The Cement Garden (2 page)

‘I already was,’ I said irritably. But he was coughing loudly on his way up the stairs.

He had constructed rather than cultivated his garden according to plans he sometimes spread out on the kitchen table in the evenings while we peered over his shoulder. There were narrow flagstone paths which made elaborate curves to visit flower beds that were only a few feet away. One path spiralled up round a rockery as though it was a mountain pass. It annoyed him once to see Tom walking straight up the side of the rockery using the path like a short flight of stairs.

‘Walk up it properly,’ he shouted out of the kitchen window. There was a lawn the size of a card table raised a couple of feet on a pile of rocks. Round the edge of the lawn there was just space for a single row of marigolds. He alone called it the hanging garden. In the very centre of the hanging garden was a plaster statue of a dancing Pan. Here and there were sudden flights of steps, down then up. There was a pond with a blue plastic bottom. Once he brought home two goldfish in a plastic bag. The birds ate them the same day. The paths were so narrow it was possible to lose your balance and fall into the flower beds. He chose flowers for their neatness and symmetry. He liked tulips best of all and planted them well apart. He did not like bushes or ivy or roses. He would have nothing that tangled. On either side of us the houses had been cleared and in summer the vacant sites grew lush with weeds and their flowers. Before his first heart attack he had intended to build a high wall round his special world.

There were a few running jokes in the family, initiated and maintained by my father. Against Sue for having almost invisible eyebrows and lashes, against Julie for her ambitions to be a famous athlete, against Tom for pissing in his bed sometimes, against Mother for being poor at arithmetic, and against me for my pimples which were just starting up at that time. One suppertime I passed him a plate of food and he remarked that he did not want his food to get too close to my face. The laughter was instant and ritual. Because little jokes like this one were stage-managed by Father, none of them ever worked against him. That night Julie and I locked ourselves in her bedroom and set to work filling pages with crude over-worked jokes. Everything we thought of seemed funny. We fell from the bed to the floor, clutching at our chests, screeching with delight. Outside Tom and Sue were banging on the door demanding to be let in. Our best jokes were, we thought, the question and answer ones. Several of them made references to Father’s constipation. But we knew the real target. We selected our best, polished it and practised it. Then we waited a day or two. It was supper, and as it happened he came out with another crack about my spots. We waited for Tom and Sue to stop laughing. My heart was beating so hard it was difficult to sound casual, conversational, the way we had rehearsed it. I said, ‘I saw something out in the garden today that gave me a shock.’

‘Oh,’ said Julie. ‘What was that?’

‘A flower.’

No one seemed to hear us. Tom was talking to himself, Mother poured a little milk into her cup and Father continued to butter with extreme care the slice of bread before him. Where butter strayed over the edge of his bread he folded it back with a quick sliding movement of his knife. I thought perhaps we should say it again louder and I looked across at Julie. She would not meet my eye. Father finished his bread and left the room. Mother said, ‘That was quite unnecessary.’

‘What was?’ But she said nothing more to me. Jokes were not made against Father because they were not funny. He sulked. I felt guilt when I desperately wanted to feel elation. I tried to convince Julie of our victory so that she in turn would convince me. We had Sue up that night lying between us but the game was giving us no pleasure. Sue got bored and went away. Julie was for apologizing, making it up to him in some way. I could not face that, but when, two days later, he spoke to me for the first time I was greatly relieved. Then the garden was not mentioned for a long time, and when he covered the kitchen table with his plans he looked at them alone. After his first heart attack he stopped work on the garden altogether. Weeds pushed up through the cracks in the paving stones, part of the rockery collapsed and the little pond dried up. The dancing Pan fell on its side and broke in two and nothing was said. The possibility that Julie and I were responsible for the disintegration filled me with horror and delight.

Shortly after the cement came the sand. A pale-yellow pile filled one corner of the front garden. It became apparent, probably through my mother, that the plan was to surround the house, front and back, with an even plane of concrete. My father confirmed this one evening.

