The Cement Garden (7 page)

When Sue asked her question, Julie looked up briefly and looked away. I said ‘If we tell someone …’ and waited. Sue said, ‘We have to tell someone so there can be a funeral.’ I glanced at Julie. She was gazing past our garden fence, across the empty land to the tower blocks.

‘If we tell them,’ I began again, ‘they’ll come and put us into care, into an orphanage or something. They might try and get Tom adopted.’ I paused. Sue was horrified. ‘They can’t do that,’ she said.

‘The house will stand empty,’ I went on, ‘people will break in, there’ll be nothing left.’

‘But if we don’t tell anyone,’ said Sue and gestured vaguely towards the house, ‘what do we do then?’ I looked at Julie again and said louder, ‘Those kids will come in and smash everything up.’ Julie tossed her pebbles across the fence. She said, ‘We can’t leave her in the bedroom or she’ll start to smell.’ Sue was almost shouting. ‘That’s a terrible thing to say.’

‘You mean,’ I said to Julie, ‘that we shouldn’t tell anybody.’

Julie walked off towards the house without replying. I watched her go into the kitchen and splash her face at the sink. She held her head under the cold-water tap till her hair was soaked, then she wrung it out and swept it clear of her face. As she walked back towards us, drops of water ran on to her shoulders. She sat down on the rockery and said, ‘If we don’t tell anybody we’ve got to do something ourselves quickly.’ Sue was close to tears.

‘But what can
we
do?’ she moaned. Julie was playing it up a bit. She said very quietly, ‘Bury her, of course.’ For all her terseness, her voice still shook.

‘Yes,’ I said, thrilling with horror, ‘we can have a private funeral, Sue.’ My younger sister was now weeping steadily and Julie had her arm round her shoulder. She looked at me coldly over Sue’s head. I was suddenly irritated with them both. I got up and walked round to the front of the house to see what Tom was up to.

He was sitting with another boy in the pile of yellow sand by the front gate. They were digging a complicated system of fist-sized tunnels.

‘He says,’ said Tom’s friend derisively, squinting up at me, ‘he says, he says his mum’s just died and it’s not true.’

‘It is true,’ I told him. ‘She’s my mum too, and she’s just died.’

‘Ner-ner, told ya, ner-ner,’ Tom sneered and plunged his wrists deep into the sand.

His friend thought for a moment. ‘Well,
my
mum’s not dead.’

‘Don’t care,’ said Tom, working away at his tunnel.

‘My mum’s not dead,’ the boy repeated to me.

‘So what?’ I said.

‘Because she isn’t,’ the boy yelled. ‘She
isn’t
.’ I composed my face and knelt down by them in the sand. I placed my hand sympathetically on the shoulder of Tom’s friend.

‘I’ll tell you something,’ I said quietly. ‘I’ve just come from your house. Your dad told me. Your mum’s dead. She came out looking for you and a car ran her over.’

‘Ner-ner, your mum’s dead,’ Tom crowed.

‘She isn’t,’ the boy said to himself.

‘I’m telling you,’ I hissed at him. ‘I’ve just come from your house. Your dad’s pretty upset, and he’s really angry with you. Your mum got run over because she was looking for you.’ The boy stood up. The colour had drained from his face. ‘I wouldn’t go home if I was you,’ I continued, ‘your dad’ll be after you.’ The boy ran off up our garden path to the front door. Then he remembered, turned round and ran back. As he passed us he was beginning to blubber.

‘Where you going?’ Tom shouted after him, but his friend shook his head and kept on running.

As soon as it was dark and we were all indoors Tom became fearful and miserable again. He cried when we tried to put him to bed, so we let him stay up and hoped he would fall asleep on the sofa. He whined and cried about the slightest thing, and it was impossible to talk about what we were going to do. We ended up talking round him, shouting over his head. While Tom was screaming and stamping his feet because there was no orange squash left, and Sue was trying to quieten him, I said rapidly to Julie, ‘Where shall we put her?’ She said something, and it was lost to Tom’s squeals.

