The Cement Garden (16 page)

‘If you’d have told me,’ Derek said, ‘I would have cleared off, left you to it.’

‘Typical!’ Julie said. ‘That’s typical.’ Now Derek was angry. His voice retreated across the room.

‘It’s sick,’ he said loudly, ‘he’s your
brother
.’

‘Talk quietly, Derek,’ Julie said firmly, ‘or you’ll wake Tom up.’

‘Sick!’ Derek repeated, and the bedroom door slammed shut.

Julie sprang off the bed, locked the door and leaned against it. We listened for Derek’s car starting but apart from Tom’s breathing everything was very quiet. Julie was smiling at me. She went to the window and parted the curtains a little way. Derek had been in the room such a short time that now it seemed as though we had imagined him.

‘Probably downstairs,’ Julie said as she settled herself beside me again, ‘probably moaning at Sue.’ We were quiet for a minute or two, waiting for the echoes of Derek’s voice to die away. Then Julie laid her palm on my belly. ‘Look how white you are,’ she said, ‘against my hand.’ I took her hand and measured it against mine. It was exactly the same size. We sat up and compared the lines on our palms, and these were entirely different. We began a long investigation of each other’s body. Lying on our backs side by side we compared our feet. Her toes were longer than mine and more slender. We measured our arms, legs, necks and tongues but none of these looked so alike as our belly buttons, the same fine slit in the whorl which was squashed to one side, the same pattern of creases in the hollow. It went on until I had my fingers in Julie’s mouth counting her teeth and we began to laugh at what we were doing.

I rolled on to my back and Julie, still laughing, sat astride me, took hold of my penis and pulled it into her. It was done very quickly and we were suddenly quiet and unable to look at each other. Julie held her breath. There was something soft in my way and as I grew larger inside her it parted and I was deep inside. She gave out a little sigh and knelt forwards and kissed me lightly on the lips. She lifted herself slightly and sank down. A cool thrill unfurled from my belly and I sighed too. Finally we looked at each other. Julie smiled and said, ‘It’s easy.’ I sat up a little way and pressed my face into her breasts. She took a nipple between her fingers again and found my mouth. As I sucked and that same shudder ran through my sister’s body, I heard and felt a deep, regular pulse, a great, dull slow thudding which seemed to rise through the house and shake it. I fell back and Julie crouched forwards. We moved slowly in time to the sound till it seemed to be moving us, pushing us along. At one point I glanced sideways and saw Tom’s face through the bars of the cot. I thought he was watching us but when I looked again his eyes were closed. I closed mine. A little later Julie decided that it was time to turn over. It was not an easy thing to do. My leg became trapped under hers. The bedcovers were in our way. We tried to roll one way and almost fell off the bed and we had to roll back. I pinned Julie’s hair against the pillow with my elbow and she said ‘Ouch!’ very loudly. We began to giggle and forget what we were about. Soon we found ourselves lying side by side listening to the great rhythmic thuds that now proceeded a little slower than before.

Then we heard Sue calling Julie’s name and pushing at the door. When Julie let her in, Sue threw her arms round Julie’s neck and hugged her. Julie led Sue to the bed where she sat between us, trembling and pressing her thin lips together. I held her hand.

‘He’s smashing it up,’ she said at last, ‘he found that sledge-hammer and he’s smashing it up.’ We listened. The thuds were not so loud now and there were sometimes pauses between blows. Julie got up and locked the door and stood by it. For a while we heard nothing. Then there were footsteps down the front path. Julie went to the window.

‘He’s getting in the car.’ There was another long pause before we heard the engine start and the car pull away. The sharp sound of the tyres on the road was like a shout. Julie pulled the curtains closed and came and sat down beside Sue and took her other hand. We sat like this, three in a row on the edge of the bed. For a long time no one spoke. Then we seemed to wake up and began to talk in whispers about Mum. We talked about her illness and what it was like when we carried her down the stairs, and when Tom tried to get in the bed with her. I reminded them of the day of the pillow fight when we were left in the house together. Sue and Julie had completely forgotten it. We remembered a holiday in the country before Tom was born and we discussed what Mum would have thought of Derek. We agreed she would have sent him packing. We were not sad, we were excited and awed. We kept on breaking out of our whispers until one of us called shhh! We talked about the birthday party at Mum’s bedside, and Julie’s handstand. We made her do it again. She kicked some clothes out of her way and threw herself upside down in the air. Her dark, brown limbs barely quivered and when she was down Sue and I clapped quietly. It was the sound of two or three cars pulling up outside, the slam of doors and the hurried footsteps of several people coming up our front path that woke Tom. Through a chink in the curtain a revolving blue light made a spinning pattern on the wall. Tom sat up and stared at it, blinking. We crowded round the cot and Julie bent down and kissed him.

‘There!’ she said, ‘wasn’t that a lovely sleep.’

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‘It is marvellously written, moving, serious, readable, and draws on that innocence which great English writers have always been able to recapture, and which is a much harder thing to come by than experience. If you want to be appalled, refreshed, exhilarated, enlivened – read it’
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‘For the almost unbearable immediacy of its writing as it studies the world in enlarged close-up, for its spooky, intellectual playfulness, and for the ingenuity and beauty of its formal architecture – a wonderful novel’
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‘This is the McEwan you and I have been waiting for . . .
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is an extraordinary achievement in which form and content, theory and practice are so expertly and inseparably interwoven that the novel becomes an advertisement for, or proof of, its own thesis. I also found it very moving, the ending beautifully so’
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In these seven interlinked stories the grown-up Peter reveals the secret journeys, metamorphoses and adventures of his childhood. Living somewhere between dreams and reality, Peter experiences magical transformations. He swaps bodies with the family cat, with a baby and, in the final story, wakes up as a twelve-year-old inside a grown-up body and embarks on the adventure of falling in love.

‘These stories are as good, as acute about childhood preocupations, and at times as disturbing as you would expect’
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