The Wasp Factory (9 page)

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Authors: Iain Banks

BOOK: The Wasp Factory
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‘You are
cooking
them, aren’t you?’
‘Of course I’m fucking cooking them,’ Eric said indignantly. ‘What do you think I am?’
‘Is that all you’re eating?’
‘No. I steal things. Shoplift. It’s so easy. I steal things I can’t eat, just for the hell of it. Like tampons and plastic dustbin-liners and party-size packets of crisps and one hundred cocktail sticks and twelve cake-candles in various colours and photograph frames and steering-wheel covers in simulated leather and towel-holders and fabric-softeners and double-action air-fresheners to waft away those lingering kitchen smells and cute little boxes for awkward odds and ends and packs of cassettes and lockable petrol-caps and record-cleaners and telephone indexes slimming magazines pot-holders packs of name-labels artificial eyelashes make-up boxes anti-smoking mixture toy watches—’
‘Don’t you like crisps?’ I broke in quickly.
‘Eh?’ He sounded confused.
‘You mentioned party-size packets of crisps as being something you couldn’t eat.’
‘For Christ’s sake, Frank, could
you
eat a party-size packet of crisps?’
‘And how are you keeping?’ I said quickly. ‘I mean, you must be sleeping rough. Aren’t you catching cold or something?’
‘I’m not sleeping.’
‘You’re not
sleeping
?’
‘Of course not. You don’t have to sleep. That’s just something
they
tell you to keep
control
over you. Nobody has to sleep; you’re
taught
to sleep when you’re a kid. If you’re really determined, you can get over it. I’ve got over the need to sleep. I never sleep now. That way it’s a lot easier to keep watch and make sure they don’t
creep up
on you, and you can keep going as well. Nothing like keeping going. You become like a ship.’
‘Like a ship?’ Now I was confused.
‘Stop repeating everything I say, Frank.’ I heard him put more money into the box. ‘I’ll teach you how not to sleep when I get back.’
‘Thanks. When do you expect to get here?’
‘Sooner or later. Ha ha ha ha ha!’
‘Look, Eric, why are you eating dogs if you can steal all that stuff?’
‘I’ve already told you, you
idiot
; you can’t eat any of that crap.’
‘But, then, why not steal stuff you can eat and don’t steal the stuff you can’t and don’t bother with the dogs?’ I suggested. I already knew it wasn’t a good idea; I could hear the tone of my voice rising higher and higher as I spoke the sentence, and that was always a sign I was getting into some sort of verbal mess.
Eric shouted: ‘Are you
crazy
? What’s the matter with you? What’s the point of that? These are
dogs
, aren’t they? It isn’t as though I was killing cats or fieldmice or goldfish or anything. I’m talking about
dogs
, you rabid dingbat!
Dogs!
’
‘You don’t have to shout at me,’ I said evenly, though starting to get angry myself. ‘I was only asking why you waste so much time stealing stuff you can’t eat and then waste more time stealing dogs when you could steal and eat at the same time, as it were.’
‘“As it were”?
“As it were”?
What the hell are you gibbering about?’ Eric yelled, his strangled voice hoarse and contralto.
‘Oh, don’t start screaming,’ I moaned, putting my other hand over my forehead and through my hair, closing my eyes.
‘I’ll scream if I want to!’ Eric screamed. ‘What do you think I’m doing all this for? Eh? What the hell do you think I’m doing all this for? These are
dogs
, you brainless little shitbag! Haven’t you any brains left? What’s happened to all your
brains
, Frankie boy? Cat got your tongue? I said, Cat got your
tongue
?’
‘Don’t start banging the—’ I said, not really into the mouthpiece.
‘Eeeeeeaaarrrggghhh Bllleeeaarrrgggrrllleeeooouurrgghh! ’ Eric spat and choked down the line, and there followed the noise of the phone-box handset being smashed around the inside of the booth. I sighed and replaced the receiver thoughtfully. I just didn’t seem to be able to handle Eric on the telephone.
