The Cement Garden (12 page)

‘And this is Julie’s brother,’ Derek said, but he did not tell them my name.

There was nowhere to sit down. Derek took a cigarette from Mr O’s packet. Mrs O kicked her legs and made a whimpering sound and held up her mouth like a baby bird in a nest. Derek took another cigarette and put it in her mouth and she and Mr O laughed. Mr O gestured towards the tables.

‘Greg’s been out there waiting almost an hour, son.’ Derek nodded. He was sitting on the edge of the desk and I was standing by the door. Mrs O wagged her finger in Derek’s face.

‘Who’s a naughty boy?’ He moved a little further away from her and reached for his tea. He did not pass me mine. Mrs O said carefully, ‘You didn’t come in yesterday then, son.’

Mr O winked at me and said, ‘He’s got other fish to fry.’ Derek sipped his tea and said nothing. Mr O went on, ‘But there was quite a crowd in here waiting for you to show up.’

Derek nodded and said, ‘Yeah? Good.’

Mrs O said to me, ‘He’s been coming in here since he was twelve and we never charge him for a table. Do we, son?’

Derek finished his tea and stood up. He said to Mr O, ‘Cue please.’ Mr O stood up and put his slippers on. Along the wall behind him was a rack of cues, and padlocked to one end was a long, tapering leather case. Mr O wiped his hands on a yellow cloth, unlocked the case and drew the cue out. It was a very dark brown, almost black. Before giving it to Derek he said to me, ‘I’m the only one he lets touch his cues.’

Mrs O said, ‘And me,’ but Mr O smiled at me and shook his head.

The man who had parked the car was waiting outside the office.

‘This is Chas,’ Derek said, ‘this is Julie’s brother.’ Chas and I did not look at each other. As Derek walked slowly towards the centre table with his cue Chas walked on tiptoe beside him, talking quickly into his ear. I walked right behind them. I felt like leaving. Chas was saying something about a horse but Derek did not reply or even turn his head to look at him. As soon as Derek was near the table Greg bent down low to aim his opening shot. He had a brown leather jacket with a big tear in one arm and his hair was tied at the back in a ponytail. I wanted him to win. The white ball drifted the length of the table, dislodged one of the reds and returned to its starting point. Derek took off his jacket and gave it to Chas to hold. He fixed silver bands round his arms to keep his cuffs clear of his wrists. Chas turned the jacket inside out and folded it over his arm and opened his paper to the racing page. Derek ducked down and hit the white ball without appearing to aim. When the dislodged red ball smacked into the bottom pocket players on the other two tables looked up and walked towards us. Derek’s heels made a sharp clicking sound as he strode to the other end of the table. The white had broken up all the reds and was lined up with the black. Before he took his shot Derek glanced up at me to see if I was watching and I looked away.

For the next few minutes he hit reds and the black into the bottom pockets. Between each shot he walked quickly from one side of the table to the other, and talked to me in a quiet voice, without looking in my direction, as if he was talking to himself.

‘Funny set-up in your house,’ he said as the first black went down. Greg and the other players watched and listened to our conversation.

I said, ‘I dunno.’

‘The parents are both dead,’ Derek said to Chas, ‘and the four of them looking after themselves.’

‘Orphans like,’ Chas said, not looking up from his paper.

‘It’s a big house,’ Derek said as he brushed past me to get to the white again.

‘Pretty big,’ I said.

‘It must be worth quite a bit.’ A red disappeared slowly over the lip of a pocket and he was able to aim for the black without changing his position. ‘All those rooms,’ he said, ‘you could turn into flats.’

I said, ‘We’re not thinking of that.’ Derek watched Greg pick the black out of the pocket and set it down on its spot.

‘And that cellar, not many houses have cellars like that …’ He walked around the table the long way, and Chas sighed at something he was reading. Another red went down. ‘You could …’ Derek was watching to see where the white ball was going to stop. ‘You could
do
something with that cellar.’

‘Like what?’ I said, but Derek shrugged and hit the black hard into the pocket.

When finally Derek missed the black he made a sharp, hissing sound between his teeth. Chas looked from his paper and said, ‘Forty-nine.’ I said to Derek, ‘I’m going now,’ but he had turned away to get a cigarette from one of the other players. Then he walked to the other end of the table to watch Greg. I felt sick. I leaned back against a pillar and looked up at the ceiling. There were iron girders and beyond them, set in the roof, panes of glass smeared with yellowish-brown paint. I looked down and Derek was playing again with only a few balls left on the table. When the game was over Derek came up to me from behind and gripped my elbow and said, ‘Want a game?’ I told him no and pulled away.

