The Wasp Factory

by Iain Banks

  ‘No, Frang, no,’ he said, shaking his head and trying to push my hands away. I let the boxes go and got hold of him by one arm, tightly. I drew him near to me, pointed the knife at his throat.

  ‘You’re going to tell me, or by God. . . .’ I let the words hang. I let go of his arm and moved my hand down to his trousers. I slipped his belt out of the little guides round the waist. He tried to stop me in a fumbling way, but I slapped his hands back and prodded him in the throat with the knife. I undid the belt and pulled the zip down, watching him all the time, trying not to imagine what I might find, what I might not find. I undid the button at the top of the zip. I pulled his trousers open, pulled his shirt up and out. He looked at me, lying on the bed with his eyes red and gleaming, and he shook his head.

  ‘Wha’ you goin’ t’do, Frangie? Am sorry, am really really sorry. Was an experimen, sall. Juss an experimen. . . . Don’ do anything’ t’me, please, Frangie. . . . Please. . . .’

  ‘You bitch, you bitch!’ I said, feeling my eyes start to blur and my voice shake. I pulled his/her underpants down with a vicious tug.

  Something screamed outside, in the night beyond the window. I stood staring at my father’s dark-haired, large, rather greasy-looking cock and balls, and something animal, out there on the landscape of the island, screamed. My father’s legs were quivering. Then came a light, orange and wavering, where no light should be, out there, over the dunes, and more screams, bleatings and baas and screams; everywhere screams.

  ‘Jesus Christ, what’s that?’ my father breathed, turning a shaking head towards the window. I stood back, then went past the bottom of the bed, looking out of the window. The awful noises and the light on the far side of the dunes seemed to be coming closer. The light was in a halo over the big dune behind the house, where the Skull Grounds were; it was flickering yellow with smoke-trails in it. The noise was like that the burning dog had made, but magnified, repeated and repeated, and with another edge to it. The light grew stronger, and something came running over the top of the big dune, something burning and screaming and running down over the sea-face of the Skull Grounds dune. It was a sheep, and it was followed by more. First another two, then half a dozen animals came charging over the grass and the sand. In seconds the hillside was covered with burning sheep, their wool in flames, bleating wildly and running down the hill, lighting up the sandy grass and weeds and leaving them burning in their fiery wake.

  And then I saw Eric. My father came shakily up by my side, but I ignored him and watched the skinny, dancing, leaping figure on the very top of the dune. Eric was waving a huge burning torch in one hand and an axe in the other. He was screaming, too.

  ‘Oh, my God, no,’ my father said. I turned to him. He was pulling his trousers up. I pushed past him and ran to the door.

  ‘Come on,’ I shouted at him. I went out, ran downstairs, not waiting to see if he was following. I could see flames through every window, hear the wails of the tortured sheep all around the house. I got to the kitchen, considered getting some water as I ran through, but decided it was pointless. I ran out through the porch and into the garden. A sheep, burning only above its back legs, nearly collided with me, running through the already blazing garden and swerving at the last second from the door with a terrified baaing, then jumping over the low fence into the front garden. I ran round the back of the house, looking for Eric.

  Sheep were everywhere, fire was all about. The grass over the Skull Grounds was ablaze, flames leaped from the shed and the bushes and the plants and flowers in the garden, and dead, burning sheep lay in pools of livid fire while others ran and jumped about, moaning and howling in their guttural, broken voices. Eric was down the steps leading to the cellar. I saw the torch he had been holding, flickering flame against the wall of the house beneath the window to the downstairs toilet. He was attacking the door to the cellar with the axe.

