by Iain Banks
After my shower, and a brisk rub-down with first a face-cloth and then a towel, I trimmed my nails. Then I brushed my teeth thoroughly with my electric toothbrush. Next the shave. I always use shaving foam and the latest razors (twin-blade swivel-heads are state-of-the-art at the moment), removing the downy brown growth of the previous day and night with dexterity and precision. As with all my ablutions, the shave follows a definite and predetermined pattern; I take the same number of strokes of the same length in the same sequence each morning. As always, I felt a rising tingle of excitement as I contemplated the meticulously shorn surfaces of my face.
I blew and picked my nose clean, washed my hands, cleaned the razor, nail-clipper, shower and basin, rinsed out the flannel and combed my hair. Happily I didn’t have any spots, so there was nothing else required but a final handwash and a clean pair of underpants. I placed all my washing materials, towels, razor and so forth exactly where they should be, wiped a little steam off the mirror on my bathroom cabinet, and returned to my room.
There I put on my socks; green for that day. Then a khaki shirt with pockets. In the winter I’d have a vest underneath and a green army jumper over the shirt, but not in the summer. My green cord trousers came next, followed by my fawn Kickers boots, labels removed as from everything I wear because I refuse to be a walking advertisement for anybody. My combat jacket, knife, bags, catapult and other equipment I took down to the kitchen with me.
It was still early, and the rain I’d heard forecast the previous night was looking about ready to drop. I had my modest breakfast, and I was ready.
I went out into the fresh damp morning, walking quickly to keep warm and get round the island before any rain started. The hills beyond the town were hidden by cloud, and the sea was rough as the wind freshened. The grass was heavy with dew; drops of mist bowed the unopened flowers and clung to my Sacrifice Poles, too, like clear blood on the shrivelled heads and tiny, desiccated bodies.
A couple of jets screamed over the island at one point, two Jaguars wing to wing about one hundred metres up and going fast, crossing the whole island in an eye-blink and racing out to sea. I glared at them, then went on my way. Once they made me jump, another couple of them, a couple of years ago. They came in illegally low after bombing practice on the range just down the firth, blasting over the island so suddenly that I jumped while in the delicate manoeuvre of teasing a wasp into a jar from the old tree stump near the ruined sheep-pen at the north end of the island. The wasp stung me.
I went into town that day, bought an extra plastic model of a Jaguar, made the kit up that afternoon and ceremonially blew it to pieces on the roof of the Bunker with a small pipe-bomb. Two weeks later a Jaguar crashed into the sea off Nairn, though the pilot ejected in time. I’d like to think the Power was working then, but I suspect it was coincidence; high-performance jets crash so often it was no real surprise my symbolic and their real destruction came within a fortnight of each other.
I sat on the earth banking that looks out over the Muddy Creek and ate an apple. I leaned back on the young tree that as a sapling had been the Killer. It was grown now, and a good bit taller than me, but when I was young and we were the same size it had been my static catapult defending the southerly approaches to the island. Then, as now, it looked out over the broad creek and the gunmetal-coloured mud with the eaten-looking wreck of an old fishing boat sticking out of it.
After the Tale of Old Saul I put the catapult to another use, and it became the Killer; scourge of hamsters, mice and gerbils.
I remember that it could whack a fist-sized stone well over the creek and twenty metres or more into the undulating ground on the mainland, and once I got keyed into its natural rhythm I could send off a shot every two seconds. I could place them anywhere within a sixty-degree angle by varying the direction in which I pulled the sapling over and down. I didn’t use a little animal every two seconds; they were expended at a few a week. For six months I was the best customer the Porteneil Pet Shop had, going in every Saturday to get a couple of beasts, and about every month buying a tube of badminton shuttlecocks from the toyshop as well. I doubt anybody ever put the two together, apart from me.
It was all for a purpose, of course; little that I do is not, one way or another. I was looking for Old Saul’s skull.
