The Cement Garden (8 page)

We were made to repeat these instructions solemnly till every detail was correct, then we gathered by the front door to watch our parents walk to the bus stop in their black clothes. Every few yards they turned anxiously and waved, and we all waved cheerily back. When they were out of sight Julie slammed the front door shut with her foot, gave out a whoop of delight and in the same movement whipped around and delivered a low, hard punch to my ribs. The blow knocked me back against the wall. Julie ran up the stairs three at a time and looked down at me and laughed. Sue and I flew after her and upstairs we had a wild, violent pillow-fight. Later I made a barricade at the top of the stairs with mattresses and chairs which my sisters stormed from below. Sue filled a balloon with water and threw it at my head. Tom stood at the foot of the stairs, grinning and lurching. An hour later in his excitement he did a shit in his pants and a rare, sharp smell drifted upstairs and interrupted our fight. Julie and Sue sided. They said I should deal with it because I was the same sex as Tom. I appealed uneasily to the very nature of things and said that, as girls, it was obviously their duty to do something. Nothing was resolved, and our wild battle continued. Soon Tom began to wail. We broke off again. We picked Tom up, carried him to his bedroom and put him in his large brass cot. Julie fetched his harness and tied him down. By now his screams were deafening and his face was a bright pink. We raised the side of the cot and hurried out of the room, anxious to be away from the smell and the screams. Once Tom’s bedroom door was shut we could hardly hear a thing, and we carried on our games quite undisturbed.

It was no more than a few hours, but this time seemed to occupy a whole stretch of my childhood. Half an hour before our parents were due back, giggling at the peril we were in, we started to clear up our mess. Between us we cleaned Tom up. We discovered the lunch we had been too busy to eat and tipped it down the lavatory. That evening our shared secret made us delirious. In our pyjamas we huddled together in Julie’s bedroom and talked of how we would ‘do it again’ soon.

When Mother died, beneath my strongest feelings was a sense of adventure and freedom which I hardly dared admit to myself and which was derived from the memory of that day five years ago. But there was no excitement now. The days were too long, it was too hot, the house seemed to have fallen asleep. We did not even sit outside because the wind was blowing a fine, black dust from the direction of the tower blocks and the main roads behind them. And even while it was hot, the sun never quite broke through a high, yellowish cloud; everything I looked at merged and seemed insignificant in the glare. Tom was the only one who was content, in the daytime at least. He had his friend, the one he had played with in the sand. Tom did not seem to notice that the sand was gone, nor did his friend ever mention the story I had given him about his mother. They played further up the road, in and out of the ruined prefabs. In the evenings, after his friend had gone home, Tom was bad-tempered and cried easily. He went to Julie most often when he wanted attention, and he got on her nerves. ‘Don’t keep asking
me
,’ she would snap. ‘Get
away
from me, Tom, just for a minute.’ But it made little difference. Tom had made up his mind that Julie was to take care of him now. He trailed Julie about the house grizzling, and ignored Sue or me when we tried to divert him. One evening, early on, when Tom was being particularly demanding, and Julie more irritable than usual, she suddenly seized hold of him in the living room and tore his clothes off.

‘Right,’ she kept saying, ‘you’ve had it.’

‘What are you doing?’ Sue said over Tom’s sobs.

‘If he wants to be mothered,’Julie shouted, ‘then he can start doing what I tell him. He’s going to bed.’ It was hardly five o’clock in the afternoon. When Tom was naked we heard his screams and the sound of bath water running. Ten minutes later Tom was back before us in his pyjamas and, utterly subdued, allowed Julie to lead him upstairs to his bedroom. She came down banging imaginary dust from her palms and smiling widely.

‘That’s what he wanted,’ she said.

‘And that’s what you’re best at giving,’ I said. It came out a little more sourly than I intended. Julie kicked my foot gently.

‘Watch it,’ she murmured, ‘or you’ll be next.’