  ‘Eric! No!’ I screamed. I started forward, then turned, grabbed the edge of the house and stuck my head round the corner to look at the open door of the porch. ‘Dad! Get out of the house! Dad!’ I could hear the sound of splintering wood behind me. I turned and ran for Eric. I jumped over the smouldering carcass of a sheep just before the cellar steps. Eric turned round and swung the axe at me. I ducked and rolled. I landed and jumped up, ready to spring away, but he was back smashing the axe into the door again, screaming with each massive blow as though he was the door. The axe head disappeared through the wood, became stuck; he wriggled it mightily and got it out, glanced back at me and then heaved the axe at the door again. The flames from the torch threw his shadow at me; the torch lay propped against the side of the door and I could see the new paint had started burning already. I got my catapult out. Eric had the door almost down. My father still hadn’t shown. Eric glanced back at me again then smashed the axe into the door. A sheep cried out behind us as I fumbled for a steelie. I could hear the crackling of fires on all sides and smell roasted meat. The metal sphere fitted into the leather and I pulled.

  ‘Eric!’ I yelled, as the door gave way. He held the axe with one hand, picked up the torch with the other; he kicked the door and it fell. I tensed the catapult one final centimetre. I gazed at him through the Y of the catapult’s arms. He looked at me. His face was bearded, dirty, like an animal mask. It was the boy, the man I had known, and it was another person entirely. That face was grinning and leering and sweating, and it beat to and fro as his chest heaved in and out and the flames pulsed. He held the axe and the burning brand, and the cellar door lay in a wreck behind him. I thought I could just make out the bales of cordite, darkly orange in the thick and shivering light from the fires around us and the torch my brother held. He shook his head, looking expectant and confused.

  I shook my head, slowly.

  He laughed and nodded, half-dropped, half-threw the torch into the cellar, and ran at me.

  I almost released the steelie as I saw him come at me through the catapult, but just in the last second before my fingers opened I saw he had dropped the axe; it clattered off the steps to the cellar as Eric dodged past me and I dropped and ducked to one side. I rolled, saw Eric haring away over the garden, heading south down the island. I dropped the catapult, ran down the steps and picked the torch up. It was a metre into the cellar, nowhere near the bales. I threw it outside quickly as the bombs in the blazing shed started to go off.

  The noise was deafening, shrapnel whizzed over my head, windows in the house blew in and the shed was totally demolished; a couple of bombs were blown out of the shed and exploded in other parts of the garden, but luckily none came near me. By the time it was safe for me to raise my head the shed no longer existed, all the sheep were dead or gone, and Eric had vanished.

  • • •

  My father was in the kitchen, holding a pail of water and a carving-knife. I came in and he put the knife down on the table. He looked about a hundred years old. On the table was the specimen-jar. I sat down at the head of the table, collapsing into the chair. I looked at him.

  ‘That was Eric at the door, Dad,’ I said, and laughed. My ears were still ringing from the explosions in the shed.

  My father stood looking old and stupid, and his eyes were bleary and wet and his hands shook. I felt myself calm down, gradually.

  ‘Wha—’ he began, then cleared his throat. ‘What . . . what happened?’ He sounded almost sober.

  ‘He tried to get into the cellar. I think he was going to blow us all up. He’s run off now. I’ve put the door back up as best I can. Most of the fires are out; you won’t need that.’ I nodded at the pail of water he held. ‘Instead I’d like you to sit down and tell me one or two things I’d like to know.’ I sat back in my chair.

  He looked at me for a second, then he picked up the specimen-jar, but it slipped from his fingers, fell to the floor and smashed. He gave a nervous laugh, bent, and stood back up holding what had been inside the jar. He held it out for me to see, but I was looking into his face. He closed his hand, then opened it again, l
ike a magician. He was holding a pink ball. Not a testicle; a pink ball, like a lump of plasticine, or wax. I stared back into his eyes.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said.

  So he told me.

  12: What Happened to Me

  ONCE, far south, past even the new house, I went to build some dams amongst the sand and the rock pools on that part of the coast. It was a perfect, calm, luminous day. There was no line between the sea and the sky, and any smoke rose straight. The sea was flat.

  On the land in the distance there were some fields, set on to a mildly sloping hillside. In one field there were some cows and two big brown horses. While I was building, a lorry came down a track by the field. It stopped by the gate, reversed and turned so that its rear was facing me. I watched through the binoculars as this went on about half a mile away. Two men got out. They opened the back of the truck so that a ramp was formed into its interior, wooden slatted sides being folded out to make fences on either side of the ramp. The two horses came to watch.

