The Wasp Factory

by Iain Banks

  I was sitting on the top of the bank, above the holes, the lighter of the Flame-thrower burning weakly in the sunlight, when, just over the minute, the first tunnel blew. I felt it through the seat of my pants, and grinned. The rest went off quickly, the puff of smoke from the charge around the mouth of each bomb bursting out of the fuming earth just before the main charge went off. Scattering earth was blasted out into the Rabbit Grounds, and the thudding noises rolled through the air. I smiled at that. There was very little noise really. You wouldn’t have been able to hear a thing back at the house. Almost all the energy from the bombs had gone into blowing the earth out and the air in the burrows back.

  The first dazed rabbits came out; two of them bleeding at the nose, looking otherwise unharmed but staggering, almost falling. I squeezed the plastic bottle and sent a jet of petrol out of it, over the wick of the lighter, held a few centimetres out from the nozzle by an aluminium tent-peg. The petrol burst into flame as it flew over the wick in the tiny steel cup, roared through the air and fell brightly on and around the two rabbits. They took flame and blazed, running and stumbling and falling. I looked round for more as the first two flamed near the centre of the Grounds, finally collapsing into the grass, stiff-limbed but twitching, crackling to the breeze. A tiny lick of flame flickered round the mouth of the ’thrower; I blew it out. Another, smaller rabbit appeared. I caught it with the jet of flame and it zipped off out of range, heading for the water by the side of the hill the savage buck had attacked me on. I dug into the War Bag, drew out the air-pistol, cocked it and fired in one movement. The shot missed and the rabbit trailed a thread of smoke round the hill.

  I got another three rabbits with the ’thrower before I packed it in. The last thing I did was to fire the blazing stream of petrol at the buck still sitting stuffed and dead and oozing blood in the forefront of the Grounds. The fire dropped all round it so that it disappeared in the rolling orange and curling black. In a few seconds the fuse caught, and after about ten seconds the mass of flame blew up and out, throwing something black and smoking twenty metres or more into the late-afternoon air and scattering pieces all over the Grounds. The explosion, much bigger than the ones in the holes, and with almost nothing to muffle it, cracked across the dunes like a whip, setting my ears ringing and making even me jump a bit.

  Whatever was left of the buck landed way behind me. I followed the smell of burning to where it lay. It was mostly the head, and a grubby stub of spine and ribs, and about half the skin. I gritted my teeth and picked the warm remnant up, took it back to the Grounds and flung it into them from the top of the bank.

  I stood in the slanting sunlight, warm and yellow around me, the stench of burning flesh and grass on the wind, the smoke rising into the air from burrows and cadavers, grey and black, the sweet smell of leaking unburned petrol coming from the Flame-thrower where I’d left it, and I breathed deeply.

  With the last of the petrol I covered the body of the catapult and the used-up bottle of the ’thrower where they lay on the sand and set fire to them. I sat cross-legged just by the blaze, staring into it from up-wind until it was out and only the metal of the Black Destroyer remained, then I took the sooty skeleton and buried it where it had been ruined, at the bottom of the hill. It would have a name now: Black Destroyer Hill.

  The fire was out everywhere; the grass too young and moist to catch. Not that I’d have cared if it had gone up. I considered setting the whin bushes alight, but the flowers always looked cheerful when they came out, and the bushes smelled better fresh than burned, so I didn’t. I decided I’d caused enough mayhem for one day. The catapult was avenged, the buck – or what it meant, its spirit maybe – soiled and degraded, taught a hard lesson, and I felt good. If the rifle was all right and hadn’t got sand inside the sights or anywhere else awkward to clean, it would almost have been worth it. The Defence budget would stand buying another catapult tomorrow; my crossbow would just have to wait another week or so.

  With that lovely sated feeling inside me, I packed the War Bag and went wearily home, thinking what had happened over in my mind, trying to figure out the whys and wherefores, see what lessons were to be learned, what signs to be read in it all.