As soon as we had finished down in the cellar, Julie and I had gone to bed. Because Sue had slept for some of the night, she stayed up and looked after Tom during the day. I woke in the late afternoon extremely thirsty and hot. There was no one downstairs, but I could hear Tom’s voice somewhere outside. As I stooped to drink water from the kitchen tap a cloud of flies hummed around my face. I walked on the sides of my bare feet because the floor around the sink was covered with something yellow and sticky, probably spilt orange juice. Still light-headed from my sleep, I went upstairs to Sue’s room. She was sitting across her bed with her back against the wall. Her knees were drawn up and in her lap was an open notebook. She put down her pencil when I came in and snapped the book shut. It was stuffy as if she had been in there for hours. I sat down on the edge of her bed, quite near her. I felt like talking, but not about the night before. I wanted someone to stroke my head. Sue pressed her thin lips together, as though determined not to speak first. ‘What are you doing?’ I said at last and stared at the notebook.

‘Nothing,’ she said, ‘just writing.’ She held her notebook in two hands against her belly.

‘What are you writing?’ She sighed.

‘Nothing. Just writing.’ I tore the book from her hands, turned my back on her and opened it. Before she blocked my view with her arm I had time to read at the top of a page, ‘Tuesday, Dear Mum.’

‘Give it back,’ Sue shouted and her voice was so unfamiliar, so unexpectedly violent, that I let her take it from me. She put the book under her pillow and sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the wall in front of her. She was red in the face and her freckles were darker. The pulse in her temple stood out and beat angrily. I shrugged and decided to leave, but she did not look up. When I was through the door she pushed it shut and locked it and as I was walking away I heard her crying. I knocked on her door and called to her. Through her sobs she told me to go away, and that is what I did. I went to the bathroom and washed the dried cement from my hands.

For a week after the burial we did not eat a cooked meal. Julie went to the post office for money and came home with bags of shopping, but the vegetables and meat she bought lay around untouched until they had to be thrown away. Instead we ate bread, cheese, peanut butter, biscuits and fruit. Tom gorged himself on bars of chocolate and did not seem to need much else. When someone felt like making it, we drank tea, but mostly we had water from the kitchen tap. The day Julie bought the shopping, she gave Sue and me two pounds each.

‘How much are you getting then?’ I asked her. She snapped her purse shut.

‘Same as you,’ she said. ‘The rest is for food and stuff.’

It was not long before the kitchen was a place of stench and clouds of flies. None of us felt like doing anything about it beyond keeping the kitchen door shut. It was too hot. Then someone, not me, threw the meat out. Encouraged, I cleaned out some milk bottles, gathered up empty wrappers and swatted a dozen or so of the flies. That same night Julie told Sue and me it was time we did something about the kitchen. I said, ‘I did a lot of things in there today which you two don’t seem to have noticed.’ The girls laughed.

‘Like what?’ Sue said, and when I told them they laughed again, louder than they needed to.

‘Oh well,’ they said to each other. ‘He’s done his bit for a few weeks.’ I decided then to have nothing more to do with the kitchen and this made Julie and Sue determined not to clean it up either. It was not until we cooked a meal, several days later, that something was finally done. In the meantime the flies spread through the house and hung in thin clouds by the windows, and made a constant clicking sound as they threw themselves against the glass.

I masturbated each morning and afternoon, and drifted through the house, from one room to another, sometimes surprised to find myself in my bedroom, lying on my back staring at the ceiling, when I had intended to go out into the garden. I looked at myself carefully in the mirror. What was wrong with me? I tried to frighten myself with the reflection of my eyes, but I felt only impatience and mild revulsion. I stood in the centre of my room listening to the very distant, constant sound of traffic. Then I listened to the voices of children playing in the street. The two sounds merged and seemed to press down on the top of my head. I lay on the bed again and this time I closed my eyes. When a fly walked across my face I was determined not to move. I could not bear to remain on the bed, and yet any activity I thought of disgusted me in advance. To stir myself I thought of my mother downstairs. She was no more to me than a fact. I got up and went to the window and stood several minutes looking out across the parched weeds to the tower blocks. Then I looked through the house to see if Julie was back. She frequently disappeared, usually in the afternoons and for hours on end. When I asked her where she went she told me to mind my own business. Julie was not in, and Sue had locked herself in her room. If I knocked on her door she would ask me what I wanted, and I would not know what to tell her. I remembered the two pounds. I left the house by the back and climbed over the fence so that Tom would not see me and want to come with me. For no particular reason at all I set off at a run towards the shops.

