The Cement Garden Read Online Free PDF Page B

bed.
    ‘Wake up, wake up, you’re one today.’
    At breakfast Julie handed me, without comment, a small leather pouch which contained a metal comb and nail scissors. Sue gave me a science fiction novel. On its cover a great, tentacled monster was engulfing a space ship and beyond the sky was black, pierced by bright stars. I took a tray up to my mother’s room. When I went in she was lying on her back and her eyes were open. I sat on the edge of her bed and balanced the tray on my knees. She sat propped up by pillows, sipping her tea. Then she said, ‘Happy birthday, son. I can’t speak in the mornings till I’ve had something to drink.’
    We embraced clumsily over the teacup she still held in her hand. I opened the envelope she gave me. Inside a birthday card were two pound notes. On the card was a still-life photograph of a globe, a pile of old leather-bound books, fishing tackle and a cricket ball. I embraced her again and she said ‘Oops’ as the cup wobbled in its saucer. We sat together for a while and she squeezed my hand. Her own was yellowish and scrawny, like a chicken’s foot I thought.
    All morning I lay on my bed reading the book Sue had given me. It was the first novel I had ever read all the way through. Minute life-bearing spores drifting in clouds across galaxies had been touched by special rays from a dying sun and had hatched into a colossal monster who fed off X-rays and who was now terrorizing regular space traffic between Earth and Mars. It was Commander Hunt’s task not only to destroy this beast but to dispose of its gigantic corpse.
    ‘To allow it to drift for ever through space,’ explained one scientist to Hunt at one of their many briefings, ‘would not only create a collision hazard, but who knows what other cosmic rays might do to its rotten bulk? Who knows what other monstrous mutation might emerge from this carcass?’
    When Julie came into my room and told me that Mother was not getting up, and that we were having the cake round her bedside, I was so engrossed that I stared at her without comprehension.
    ‘Why don’t you do her a favour,’ Julie said as she was leaving, ‘and clean yourself up for once?’
    In the afternoon Tom and Sue carried the cake and cups upstairs. I locked myself in the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror. I was not the kind Commander Hunt would have had on board his space ship. I was trying to grow a beard to conceal my skin, yet each of the sparse hairs led the eye like a pointing finger to the spot at its base. I filled the wash-basin with hot water and leaned with my immersed palms taking my weight against the bottom of the sink. I often passed half an hour this way, inclined towards the mirror, my hands and wrists in hot water. It was the closest I came to washing. I day-dreamed instead, this time about Commander Hunt. When the water was no longer hot I dried my hands and took from my pocket the little leather pouch. I cut my fingernails and combed my lank brown hair, experimenting with different styles and deciding at last to celebrate my birthday with a centre parting.
    As I entered my mother’s bedroom Sue started singing ‘Happy Birthday’, and the others joined in. The cake rested on the bedside table and its candle was already lit. My mother lay surrounded by pillows, and though she was moving her lips to the song, I could not make out her voice. When they were done, I blew out the candle and Tom danced before the bed and chanted, ‘You’re one, you’re one,’ till Julie shushed him.
    ‘You look very smart,’ my mother said. ‘Have you just had a bath?’
    ‘Yes,’ I said, and cut the cake.
    Into the teacups Sue poured the orange juice she had made, she said, from four pounds of real oranges.
    ‘All oranges are real, aren’t they, Mum?’ Tom said.
    We all laughed and Tom, delighted with himself, repeated his remark several times but with diminishing success. It was hardly a party really, and I was impatient to return to