  On the way I passed the rabbit I thought had escaped, lying just before the sparkling clean water of the stream; blackened and contorted, locked into a weird, twisted crouch, its dead dry eyes staring up at me as I passed by, accusatory.

  I kicked it into the water.

  • • •

  My other dead uncle was called Harmsworth Stove, a half-uncle from Eric’s mother’s side of the family. He was a businessman in Belfast, and he and his wife looked after Eric for nearly five years, when my brother was a toddler. Harmsworth committed suicide, eventually, with an electric power-drill and a quarter-inch bit. He inserted it through the side of his skull and, finding that he was still alive though in some pain, drove to a nearby hospital, where he later died. Actually, I might just have had a little to do with his death, as it occurred less than a year after the Stoves lost their only child, Esmerelda. Unknown to them – and to everybody else, for that matter – she was one of my victims.

  • • •

  I lay in bed that night, waiting for my father to return, and for the phone to ring, while I thought about what had happened. Maybe the big buck was a rabbit from outside the Grounds, some wild beast come into the warren from beyond, to terrorise the locals and make itself boss, only to die in an encounter with a superior being it could have no real comprehension of.

  Whatever, it was a Sign. I was sure of that. The whole fraught episode must signify something. My automatic response might just have had something to do with the fire that the Factory had predicted, but deep inside I knew that that wasn’t all there was to it, and that there was more to come. The sign was in the whole thing, not just the unexpected ferocity of the buck I’d killed, but also in my furious, almost unthinking response and the fate of the innocent rabbits who took the brunt of my wrath.

  It also meant something looking back as well as forward. The first time I murdered it was because of rabbits meeting a fiery death, and meeting that fiery death from the nozzle of a Flame-thrower virtually identical to the one I had used to exact my revenge on the warren. It was all too much, all too close and perfect. Events were shaping up faster and worse than I could have expected. I was in danger of losing control of the situation. The Rabbit Grounds – that supposed happy hunting-ground – had shown it could happen.

  From the smaller to the greater, the patterns always hold true, and the Factory has taught me to watch out for them and respect them.

  That was the first time I killed, because of what my cousin Blyth Cauldhame had done to our rabbits, Eric’s and mine. It was Eric who first invented the Flame-thrower, and it was lying in what was then the bicycle-shed (now my shed) when our cousin, who had come to spend the weekend with us along with his parents, decided it would be fun to ride Eric’s bike into the soft mud at the south end of the island. This he duly did while Eric and I were out flying kites. Then he came back and filled the Flame-thrower with petrol. He sat in the back garden with it, obscured from the windows of the lounge (where his parents and our father sat) by the washing blowing in the breeze; he lit the ’thrower and sprayed our two hutches with flame, incinerating all our beauties.

  Eric in particular was very upset. He cried like a girl. I wanted to kill Blyth there and then; the hiding he got from his father, my dad’s brother James, was not enough as far as I was concerned, not for what he’d done to Eric, my brother. Eric was inconsolable, desperate with grief because he had made the thing Blyth had used to destroy our beloved pets. He always was a bit sentimental, always the sensitive one, the bright one; until his nasty experience everybody was sure he would go far. Anyway, that was the start of the Skull Grounds, the area of the big, old, partially earthed-over dune behind the house where all our pets went when they died. The burned rabbits started that. Old Saul was there before them, but that was just a
one-off thing.

  I hadn’t said anything to anybody, even Eric, about what I wanted to do to Blyth. I was wise in my childishness even then, at the tender age of five, when most children are forever telling their parents and friends that they hate them and they wish they were dead. I kept quiet.

  When Blyth came back the next year he was even more unpleasant than before, having lost his left leg from above the knee in a road accident (the boy he was playing ‘chicken’ with was killed). Blyth resented his handicap bitterly; he was ten by that time, and very active. He tried to pretend that the nasty pink thing he had to strap on didn’t exist, that it had nothing to do with him. He could just about ride a bike and he liked wrestling and playing football, usually in goal. I was just six then, and while Blyth knew that I had had some sort of little accident when I was much younger I certainly seemed to him to be a lot more able-bodied that he was. He thought it was great fun to throw me about and wrestle with me and punch and kick me. I made a convincing show of joining in all this horse-play and appeared to enjoy it hugely for a week or so while I thought about what I could do to our cousin.

