“Why should I know?”
There was another silence. Then Sue said, “‘Cause you talk to her more than we do.”
Julie’s anger expressed itself in mounting silence. She stood up and when she had crossed the room she turned in the doorway and said quietly, “Only because you two won’t have anything to do with her.”
She paused by the door waiting for a reply, and then she was gone, leaving behind a very faint smell of perfume.
The next day, after school, I offered to walk down to the shops with my mother.
“There’s nothing to carry,” she said. She was standing in the gloomy hallway, knotting her scarf in the mirror.
“Feel like a walk,” I mumbled.
We walked in silence for several minutes; then she linked her arm through mine and said to me, “It’s your birthday soon.”
I said, “Yeah, pretty soon.”
“Are you excited about being fifteen?”
“Dunno,” I said.
While we waite
“Oh, they’re all talking rubbish. I’ve done with the lot of them.” She nodded toward the pharmaceutical counter. “As long as I get my pills.”
I felt relieved. The prescription came at last in a heavy brown bottle which I offered to carry for her. On the way home she suggested we have a little party on my birthday and that I invite a few friends from school.
“No,” I said immediately. “Let’s just have the family.”
For the rest of the way home we made plans, and we were both glad to have at last something to talk about. My mother remembered a party we had had on Julie’s tenth birthday. I remembered it too; I was eight. Julie had wept because someone had told her that there were no more birthdays after you were ten. It had become for a while a family joke. Neither of us mentioned the effect my father had had on that and all the other parties I could remember. He liked to have the children stand in neat lines waiting their turn at some game he had set up. Noise and chaos, children milling around without purpose, irritated him profoundly. There was never a birthday party during which he did not lose his temper with someone. At Sue’s eighth birthday party he tried to send her to bed for fooling around. Mother intervened, and that was the last of the parties. Tom had never had one. By the time we reached our front gate we had fallen silent. As she fumbled in her handbag for a front door key, I wondered if she was glad that this time we would be having a party without him.
I said, “Pity Dad couldn’t be….”
And she said, “Poor dear. He would have been so proud of you.”
Two days before my birthday my mother took to her bed.
“I’ll be up in time,” she said when Sue and I went in to see her. “I’m not ill, I’m just very, very tired.”
Even as she was speaking to us her eyes were barely open. She had already made a cake and iced it with concentric circles of red and blue. In the very center stood one candle. Tom was amused by this.
“You’re not fifteen,” he shouted, “you’re only one when it’s your birthday.”
Early in the morning Tom came into my room and jumped on my bed.
“Wake up, wake up, you’re one today.”
At breakfast Julie handed me, without comment, a small leather pouch which contained a metal comb and nail scissors. Sue gave me a science fiction novel. On its cover a great, tentacled monster was engulfing a spaceship and beyond the sky was black, pierced by bright stars. I took a tray up to my mother’s room. When I went in she was lying on her back and her eyes were open. I sat on the edge of her bed and balanced the tray on my knees. She sat propped up by pillows, sipping her tea. Then she said, “Happy birthday, son. I can’t speak in the mornings till I’ve had something to drink.”
We embraced clumsily over the teacup she still held in her hand. I opened the envelope she gave me. Inside a birthday card were two pound notes. On the card was a still-life photograph of a globe, a pile of old leather-bound books, fishing tackle and a cricket ball. I embraced her again and she said “oops” as the cup wobbled in its saucer. We sat together for a while and she squeezed my hand. Her own was yellowish and scrawny, like a chicken’s foot, I thought.
All morning I lay on my bed reading the book Sue had given me. It was the first novel I had ever read all the way through. Minute life-bearing spores drifting in clouds across galaxies had been touched by special rays from a dying sun and had hatched into a colossal monster who fed off x-rays and who was now terrorizing regular space traffic between Earth and Mars. It was Commander Hunt’s task not only to destroy this beast but to dispose of its gigantic corpse.
“To allow it to drift forever through space,” explained one scientist to Hunt at one of their many briefings, “would not only create a collision hazard, but who knows what other cosmic rays might do to their rotten bulks? Who knows what other monstrous mutation might emerge from this carcass?”
When Julie came into my room and told me that Mother was not getting up and that we were having the cake round her bedside, I was so engrossed that I stared at her without comprehension.
“Why don’t you do her a favor,” Julie said as she was leaving, “and clean yourself up for once?”
