Free The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan Page B

pulse in her temple stood out and beat angrily. I shrugged and decided to leave, but she did not look up. When I was through the door she pushed it shut and locked it and as I was walking away I heard her crying. I knocked on her door and called to her. Through her sobs she told me to go away, and that is what I did. I went to the bathroom and washed the dried cement from my hands.
    For a week after the burial we did not eat a cooked meal. Julie went to the post office for money and came home with bags of shopping, but the vegetables and meat she bought lay around untouched until they had to be thrown away. Instead we ate bread, cheese, peanut butter, biscuits and fruit. Tom gorged himself on bars of chocolate and did not seem to need much else. When someone felt like making it, we drank tea, but mostly we had water from the kitchen tap. The day Julie bought the shopping, she gave Sue and me two pounds each.
    ‘How much are you getting then?’ I asked her. She snapped her purse shut.
    ‘Same as you,’ she said. ‘The rest is for food and stuff.’
    It was not long before the kitchen was a place of stench and clouds of flies. None of us felt like doing anything about it beyond keeping the kitchen door shut. It was too hot. Then someone, not me, threw the meat out. Encouraged, I cleaned out some milk bottles, gathered up empty wrappers and swatted a dozen or so of the flies. That same night Julie told Sue and me it was time we did something about the kitchen. I said, ‘I did a lot of things in there today which you two don’t seem to have noticed.’ The girls laughed.
    ‘Like what?’ Sue said, and when I told them they laughed again, louder than they needed to.
    ‘Oh well,’ they said to each other. ‘He’s done his bit for a few weeks.’ I decided then to have nothing more to do with the kitchen and this made Julie and Sue determined not to clean it up either. It was not until we cooked a meal, several days later, that something was finally done. In the meantime the flies spread through the house and hung in thin clouds by the windows, and made a constant clicking sound as they threw themselves against the glass.
    I masturbated each morning and afternoon, and drifted through the house, from one room to another, sometimes surprised to find myself in my bedroom, lying on my back staring at the ceiling, when I had intended to go out into the garden. I looked at myself carefully in the mirror. What was wrong with me? I tried to frighten myself with the reflection of my eyes, but I felt only impatience and mild revulsion. I stood in the centre of my room listening to the very distant, constant sound of traffic. Then I listened to the voices of children playing in the street. The two sounds merged and seemed to press down on the top of my head. I lay on the bed again and this time I closed my eyes. When a fly walked across my face I was determined not to move. I could not bear to remain on the bed, and yet any activity I thought of disgusted me in advance. To stir myself I thought of my mother downstairs. She was no more to me than a fact. I got up and went to the window and stood several minutes looking out across the parched weeds to the tower blocks. Then I looked through the house to see if Julie was back. She frequently disappeared, usually in the afternoons and for hours on end. When I asked her where she went she told me to mind my own business. Julie was not in, and Sue had locked herself in her room. If I knocked on her door she would ask me what I wanted, and I would not know what to tell her. I remembered the two pounds. I left the house by the back and climbed over the fence so that Tom would not see me and want to come with me. For no particular reason at all I set off at a run towards the shops.
    I had no idea what I wanted. I thought I would know when I saw it and, even if it cost more than two pounds, then at least I would have something to want, something to think about. I ran all the way. The main