I went back to my room, trying to forget about my brother; I wanted to get to bed early so that I could be up in time for the naming ceremony of the new catapult. I’d think about a better way to handle Eric once I had that out of the way.
... Like a ship, indeed. What a loony.
4
The Bomb Circle
Often I’ve thought of myself as a state; a country or, at the very least, a city. It used to seem to me that the different ways I felt sometimes about ideas, courses of action and so on were like the differing political moods that countries go through. It has always seemed to me that people vote in a new government not because they actually agree with their politics but just because they want a change. Somehow they think that things will be better under the new lot. Well, people are stupid, but it all seems to have more to do with mood, caprice and atmosphere than carefully thought-out arguments. I can feel the same sort of thing going on in my head. Sometimes the thoughts and feelings I had didn’t really agree with each other, so I decided I must be lots of different people inside my brain.
For example, there has always been a part of me which has felt guilty about killing Blyth, Paul and Esmerelda. That same part feels guilty now about taking revenge on innocent rabbits because of one rogue male. But I liken it to an opposition party in a parliament, or a critical press; acting as a conscience and a brake, but not in power and unlikely to assume it. Another part of me is racist, probably because I’ve hardly met any coloured people and all I know of them is what I read in papers and see on television, where black people are usually talked of in terms of numbers and presumed guilty until proved innocent. This part of me is still quite strong, though of course I know there is no logical reason for race hatred. Whenever I see coloured people in Porteneil, buying souvenirs or stopping off for a snack, I hope that they will ask me something so that I can show how polite I am and prove that my reasoning is stronger than my more crass instincts, or training.
By the same token, though, there was no
need
to take revenge on the rabbits. There never is, even in the big world. I think reprisals against people only distantly or circumstantially connected with those who have done others wrong are to make the people doing the avenging feel good. Like the death penalty, you want it because it makes
you
feel better, not because it’s a deterrent or any nonsense like that.
At least the rabbits won’t know that Frank Cauldhame did what he did to them, the way a community of people knows what the baddies did to them, so that the revenge ends up having the opposite effect from that intended, inciting rather than squashing resistance. At least I admit that it’s all to boost my ego, restore my pride and give me pleasure, not to save the country or uphold justice or honour the dead.
So there were parts of me that watched the naming ceremony for the new catapult with some amusement, even contempt. In that state inside my head, this is like intellectuals in a country sneering at religion while not being able to deny the effect it has on the mass of people. In the ceremony I smeared the metal, rubber and plastic of the new device with earwax, snot, blood, urine, belly-button fluff and toenail cheese, christened it by firing the empty sling at a wingless wasp crawling on the face of the Factory, and also fired it at my bared foot, raising a bruise.
Parts of me thought all this was nonsense, but they were in a tiny minority. The rest of me knew this sort of thing
worked
. It gave me power, it made me part of what I own and where I am. It makes me feel good.
 