  I stood in a rock pool, water round my wellingtons, and I cast a watery shadow. The men went into the field and led one of the horses out, a rope round its neck. It went out with no complaint, but when the men tried to get it to go into the truck, up the tailboard, between the skewed, slatted sides, it shied and refused, leaned backwards. Its mate pressed against the fence beside it. I heard its cries, seconds late through the still air. The horse would not go in. Some cows in the field looked on, then continued munching.

  Tiny waves, clear folds of light, consumed the sand, rock, weed and shell beside me, lapping quietly. A bird called in the calmness. The men moved the truck away, led the horse after it, down the track and along an offshoot of it. The horse in the field cried out, and ran in pointless circles. My arms and eyes grew tired, and I looked away, at the line of hills and mountains marching into the glowing light of the north. When I looked back they had the horse inside the truck.

  The truck moved off, wheels spinning briefly. The lone horse, confused again, ran from gate to fence and back again, first following the truck, then not. One of the men had stayed behind in the field with it, and as the truck disappeared over the brow of the hill he calmed the animal.

  Later, on my way back home, I passed the field with the horse in it, and it was quietly cropping the grass.

  • • •

  I am sitting on the dune above the Bunker now, in this fresh, breezy Sunday morning, and I am remembering dreaming about that horse last night.

  After my father told me what he had to tell me, and I passed through disbelief and fury to stunned acceptance, and after we had a look round the outskirts of the garden, calling for Eric, cleaning up the mess the best we could and putting out the remaining small fires, after we barricaded the cellar door and went back to the house and he told me why he had done what he had, we went to bed. I locked my bedroom door, and I’m pretty sure he locked his. I slept, had a dream in which I relived that evening of the horses, then woke early and went out, looking for Eric. I saw Diggs coming down the path as I left. My father had a lot of talking to do. I left them to it.

  The weather had cleared. No storm, no thunder and lightning, just a wind out of the west sweeping all the cloud away out to sea, and the worst of the heat with it. Like a miracle, though more likely just an anticyclone over Norway. So it was bright and clear and cool.

  I found Eric lying asleep on the dune above the Bunker, head in the swaying grass, curled up like a little child. I went up to him and sat beside him for a while, then spoke his name, nudged his shoulder. He woke up, looked at me and smiled.

  ‘Hello, Eric,’ I said. He held out one hand and I clasped it. He nodded, still smiling. Then he shifted, put his curly head on my lap, closed his eyes and went to sleep.

  • • •

  I’m not Francis Leslie Cauldhame. I’m Frances Lesley Cauldhame. That’s what it boils down to. The tampons and the hormones were for me.

  My father dressing Eric up as a girl was just, as it turned out, a rehearsal for me. When Old Saul savaged me, my father saw it as an ideal opportunity for a little experiment, and a way of lessening – perhaps removing entirely – the influence of the female around him as I grew up. So he started dosing me with male hormones, and has been ever since. That’s why he’s always made the meals, that’s why what I’ve always thought was the stump of a penis is really an enlarged clitoris. Hence the beard, no periods, and all the rest.

  But he has kept tampons for the last few years, just in case my own hormones got the better of the ones he had been pumping me with. He had the bromide to stop the added androgen making me feel randy. He made a fake set of male genitals from the same wax kit I found under the stairs and made my candles from. He was going to confront me with the specimen-jar if I ever started to query whether I really was castrated. More proof; more lies. Even the stuff about farting was a cheat; he’s been friends with Duncan the barman for years and buys him drinks in return for an informative phone call after I’ve been drinking in the Arms. Even now I can’t be sure he’s told me everything, though he did seem to be gripped by the urge to confess all, and tears were in his eyes last night.

  Thinking about it, I feel a knot of anger building in my stomach again, but I fight it. I wanted to kill him, there and then in the kitchen after he told me and convinced me. Part of me still wants to believe it’s just his latest lie, but really I know it’s the truth. I’m a woman. Scarred thighs, outer labia a bit chewed up, and I’ll never be attractive, but according to Dad a normal female, capable of intercourse and giving birth (I shiver at the thought of either).

