by Ian Mcewan
When our final mix was ready it was five o’clock. We had not looked at or spoken to each other for almost an hour. I took the key from my pocket and Julie said, “I thought I’d lost that and you had it all the time.”
I followed her up the cellar stairs to the kitchen. We rested and drank some more water. In the living room we pushed some furniture aside and propped open the living-room door with a shoe. Upstairs I was the one who turned the key in the lock and pushed open the door, but it was Julie who stepped into the room first. She was about to turn on the light and then changed her mind. The grayish blue light gave everything in the room a flat, two-dimensional appearance. We seemed to be stepping into an old photograph of Mother’s bedroom. I did not look immediately toward the bed. The air was damp and stuffy, as though several people had been sleeping in here with the windows closed. Beyond this closeness was a faint, sharp odor. You could just smell it at the top of your breath, when your lungs were full. I took shallow breaths through my nose. She lay exactly as we had left her, the very image that had been presenting itself whenever I closed my eyes. Julie stood at the foot of the bed hugging herself. I stepped nearer and abandoned the idea that we could ever pick her up. I waited for Julie, but she did not move. I said, “We can’t do it.” Julie’s voice was high-pitched and strained, and she spoke rapidly, as if pretending to be cheerful and efficient.
“We’ll wrap her up in the sheet. It won’t be so bad. We’ll do it quickly, and it won’t be so bad.” But still she did not move.
I sat down at the table with my back to the bed, and instantly Julie was angry.
“That’s right,” she said quickly, “leave it to me. Why don’t you do something first?”
“Like what?”
“Roll her up in that sheet. It’s your plan isn’t it?” I wanted to sleep. I closed my eyes and experienced a sharp falling motion. I clutched at the sides of the table and stood up. Julie spoke more gently.
“If we spread the sheet out on the floor, we could lift her onto it.” I strode toward my mother and pulled the sheet off her. When I spread the sheet it settled on the floor in such dreamy, slow motion, the corners billowing and folding in on themselves, that I gasped with impatience. I caught my mother by the shoulder, half closed my eyes and pushed her off the table back onto the bed. I avoided her face. She seemed to resist me, and it took both hands to make her move. Now she lay on her side, her arms at odd angles, her body twisted and fixed in the position she had been lying in since the day before yesterday. Julie took her feet and I held her behind her shoulders. When we set her down on the sheet, she looked so frail and sad in her nightdress, lying at our feet like a bird with a broken wing, that for the first time I cried for her and not for myself. Behind her she left on the bed a large brown stain whose outer edges faded to yellow. Julie’s face was wet too when we knelt down by Mother and tried to roll her over in the sheet. It was difficult; her body was too twisted to turn.
“She won’t go. She won’t go,” Julie cried in exasperation. At last we succeeded in tucking the sheet round her loosely a couple of times. As soon as she was covered it was a little easier. We picked her up and carried her out of the bedroom.
We brought her down one step at a time, and at the bottom, in the downstairs hall, we rearranged the sheet where it was coming free. My wrists ached. We did not talk about it, but we knew we wanted to get her across the living room without putting her down. We were almost to the kitchen door on the other side when I glanced round to my left, toward Sue’s chair. She sat with the coat drawn up to her chin, watching as we passed. I was going to whisper to her but before I could think of anything we were through the kitchen door and edging round to the cellar stairs. We set her down at last several feet away from the trunk. I fetched a bucket of water to moisten our huge pile of cement, and later, when I looked up from the mixing, Sue was standing in the doorway. I thought she might try to stop us, but when Julie and I stood ready to lift the body Sue came and took hold of the middle. Because she would not lie straight, there was barely enough space in the trunk for her. She sank an inch or two into the cement that was already there. I turned for the shovel, but Julie already had it in her hands. As she emptied the first load of wet cement onto Mother’s feet, Sue gave out a little cry. And then, as Julie was filling the shovel again, Sue hurried over to the pile, picked up as much cement as she could get in two hands and threw it into the trunk. And then she was throwing cement in as fast as she could. Julie was shoveling faster too, staggering to the trunk with huge loads and running back for more. I plunged my hands into the cement and threw in a heavy armload. We worked like maniacs. Soon only a few patches of the sheet were visible, and then they too were gone. Still we kept on. The only sounds were the scrape of the shovel and our heavy breathing. When we finished, when there was nothing left of the pile but a damp path on the floor, the cement in the trunk was almost overflowing. Before we went back upstairs we stood about looking at 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
CHAPTER SIX
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 onto 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 pajamas 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 myself and which was derived from the memory of that day years ago. But there was no excitement now. The days were too long; it was too hot; the house seemed to have fallen asleep. We did not even sit outside because the wind was blowing a fine, black dust from the direction of the tower blocks and the main roads behind them. And even while it was hot, the sun never quite broke through a high, yellowish cloud; everything I looked at merged and seemed insignificant in the glare. Tom was the only one who was content, in the daytime at least. He had his friend, the one he had played with in the sand. Tom did not seem to notice that the sand was gone, nor did his friend ever mention the story I had given him about his mother. They played farther up the road, in and out of the ruined prefabs. In the evenings, after his friend had gone home, Tom was bad-tempered and cried easily. He went to Julie most often when he wanted attention, and he got on her nerves. “Don’t keep asking me,” she would snap. “Get away from me, Tom, just for a minute.” But it made little difference. Tom had made up his mind that Julie was to take care of him now. He trailed Julie about the house grizzling, and ignored Sue or me when we tried to divert him. One evening, early on, when Tom was being particularly demanding, and Julie more irritable than usual, she suddenly seized hold of him in the living room and tore his clothes off.