I found a photograph of Paul as a baby in one of the albums I kept in the loft, and after the ceremony I wrote the name of the new catapult on the back of the picture, scrunched it up around a steelie and secured it with a little tape, then went down, out of the loft and the house, into the chill drizzle of a new day.
I went to the cracked end of the old slipway at the north end of the island. I pulled the rubber almost to maximum and sent the ball-bearing and photograph hissing and spinning way out to sea. I didn’t see the splash.
The catapult ought to be safe so long as nobody knew its name. That didn’t help the Black Destroyer, certainly, but it died because I made a mistake, and my power is so strong that when it goes wrong, which is seldom but not never, even those things I have invested with great protective power become vulnerable. Again, in that head-state, I could feel anger that I could have made such a mistake, and a determination it wouldn’t happen again. This was like a general who had lost a battle or some important territory being disciplined or shot.
Well, I had done what I could to protect the new catapult and, while I was sorry that what had happened at the Rabbit Grounds had cost me a trusted weapon with many battle honours to its name (not to mention a significant sum out of the Defence budget), I thought that maybe what had happened had been for the best. The part of me which made the mistake with the buck, letting it get the better of me for a moment, might still be around if that acid test hadn’t found it out. The incompetent or misguided general had been dismissed. Eric’s return might call for all my reactions and powers to be at their peak of efficiency.
It was still very early and, although the mist and drizzle should have had me feeling a little mellow, I was still in good and confident spirits from the naming ceremony.
I felt like a Run, so I left my jacket near the Pole I’d been at the day Diggs had come with the news, and tucked the catapult tightly between my cords and my belt. I tugged my boots to running tension after checking my socks were straight and unruffled, then jogged slowly down to the line of hard sand between the seaweed tide-lines. The drizzle was coming and going and the sun was visible occasionally through the mist and cloud as a red and hazy disc. There was a slight wind coming from the north, and I turned into it. I powered up gradually, settling into an easy, long-paced stride that got my lungs working properly and readied my legs. My arms, fists clenched, moved with a fluid rhythm, sending first one then the other shoulder forward. I breathed deeply, padding over the sand. I came to the braided reaches of the river where it swung out over the sands, and adjusted my steps so that I cleared all the channels easily and cleanly, a leap at a time. Once over, I put my head down and increased speed. My head and fists rammed the air, my feet flexed, flung, gripped and pushed.
The air whipped at me, little gusts of drizzle stinging slightly as I hit them. My lungs exploded, imploded, exploded, imploded; plumes of wet sand flew from my soles, rising as I sped on, falling in little curves and spattering back as I raced on into the distance. I brought my face up and put my head back, baring my neck to the wind like a lover, to the rain like an offering. My breath rasped in my throat, and a slight light-headedness I had started to feel owing to hyperoxygenating earlier waned as my muscles took up the slack of the extra power in my blood. I boosted, increasing speed as the jagged line of dead seaweed and old wood and cans and bottles skittered by me; I felt like a bead on a thread being pulled through the air on a line, sucked along by throat and lungs and legs, a continual pounce of flowing energy. I kept the boost up as long as I could; then, when I felt it start to go, relaxed, and went back to merely running fast for a while.
I charged across the sands, the dunes to my left moving by like stands on a racetrack. Ahead I could see the Bomb Circle, where I would stop or turn. I boosted again, head down and shouting to myself inside, screaming mentally, my voice like a press, screwing down tighter to squeeze a final effort from my legs. I
flew
across the sands, body tilted crazily forward, lungs bursting, legs pounding.
The moment passed and I slowed quickly, dropping to a trot as I approached the Bomb Circle, almost staggering into it, then flinging myself on to the sand inside to lie panting, heaving, gasping, staring at the grey sky and invisible drizzle, spreadeagled in the centre of the rocks. My chest rose and fell, my heart pounded inside its cage. A dull roaring filled my ears, and my whole body tingled and buzzed. My leg muscles seemed to be in some daze of quivering tension. I let my head fall to one side, my cheek against the cool damp sand.
I wondered what it felt like to die.
 
The Bomb Circle, my dad’s leg and his stick, his reluctance to get me a motorbike perhaps, the candles in the skull, the legions of dead mice and hamsters - they’re all the fault of Agnes, my father’s second wife and my mother.
I can’t remember my mother, because if I did I’d hate her. As it is, I hate her name, the idea of her. It was she who let the Stoves take Eric away to Belfast, away from the island, away from what he knew. They thought that my father was a bad parent because he dressed Eric in girl’s clothes and let him run wild, and my mother let them take him because she didn’t like children in general and Eric in particular; she thought he was bad for her karma in some way. Probably the same dislike of children led her to desert me immediately after my birth, and also caused her only to return on that one, fateful occasion when she was at least partly responsible for my little accident. All in all, I think I have good reason to hate her. I lay there in the Bomb Circle where I killed her other son, and I hoped that she was dead, too.

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