The wasp factory: a novel (8 page)

The cache system survives, and I've even added a couple of petrol bombs to one or two of the secret stores, where a likely avenue of attack comes in over terrain the bottles would smash on, but the trip-wires I've dismantled and left in the shed. My Defence Manual, which contains things like maps of the island with the caches marked, likely attack routes, a summary of tactics, a list of weapons I have or might make, includes within this last category quite a few unpleasant things like trip-wires and snares set a body-length away from a concealed broken bottle sticking up in the grass, electrically detonated mines made from pipe-bombs and small nails, all buried in the sand, and a few interesting, if unlikely, secret weapons, like frisbees with razors embedded in the edge.

Not that I want to kill anybody now, but it is all for defence rather than offence, and it does make me feel a lot more secure. Soon I'll have enough money for a really powerful crossbow, and that I'm certainly looking forward to; it'll help make up for the fact that I've never been able to persuade my father to buy a rifle or a shotgun that I could use sometimes. I have my catapults and slings and air-rifle, and they could all be lethal in the right circumstances, but they just don't have the long-range hitting power I really hanker after. The pipebombs are the same. They have to be placed, or at best thrown, at the target, and even slinging some of the purpose-built smaller ones is inaccurate and slow. I can imagine some unpleasant things happening with the sling, too; the sling-bombs have to be on a pretty short fuse if they're to detonate soon enough after they land not to be throw-backable, and I've had a couple of close calls already when they've gone off just after they left the sling.

I've experimented with guns, of course, both mere projectile weapons and mortars which would lob the sling-bombs, but they have all been clumsy, dangerous, slow and rather prone to blowing up.

A shotgun would be ideal, though I'd settle for a .22 rifle, but a crossbow will just have to do. Perhaps sometime I'll be able to devise a way round my official non-existence and apply for a gun myself, though even then, all things considered, I might not be granted a licence. Oh, to be in America, I occasionally think.

I was logging the cache petrol bombs which hadn't been inspected for evaporation recently when the phone went. I looked at my watch, surprised at the lateness of the hour: nearly eleven. I ran downstairs to the phone, hearing my father coming to the door of his room as I passed it.

'Porteneil 531.' Pips sounded.

'Fuck it, Frank, I've got luna maria callouses on me feet. How the hell are ye, me young bucko?'

I looked at the handset, then up at my father, who was leaning over the rail from the floor above, tucking his pyjama top into his trousers. I spoke into the phone: 'Hello there, Jamie, what are you doing calling me this late?'

'Wha-? Oh, the old man's there, is he?' Eric said. 'T-ell him he's a bag of effervescent pus, from me.'

'Jamie sends his regards,' I called up to my father, who turned without a word and went back to his room. I heard the door close. I turned back to the phone. 'Eric, where are you this time ?'

'Ah, shit, I'm not telling you. Guess.'

'Well, _I_ don't know.... Glasgow?'

'Ah ha ha ha ha ha!' Eric cackled. I clenched plastic.

'How are you? Are you all right?'

'I'm fine. How are you?'

'Great. Look, how are you eating? Have you got any money? Are you hitching lifts or what? They're looking for you, you know, but there hasn't been anything on the news yet. You haven't-' I stopped before I said something he might take exception to.

'I'm doing fine. I eat dogs! Heh heh heh!'

I groaned. 'Oh, God, you're not really, are you?'

'What else can I eat? It's great, Frankie boy; I'm keeping to the fields and the woods and walking a lot and getting lifts and when I get near a town I look for a good fat juicy dog and I make friends with it and take it out to the woods and then I kill it and eat it. What could be simpler? I do love the outdoor life.'

'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 recordcleaners and telephone indexes slimming magazines potholders 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 field mice 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 colored 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 tidelines. 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.