The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan Read Free Book Online Page A

one of my old frocks. That sweet little face.’ They looked at each other and laughed. There was a strange excitement in the air.
    ‘He’d look bloody idiotic,’ I said suddenly.
    ‘Yes?’ Julie said coolly. ‘Why do you think that?’
    ‘You know he would …’ There was a pause; Julie was gathering and shaping her anger. Her bare arms lay across the table, a deeper brown than ever under the electric light.
    ‘Making him look stupid,’ I muttered when I sensed I should be silent, ‘just so you can have a laugh.’
    Julie spoke quietly. ‘You think girls look idiotic, daft, stupid …’
    ‘No,’ I said indignantly.
    ‘You think it’s humiliating to look like a girl, because you think it’s humiliating to be a girl.’
    ‘It would be for Tom, to look like a girl.’ Julie took a deep breath and her voice dropped to a murmur.
    ‘Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because it’s okay to be a boy, for girls it’s like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading. Why else would you think it’s humiliating for Tom to wear a frock?’
    ‘Because it is,’ I said determinedly.
    ‘But why?’ Julie and Sue called together, and before I could think of anything Julie said, ‘If I wore your trousers to school tomorrow and you wore my skirt we’d soon see who had the worse time. Everyone would point at you and laugh.’ Here Julie pointed across the table, her fingers inches from my nose.
    ‘Look at him! He looks just like … ugh! … a girl !’
    ‘And look at her,’ Sue was pointing at Julie, ‘she looks rather … clever in those trousers.’ My two sisters laughed so hard they collapsed in each other’s arms.
    It was simply a theoretical discussion, for one day later Tom was back at school and his teacher wrote Mother a long letter. She read parts of it out loud while Sue and I were manoeuvring the dining-room table into her bedroom.
    ‘Tom is a pleasure to have in the class.’ Mother read this line over a couple of times with great satisfaction. Also she liked ‘He is a gentle but spirited child.’ We had decided to eat our meals in the bedroom with Mother. I carried up two small armchairs too and now there was barely space to move around the bed. Reading the letter exhausted her. She lay back against the pillows, holding her glasses loosely in one hand. The letter slid to the floor. Sue picked it up and pushed it back into the envelope.
    ‘When I’m up,’ Mother said to her, ‘we’ll redecorate the downstairs room before we put all this furniture back.’ Sue sat on her bed and they talked about colour schemes. I sat at the table, leaning on my elbows. It was late afternoon and still very hot. Both the sash windows in the bedroom were open as far as they could go. From outside there were the sounds of kids playing round the empty prefabs further up the street, sudden shouts above the murmur of voices, someone’s name being called. There were a lot of flies in the room. I watched one crawl the length of my arm. Julie was sunning herself on the rockery and Tom was out playing somewhere.
    Mother had fallen asleep. Sue took the glasses out of her hand, folded them and placed them on the bedside table, and then she left the room. I listened to the rise and fall of my mother’s breathing. A particular arrangement of mucus in her nose caused a faint, high-pitched sound like a sharp blade in the air, and then that faded. To have the dining-room table up here was still a novelty to me, I could not quite leave it. I saw for the first time the swirling black lines of the wood’s grain beneath the dark lacquer stain. I rested my bare arms along its cool surface. It seemed more substantial here and I could no longer imagine it downstairs. From her bed my mother made a brief, soft, chewing sound with her tongue against her teeth, as though she were dreaming of being thirsty.