I said, ‘I’m going back home now.’ Derek stood in front of me and laughed. He rested the thick end of his cue against his foot and jigged it up and down.

‘You’re a queer one,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you relax a bit, why don’t you ever smile?’ I leaned right back against the pillar. Something heavy and dark was pressing down on me and I stared up at the ceiling again, half expecting to see it.

Derek went on jigging his cue and then he had an idea. He drew in his breath sharply and called over his shoulder, ‘Hey, Chas! Greg! Come and help me make this miserable bugger laugh.’ He smiled and winked at me as he said this, as if I should be in on the joke too. Chas and Greg appeared on either side of Derek and slightly behind him.

‘Come on,’ Derek said, ‘a big laugh or I’ll tell your sister.’ Their faces grew larger. ‘Or I’ll make Greg tell you one of his jokes.’ Chas and Greg laughed. Everyone wanted to be on the right side of Derek.

‘Fuck off!’ I said. Chas said, ‘Ah, leave the lad alone,’ and walked away. The way he said this made me want to cry and so to show them that this was the last thing I was going to do I stared at Derek fiercely and without blinking. But water was collecting in one eye, and though I snatched at the tear as soon as it rolled out, I knew they had seen it. Greg held out his hand for me to shake.

‘No harm meant, me old mate,’ he said. I did not shake it because my hand was wet. Greg walked off and it was just Derek and me again.

I turned and walked towards the door. Derek left his cue on a table and came with me. We walked so close we could have been handcuffed.

‘You’re really just like your sister, you are,’ he said. Because I could not get by Derek I had to head to the left of the door, towards the tea hatch. As soon as he saw us coming, the old man there took up his big steel teapot and filled two cups. He had a very high-pitched voice.

‘You can have these ones on me,’ he said, ‘for your forty-nine points.’ He said it to me as much as to Derek and I had to pick up one of the cups. Derek picked up his too and we leaned against the wall facing each other. For several minutes he seemed about to say something, but he remained silent. I tried to drink the tea quickly and that made me feel hot and sick. Under my shirt my skin prickled and itched, my feet sweated and my toes were slippery against one another. I leaned my head against the wall.

Greg had gone off with Chas through another door and the other players were back at their tables. Through the wall I heard Mrs O talking uninterruptedly. After a while I thought it might be the radio.

Derek said, ‘Is your sister always like this or is there something wrong that I should know about?’

‘Always like what?’ I said immediately. My heart thudded, but very slowly. Again Derek had to think for a moment. He stretched the skin under his chin and touched the clasp on his cravat.

‘Strictly man to man, you understand?’ I nodded. ‘Take this afternoon for instance. She was doing something, so I thought I’d take a look round your cellar. No harm in that but she got very funny about it. I mean, there’s nothing down there is there?’ I did not think it was a real question and I made no reply. But Derek repeated, ‘Is there?’

And I said, ‘No, no. I hardly ever go down there but there’s nothing.’

‘So why should she get so upset?’ Derek stared at me and waited for an answer, as if I was the one who had been upset.

‘She’s always like that,’ I told him, ‘that is what Julie is like.’

Derek looked down at his shoes for a moment, looked up and said, ‘And another time …’ But Mr O came out of his office just then and started talking to Derek. I finished the rest of my tea and left.

At home the back door was open and I went in very quietly. There were smells in the kitchen of something that had been fried a long time before. I had a strange sensation of having been away several months and that many things had happened in my absence. In the living room Julie was sitting by the table which had dirty plates and a frying pan on it. She was looking very pleased with herself. Tom was sitting on her lap with his thumb in his mouth and round his neck there was a napkin tied like a bib. He was staring across the room in a glazed kind of way and his head leaned against Julie’s breasts. He did not seem to notice that I had come in and went on making small sucking noises with his thumb. Julie rested one hand on the small of his back. She smiled at me and I put my hand on the doorknob to steady myself. I felt as though I weighed nothing and might drift away.

