The Wasp Factory

by Iain Banks

  But he was my brother, and I still loved him in a way. I loved him despite his alteration the way, I suppose, he had loved me despite my disability. That feeling of wanting to protect, I suppose, which women are supposed to feel for the young and men are meant to feel for women.

  Eric left the island before I was even born, only coming back for holidays, but I think that spiritually he was always there, and when he did return properly, a year after my little accident, when my father thought we both old enough for him to be able to look after the two of us, I didn’t resent him being there at all. On the contrary, we got on well from the start, and I’m sure I must have embarrassed him with my slavish following around and copying, though, being Eric, he was too sensitive to other people’s feelings to tell me so and risk hurting me.

  When he was sent off to private schools I pined; when he came back on holidays I enthused; I jumped and bubbled and got excited. Summer after summer we spent on the island, flying kites, making models from wood and plastic, Lego and Meccano and anything else we found lying about, building dams and constructing huts and trenches. We flew model airplanes, sailed model yachts, built sand-yachts with sails and invented secret societies, codes and languages. He told me stories, inventing them as he went along. We played some stories out: brave soldiers in the dunes and fighting, winning and fighting and fighting and sometimes dying. Those were the only times he deliberately hurt me, when his stories required his own heroic death and I would take it all too seriously as he lay expiring on the grass or the sands, having just blown up the bridge or the dam or the enemy convoy and like as not saved me from death, too; I would choke back tears and punch him lightly as I tried to change the story myself and he refused, slipping away from me and dying; too often dying.

  When he had his migraines – sometimes lasting days – I lived on edge, taking cool drinks and some food up to the darkened room on the second floor, creeping in, standing and shaking sometimes if he moaned and shifted on the bed. I was wretched while he suffered, and nothing meant anything; the games and the stories seemed stupid and pointless, and only throwing stones at bottles or seagulls made much sense. I went out fishing for gulls, determined things other than Eric should suffer: when he recovered it was like him coming back for the summer all over again, and I was irrepressible.

  Finally, though, that outward urge consumed him, as it does any real man, and it took him away from me, to the outside world with all its fabulous opportunities and awful dangers. Eric decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a doctor. He told me then that nothing much would change; he would still have most of the summer off, even if he would have to stay down in Glasgow to do hospital work or go around with doctors when they visited people; he told me that we would still be the same when we were together, but I knew it wasn’t true, and I could see that in his heart he knew it, too. It was there in his eyes and his words. He was leaving the island, leaving me.

  I couldn’t blame him, even then, when I felt it hardest. He was Eric, he was my brother, he was doing what he had to do, just like the brave soldier who died for the cause, or for me. How could I doubt or blame him when he had never even started to suggest that he doubted or blamed me? My God; all those murders, those three young children killed, one a fratricide. And he simply could not have entertained the idea that I had had a hand in even one of them. I would have known. He couldn’t have looked me in the face if he had suspected, he was so incapable of deceit.

  So south he went, first one year, carried there earlier than most by his brilliant examination results, then another. The summer in between he came back, but he was changed. He still tried to get along with me the way he always had, but I could feel it was forced. He was away from me, his heart was no longer on the island. It was with the people he knew in the University, with his studies, which he loved; it was in all the rest of the world perhaps, but it was no longer on the island. No longer with me.

  We went out, we flew kites, built dams and so on, but it wasn’t the same; he was an adult helping me to enjoy myself, not another boy sharing his own joy. It wasn’t a bad time, and I was still glad he was there, but he was relieved to go after a month to join some of his student friends on a holiday in the South of France. I mourned what I knew was the passing of the friend and brother I had known, and felt more keenly than at any other time my injury – that thing which I knew would keep me in my adolescent state for ever, would never let me grow up and be a real man, able to make my own way in the world.

  I threw that feeling off quickly. I had the Skull, I had the Factory, and I had a vicarious feeling of manly satisfaction in the brilliant performance of Eric on the outside as, for my part, I slowly made myself unchallenged lord of the island and the lands about it. Eric wrote me letters telling me how he was getting on, he called up and spoke to me and my father, and he would make me laugh then on the phone, the way a clever adult can, even though you might not want to let them. He never let me feel that he had totally abandoned me or the island.

  Then he had his unfortunate experience which, unknown to me and my father, came on top of other things, and it was enough to kill even the altered person I knew. It was to send Eric flying back and out to something else: an amalgam of both his earlier self (but satanically reversed) and a more worldy-wise man, an adult damaged and dangerous, confused and pathetic and manic all at once. He reminded me of a hologram, shattered; with the whole image contained within one spear-like shard, at once splinter and entirety.

  It was during that second year, when he was helping out in a big teaching hospital, that it happened. He didn’t even have to be there at the time, down in the guts of the hospital with human rejects; he was helping out in his spare time. Later my father and I heard that Eric had had problems he hadn’t told us about. He’d fallen for some girl and it had ended badly, with her telling him she didn’t love him after all and going off with somebody else. His migraines had been particularly bad for a while and had interfered with his work. It was because of that as well as the girl that he had been working unofficially in the hospital near the University, helping the nurses on late shifts, sitting in the darkness of the wards with his books while the old and the young and the sick moaned and coughed.

