The Cement Garden Read Free Page A

run faster than anyone I knew. Father had never taken her seriously, he said it was daft in a girl, running fast, and not long before he died he refused to come to a sports meeting with us. We attacked him bitterly, even Mother joined in. He laughed at our exasperation. Perhaps he really intended to be there, but we left him alone and sulked among ourselves. On the day, because we did not ask him to come, he forgot and never saw in the last month of his life his elder daughter star of all the field. He missed the pale-brown, slim legs flickering across the green like blades, or me, Tom, Mother and Sue running across the enclosure to cover Julie with kisses when she took her third race. In the evenings she often stayed at home to wash her hair and iron the pleats in her navy-blue school skirt. She was one of a handful of daring girls at school who wore starched white petticoats beneath their skirts to fill them out and make them swirl when they turned on their heel. She wore stockings and black knickers, strictly forbidden. She had a clean white blouse five days a week. Some mornings she gathered her hair at the nape of her neck with a brilliant white ribbon. All this took considerable preparation each evening. I used to sit around, watching her at the ironing-board, getting on her nerves.
    She had boyfriends at school, but she never really let them get near her. There was an unspoken family rule that none of us ever brought friends home. Her closest friends were girls, the most rebellious, the ones with reputations. I sometimes saw her at school at the far end of a corridor surrounded by a small noisy group. But Julie herself gave little away, she dominated her group and heightened her reputation with a disruptive, intimidating quietness. I had some status at school as Julie’s brother but she never spoke to me there or acknowledged my presence.
    At some point during the same period my spots were so thoroughly established across my face that I abandoned all the rituals of personal hygiene. I no longer washed my face or hair or cut my nails or took baths. I gave up brushing my teeth. In her quiet way my mother reproved me continuously, but I now felt proudly beyond her control. If people really liked me, I argued, they would take me as I was. In the early morning my mother came into my bedroom and exchanged my dirty clothes for clean ones. At weekends I lay in bed till the afternoon and then took long solitary walks. In the evenings I watched Julie, listened to the radio or just sat. I had no close friends at school.
    I frequently stared at myself in mirrors, sometimes for as long as an hour. One morning, shortly before my fifteenth birthday, I was searching in the gloom of our huge hallway for my shoes when I glimpsed myself in a full-length mirror which leaned against the wall. My father had always intended to secure it. Coloured light through the stained glass above the front door illuminated from behind stray fibres of my hair. The yellowish semi-darkness obscured the humps and pits of my complexion. I felt noble and unique. I stared at my own image till it began to dissociate itself and paralyse me with its look. It receded and returned to me with each beat of my pulse, and a dark halo throbbed above its head and shoulders. ‘Tough,’ it said to me. ‘Tough.’ And then louder, ‘Shit … piss … arse.’ From the kitchen my mother called my name in weary admonition.
    From a bowl of fruit I picked out an apple and went to the kitchen. I slouched in the doorway and watched the family at breakfast and tossed the apple in my hand, catching it with crisp smacks against the palm. Julie and Sue read school books while they were eating. My mother, drained by another night without sleep, was not eating. Her sunken eyes were grey and watery. With whines of irritation Tom was trying to push his chair nearer hers. He wanted to sit in her lap, but she complained he was too heavy. She arranged the chair for him and ran her