水泥花園英文原版the_cement_garden

1、Ian McEwanThe Cement Gardenfoot and narrowed my eyes a little. I wanted to say something terse and appropriate, but I was not sure I had heard them right. I left it too long, for the one who had spoken rolled his eyes to

2、wards the sky and with his hands on his hips stared past me at the front door. It opened and my father stepped out biting his pipe and holding a clipboard against his hip.‘Cement,’ the man said again, this time with a do

3、wnward inflection. My father nodded. I folded the comic into my back pocket and followed the three men up the path to the lorry. My father stood on tiptoe to look over the side, took his pipe from his mouth and nodded ag

4、ain. The man who had not yet spoken made a savage chop with his hand. A steel pin flew free and one side of the lorry fell away with a great noise. The tightly packed paper sacks of cement were arranged two deep along th

5、e floor of the lorry. My father counted them, looked at his clipboard and said, ‘Fifteen.’ The two men grunted. I liked this kind of talk. I too said to myself, ‘Fifteen.’ The men took a sack each on their shoulders and

6、we went back down the path, this time with me in front followed by my father. Round to one side of the house he pointed with the wet stem of his pipe at the coal hole. The men heaved their sacks into the cellar and retur

7、ned to their lorry for more. My father made a mark on the clipboard with a pencil which dangled from it by a piece of string. He rocked back on his heels, waiting. I leaned against the fence. I did not know what the ceme

8、nt was for and I did not wish to be placed outside this intense community of work by showing ignorance. I counted the sacks too, and when they were all done I stood at my father’s elbow while he signed the delivery note.

9、 Then without a word he returned indoors.That night my parents argued over the bags of cement. My mother, who was a quiet sort of person, was furious. She wanted my father to send the whole lot back. We had just finished

10、 supper. While my mother talked my father used a penknife to scrape black shards from the bowl of his pipe on to the food he had barely touched. He knew how to use his pipe against her. She was telling him how little mon

11、ey we had and that Tom would soon be needing new clothes for starting at school. He replaced the pipe between his teeth like a missing section of his own anatomy and interrupted to say it was ‘out of the question’ sendin

12、g the bags back and that was the end of it. Having seen for myself the lorry and the heavy sacks and the men who had brought them, I sensed he was right. But how self-important and foolish he looked as he took the thing

13、out of his mouth, held it by its bowl and pointed the black stem at my mother. She became angrier, her voice choked with exasperation. Julie, Sue and I slipped away upstairs to Julie’s bedroom and closed the door. The ri

14、se and fall of our mother’s voice reached us through the floor, but the words themselves were lost.Sue lay on the bed giggling with her knuckles in her mouth while Julie pushed a chair against the door. Together we rapid

15、ly stripped（除去） Sue of her clothes and when we were pulling down her pants （內(nèi)褲） our hands touched. Sue was rather thin. Her skin clung tightly to her rib cage（胸腔）and the hard muscular ridge（肌肉突起） of her buttocks（臀部）stran

16、gely resembled（與……相似）her shoulder blades. Faint gingerish（模糊的姜黃色）down grew between her legs. The game was that Julie and I were scientists examining a specimen（樣本）from outer space. We spoke in clipped（片段）Germanic voices

17、as we faced each other across the naked body. From downstairs came the tired, insistent drone（嗡嗡聲） of our mother’s voice. Julie had a high ridge（突起）of cheekbone（顴骨）beneath（在……之下） her eyes which gave her the deep look of

18、some rare wild animal. In the electric light her eyes were black and big. The soft line of her mouth was just broken by two front teeth and she had to pout（撅嘴）a little to conceal（隱藏）her smile. I longed to examine my olde