by Ian Mcewan
“The house must be run properly, Jack, and Tom has to be looked after. You’ve got to keep things clean and tidy; otherwise you know what will happen.”
“What?”
“They’ll come and put Tom into care, and perhaps you and Susan too. Julie wouldn’t stay here by herself. So the house would stand empty, the word would get around and it wouldn’t be long before people would be breaking in, taking things, smashing everything up.” She squeezed my arm and smiled. “And then when I come out of hospital there would be nothing for us all to come back to.” I nodded. “I’ve opened an account at the post office for Julie, and money will get paid into it from my savings. There’s enough for you all for quite a while, easily enough till I come out of hospital.” She settled back against the pillows and half closed her eyes. I stood up.
“Okay,” I said. “When do you go in?”
“It might not be for a week or two yet,” she said without opening her eyes. As I reached the door she said, “The sooner the better, I think.”
“Yes.”
The different position of my voice made her open her eyes. I stood at the door, ready to leave. She said, “I’m tired of lying here doing nothing all day.”
Three days later she was dead. Julie found her when she got in from school on Friday afternoon, the last day of the summer term. Sue had taken Tom swimming, and I arrived back minutes after Julie. As I turned down our front path I saw her leaning out of Mother’s window and she saw me, but we ignored each other. I did not go upstairs immediately. I took my jacket and shoes off and drank a glass of cold water from the tap in the kitchen. I looked in the refrigerator for something to eat, found some cheese and ate it with an apple. The house was very quiet and I felt oppressed by the empty weeks ahead. I had not found a job yet; I had not even looked for one. Out of habit, I went upstairs to say hello to my mother. I found Julie on the landing just outside Mother’s bedroom, and when she saw me she pulled the door shut and stooped to lock it. Trembling slightly, she stood facing me, the key clenched tightly in her fist.
“She’s dead,” Julie said evenly.
“What do you mean? How do you know?”
“She’s been dying for months.” Julie pushed past me on the stairs. “She didn’t want you lot to know.” I resented “you lot” immediately.
“I want to see,” I said. “Give me that key.” Julie shook her head.
“You better come down and talk before Tom and Sue get in.”
For a moment I thought of snatching at the key, but I turned and, light-headed, close to blasphemous laughter, followed my sister down.
CHAPTER FIVE
BY THE time I got to the kitchen Julie had already arranged herself there. She had tied her hair in a ponytail and was leaning back against the sink, her arms folded. All her weight was on one foot, and the other rested flat against the cupboard behind her so that her knee protruded.
“Where have you been?” she said, but I did not understand her.
“I want to see,” I said. Julie shook her head. “We’re both in charge,” I said as I circled the kitchen table, “she told me.
“She’s dead,” Julie said, “Sit down. Don’t you understand yet? She’s dead.” I sat down.
“I’m in charge too,” I said, and began to cry because I felt cheated. My mother had gone without explaining to Julie what she had told me. Not to hospital, but gone completely, and there could be no verification. For a moment I perceived clearly the fact of her death, and my crying became dry and hard. But then I pictured myself as someone whose mother had just died and my crying was wet and easy again. Julie’s hand was on my shoulder. As soon as I became aware of it I saw, as though through the kitchen window, the unmoving tableau we formed, sitter and stander, and I was unsure briefly which was me. Someone below me sat weeping at the end of my fingers. I was uncertain whether Julie was waiting tenderly or impatiently for me to stop crying. I did not know if she was thinking of me at all for the hand on my shoulder was neutral in touch. This uncertainty made me stop crying. I wished to see the expression on her face. Julie resumed her position by the sink and said, “Tom and Sue will be here.” I wiped my face and blew my nose on the kitchen towel. “We might as well tell them as soon as they get in.” I nodded, and we stood about, waiting in silence, for almost half an hour.
