Free The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan

what we had done, and catching our breath. We decided to leave the lid of the trunk up so the cement would harden quicker.

PART TWO
     

6
     
    Two or three years before my father died my parents had to attend the funeral of one of their last surviving relatives. It might have been my mother’s aunt, or my father’s, or it might have been an uncle. Exactly who had died was not discussed, probably because the death meant very little to our parents. Certainly it meant nothing to us children. We were more interested in the fact that we were to be left alone in the house in charge of Tom for most of the day. Mother prepared us for our responsibilities several days in advance. She would cook our lunch, and all we had to do was warm it up when we were hungry. She showed each one of us in turn – Julie, Sue, then me – how to operate the stove and she made us promise to check three times that it was properly turned off. She changed her mind and said she would prepare a cold lunch. But that would not do, she finally decided, because it was winter and we could not go without something hot in the middle of the day. Father, in his turn, told us what to do if someone knocked at the front door, though, of course, no one had ever knocked at the front door. He instructed us in what to do if the house caught fire. We were not to stay and fight it, we were to run out of the house to the telephone kiosk, and under no circumstances were we to forget Tom. We were not to play down in the cellar, we were not to plug the electric iron in, nor were we to put our fingers in the electric sockets. When we took Tom to the lavatory we were to hold on to him all the time.
    We were made to repeat these instructions solemnly till every detail was correct, then we gathered by the front door to watch our parents walk to the bus stop in their black clothes. Every few yards they turned anxiously and waved, and we all waved cheerily back. When they were out of sight Julie slammed the front door shut with her foot, gave out a whoop of delight and in the same movement whipped around and delivered a low, hard punch to my ribs. The blow knocked me back against the wall. Julie ran up the stairs three at a time and looked down at me and laughed. Sue and I flew after her and upstairs we had a wild, violent pillow-fight. Later I made a barricade at the top of the stairs with mattresses and chairs which my sisters stormed from below. Sue filled a balloon with water and threw it at my head. Tom stood at the foot of the stairs, grinning and lurching. An hour later in his excitement he did a shit in his pants and a rare, sharp smell drifted upstairs and interrupted our fight. Julie and Sue sided. They said I should deal with it because I was the same sex as Tom. I appealed uneasily to the very nature of things and said that, as girls, it was obviously their duty to do something. Nothing was resolved, and our wild battle continued. Soon Tom began to wail. We broke off again. We picked Tom up, carried him to his bedroom and put him in his large brass cot. Julie fetched his harness and tied him down. By now his screams were deafening and his face was a bright pink. We raised the side of the cot and hurried out of the room, anxious to be away from the smell and the screams. Once Tom’s bedroom door was shut we could hardly hear a thing, and we carried on our games quite undisturbed.
    It was no more than a few hours, but this time seemed to occupy a whole stretch of my childhood. Half an hour before our parents were due back, giggling at the peril we were in, we started to clear up our mess. Between us we cleaned Tom up. We discovered the lunch we had been too busy to eat and tipped it down the lavatory. That evening our shared secret made us delirious. In our pyjamas we huddled together in Julie’s bedroom and talked of how we would ‘do it again’ soon.
    When Mother died, beneath my strongest feelings was a sense of adventure and freedom which I hardly dared admit to