‘In the garden, under the rockery,’ she repeated. Later on Tom cried quite simply for his mother, and while I was trying to comfort him I saw Julie explaining something to Sue, who was nodding her head and rubbing her eyes. As I was attempting to divert Tom with talk of the tunnels he had been building in the sand, I suddenly had my own idea. I lost track of what I was saying, and Tom began to cry loudly once more. He did not fall asleep till after midnight and only then was I able to tell my sisters that I did not think that the garden was a good plan. We would have to dig deep and it would take a long time. If we did it in the day someone would see us, and if we did it at night we would need torches. We might be seen from the tower blocks. And how would we keep it from Tom? I paused for effect. Despite everything, I was enjoying myself. I had always admired the gentlemen criminals in films who discussed the perfect murder with elegant detachment. As I spoke, I touched the key in my pocket and my stomach turned. I went on confidently, ‘And of course, if someone came looking, digging up the garden is what they would do first. You read about that sort of thing in the paper every day.’ Julie was watching me closely. She appeared to be taking me seriously and when I finished she said, ‘Well then?’

We left Sue in the kitchen with Tom. She was not angry or horrified by my idea. She was too miserable to care, and shook her head slowly like a sad old lady. Outside there was enough moonlight for us to find the wheelbarrow and a shovel. We pushed it round to the front garden and filled it with sand. We tipped six loads down the coal hole into the cellar, and then we stood outside the kitchen arguing about the water. I said we would have to take it down in buckets. Julie said there was a tap down there. Finally we found it in the small room where all the old clothes and toys were. Because it was further from the bedroom, the cellar seemed less frightening to me than the rest of the house. Obscurely, I felt entitled to do the shovelling and mixing, but Julie had the shovel and had already made up a pile of sand. She split open one of the cement sacks and stood waiting for me to fetch the water. She worked at great speed, turning and folding the huge pile in on itself till it was a stiff, grey sludge. I lifted the lid of the great tin chest and Julie shovelled the cement in. The cement was now five inches deep on the bottom of the chest. We agreed to do another larger load, and this time I did the mixing and Julie fetched the water. As I worked, the whole purpose of what we were doing never crossed my mind. There was nothing odd about mixing cement. When the second pile of cement was in the chest we had been working for three hours. We went upstairs to the kitchen to drink some water. Sue was sleeping in an armchair and Tom lay face down on the sofa. We covered Sue with a coat and returned to the cellar. The chest was now almost half full. We decided that before we fetched her down we should have a really big pile of cement ready. It took us a long time to make this one up. We ran out of sand, and since there was only one shovel, we both went out into the garden again to fetch some more. The sky was already lightening in the east. We made five journeys with the wheelbarrow. I wondered aloud what we would tell Tom when he came out in the morning to find that his sand had disappeared. Julie said, mimicking him, ‘Blowed away,’ and we giggled tiredly.

When our final mix was ready it was five o’clock. We had not looked at or spoken to each other for almost an hour. I took the key from my pocket and Julie said, ‘I thought I’d lost that and you had it all the time.’ I followed her up the cellar stairs to the kitchen. We rested and drank some more water. In the living room we pushed some furniture aside and propped open the living-room door with a shoe. Upstairs I was the one who turned the key in the lock and pushed open the door, but it was Julie who stepped into the room first. She was about to turn on the light, and then changed her mind. The greyish-blue light gave everything in the room a fiat, two-dimensional appearance. We seemed to be stepping into an old photograph of Mother’s bedroom. I did not look immediately towards the bed. The air was damp and stuffy, as though several people had been sleeping in here with the windows closed. Beyond this closeness was a faint, sharp odour. You could just smell it at the top of your breath, when your lungs were full. I took shallow breaths through my nose. She lay exactly as we had left her, the very image that had been presenting itself whenever I closed my eyes. Julie stood at the foot of the bed hugging herself. I stepped nearer and abandoned the idea that we could ever pick her up. I waited for Julie, but she did not move. I said, ‘We can’t do it.’ Julie’s voice was high-pitched and strained, and she spoke rapidly, as if pretending to be cheerful and efficient.

‘We’ll wrap her up in the sheet. It won’t be so bad. We’ll do it quickly, and it won’t be so bad.’ But still she did not move.

I sat down at the table with my back to the bed, and instantly Julie was angry.

‘That’s right,’ she said quickly, ‘leave it to me. Why don’t
you
do something first?’