When Sue came in and Julie told her the news, both girls burst into tears and embraced each other. Tom was still outside somewhere. I watched my sisters crying; I sensed it would seem hostile to look elsewhere. I felt excluded but I did not wish to appear so. At one point I placed my hand on Sue’s shoulder, the way Julie had on mine, but neither of them noticed me, any more than wrestlers in a clinch would, so I removed it. Through their crying Julie and Sue were saying unintelligible things, to themselves perhaps or to each other. I wished I could abandon myself like them, but I felt watched. I wanted to go and look at myself in the mirror. When Tom came in the girls separated and turned their faces. He demanded a glass of squash, drank it and left. Sue and I followed Julie upstairs, and while we were standing behind her on the landing, waiting for her to open the door, I thought of Sue and myself as a married couple about to be shown into a sinister hotel room. I belched, Sue giggled and Julie made a shushing noise.
The curtains were not drawn in order, Julie told me later, to “avoid suspicion.” The room was full of sunlight. Mother lay propped up by pillows, her hands under the sheet. She could have been about to doze off, for her eyes were not open and staring like dead people’s in films, nor were they completely closed. On the floor near the bed were her magazines and books, and on the bedside table there was an alarm clock which still ticked, a glass of water and an orange. While Sue and I watched from the foot of the bed, Julie took hold of the sheet and tried to draw it over Mother’s head. Because she was sitting up, the sheet would not reach. Julie pulled harder, the sheet came loose and she was able to cover the head. Mother’s feet appeared; they stuck out from underneath the blanket, bluish white with a space between each toe. Sue and I giggled again. Julie pulled the blanket over the feet and Mother’s head was revealed once more like an unveiled statue. Sue and I laughed uncontrollably. Julie was laughing too; through clenched teeth her whole body shook. The bedclothes were finally in place, and Julie came and stood by us at the foot of the bed. The shape of Mother’s head and shoulders was obvious through the white sheet.
“She looks ridiculous like that,” Sue wailed.
“No she doesn’t,” Julie said violently. Sue reached forward and pulled the sheet clear of Mother’s head, and almost simultaneously Julie punched her hard on the arm and shouted, “Leave it alone.” The door behind us opened and Tom was in the room, breathless from his game in the street.
As soon as Julie and I caught hold of him he said, “I want Mum.”
“She’s asleep,” we whispered, “look, you can see.” Tom struggled to get by us.
“Why were you shouting then? Anyway, she’s not asleep, are you Mum?”
“She’s very asleep,” said Sue. For a moment it seemed that through sleep, a very deep sleep, we might initiate Tom in the concept of death. But we knew no more about it than he did, and he sensed something was up.
“Mum!” he yelled, and tried to fight his way round the bed. I held him by his wrists.
“You can’t,” I said. Tom kicked my ankle, pulled free and slipped round Julie to the head of the bed. Steadying himself with one hand on Mother’s shoulder, Tom took his shoes off and glared at us triumphantly. Scenes like this had happened before, and sometimes he got his way. By now I was all for letting him find out for himself. I just wanted to watch what happened. But as soon as Tom pulled back the bedclothes to climb in beside his mother, Julie sprang forward and caught Tom by the arm.
“Come on,” she said gently, and pulled him.
“No, no …” Tom squealed, just as he always did, and with his free hand held onto the sleeve of Mother’s nightdress. As Julie pulled, Mother toppled sideways in a frightening, wooden sort of way, he
r head struck the bedside table and the clock and the glass of water crashed to the floor. Her head remained wedged between the bed and the table, and now one hand was visible by the pillow. Tom became quiet and still, almost rigid, and let himself be led away like a blindman by Julie. Sue had already left, though I did not notice her go. I paused a moment, wondering whether I should push the corpse into an upright position. I took a pace toward her, but I could not bear the idea of touching her. I ran out of the room, slammed the door shut, turned the key and put it in my pocket.
In the early evening Tom cried himself to sleep on the sofa downstairs. We covered him with a bath towel because no one wanted to go upstairs alone to fetch a blanket. For the rest of the evening we sat about the living room without saying much. Once or twice Sue began to cry, and gave up, as if the effort was too much for her. Julie said, “She probably died in her sleep,” and Sue and I nodded.
After a couple of minutes Sue added, “It didn’t hurt.” Julie and I murmured in agreement.
A long pause and then I said again, “Are you hungry?” My sisters shook their heads. I longed to eat, but I did not want to eat alone. I did not want to do anything alone. When finally they did agree to have something I brought in bread, butter and marmalade and two pints of milk. While we were eating and drinking, conversation picked up. Julie told us that she first “knew” two weeks before my birthday.
