The Cement Garden Read Online Free PDF

person. One long Sunday afternoon Julie came in during a conversation we were having about our parents. I had been saying that secretly they had hated each other and that Mother was relieved when Father died. Julie sat on the bed next to Sue, crossed her legs and yawned. I paused and cleared my throat.
    ‘Go on,’ Julie said, ‘it sounds interesting.’
    I said, ‘It wasn’t anything.’
    ‘Oh,’ said Julie. She flushed a little, and looked down. Now Sue cleared her throat, and we all waited.
    I said foolishly, ‘I was just saying I don’t think Mum ever really liked Dad.’
    ‘Didn’t she?’ Julie said with mock interest. She was angry.
    ‘I don’t know,’ I muttered. ‘Perhaps you know.’
    ‘Why should I know?’ There was another silence, then Sue said, ‘’Cos you talk to her more than we do.’
    Julie’s anger expressed itself in mounting silence. She stood up and when she had crossed the room she turned in the doorway and said quietly, ‘Only because you two won’t have anything to do with her.’ She paused by the door waiting for a reply, and then she was gone leaving behind a very faint smell of perfume.
    The next day, after school, I offered to walk down to the shops with my mother.
    ‘There’s nothing to carry,’ she said. She was standing in the gloomy hallway, knotting her scarf in the mirror.
    ‘Feel like a walk,’ I mumbled.
    We walked in silence for several minutes, then she linked her arm through mine and said to me, ‘It’s your birthday soon.’
    I said, ‘Yeah, pretty soon.’
    ‘Are you excited about being fifteen?’
    ‘Dunno,’ I said.
    While we waited in a chemist’s shop for a prescription for my mother, I asked her what the doctor had said. She was examining a gift-wrapped bar of soap in a plastic dish. She put it down and smiled cheerily.
    ‘Oh, they’re all talking rubbish. I’ve done with the lot of them.’ She nodded towards the pharmaceutical counter. ‘As long as I get my pills.’
    I felt relieved. The prescription came at last in a heavy, brown bottle which I offered to carry for her. On the way home she suggested we had a little party on my birthday and that I invited a few friends from school. ‘No,’ I said immediately. ‘Let’s just have the family.’ For the rest of the way home we made plans, and we were both glad to have at last something to talk about. My mother remembered a party we had had on Julie’s tenth birthday. I remembered it too, I was eight. Julie had wept because someone had told her that there were no more birthdays after you were ten. It had become for a while a family joke. Neither of us mentioned the effect my father had had on that and all the other parties I could remember. He liked to have the children stand in neat lines, quietly waiting their turn at some game he had set up. Noise and chaos, children milling around without purpose, irritated him profoundly. There was never a birthday party during which he did not lose his temper with someone. At Sue’s eighth birthday party he tried to send her to bed for fooling around. Mother intervened, and that was the last of the parties. Tom had never had one. By the time we reached our front gate we had fallen silent. As she fumbled in her handbag for a front-door key I wondered if she was glad that this time we would be having a party without him.
    I said, ‘Pity Dad couldn’t be …’ and she said, ‘Poor dear. He would have been so proud of you.’
    Two days before my birthday my mother took to her bed.
    ‘I’ll be up in time,’ she said when Sue and I went in to see her. ‘I’m not ill, I’m just very, very tired.’ Even as she was speaking to us her eyes were barely open. She had already made a cake and iced it with concentric circles of red and blue. In the very centre stood one candle. Tom was amused by this.
    ‘You’re not fifteen,’ he shouted, ‘you’re only one when it’s your birthday.’
    Early in the morning Tom came into my room and jumped on my