• • •
I threw the core of the apple over the creek; it plopped into the mud on the far bank with a satisfying slurp. I decided it was time to look into the Bunker properly, and set off along the bank at a jog, swinging round the southernmost dune towards the old pillbox. I stopped to look at the shore. There didn’t seem to be anything interesting there, but I remembered the lesson of the day before, when I had stopped to sniff the air and everything had seemed fine, then ten minutes later I was wrestling with a kamikaze rabbit, so I trotted down off the side of the dune and down to the line of debris thrown up by the sea.
There was one bottle. A very minor enemy, and empty. I went down to the water-line and threw the bottle out. It bobbed, head up, ten metres out. The tide hadn’t covered the pebbles yet, so I took up a handful and lobbed them at the bottle. It was close enough to use the under-arm style, and the pebbles I’d selected were all of roughly the same size, so my fire was very accurate: four shots within splashing distance and a fifth which smashed the neck off the bottle. A small victory really, because the decisive defeat of the bottles had come about long ago, shortly after I learned to throw, when I first realised the sea was an enemy. It still tried me out now and again, though, and I was in no mood to allow even the slightest encroachment on my territory.
The bottle sunk, I returned to the dunes, went to the top of the one the Bunker lay half-buried in, and had a look round with my binoculars. The coast was clear, even if the weather wasn’t. I went down to the Bunker.
I repaired the steel door years ago, loosening the rusted hinges and straightening the guides for the bolt. I took out the key to the padlock and opened the door. Inside there was the familiar waxy, burned smell. I closed the door and propped a piece of wood against it, then stood for a while, letting my eyes adjust to the gloom and my mind to the feel of the place.
After a while I could see dimly by the light filtering through the sacking hung over the two narrow slits which are the Bunker’s only windows. I took off my shoulder bag and binoculars and hung them on nails hammered into the slightly crumbling concrete. I took up the tin with the matches in it and lit the candles; they burned yellowly and I knelt, clenching my fists and thinking. I’d found the candle-making kit in the cupboard under the stairs five or six years ago, and experimented with the colours and consistencies for months before hitting on the idea of using the wax as a wasp-prison. I looked up then and saw the head of a wasp poking up from the top of a candle on the altar. The newly lit candle, blood red and as thick as my wrist, contained the still flame and the tiny head within its caldera of wax like pieces of an alien game. As I watched, the flame, a centimetre behind the wasp’s wax-gummed head, freed the antennae from the grease and they came upright for a while before they frazzled. The head started to smoke as the wax dribbled off it, then the fumes caught light, and the wasp body, a second flame within the crater, flickered and crackled as the fire incinerated the insect from its head down.
I lit the candle inside the skull of Old Saul. That orb of bone, holed and yellowing, was what killed all those little creatures who met their death in the mud on the far side of the creek. I watched the smoky flame waver inside the place where the dog’s brains used to be and I closed my eyes. I saw the Rabbit Grounds again, and the flaming bodies as they jumped and sped. I saw again the one that escaped the Grounds and died just before it made it to the stream. I saw the Black Destroyer, and remembered its demise. I thought of Eric, and wondered what the Factory’s warning was about.
I saw myself, Frank L. Cauldhame, and I saw myself as I might have been: a tall slim man, strong and determined and making his way in the world, assured and purposeful. I opened my eyes and gulp
ed, breathing deeply. A fetid light blazed from Old Saul’s sockets. The candles on either side of the altar flickered with the skull-flame in a draught.
I looked round the Bunker. The severed heads of gulls, rabbits, crows, mice, owls, moles and small lizards looked down on me. They hung drying on short loops of black thread suspended from lengths of string stretched across the walls from corner to corner, and dim shadows turned slowly on the walls behind them. Around the foot of the walls, on plinths of wood or stone, or on bottles and cans the sea had surrendered, my collection of skulls watched me. The yellow brain-bones of horses, dogs, birds, fish and horned sheep faced in towards Old Saul, some with beaks and jaws open, some shut, the teeth exposed like drawn claws. To the right of the brick, wood and concrete altar where the candles and the skull sat were my small phials of precious fluids; to the left rose a tall set of clear plastic drawers designed to hold screws, washers, nails and hooks. Each drawer, not much larger than a small matchbox, held the body of a wasp which had been through the Factory.