I had no idea what I wanted. I thought I would know when I saw it and, even if it cost more than two pounds, then at least I would have something to want, something to think about. I ran all the way. The main shopping street was empty except for cars. It was Sunday. The only person I could see was a woman in a red coat standing on a footbridge that spanned the road. I wondered why she wore a red coat in such heat. Perhaps she was wondering why I had been running for she seemed to be staring in my direction. She was still a long way off, but she looked familiar. She could have been a teacher at my school. I walked towards the footbridge because I did not want to turn back so soon. As I walked I stared into the shop windows on my left. I did not like meeting school teachers in the street. I thought I could pass beneath her, if she was still there, and pretend I had not seen her. But fifty yards from the bridge I could not resist glancing up. The woman was my mother and she was looking right at me. I stopped. She had shifted her weight from one foot to the other, but she did not move from her position. I started towards her again. I found it was difficult to make my legs move and my heart beat so fast I was certain I would be sick. When I was almost under the footbridge I stopped again and looked up. Great relief and recognition swept through me and I laughed out loud. It was not Mother of course, it was Julie, wearing a coat I had never seen before.

‘Julie!’ I called up, ‘I thought you …’ I ran under the bridge and up a flight of wooden stairs. Face to face with her now I saw that it was not Julie either. She had a thin face and straggling greyish-black hair. I could not tell if she was young or old. She put her hands deep into her pockets and swayed slightly.

‘I ain’t got any money,’ she said, ‘so don’t you come near me.’

As I walked home my blankness returned, and significance drained from the event of my day. I went straight upstairs to my bedroom, and although I did not meet or hear anyone, I knew the others were in. I took off all my clothes and lay under the sheet on my bed. Some time later I was woken from a heavy sleep by the sound of shrill laughter. I was curious, but for some reason I did not move at first. I preferred to listen. The voices were Julie’s and Sue’s. At the end of each burst of laughter they made a sighing, singing sound which merged into words I could not make out. Then the laughter began again. I felt irritable after my sudden sleep. My head felt tight and shrunken, the objects in the room seemed too dense, locked hard into the space they occupied and bulging with strain. My clothes, before I picked them up and put them on, could have been made of steel. When I was dressed I stood outside my bedroom listening. I heard only the murmur of one voice and the creak of a chair. I went down the stairs as quietly as possible. I had a strong wish to spy on my sisters, to be with them and be invisible. It was completely dark in the large hallway downstairs. I was able to stand a little back from the open living-room door without being seen. Sue I could see clearly, she was sitting at the table cutting something with a large pair of scissors. Julie, who was partly obscured by the door frame, stood with her back to me and I could not see what she was doing. Her arm moved forwards and back with a faint, rasping sound. Just as I was moving to see better a little girl stepped in front of Julie and went to stand by Sue’s elbow. Julie turned also and stood behind the girl, one hand resting on her shoulder. In her other hand she held a hairbrush. They remained grouped like this for a while without talking. When Sue turned a little I saw she was cutting blue cloth. The little girl leaned backwards against Julie who clasped her hands under the girl’s chin and tapped her gently on the chest with the brush.

Of course, as soon as the girl spoke I knew it was Tom. He said, ‘It takes a long time, doesn’t it?’ and Sue nodded. I took a couple of paces into the room and was not noticed. Tom and Julie were intent on watching Sue, who was making alterations to one of her school skirts. She had cut it shorter and now she was beginning to sew. Tom was wearing an orange-coloured dress that looked familiar and from somewhere they had found him a wig. His hair was fair and thick with curls. How easy it was to be someone else. I crossed my arms and hugged myself. They are only clothes and a wig, I thought, it is Tom dressed up. But I was looking at another person, someone who could expect a life quite different from Tom’s. I was excited and scared. I squeezed my hands together and the movement caused all three to turn and look at me.

‘What are you doing?’ I said after a pause.