‘It will be tidier,’ he said. ‘I won’t be able to keep up the garden now’ (he tapped his left breast with his pipe) ‘and it will keep the muck off your mother’s clean floors.’ He was so convinced of the sanity of his ideas that through embarrassment, rather than fear, no one spoke against the plan. In fact, a great expanse of concrete round the house appealed to me. It would be a place to play football. I saw helicopters landing there. Above all, mixing concrete and spreading it over a levelled garden was a fascinating violation. My excitement increased when my father talked of hiring a cement mixer.

My mother must have talked him out of that, for we started work one Saturday morning in June with two shovels. In the cellar we split open one of the paper sacks and filled a zinc bucket with the fine, pale-grey powder. Then my father went outside to take the bucket from me as I passed it up through the coal hole. When he reached forward he made a silhouette against the white, featureless sky behind him. He emptied the powder on the path and returned the bucket to me for refilling. When we had enough of that, I wheeled a barrowload of sand from the front and added it to the pile. His plan was to make a hard path round the side of the house so that it would be easy to move sand from the front garden to the back. Apart from his infrequent, terse instructions we said nothing. I was pleased that we knew so exactly what we were doing and what the other was thinking that we did not need to speak. For once I felt at ease with him. While I fetched water in the bucket he shaped the cement and sand into a mound with a dip in its centre. I did the mixing while he added the water. He showed me how to use the inside of my knee against my forearm to gain better leverage. I pretended that I knew already. When the mix was consistent we spread it on the ground. Then my father went down on his knees and smoothed the surface with the flat side of a short plank. I stood behind him leaning on my shovel. He stood up and supported himself against the fence and closed his eyes. When he opened them he blinked as if surprised to find himself there and said, ‘Well, let’s get on then.’ We repeated the operation, the bucketloads through the coal hole, the wheelbarrow, the water, the mixing and spreading and smoothing.

The fourth time round boredom and familiar longings were slowing my movements. I yawned frequently and my legs felt weak behind the knees. In the cellar I put my hands in my pants. I wondered where my sisters were. Why weren’t they helping? I passed a bucketful to my father and then, addressing myself to his shape, told him I needed to go to the toilet. He sighed and at the same time made a noise with his tongue against the roof of his mouth. Upstairs, aware of his impatience, I worked on myself rapidly. As usual, the image before me was Julie’s hand between Sue’s legs. From downstairs I could hear the scrape of the shovel. My father was mixing the cement himself. Then it happened, it appeared quite suddenly on the back of my wrist, and though I knew about it from jokes and school biology books, and had been waiting for many months, hoping that I was no different from any other, now I was astonished and moved. Against the downy hairs, lying across the edge of a grey concrete stain, glistened a little patch of liquid, not milky as I had thought, but colourless. I dabbed at it with my tongue and it tasted of nothing. I stared at it a long time, up close to look for little things with long flickering tails. As I watched, it dried to a barely visible shiny crust which cracked when I flexed my wrist. I decided not to wash it away.

I remembered my father waiting and I hurried downstairs. My mother, Julie and Sue were standing about talking in the kitchen as I passed through. They did not seem to notice me. My father was lying face down on the ground, his head resting on the newly spread concrete. The smoothing plank was in his hand. I approached slowly, knowing I had to run for help. For several seconds I could not move away. I stared wonderingly, just as I had a few minutes before. A light breeze stirred a loose corner of his shirt. Subsequently there was a great deal of activity and noise. An ambulance came and my mother went off in it with my father, who was laid out on a stretcher and covered with a red blanket. In the living room Sue cried and Julie comforted her. The radio was playing in the kitchen. I went back outside after the ambulance had left to look at our path. I did not have a thought in my head as I picked up the plank and carefully smoothed away his impression in the soft, fresh concrete.