  He was doing that the night he had his unpleasant experience. The ward was one where they kept babies and young children so badly deformed they were sure to die outside hospital, and not last much longer even inside. We got a letter explaining most of what had happened from a nurse who had been friendly with my brother, and from the tone of her letter she thought it was wrong to keep some of the children alive; apparently, they were little else than exhibits to be shown to students by the doctors and consultants.

  It was a hot, close night in July, and Eric was down in this ghoulish place, near the hospital boiler room and store rooms. He’d had a sore head all day, and while he was in the ward it had worsened into a bad migraine. The ventilation in the place had been faulty for the past couple of weeks, and engineers had been working on the system; that night it was hot and stuffy, and Eric’s migraines have always been bad in those conditions. Somebody was coming to replace him in an hour or so, or I suppose even Eric would have admitted defeat and left to go back to his hall of residence and lie down. As it was, he was going round the ward changing nappies and quieting mewling babies and changing dressings and drips or whatever, his head feeling as though it was splitting and his vision distorted with lights and lines.

  The child he was attending to when it happened was more or less a vegetable. Amongst its other defects it was totally incontinent, unable to make any other noise apart from a gurgle, couldn’t control its muscles properly – even its head had to be supported by a brace – and it wore a metal plate over its head because the bones which should have made up its skull never did grow together, and even the skin over its brain was paper thin.

  It had to be fed every few hours with some special mixture, and Eric was doing that when it happened. He had noticed that the chil
d was a little quieter than usual, just sitting there slackly in its chair and staring straight ahead, breathing lightly, eyes glazed and an almost peaceful expression on its usually vacant face. It seemed to be incapable of taking its food, though – one of the few activities that normally it was able to appreciate and even join in. Eric was patient, and held the spoon in front of its unfocused eyes; he put it to its lips where normally the child would have put its tongue out, or try to lean forward and take the spoon into its mouth, but that night it just sat there, not gurgling, not shaking its head or shifting or flapping its arms or rolling its eyes but staring and staring, that curious look on its face which might have been mistaken for happiness.

  Eric persevered, sitting closer, trying to ignore the pressing pain in his own head as the migraine got gradually worse. He spoke gently to the child – something that would normally get it to swivel its eyes and shift its head towards the source of the noise, but which that night had no effect at all. Eric checked the sheet of paper by the chair to see if the child had been given any extra medication, but everything appeared normal. He edged closer, crooning, waving the spoon, fighting the waves of pain inside his skull.

  Then he saw something, something like a movement, just a tiny little movement, barely visible on the shaved head of the slightly smiling child. Whatever it was was small and slow. Eric blinked, shook his head to try to dislodge the quivering lights of the migraine building inside. He stood up, still holding the spoon with the mushy food on it. He bent closer to the skull of the child, looking closer. He couldn’t see anything, but he looked round the edge of the metal skull-cap the child wore, thought he saw something under it, and lifted it easily from the head of the infant to see if there was anything wrong.

  • • •

  A boiler-room worker heard Eric screaming and rushed into the ward brandishing a big spanner; he found Eric crammed into a corner howling as hard as he could at the floor, his head down between his knees as he half-knelt, half-lay, foetal on the tiles. The chair the child was in had been tipped over, and it and the strapped-in child, who was still smiling, lay on the floor a few yards away.

  The man from the boiler-room shook Eric but got no response. Then he looked at the child on the chair and went over to it, perhaps to right its chair; he got within a couple of feet, then rushed to the door, throwing up before he got there. A ward sister from the floor above found the man in the corridor still fighting his dry heaves when she came down to see what all the fuss was about. Eric had stopped screaming by that time and gone quiet. The child was still smiling.

  The sister righted the child’s chair. Whether she choked back any of her own sickness, or felt dizzy, or whether she had seen as bad or worse before and treated it as just something to be coped with, I don’t know, but she finally pulled things together, calling for help on the telephone and getting Eric stiffly out of his corner. She put him in a seat, covered the child’s head with a towel, and comforted the workman. She had removed the spoon from the open skull of the smiling infant. Eric had stuck it there, perhaps thinking in that first instant of his mania to spoon out what he saw.

  Flies had got into the ward, presumably when the air-conditioning had been faulty earlier. They had got underneath the stainless steel of the child’s skull-cap and deposited their eggs there. What Eric saw when he lifted that plate up, what he saw with all that weight of human suffering above, with all that mighty spread of closed-in, heat-struck darkened city all around, what he saw with his own skull splitting, was a slowly writhing nest of fat maggots, swimming in their combined digestive juices as they consumed the brain of the child.

  • • •

  In fact, Eric appeared to recover from what happened. He was sedated, he spent a couple of nights in the hospital as a patient, then a few days resting in his room in the residence. He went back to his studies within the week, and attended classes as normal. A few people knew something had happened, and they saw that Eric was quieter, but that was all. My father and I didn’t know anything except that he’d been off from his classes for a short while because of a migraine.