“When you did your handstand,” I said.
“And you sang ‘Greensleeves,’ “said Sue, “but what did I do?” We could not remember what Sue had done, and she kept saying, “I know I did something,” till I told her to shut up. A little after midnight we went upstairs together, keeping very close on the stairs. Julie went first, and I carried Tom. On the first landing we stopped and huddled together before passing Mother’s door. I thought I could hear the alarm clock ticking. I was glad the door was locked. We put Tom to bed without waking him. The girls had agreed, without even talking about it, that they would sleep in the same bed. I got into my own bed and lay on my back tensely and turned my head violently to one side whenever there was a thought or an image I wanted to avoid. After half an hour I went into Tom’s bedroom and carried him to my own bed. I noticed the light was still on in Julie’s room. I put my arms round my brother and fell asleep.
TOWARD THE end of the next day Sue said, “Don’t you think we ought to tell someone?”
We were sitting round the rockery. We had spent the whole day in the garden because it was hot and because we were afraid of the house at our backs whose small windows now suggested not concentration, but heavy sleep. In the morning there had been a row over Julie’s bikini. Sue thought it was wrong of her to wear it. I said I did not care. Sue said that if Julie wore the bikini it meant “she didn’t care about Mum.” Tom started to cry and Julie went indoors to take her bikini off. I passed the day looking through a pile of old comics, some of them Tom’s. At the back of my mind I had a sense of us sitting about waiting for some terrible event, and then I would remember that it had already happened. Sue looked through her books and sometimes cried to herself. Julie sat on top of the rockery rattling pebbles in her cupped hands, tossing them up and catching them. She was irritable with Tom who one moment was whining and wanting attention, and the next was off playing as if nothing had happened. Once he tried to climb onto Julie’s knee and I heard her say as she pushed him away, “Go away. Please go away.” In the afternoon I read to him from one of the comics.
When Sue asked her question, Julie looked up briefly and looked away. I said, “If we tell someone…” and waited.
Sue said, “We have to tell someone so there can be a funeral.” I glanced at Julie. She was gazing past our garden fence, across the empty land to the tower blocks.
“If we tell them,” I began again, “they’ll come and put us into care, into an orphanage or something. They might try and get Tom adopted.” I paused. Sue was horrified.
“They can’t do that,” she said.
“The house will stand empty,” I went on, “people will break in, there’ll be nothing left.”
“But if we don’t tell anyone,” said Sue, and gestured vaguely toward the house, “what do we do then?”
I looked at Julie again and said louder, “Those kids will come in and smash everything up.”
Julie tossed her pebbles across the fence. She said, “We can’t leave her in the bedroom or she’ll start to smell.”
Sue was almost shouting. “That’s a terrible thing to say.”
“You mean,” I said to Julie, “that we shouldn’t tell anybody.”
Julie walked off toward the house without replying. I watched her go into the kitchen and splash her face at the sink. She held her head under the cold water tap till her hair was soaked; then she wrung it out and swept it clear of her face. As she walked back toward us, drops of water ran onto her shoulders. She sat down on the rockery and said, “If we don’t tell anybody we’ve got to do something ourselves quickly.” Sue was close to tears.
“But what can we do?” she moaned.
Julie was playing it up a bit. She said very quietly, “Bury her, of course.” For all her terseness, her voice still shook.
“Yes,” I said, thrilling with horror, “we can have a private funeral, Sue.” My younger sister was now weeping steadily, and Julie had her arm round her shoulder. She looked at me coldly over Sue’s head. I was suddenly irritated with them both. I got up and walked round to the front of the house to see what Tom was up to.
He was sitting with another boy in the pile of yellow sand by the front gate. They were digging a complicated system of fist-sized tunnels.
“He says,” said Tom’s friend derisively, squinting up at me, “he says, he says his mum’s just died and it’s not true.”
“It is true,” I told him. “She’s my mum too, and she’s just died.”
“Ner-ner, told ya, ner-ner,” Tom sneered and plunged his wrists deep into the sand.
His friend thought for a moment. “Well, my mum’s not dead.”
“Don’t care,” said Tom, working away at his tunnel.
“My mum’s not dead,” the boy repeated to me.
“So what?” I said.