  My other brother, a full brother, Paul, was still alive at the time. He, Eric and I were supposed to keep Blyth entertained. We did our best, taking Blyth to our favourite places, letting him play with our toys, and playing games with him. Eric and I had to restrain him at times when he wanted to do something like throw little Paul into the water to see if he’d float, or like when he wanted to fell a tree over the railway line that goes through Porteneil, but as a rule we got on surprisingly well, even though it rankled to see Eric, who was the same age as Blyth, obviously in fear of him.

  So one day, very hot and insecty, with a faint breeze coming in off the sea, we were all lying in the grass on the flat area just to the south of the house. Paul and Blyth had fallen asleep, and Eric was lying with his hands behind his neck, staring drowsily up at the bright blue. Blyth had taken off the hollow plastic leg and left it lying tangled in its straps and the long grass blades. I watched Eric fall slowly asleep, his head gently tipping to one side, eyes closing. I got up and went for a walk and ended up at the Bunker. It hadn’t assumed the full importance it later would in my life, though I already liked the place and felt at home in its coolness and dark. It was an old concrete pillbox built just before the last war to house a gun covering the firth, and it stuck in the sand like a big grey tooth. I went inside and found the snake. It was an adder. I didn’t see it for ages because I was too busy sticking an old rotten fence-post out through the slits in the pillbox, pretending it was a gun and firing at imaginary ships. It was only after I’d stopped doing that and gone into the corner to have a piss that I looked over into the other corner where there was a pile of rusty cans and old bottles; there I saw the jagged stripes of the sleeping snake.

  I decided what I was going to do almost immediately. I went outside quietly and found a length of driftwood of the appropriate shape, came back to the Bunker, caught the snake by the neck with the piece of wood and bundled it into the first rusty can I could find which still had a lid.

  I don’t think the snake had fully wakened up when I caught it, and I was careful not to jar it as I ran back to where my brothers and Blyth were lying on the grass. Eric had rolled over and had one hand under his head, the other over his eyes. His mouth was open slightly and his chest moved slowly. Paul lay in the sunlight curled up into a little ball, quite still, and Blyth was lying on his stomach, hands under his cheek, the stump of his left leg drawn up in the flowers and the grass, sticking out from his shorts like some monstrous erection. I went closer, still clutching the rusty can in my shadow. The gable end of the house looked down on us from about fifty metres away, windowless. White sheets flapped feebly in the back garden. My heart beat wildly and I licked my lips.

  I sat down by the side of Blyth, careful not to let my shadow cross his face. I put one ear to the can and held it still. I couldn’t hear or feel the snake stir. I reached for Blyth’s artificial leg, lying smooth and pink by the small of his back and in his shadow. I held the leg to the can and took the lid away, sliding the leg over the hole as I did so. Then I slowly turned the can and the leg the other way up, so that the can was over the leg. I shook the can, and felt the snake fall into the leg. It didn’t like it at first, and moved and beat against the sides of the plastic and the neck of the can while I held it and sweated, listening to the hum of the insects and the rustling of the grass, staring at Blyth as he lay there still and silent, his dark hair ruffled now and again by the breeze. My hands shook and the perspiration ran into my eyes.

  The snake stopped moving. I held it longer, glancing at the house again. Then I tipped the leg and the can over until the leg was lying at the same angle on the grass as it had been, behind Blyth. I took the can carefully away at the last moment. Nothing happened. The snake was still inside the leg, and I couldn’t even see it. I got up, walked backwards towards the nearest dune, threw the can way high over the top of it, then came back, lay down where I’d been sitting earlier, and closed my eyes.