  Later we heard Eric started drinking a lot, missing classes, turning up at the wrong ones, shouting in his sleep and waking other people on his floor of the residence, taking drugs, missing exams and practical classes. . . . In the end the University had to suggest he took the rest of the year off because he had missed so much work. Eric took it badly; he got all his books and piled them up in the corridor outside his tutor’s room and set light to them. He was lucky they didn’t prosecute him, but the University authorities took a lenient view of the smoke and the slight damage to their ancient wood panelling, and Eric came back to the island.

  But not to me. He refused to have anything to do with me, and kept himself locked in his room, listening to his records very loudly and hardly ever going out except to the town, where he was quickly banned from all four pubs for starting fights and shouting and swearing at people. When he did notice me he would stare at me with his huge eyes, or tap his nose and wink slyly. His eyes had grown dark-set and were underlined by bags, and his nose seemed to twitch a lot, too. Once he picked me up and gave me a kiss on the lips which really made me frightened.

  My father grew almost as uncommunicative as Eric. He settled into a morose existence of long walks and dour, introspective silences. He started smoking cigarettes, virtually chain-smoking for a while. For a month or so the house was hell to be in, and I went out a lot, or stayed in my room and watched television.

  Then Eric took to frightening small boys from the town, first by throwing worms at them, then by stuffing worms down their shirts as they came back from school. Some of the parents, a teacher and Diggs came to the island to see my father once Eric started trying to force the kids to eat the worms and handfuls of maggots. I sat sweating in my room while they met in the lounge underneath, the parents shouting at my father. Eric was talked to by the doctor, by Diggs, even by a social worker from Inverness, but he didn’t say much; he just sat smiling and sometimes mentioned how much protein there was in worms. Once he came back to the house all battered and bleeding, and my father and I assumed some of the bigger boys or a few of the parents had caught him and beaten him.

  Apparently dogs had been disappearing from the town for a couple of weeks before some children saw my brother pouring a can of petrol over a little Yorkshire terrier and setting fire to it. Their parents believed them and went looking for Eric, to find him doing the same thing with an old mongrel he had tempted with aniseed balls sweeties, and caught. They chased him through the woods behind the town but lost him.

  Diggs came to the island again that evening to tell us he had come to arrest Eric for disturbing the peace. He waited until quite late, only accepting a couple of the whiskies my father offered him, but Eric did not return. Diggs left, and my father waited up, but still Eric didn’t show. It was three days and five dogs later before he came back, haggard and unwashed and smelling of petrol and smoke, his clothes all torn and his face lean and filthy. My father heard him come in early in the morning, raid the fridge, gulp down several meals at once, and stamp upstairs to bed.

  My father crept down to the phone and called Diggs, who arrived before breakfast. Eric must have heard or seen something, though, because he went out through his room window and down the drainpipe to the ground, and made off with Diggs’s bike. It was another week and two more dogs before he was finally caught, siphoning petrol from somebody’s car in the street. They broke his jaw in the process of making their citizen’s arrest, and this time Eric didn’t get away.

  A few months later he was certified insane. He had had all sorts of tests, tried to escape countless times, assaulted male nurses and social workers and doctors, and threatened all of them with legal action and assassination. He was moved to gradually more and more long-term and secure institutions as his tests and threats and struggles continued. My father and I heard that he quieted down a lot once he settled into the hospital to the south of Glasg
ow and no longer made his escape attempts, but looking back he was probably just trying – successfully, it would seem – to lull his keepers into a false sense of security.

  And now he was making his way back to see us.

  • • •

  I swept my binoculars slowly across the land in front and beneath me, from north to south, from haze to haze, across the town and the roads and the railway and the fields and the sands, and I wondered if under my gaze at any point came the place where Eric was now, if he had got this far already. I felt he was close. I didn’t have any good reason, but he had had the time, the call of last night sounded clearer than the others he had made, and . . . I just felt it. He might be here now, lying up waiting for night before he moved, or skulking through the woods or through the whin bushes or within the hollows of the dunes, heading for the house or looking for dogs.

  I walked along the ridge of hills, then came down a few miles south of the town, down through the ranks of conifers where distant buzz-saws sounded and the dark masses of the trees were shady and quiet. I went across the railway line and over a few fields of swaying barley, across the road and over the rough sheep-pasture to the sands.

  My feet were sore and my legs ached slightly as I walked along the line of hard sand on the beach. A slight wind had come up off the sea, and I was glad of it, because the clouds had all gone and the sun, though sinking gradually, was still powerful. I came to a river I had already crossed once in the hills, and crossed it again near the sea, going up into the dunes a way to where I knew there was a wire bridge. Sheep scattered in front of me, some shorn, some still shaggy, bouncing away with their fractured-sounding baas, then stopping once they thought they were safe and dipping their heads or kneeling to resume cropping the flower-scattered grass.

  I remember I used to despise sheep for being so profoundly stupid. I’d seen them eat and eat and eat, I’d watched dogs outsmart whole flocks of them, I’d chased them and laughed at the way they ran, watched them get themselves into all sorts of stupid, tangled situations, and I’d thought they quite deserved to end up as mutton, and that being used as wool-making machines was too good for them. It was years, and a long slow process, before I eventually realised just what sheep really represented: not their own stupidity, but our power, our avarice and egotism.