‘Don’t be so surprised,’ Julie said, ‘Tom wants to be a little baby.’ She rested her chin on his head and began to rock backwards and forwards slightly. ‘He was such a naughty boy this afternoon,’ she went on, talking more to him than to me, ‘so we had a long talk and decided lots of things.’ Tom’s eyes were closing. I sat down at the table close to Julie but where I could not see Tom’s face. I picked at the cold pieces of bacon in the frying pan. Julie rocked and hummed quietly to herself.

Tom was asleep. I had intended to talk to Julie about Derek, but now she stood up with Tom in her arms and I followed them up the stairs. Julie pushed open the door of the bedroom with her foot. She had brought up from the cellar our old brass cot and put it right by her own bed. It was all made up ready, with one side down. I was annoyed to see the cot and the bed so close together.

I pointed and said, ‘Why didn’t you put it in his own room?’ Julie had her back to me and was setting Tom down in the cot. He sat swaying slightly as Julie unbuttoned his dress. His eyes were open.

‘He wanted it in here, didn’t you, my sweet?’ Tom nodded as he crawled between the sheets. Julie went to the window to draw the curtains. I advanced into the semidarkness and stood at the end of the cot. She pushed by me, kissed Tom’s head and carefully raised the side. Tom seemed to be asleep almost instantly. ‘There’s a good boy,’ Julie whispered, and took my hand and led me out of her bedroom.

9

Not long after Sue read to me from her diary I began to notice a smell on my hands. It was sweet and faintly rotten and was more on the fingers than the palms, or perhaps even between the fingers. It was a smell that reminded me of the meat we had thrown out. I stopped masturbating. I did not feel like it anyway. After I washed my hands they smelled only of soap, but if I turned my head away and moved one hand quickly in front of my nose, the bad smell was just there, beneath the perfume of the soap. I took long baths in the middle of the afternoon and lay perfectly still without a thought till the water was cold. I cut my nails, washed my hair and found clean clothes. Within half an hour the smell was back, so distant that it was more like the memory of a smell. Julie and Sue made jokes about my appearance. They said I was dressing up for a secret girlfriend. However, my new look made Julie more friendly. She bought me two shirts from a jumble sale, almost new and a good fit. I confronted Tom and wiggled my fingers under his nose. He said, ‘Like a fishy,’ in his loud new baby voice. I found the home medical encyclopaedia and looked up cancer. I thought I might be rotting away from a slow disease. I looked in the mirror and tried to catch my breath in my cupped hands. One evening it rained at last, very heavily. Someone had once told me that rain was the cleanest water in the world so I took my shirt, shoes and socks off and stood on top of the rockery with my hands stretched out. Sue came to the kitchen door and, shouting over the noise of the rain, asked me what I was doing. She went away and returned with Julie. They called to me and laughed, and I turned my back on them.

At supper we had an argument. I said it was the first time it had rained since Mother died. Julie and Sue said it had rained several times since. When I asked them when exactly, they said they could not remember. Sue said she knew she had used her umbrella because it was now in her bedroom, and Julie said she remembered the sound the windscreen wipers made in Derek’s car. I said that proved nothing at all. They became angry, which made me feel calm and intent on making them angrier. Julie challenged me to prove it had not rained and I said I did not need to, I
knew
it had not. My sisters gasped with annoyance. When I asked Sue to pass me the sugar bowl she ignored me. I walked round the table and just as I was reaching for it she picked up the bowl and put it on the other side of the table, near where I had been sitting. I went to smack her hard on the back of her neck but Julie cried out, ‘You dare!’ so sharply that I drew back startled and my hand swept over the top of Sue’s head. Immediately I caught the smell again. As I sat down I waited for Julie or Sue to accuse me of farting, but they began a conversation that was designed to exclude me. I sat on my hands and winked at Tom.

Tom stared at me with his mouth half open and I could see chewed food on his tongue. He sat close to Julie’s side. While we were arguing about the rain he had smeared food over his face. Now he was waiting for Julie to remember him, wipe his face with the bib round his neck and tell him he could leave the table. Then he might crawl under the table and sit among our legs while we finished eating.

Other times he tore his bib off and ran outside to play with his friends and would not be a baby again till he came back inside and found Julie. As a baby he rarely spoke or made a noise. He simply waited for her next move. When she babied him his eyes grew larger and further apart, his mouth slackened and he seemed to sink inside himself. One evening as Julie picked Tom up to take him upstairs I said, ‘Real babies kick and scream when they get put to bed.’ Tom glared at me over Julie’s shoulder and his eyes and mouth narrowed suddenly.