‘Like what?’

‘Roll her up in that sheet. It’s your plan, isn’t it?’

I wanted to sleep. I closed my eyes and experienced a sharp falling motion. I clutched at the sides of the table and stood up. Julie spoke more gently.

‘If we spread the sheet out on the floor, we could lift her on to it.’ I strode towards my mother and pulled the sheet off her. When I spread the sheet it settled on the floor in such dreamy, slow motion, the corners billowing and folding in on themselves, that I gasped with impatience. I caught my mother by the shoulder, half closed my eyes and pushed her off the table back on to the bed. I avoided her face. She seemed to resist me and it took both hands to make her move. Now she lay on her side, her arms at odd angles, her body twisted and fixed in the position she had been lying in since the day before yesterday. Julie took her feet and I held her behind her shoulders. When we set her down on the sheet, she looked so frail and sad in her night-dress, lying at our feet like a bird with a broken wing, that for the first time I cried for her and not for myself. Behind her she left on the bed a large brown stain whose outer edges faded to yellow. Julie’s face was wet too when we knelt down by Mother and tried to roll her over in the sheet. It was difficult, her body was too twisted to turn.

‘She won’t go. She won’t go,’ Julie cried in exasperation.

At last we succeeded in tucking the sheet round her loosely a couple of times. As soon as she was covered it was a little easier. We picked her up and carried her out of the bedroom.

We brought her down one step at a time, and at the bottom, in the downstairs hall, we rearranged the sheet where it was coming free. My wrists ached. We did not talk about it, but we knew we wanted to get her across the living room without putting her down. We were almost at the kitchen door on the other side when I glanced round to my left, towards Sue’s chair. She sat with the coat drawn up to her chin, watching as we passed. I was going to whisper to her but before I could think of anything we were through the kitchen door and edging round to the cellar stairs. We set her down at last several feet away from the trunk. I fetched a bucket of water to moisten our huge pile of cement, and later, when I looked up from the mixing, Sue was standing in the doorway. I thought she might try to stop us, but when Julie and I stood ready to lift the body Sue came and took hold of the middle. Because she would not lie straight, there was barely enough space in the trunk for her. She sank an inch or two into the cement that was already there. I turned for the shovel, but Julie already had it in her hands. As she emptied the first load of wet cement on to Mother’s feet, Sue gave out a little cry. And then, as Julie was filling the shovel again, Sue hurried over to the pile, picked up as much cement as she could get in two hands and threw it into the trunk. And then she was throwing cement in as fast as she could. Julie was shovelling faster too, staggering to the trunk with huge loads, and running back for more. I plunged my hands into the cement and threw in a heavy armload. We worked like maniacs. Soon only a few patches of the sheet were visible, and then they too were gone. Still we kept on. The only sounds were the scrape of the shovel and our heavy breathing. When we finished, when there was nothing left of the pile but a damp patch on the floor, the cement in the trunk was almost overflowing. Before we went back upstairs we stood about looking at what we had done, and catching our breath. We decided to leave the lid of the trunk up so the cement would harden quicker.

PART TWO

6

Two or three years before my father died my parents had to attend the funeral of one of their last surviving relatives. It might have been my mother’s aunt, or my father’s, or it might have been an uncle. Exactly who had died was not discussed, probably because the death meant very little to our parents. Certainly it meant nothing to us children. We were more interested in the fact that we were to be left alone in the house in charge of Tom for most of the day. Mother prepared us for our responsibilities several days in advance. She would cook our lunch, and all we had to do was warm it up when we were hungry. She showed each one of us in turn – Julie, Sue, then me – how to operate the stove and she made us promise to check three times that it was properly turned off. She changed her mind and said she would prepare a cold lunch. But that would not do, she finally decided, because it was winter and we could not go without something hot in the middle of the day. Father, in his turn, told us what to do if someone knocked at the front door, though, of course, no one had ever knocked at the front door. He instructed us in what to do if the house caught fire. We were not to stay and fight it, we were to run out of the house to the telephone kiosk, and under no circumstances were we to forget Tom. We were not to play down in the cellar, we were not to plug the electric iron in, nor were we to put our fingers in the electric sockets. When we took Tom to the lavatory we were to hold on to him all the time.