  I look out at the glittering sea while Eric’s head rests on my lap and I think again of that poor horse.

  I don’t know what I’m going to do. I can’t stay here, and I’m frightened of everywhere else. But I suppose I’ll have to go. What a bummer. Maybe I’d consider suicide, if some of my relatives hadn’t produced such difficult acts to follow.

  I look down at Eric’s head: quiet, dirty, asleep. His face is calm. He feels no pain.

  I watched the small waves fall on the beach for a while. On the sea, on that lens of water, twice-bulged and wobbling and rolling around the earth, I am looking at a rippled desert, and I have seen it as flat as a salt lake. Elsewhere the geography is different; the sea undulates, sways and swells, folds into rolling downs under freshening breezes, piles into foothills beneath the stiffening trades, and finally rears white-topped and blizzard-streaked in circling mountain ranges rammed by the storm-forced wind.

  And where I am, where we sit and lie and sleep and look, on this warm summer’s day, the snow will fall in a half-year’s time. The ice and frost, the rime and hoar, the howling gale born in Siberia, pushed over Scandinavia and swept across the North Sea, the world’s grey waters and the air’s dun skies will lay their cold, determined hands on this place, make it theirs for a while.

  I want to laugh or cry or both, as I sit here, thinking about my one life, my three deaths. Four deaths now, in a way, now that my father’s truth has murdered what I was.

  But I am still me; I am the same person, with the same memories and the same deeds done, the same (small) achievements, the same (appalling) crimes to my name.

  Why? How could I have done those things?

  Perhaps it was because I thought I had had all that really mattered in the world, the whole reason – and means – for our continuance as a species, stolen from me before I even knew its value. Perhaps I murdered for revenge in each case, jealously exacting – through the only potency at my command – a toll from those who passed within my range; my peers who each would otherwise have grown into the one thing I could never become: an adult.

  Lacking, as one might say, one will, I forged another; to lick my own wound, I cut them off, reciprocating in my angry innocence the emasculation I could not then fully appreciate, but somehow – through the attitudes of others perhaps – sensed as an unfair, irrecoverable loss. Having no purpose in life or procreation, I invested all
my worth in that grim opposite, and so found a negative and negation of the fecundity only others could lay claim to. I believe that I decided if I could never become a man, I – the unmanned – would out-man those around me, and so I became the killer, a small image of the ruthless soldier-hero almost all I’ve ever seen or read seems to pay strict homage to. I would find or make my own weapons, and my victims would be those most recently produced by the one act I was incapable of; my equals in that, while they possessed the potential for generation, they were at that point no more able to perform the required act than I was. Talk about penis envy.

  Now it all turns out to have been for nothing. There was no revenge that needed taking, only a lie, a trick that should have been exposed, a disguise which even from the inside I should have seen through, but in the end did not want to. I was proud; eunuch but unique; a fierce and noble presence in my lands, a crippled warrior, fallen prince. . . .

  Now I find I was the fool all along.

  Believing in my great hurt, my literal cutting off from society’s mainland, it seems to me that I took life in a sense too seriously, and the lives of others, for the same reason, too lightly. The murders were my own conception; my sex. The Factory was my attempt to construct life, to replace the involvement which otherwise I did not want.

  Well, it is always easier to succeed at death.

  Inside this greater machine, things are not quite so cut and dried (or cut and pickled) as they have appeared in my experience. Each of us, in our own personal Factory, may believe we have stumbled down one corridor, and that our fate is sealed and certain (dream or nightmare, humdrum or bizarre, good or bad), but a word, a glance, a slip – anything can change that, alter it entirely, and our marble hall becomes a gutter, or our rat-maze a golden path. Our destination is the same in the end, but our journey – part chosen, part determined – is different for us all, and changes even as we live and grow. I thought one door had snicked shut behind me years ago; in fact I was still crawling about the face. Now the door closes, and my journey begins.