I reached over for a large tin on my right, prised the tight lid off with my knife and used a small teaspoon inside to place some of the white mixture from the tin on to a round metal plate in front of the old dog’s skull. Then I took the oldest of the wasp cadavers from its little tray and tipped it on to the white pile of granules. I replaced the sealed tin and the plastic drawer and lit the tiny pyre with a match.
The mixture of sugar and weedkiller sizzled and glared; the intense light seared through me and clouds of smoke rolled up and around my head as I held my breath and my eyes watered. In a second the blaze was over, the mixture and the wasp a single black lump of scarred and blistered debris cooling from a bright yellow heat. I closed my eyes to inspect the patterns, but only the burning after-image remained, fading like the glow on the metal plate. It danced about briefly on my retinas, then disappeared. I had hoped for Eric’s face, or some further clue about what was going to happen, but I got nothing.
I leaned forward, blew out the wasp candles, right then left, then blew through one eye and extinguished the candle inside the dog skull. Still glare-blind, I felt my way to the door through the dark and the smoke. I went out, letting the smoke and fumes free into the damp air; coils of blue and grey curled off my hair and clothes as I stood there, breathing deeply. I closed my eyes for a bit, then went back into the Bunker to tidy up.
• • •
I closed the door and locked it. I went back to the house for lunch and found my father chopping driftwood in the back garden.
‘Good day,’ he said, wiping his brow. It was humid if not particularly warm, and he was stripped to the vest.
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘Were you all right yesterday?’
‘I was.’
‘I didn’t get back till late.’
‘I was asleep.’
‘I thought you might be. You’ll be wanting some lunch.’
‘I’ll make it today, if you want.’
‘No, that’s all right. You can chop the wood if you have a mind to. I’ll make lunch for us.’ He put the axe down and wiped his hands on his trousers, eyeing me. ‘Was everything quiet yesterday?’
‘Oh, yes,’ I nodded, standing there.
‘Nothing happened?’
‘Nothing special,’ I assured him, putting down my gear and taking my jacket off. I took up the axe. ‘Very quiet, in fact.’
‘Good,’ he said, apparently convinced, and went into the house. I started swinging the axe at the lumps of driftwood.
• • •
After lunch I went into town, taking Gravel my bike and some money. I told my father I’d be back before dinner. It started to rain when I was halfway to Porteneil, so I stopped to put on my ka-gool. The going was heavy but I got there without mishap. The town was grey and empty in the dull afternoon light; cars swished through on the road going north, some with their headlights on, making everything else seem even dimmer. I went to the gun and tackle shop first, to see old Mackenzie and take another of his American hunting-catapults off him, and some air-gun pellets, too.
‘And how are you today, young man?’
‘Very well, and yourself?’
‘Och, not too bad, you know,’ he said, shaking his grey head slowly, his yellowed eyes and hair rather sickly in the electric light of the shop. We always say the same things to each other. Often I stay longer in the shop than I mean to because it smells so good.
‘And how’s that uncle of yours these days? I haven’t seen him for – oh, a while.’
‘He’s well.’
‘Oh, good, good,’ Mr Mackenzie said, screwing up his eyes with a slightly pained expression and nodding slowly. I nodded, too, and looked at my watch.
‘Well, I must be going,’ I said, and started to back off, putting my new catapult into the day-pack on my back and stuffing the pellets wrapped in brown paper into my combat-jacket pockets.
‘Oh, well, if you must, you must,’ said Mackenzie, nodding at the glass counter as though inspecting the flies, reels and duck-calls within. He took up a cloth by the side of the cash register and started to move it slowly over the surface, looking up just once as I left the shop, saying, ‘Goodbye, then.’
