The Cement Garden

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.

Most houses were crammed with immovable objects in their proper places, and each object told you what to do - here you ate, here you slept, here you sat. I tried to imagine carpets, wardrobes, pictures, chairs, a sewing machine, in these gaping, smashed-up rooms. I was pleased by how irrelevant, how puny such objects now appeared.

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.

I felt stifled. Everything I looked at reminded me of myself.

The possibility that Julie and I were responsible for the disintegration filled me with horror and delight.