“Right,” she kept saying, “you’ve had it”.
“What are you doing?” Sue said over Tom’s sobs.
“If he wants to be mothered,” Julie shouted, “then he can start doing what I tell him. He’s going to bed.” It was hardly five o’clock in the afternoon. When Tom was naked, she dragged him by the arm to the bathroom. From there we heard his screams and the sound of bath water running. Ten minutes later Tom was back before us in his pajamas and, utterly subdued, allowed Julie to lead him upstairs to his bedroom. She came down banging imaginary dust from her palms and smiling widely.
“That’s what he wanted,” she said.
“And that’s what you’re best at giving,” I said. It came out a little more sourly than I intended. Julie kicked my foot gently.
“Watch it,” she murmured, “or you’ll be next.”
As soon as we had finished down in the cellar, Julie and I had gone to bed. Because Sue had slept for some of the night, she stayed up and looked after Tom during the day. I woke in the late afternoon extremely thirsty and hot. There was no one downstairs, but I could hear Tom’s voice somewhere outside. As I stooped to drink water from the kitchen tap a cloud of flies hummed around my face. I walked on the sides of my bare feet because the floor around the sink was covered with something yellow and sticky, probably spilled orange juice. Still light-headed from my sleep, I went upstairs to Sue’s room. She was sitting across her bed with her back against the wall. Her knees were drawn up and in her lap was an open notebook. She put down her pencil when I came in and snapped the book shut. It was stuffy as if she had been in here for hours. I sat down on the edge of her bed, quite near her. I felt like talking, but not about the night before. I wanted someone to stroke my head. Sue pressed her thin lips together, as though determined not to speak first.
“What are you doing?” I said at last, and stared at the notebook.
“Nothing,” she said, “just writing.” She held her notebook in two hands against her belly.
“What are you writing?”
She sighed. “Nothing. Just writing.” I tore the book from her hands, turned my back on her and opened it. Before she blocked my view with her arm I had time to read at the top of a page, “Tuesday, Dear Mum.”
“Give it back,” Sue shouted, and her voice was so unfamiliar, so unexpectedly violent, that I let her take it from me. She put the book under her pillow and sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the wall in front of her. She was red in the face, and her freckles were darker. The 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 was 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 center 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 toward the shops.
I had no idea what I wanted. I thought I would know when I saw it, and even if i
t 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 shopping street was empty except for cars. It was Sunday. The only person I could see was a woman in a red coat standing on a footbridge that spanned the road. I wondered why she wore a red coat in such heat. Perhaps she was wondering why I had been running for she seemed to be staring in my direction.
She was still a long way off, but she looked familiar. She could have been a teacher at my school. I walked toward the footbridge because I did not want to turn back so soon. As I walked I stared into the shop windows on my left. I did not like meeting schoolteachers in the street. I thought I could pass beneath her, if she was still there, and pretend I had not seen her. But fifty yards from the bridge I could not resist glancing up. The woman was my mother, and she was looking right at me. I stopped. She had shifted her weight from one foot to the other, but she did not move from her position. I started toward her again. I found it was difficult to make my legs move and my heart beat so fast I was certain I would be sick. When I was almost under the footbridge I stopped again and looked up. Great relief and recognition swept through me and I laughed out loud. It was not Mother, of course; it was Julie, wearing a coat I had never seen before.