2

During the following year Julie trained for the school athletics team. She already held the local under-eighteen records for the 100- and 220-yard sprint. She could run faster than anyone I knew. Father had never taken her seriously, he said it was daft in a girl, running fast, and not long before he died he refused to come to a sports meeting with us. We attacked him bitterly, even Mother joined in. He laughed at our exasperation. Perhaps he really intended to be there, but we left him alone and sulked among ourselves. On the day, because we did not ask him to come, he forgot and never saw in the last month of his life his elder daughter star of all the field. He missed the pale-brown, slim legs flickering across the green like blades, or me, Tom, Mother and Sue running across the enclosure to cover Julie with kisses when she took her third race. In the evenings she often stayed at home to wash her hair and iron the pleats in her navy-blue school skirt. She was one of a handful of daring girls at school who wore starched white petticoats beneath their skirts to fill them out and make them swirl when they turned on their heel. She wore stockings and black knickers, strictly forbidden. She had a clean white blouse five days a week. Some mornings she gathered her hair at the nape of her neck with a brilliant white ribbon. All this took considerable preparation each evening. I used to sit around, watching her at the ironing-board, getting on her nerves.

She had boyfriends at school, but she never really let them get near her. There was an unspoken family rule that none of us ever brought friends home. Her closest friends were girls, the most rebellious, the ones with reputations. I sometimes saw her at school at the far end of a corridor surrounded by a small noisy group. But Julie herself gave little away, she dominated her group and heightened her reputation with a disruptive, intimidating quietness. I had some status at school as Julie’s brother but she never spoke to me there or acknowledged my presence.

At some point during the same period my spots were so thoroughly established across my face that I abandoned all the rituals of personal hygiene. I no longer washed my face or hair or cut my nails or took baths. I gave up brushing my teeth. In her quiet way my mother reproved me continuously, but I now felt proudly beyond her control. If people really liked me, I argued, they would take me as I was. In the early morning my mother came into my bedroom and exchanged my dirty clothes for clean ones. At weekends I lay in bed till the afternoon and then took long solitary walks. In the evenings I watched Julie, listened to the radio or just sat. I had no close friends at school.

I frequently stared at myself in mirrors, sometimes for as long as an hour. One morning, shortly before my fifteenth birthday, I was searching in the gloom of our huge hallway for my shoes when I glimpsed myself in a full-length mirror which leaned against the wall. My father had always intended to secure it. Coloured light through the stained glass above the front door illuminated from behind stray fibres of my hair. The yellowish semi-darkness obscured the humps and pits of my complexion. I felt noble and unique. I stared at my own image till it began to dissociate itself and paralyse me with its look. It receded and returned to me with each beat of my pulse, and a dark halo throbbed above its head and shoulders. ‘Tough,’ it said to me. ‘Tough.’ And then louder, ‘Shit … piss … arse.’ From the kitchen my mother called my name in weary admonition.

From a bowl of fruit I picked out an apple and went to the kitchen. I slouched in the doorway and watched the family at breakfast and tossed the apple in my hand, catching it with crisp smacks against the palm. Julie and Sue read school books while they were eating. My mother, drained by another night without sleep, was not eating. Her sunken eyes were grey and watery. With whines of irritation Tom was trying to push his chair nearer hers. He wanted to sit in her lap, but she complained he was too heavy. She arranged the chair for him and ran her fingers through her hair.

The issue was whether Julie would walk to school with me. We used to go together every morning, but now she preferred not to be seen with me. I continued to toss the apple, imagining it made them all uneasy. My mother watched me steadily.

‘Come on, Julie,’ I said at last. Julie refilled her teacup.

‘I’ve got things to do,’ she said firmly. ‘You go on.’

‘What about you then, Sue?’ My younger sister did not look up from her book. She murmured, ‘Not going yet.’

My mother reminded me gently that I had not had my breakfast but I was already on my way through the hall. I slammed the front door hard and crossed the road. Our house had once stood in a street full of houses. Now it stood on empty land where stinging nettles were growing round torn corrugated tin. The other houses were knocked down for a motorway they had never built. Sometimes kids from the tower blocks came to play near our house, but usually they went further up the road to the empty prefabs to kick the walls down and pick up what they could find. Once they set fire to one, and no one cared very much. Our house was old and large. It was built to look a little like a castle, with thick walls, squat windows and crenellations above the front door. Seen from across the road it looked like the face of someone concentrating, trying to remember.