“Because she isn’t,” the boy yelled. “She isn’t.” I composed my face and knelt down by them in the sand. I placed my hand sympathetically on the shoulder of Tom’s friend.
“I’ll tell you something,” I said quietly, “I’ve just come from your house. Your dad told me. Your mum’s dead. She came out looking for you and a car run her over.”
“Ner-ner, your mum’s dead,” Tom crowed.
“She isn’t,” the boy said to himself.
“I’m telling you,” I hissed at him, “I’ve just come from your house. Your dad’s pretty upset, and he’s really angry with you. Your mum got run over because she was looking for you.” The boy stood up. The color had drained from his face. “I wouldn’t go home if I was you,” I continued, “your dad’ll be after you.” The boy ran off, up our garden path to the front door. Then he remembered, turned round and ran back. As he passed us he was beginning to blubber.
“Where you going?” Tom shouted after him, but his friend shook his head and kept on running.
As soon as it was dark and we were all indoors, Tom became fearful and miserable again. He cried when we tried to put him to bed, so we let him stay up and hoped he would fall asleep on the sofa. He whined and cried about the slightest thing, and it was impossible to talk about what we were going to do. We ended up talking round him, shouting over his head. While Tom was screaming and stamping his feet because there was no orange squash left, and Sue was trying to quieten him, I said rapidly to Julie, “Where shall we put her?” She said something, and it was lost to Tom’s squeals.
“In the garden, under the rockery,” she repeated. Later on Tom cried quite simply for his mother, and while I was trying to comfort him, I saw Julie explaining something to Sue who was nodding her head and rubbing her eyes. As I was attem
pting to divert Tom with talk of the tunnels he had been building in the sand, I suddenly had my own idea. I lost track of what I was saying, and Tom began to cry loudly once more. He did not fall asleep till after midnight, and only then was I able to tell my sisters that I did not think that the garden was a good plan. We would have to dig deep and it would take a long time. If we did it in the day someone would see us, and if we did it at night we would need torches. We might be seen from the tower blocks. And how would we keep it from Tom? I paused for effect. Despite everything, I was enjoying myself. I had always admired the gentlemen criminals in films who discussed the perfect murder with elegant detachment As I spoke, I touched the key in my pocket and my stomach turned. I went on confidently, “And of course, if someone came looking, digging up the garden is what they would do first. You read about that sort of thing in the paper every day.”
Julie was watching me closely. She appeared to be taking me seriously and when I finished she said, “Well then?”
WE LEFT Sue in the kitchen with Tom. She was not angry or horrified by my idea. She was too miserable to care and shook her head slowly like a sad old lady. Outside there was enough moonlight for us to find the wheelbarrow and a shovel. We pushed it round to the front garden and filled it with sand. We tipped six loads down the coal hole into the cellar, and then we stood outside the kitchen arguing about the water. I said we would have to take it down in buckets. Julie said there was a tap down there. Finally we found it in the small room where all the old clothes and toys were. Because it was farther from the bedroom, the cellar seemed less frightening to me than the rest of the house. Obscurely, I felt entitled to do the shoveling and mixing, but Julie had the shovel and had already made up a pile of sand. She split open one of the cement sacks and stood waiting for me to fetch the water. She worked at great speed, turning and folding the huge pile in on itself till it was a stiff, gray sludge. I lifted the lid of the great tin chest and Julie shoveled the cement in. The cement was now five inches deep on the bottom of the chest. We agreed to do another larger load, and this time I did the mixing and Julie fetched the water. As I worked, the whole purpose of what we were doing never crossed my mind. There was nothing odd about mixing cement. When the second pile of cement was in the chest we had been working three hours. We went upstairs to the kitchen to drink some water. Sue was sleeping in an armchair and Tom lay face down on the sofa. We covered Sue with a coat and returned to the cellar. The chest was now almost half full. We decided that before we fetched her down we should have a really big pile of cement ready. It took us a long time to make this one up. We ran out of sand, and since there was only one shovel, we both went out into the garden again to fetch some more. The sky was already lightening in the east. We made five journeys with the wheelbarrow. I wondered aloud what we would tell Tom when he came out in the morning to find that his sand had disappeared. Julie said, mimicking him, “Blowed away,” and we giggled tiredly.