  Eric woke first, then I opened my eyes as though sleepily, and we woke little Paul, and our cousin. Blyth saved me the trouble of suggesting a game of football by doing it himself. Eric, Paul and I got the goalposts together while Blyth hurriedly strapped his leg on.

  • • •

  Nobody suspected. From the first moments, when my brothers and I stood there incredulous as Blyth screamed and jumped and tugged at his leg, to the tearful farewell of Blyth’s parents and Diggs taking statements (a bit even appeared in the Inverness Courier which was picked up for its curiosity value by a couple of the Fleet Street rags), not one person even suggested that it might have been anything other than a tragic and slightly macabre accident. Only I knew better.

  I didn’t tell Eric. He was shocked by what had happened and genuinely sorry for Blyth and his parents. All I said was that I thought it was a judgement from God that Blyth had first lost his leg and then had the replacement become the instrument of his downfall. All because of the rabbits. Eric, who was going through a religious phase at the time which I suppose I was to some extent copying, thought this was a terrible thing to say; God wasn’t like that. I said the one I believed in was.

  At any rate, such was the reason that particular patch of ground got its name: the Snake Park.

  • • •

  I lay in bed, thinking back on all this. Father still hadn’t come back. Perhaps he was going to stay out all night. That was extremely unusual, and rather worrying. Perhaps he had been knocked down, or had died of a heart attack.

  I’ve always had a rather ambivalent attitude towards something happening to my father, and it persists. A death is always exciting, always makes you realise how alive you are, how vulnerable but so-far-lucky; but the death of somebody close gives you a good excuse to go a bit crazy for a while and do things that would otherwise be inexcusable. What delight to behave really badly and still get loads of sympathy!

  But I’d miss him, and I don’t know what the legal position would be about me staying on here by myself. Would I get all his money? That would be good; I could get my motorbike now instead of having to wait. Jesus, there’d be so many things I could do I don’t even know where to start thinking about them. But it would be a big change, and I don’t know that I’m ready for it yet.

  I could feel myself starting to slide off into sleep; I began to imagine and see all sorts of weird things behind my eyes: maze-shapes and spreading areas of unknown colours, then fantastic buildings and spaceships and weapons and landscapes. I often wish I could remember my dreams better. . . .

  Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I’d disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim.

  That’s my score to date. Three. I haven’t killed anybody for years, and don’t intend to ever again.

  It was just a stage
I was going through.

  3: In the Bunker

  MY GREATEST ENEMIES are Women and the Sea. These things I hate. Women because they are weak and stupid and live in the shadow of men and are nothing compared to them, and the Sea because it has always frustrated me, destroying what I have built, washing away what I have left, wiping clean the marks I have made. And I’m not all that sure the Wind is blameless, either.

  The Sea is a sort of mythological enemy, and I make what you might call sacrifices to it in my soul, fearing it a little, respecting it as you’re supposed to, but in many ways treating it as an equal. It does things to the world, and so do I; we should both be feared. Women . . . well, women are a bit too close for comfort as far as I’m concerned. I don’t even like having them on the island, not even Mrs Clamp, who comes every week on a Saturday to clean the house and deliver our supplies. She’s ancient, and sexless the way the very old and the very young are, but she’s still been a woman, and I resent that, for my own good reason.

  • • •

  I woke the next morning, wondering if my father had come back or not. Without bothering to dress, I went to his room. I was going to try the door, but I could hear him snoring before I touched the handle, so I turned and went to the bathroom.

  In the bathroom, after a piss, I went through my daily washing ritual. First I had my shower. The shower is the only time in any twenty-four-hour period I take my underpants right off. I put the old pair in the dirty-linen bag in the airing cupboard. I showered carefully, starting at my hair and ending between my toes and under my toenails. Sometimes, when I have to make precious substances such as toenail cheese or belly-button fluff, I have to go without a shower or bath for days and days; I hate doing this because I soon feel dirty and itchy, and the only bright thing about such abstinence is how good it feels to have a shower at the end of it.