The Cement Garden Read Free Page B

fingers through her hair.
    The issue was whether Julie would walk to school with me. We used to go together every morning, but now she preferred not to be seen with me. I continued to toss the apple, imagining it made them all uneasy. My mother watched me steadily.
    ‘Come on, Julie,’ I said at last. Julie refilled her teacup.
    ‘I’ve got things to do,’ she said firmly. ‘You go on.’
    ‘What about you then, Sue?’ My younger sister did not look up from her book. She murmured, ‘Not going yet.’
    My mother reminded me gently that I had not had my breakfast but I was already on my way through the hall. I slammed the front door hard and crossed the road. Our house had once stood in a street full of houses. Now it stood on empty land where stinging nettles were growing round torn corrugated tin. The other houses were knocked down for a motorway they had never built. Sometimes kids from the tower blocks came to play near our house, but usually they went further up the road to the empty prefabs to kick the walls down and pick up what they could find. Once they set fire to one, and no one cared very much. Our house was old and large. It was built to look a little like a castle, with thick walls, squat windows and crenellations above the front door. Seen from across the road it looked like the face of someone concentrating, trying to remember.
    No one ever came to visit us. Neither my mother nor my father when he was alive had any real friends outside the family. They were both only children, and all my grandparents were dead. My mother had distant relatives in Ireland whom she had not seen since she was a child. Tom had a couple of friends he sometimes played with in the street, but we never let him bring them into the house. There was not even a milkman in our road now. As far as I could remember, the last people to visit the house had been the ambulance men who took my father away.
    I stood there several minutes wondering whether to return indoors and say something conciliatory to my mother. I was about to move on when the front door opened and Julie slipped out. She wore her black gabardine school raincoat belted tightly about her waist and the collar was turned up. She turned quickly to catch the front door before it slammed and the coat, skirt and petticoat spun with her, the desired effect. She had not seen me yet. I watched her sling her satchel over her shoulder. Julie could run like the wind, but she walked as though asleep, dead slow, straight-backed, and in a very straight line. She often appeared deep in thought, but when we asked her she always protested that her mind was empty.
    She did not see me until she was across the road and then she half-smiled, half-pouted and remained silent. Her silence made us all a little afraid of her, but again she would protest, her voice musical with bemusement, that she was the one who was afraid. It was true, she was shy – there was a rumour she never spoke in class without blushing – but she had the quiet strength and detachment, and lived in the separate world of those who are, and secretly know they are, exceptionally beautiful. I walked alongside her and she stared ahead, her back straight as a ruler, her lips softly pursed.
    A hundred yards on, our road ran into another street. A few terraced houses remained. The rest, and all the houses in the next street across, had been cleared to make way for four twenty-storey tower blocks. They stood on wide aprons of cracked asphalt where weeds were pushing through. They looked even older and sadder than our house. All down their concrete sides were colossal stains, almost black, caused by the rain. They never dried out. When Julie and I reached the end of our road I lunged at her wrist and said, ‘Carry your satchel, miss.’ Julie pulled her arm away and went on walking. I danced backwards in her path. Her brooding silences turned me into a nuisance.
    ‘Wanna fight? Wanna race?’ Julie lowered her eyes and kept to