‘Yes, goodbye.’
• • •
In the Firthview café, apparently the location of some awful and localised ground subsidence since it was named, because it would have to be at least a storey taller to catch a view of the water, I had a cup of coffee and a game of Space Invaders. They had a new machine in, but after a pound or so I had mastered it and won an extra spaceship. I got bored with it and sat down with my coffee.
I inspected the posters on the café walls to see if there was anything interesting happening in the area in the near future, but apart from the Film Club there wasn’t much. The next showing was The Tin Drum, but that was a book my father had bought for me years ago, one of the few real presents he has ever given me, and I had therefore assiduously avoided reading it, just as I had Myra Breckinridge, another of his rare gifts. Mostly my father just gives me the money that I ask for and lets me get what I want for myself. I don’t think he’s really interested; but, on the other hand, he wouldn’t refuse me anything. As far as I can tell, we have some sort of unspoken agreement that I keep quiet about not officially existing in return for being able to do more or less as I like on the island and buy more or less what I like in the town. The only thing we had argued about recently was the motorbike, which he said he would buy me when I was a bit older. I suggested that it might be a good idea to get it in midsummer so that I could get plenty of practice in before the skiddy weather set in, but he thought there might be too much tourist traffic going through the town and on the roads around it in the middle of the summer. I think he just wants to keep putting it off; he might be frightened of me gaining too much independence, or he might simply be scared that I’ll kill myself the way a lot of youths seem to when they get a bike. I don’t know; I never know exactly how much he really feels for me. Come to think of it, I never know exactly how much I really feel for him.
I had rather been hoping that I might see somebody I knew while I was in the town, but the only people I saw were old Mackenzie in the gun and tackle shop and Mrs Stuart in the café, yawning and fat behind her Formica counters and reading a Mills & Boon. Not that I know all that many people anyway, I suppose; Jamie is my only real friend, though through him I have met a few people of about my own age I regard as acquaintances. Not going to school, and having to pretend I didn’t live on the island all the time, has meant that I didn’t grow up with anybody of my own age (except Eric, of course, but even he was away for a long time), and about the time I was thinking of venturing further afield and getting to know more people Eric went crazy, and things got a bit uncomfortable in the town for a while.
Mothers told their children to behave or Eric Cauldhame would get them and do horrible things to them with worms and maggots. As I suppose was inevitable, the story graduall
y became that Eric would set fire to them, not just their pet dogs; and, as was probably also inevitable, a lot of kids started to think that I was Eric, or that I got up to the same tricks. Or perhaps their parents guessed about Blyth, Paul and Esmerelda. Whatever, they would run from me, or shout rude things from a distance, so I kept a low profile and restricted my brief visits to the town to a taciturn minimum. I get the odd funny look to this day, from children, youths and adults, and I know some mothers tell their children to behave or ‘Frank’ll get you,’ but it doesn’t bother me. I can take it.
I got on my bike and went back to the house a bit recklessly, shooting through puddles on the path and taking the Jump – a bit on the path where there’s a long downhill on a dune and then a short uphill where it’s easy to leave the ground – at a good forty kilometres per hour, landing with a muddy thump that nearly had me in the whin bushes and left me with a very sore bum, making me want to keep opening my mouth with the feeling of it. But I got back safely. I told my father I was all right and I’d be in for my dinner in an hour or so, then went back to the shed to wipe Gravel down. After I’d done that I made up some new bombs to replace the ones I’d used the day before, and a few extra besides. I put the old electric fire on in the shed, not so much to warm me as to keep the highly hygroscopic mixture from absorbing moisture out of a damp air.
What I’d really like, of course, is not to have to bother with lugging kilo bags of sugar and tins of weedkiller back from the town to stuff into electrical-conduit piping which Jamie the dwarf gets for me from the building contractor’s where he works in Porteneil. With a cellar full of enough cordite to wipe half the island off the map it does seem a bit daft, but my father won’t let me near the stuff.