First Love, Last Rites

This short story collection contains eight tales set mostly in England, each exploring disturbing intersections of desire, innocence, power, and transgression. The stories share a preoccupation with characters at the margins of social life, often narrating their own unsettling experiences in first person.

In "Homemade," a fourteen-year-old narrator recounts how his older friend Raymond served as his guide to adult pleasures: smoking, alcohol, marijuana, shoplifting, and masturbation. In every case, the narrator mastered the activity while Raymond failed. When Raymond proposes they pay a girl named Lulu Smith to let them view her body, the narrator agrees but becomes fixated on losing his virginity first. Left to babysit his ten-year-old sister Connie, he lures her into a game of Mummies and Daddies, a domestic role-play she has always wanted to play, then tells her the game involves what parents do in bed. His attempt at penetration fails; Connie is bored and uncomprehending. She takes charge, and the narrator achieves a minimal orgasm, feeling not pleasure but pride. The story ends where it began, with Connie weeping in the bathroom while the narrator whistles with satisfaction.

"Solid Geometry" follows an unnamed narrator obsessively editing the forty-five-volume diary of his great-grandfather, a Victorian amateur mathematician. The narrator's marriage to Maisie has deteriorated badly; she has quit her job, reads occult books, and resents the diary project. After Maisie smashes a glass jar containing the preserved penis of Captain Nicholls, one of the great-grandfather's prized possessions, the narrator reads the diary's account of a mathematics conference in Vienna. There, a Scottish mathematician named David Hunter made a sheet of paper vanish through a technique called "the plane without a surface," then contorted his own body until he disappeared. The great-grandfather deciphered Hunter's papers, concluding that "Dimensionality is a function of consciousness" (39), and recorded instructions to re-create the effect. The narrator makes a sheet of paper vanish. That evening, he and Maisie share a rare tender night. In bed, the narrator manipulates Maisie's limbs into positions from the diary's sketches. Her voice grows faint, and she disappears, leaving only the echo of her question above the sheets.

"Last Day of Summer" is narrated by a twelve-year-old boy whose parents died in a car crash two years earlier. He lives in a riverside commune run by his older brother Peter and bonds with Jenny, a large young woman with thick glasses who moves into the attic. Jenny transforms the household, cleaning, cooking, and caring for Alice, the toddler daughter of Kate, a distant single mother who increasingly leaves Alice behind. As summer ends, Jenny prepares the narrator for school. On the last day, he rows Jenny and Alice out on the still, silent river. They erupt in uncontrollable laughter, and Jenny falls against the side of the small boat, capsizing it. The narrator surfaces and calls for Jenny and Alice, but no one answers. He clings to the upturned hull, drifting downstream, hallucinating his dead mother. Eventually he drifts past the jetty near his house, releases the boat, and swims to shore.

"Cocker at the Theatre" is a brief, darkly comic scene. Jasmin, a flamboyant theatre director, rehearses a nude copulation number with ten couples on stage. During the routine, one couple begins actually having sex. Jasmin, unable to separate them, turns away in tears. When the man gives his name as Cocker, Jasmin expels him and his partner from the production.

"Butterflies" is narrated by a socially isolated, chinless man who speaks to almost no one besides Charlie, an elderly mechanic, and Mr. Watson, who runs a corner shop. In a flashback, the narrator recounts how a nine-year-old neighbor named Jane followed him out of her garden, commenting that he smelled like flowers. He bought her a doll and an ice cream, then lured her toward the canal with promises of butterflies. In a dark tunnel, as a train overhead drowned her screams, he exposed himself and ordered her to touch him. Jane tried to run, fell, and hit her head. The narrator lowered her unconscious body into the canal. On Sunday, he sits on library steps, having identified Jane's body at a mortuary. West Indian boys playing football kick their ball toward him, and he traps a thrown stone with his foot, earning their cheers. He fantasizes about lasting friendship but acknowledges it will never happen, then walks to keep his appointment with Jane's parents.

"Conversation with a Cupboard Man" takes the form of a monologue addressed to a social worker. The speaker admits that when he sees a girl on the street, he runs to his attic room, climbs into his wardrobe, and masturbates while mentally regressing to infancy. His father died before his birth, and his mother raised him alone, obsessively preventing him from growing up: She kept him from school, did not teach him to speak, and fed him only mush. At seventeen, she met a man, married, and placed the speaker in a residential home, where the director, Mr. Smith, taught him to read and paint. After leaving at twenty-one, the speaker endured a brutal hotel job, turned to shoplifting, and served three months in prison, where he found a comfort resembling childhood security. Now he spends entire days inside his wardrobe, cushioned with blankets, wishing to be an infant again.

"First Love, Last Rites," the title story, follows a seventeen-year-old narrator and his girlfriend Sissel through a stagnant summer in a room above a quayside. They make love on a mattress before an open window while the narrator is haunted by involuntary fantasies about biological creation and a persistent scratching behind the wall. His eel-trapping venture fails when the tide sweeps away most of the traps. The room grows oppressive with heat, flies, and spoiled food. Sissel takes a numbing factory job. Adrian, Sissel's ten-year-old brother, visits daily to escape his parents' disintegrating marriage. One day, Sissel spots a rat. The narrator kills it with a poker, and the rat splits open to reveal five unborn babies in a translucent sac. Sissel tenderly pushes the sac back inside and wraps the body in newspaper. The narrator releases a surviving eel into the river. They return the mattress to the table and lie face to face before the open window, a breeze carrying autumn's scent. The narrator presses his palm against Sissel's belly. She suggests they clean the room and go for a walk. He says yes.

In "Disguises," ten-year-old Henry is taken in by his aunt Mina, a retired actress, after his mother dies. Mina institutes a nightly ritual of dressing in costume for dinner. One afternoon, she lays out a girl's party frock, a blonde wig, and white tights. When Henry refuses, Mina, dressed as a military officer, forces him into the costume. Over repeated evenings, she grows increasingly aggressive, pulling Henry onto her lap, pressing his face against her bare breast, and fondling him. Henry vomits on her each time. At school, Henry meets Linda, a girl with long yellow hair, and becomes fascinated by her. At Linda's home, they lie in bed together, chests touching, talking and dozing; the household's warmth contrasts sharply with Mina's intensity. When the costume appears again, Henry puts it on without resistance and notices he resembles Linda in the wig, feeling liberated rather than oppressed. At Mina's costume party, Henry spots Linda across the room. Before he can reach her, a man pulls Linda onto his lap, pressing her face against his unbuttoned shirt. Linda is too frightened to move. Henry, drunk and unsteady, begins moving toward them. McEwan ends the story—and the collection—here, leaving Henry's intervention and Linda's fate unresolved.