In the afternoon Tom and Sue carried the cake and cups upstairs. I locked myself in the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror. I was not the kind Commander Hunt would have had on board his spaceship. I was trying to grow a beard to conceal my skin, yet each of the sparse hairs led the eye like a pointing finger to the spot at its base. I filled the washbasin with hot water and leaned with my immersed palms taking my weight against the bottom of the sink. I often passed half an hour this way, inclined toward the mirror, my hands and wrists in hot water. It was the closest I came to washing. I daydreamed instead, this time about Commander Hunt. When the water was no longer hot I dried my hands and took from my pocket the little leather pouch. I cut my fingernails and combed my lank brown hair, experimenting with different styles and deciding at last to celebrate my birthday with a center parting.
As I entered my mother’s bedroom, Sue started singing “Happy Birthday,” and the others joined in. The cake rested on the bedside table and its candle was already lit. My mother lay surrounded by pillows, and though she was moving her lips to the song, I could not make out her voice. When they were done, I blew out the candle and Tom danced before the bed and chanted, “You’re one, you’re one,” till Julie shushed him.
“You look very smart,” my mother said. “Have you just had a bath?”
“Yes,” I said, and cut the cake.
Into the teacups Sue poured the orange juice she had made, she said, from four pounds of real oranges.
“All oranges are real, aren’t they Mum?” Tom said.
We all laughed and Tom, delighted with himself, repeated his remark several times but with diminishing success. It was hardly a party really, and I was impatient to return to my book. Julie had arranged four chairs in a shallow curve facing one side of the bed, and there we sat, nibbling the cake and sipping the juice. Mother ate and drank nothing. Julie wanted something to happen; she wanted us to be entertaining.
“Tell us a joke,” she said to Sue, “the one you told me yesterday.”
And when Sue had told her joke and Mother had laughed, Julie said to Tom, “Show us all your cartwheel.”
We had to move the chairs and plates out of the way so that Tom could fool around on the floor and giggle. Julie made him stop after a while, and then she turned to me.
“Why don’t you sing us a song?”
I said, “I don’t know any songs.”
“Yes you do,” she said. “What about ‘Greensleeves’?”
The very title of the song irritated me. “I wish you’d stop telling people what to do,” I said. “You’re not God are you?”
Sue intervened. “You do something, Julie,” she said.
While Julie and I were talking Tom had taken his shoes off and climbed into bed beside Mother. She had put her arm around his shoulder and was watching us as if we were a long way off.
“Yeah,” I said to Julie, “you do something for a change.”
Without a word Julie launched herself into the space cleared for Tom’s cartwheels, and suddenly her body was upside down, supported only by her hands, taut and lean and perfectly still. Her skirt fell down over her head. Her knickers showed a brilliant white against the pale brown skin of her legs, and I could see how the material bunched in little pleats around the elastic that clung to her flat, muscular belly. A few black hairs curled out from the white crotch. Her legs, which were together at first, now moved slowly apart like giant arms. Julie brought her legs together again and, dropping them to the floor, stood up. In a confused, wild moment I found myself on my feet singing “Greensleeves” in a trembling, passionate tenor. When I finished they all clapped and Julie squeezed my hand.
CHAPTER FOUR
ONE HOT afternoon I found a sledgehammer lying concealed by weeds and long grass. I was in the garden of one of the abandoned prefabs, poking around, bored. The building itself had been gutted by fire six months before. I stood inside the blackened living room where the ceiling had collapsed and the floorboards burned away. One partitioned wall remained and in its center was a serving hatch connecting with the kitchen. One of its small wooden doors was still on its hinges. In the kitchen, broken sections of water pipe and electrical fittings clung to the wall, and on the floor was a smashed sink. In all the rooms tall weeds were struggling for the light. Most houses were crammed with immovable objects in their proper places, and each object told you what to do—here you ate, here you slept, here you sat. But in this burned-out place there was no order; everything had gone. I tried to imagine carpets, wardrobes, pictures, chairs, a sewing machine, in these gaping smashed-up rooms. I was pleased by how irrelevant, how puny such objects now appeared. There was a mattress in one room, buckled between the blackened, broken joists. The wall was crumbling away round the window, and the ceiling had fallen in without quite reaching the ground. The people who slept on that mattress, I thought, really believed they were in “the bedroom.” They took it for granted that it would always be so. I thought of my own bedroom, of Julie’s, my mother’s, all rooms that would one day collapse. I had climbed over the mattress and was balancing on a ridge of broken wall, thinking about this, when I saw the handle of the sledgehammer in the grass. I jumped down and seized it. Gray wood lice had been living under the massive iron head and now they ran backward and forward in blind confusion across the little patch of earth. I swung the hammer down on them and felt the ground shake beneath my feet.