The Cement Garden Read Online Free PDF Page A

cheekbones and losing themselves in her hair. The room smelled only faintly of urine. I picked up the gloves from the floor. Julie turned her head.
    ‘Get out,’ she said dully.
    ‘Sorry,’ I said.
    ‘Get … out.’
    Tom and Sue were in the doorway watching.
    ‘What happened?’ Sue asked me as I came out.
    ‘Nothing,’ I said, and closed the door very quietly.
    It was about this time that Mother more and more frequently went to bed in the early evening. She said she could barely keep awake.
    ‘A few early nights in a row,’ she would say, ‘and I’ll be myself again.’
    This left Julie in charge of supper and bedtime. Sue and I were in the living room listening to the radio. Julie came in and snapped it off.
    ‘Empty the rubbish bucket, will you,’ she said to me, ‘and carry the dustbins round to the front.’
    ‘Piss off,’ I shouted, ‘I was listening to that,’ and reached for the control knob.
    Julie covered it with her hand. I still felt too shamed by my assault on her to struggle with her. A few words of token resistance and I was outside carrying the dustbins. When I returned Sue was at the kitchen sink peeling potatoes. Later, when we sat down to eat, there was strained silence instead of the usual row. When I looked across at Sue she giggled. Julie would not look at us, and when she spoke it was in a low voice to Tom. When she left the room for a minute to take a tray of food upstairs, Sue and I kicked each other under the table and laughed. But we stopped when we heard her coming back down.
    Tom did not like these evenings without his mother. Julie made him eat everything on his plate, and he was not permitted to crawl under the table or make funny noises. What outraged him most was that Julie would not let him into Mother’s bedroom while she was sleeping. He liked to climb in beside her with all his clothes on. Julie caught him by his wrist on his way upstairs. ‘Not up there,’ she said quietly. ‘Mum’s asleep.’ Tom set up a terrible howl, but he did not resist when Julie dragged him back into the kitchen. He too was a little afraid of her. She was suddenly so remote from us, quiet, certain of her authority. I wanted to say to her, ‘Come on, Julie, stop pretending. We know who you are really.’ And I kept looking her way. But there was no answering look. She kept busy and her eyes met mine only briefly.
    I avoided being alone with my mother in case she spoke to me again. I knew from school she had got it wrong. But every time I set to now, once or twice a day, there passed through my mind the image of two pint milk bottles filled with blood and capped with silver foil. I was spending more time with Sue. She seemed to like me, or at least was prepared to ignore me. She passed much of her time at home reading in her bedroom, and she never objected to me lying around in there. She read novels about girls her own age, thirteen or so, who had adventures at their boarding schools. From the local library she borrowed large, illustrated books about dinosaurs or volcanoes or the fish of tropical seas. Sometimes I thumbed through them, looking at the pictures. None of the information interested me. I was suspicious of the paintings of dinosaurs, and I told Sue that no one could really know what they looked like. She told me about skeletons and all the clues there were to help in a reconstruction. We argued all afternoon. She knew far more than I, but I was determined not to let her win. Finally, bored and exasperated, we became sulky and left each other alone. But most often we talked like conspirators, about the family and all the other people we knew, careful scrutinies of their behaviour and appearance, what they were ‘really like’. We wondered how ill our mother was. Sue had overheard her tell Julie that she was changing her doctor again. We agreed that our elder sister was getting above herself. I did not really think of Sue as a girl now. She was, unlike Julie, merely a sister, a