The wasp factory: a novel (9 page)

The air whipped at me, little gusts of drizzle stinging slightly as I hit them. My lungs exploded, imploded, exploded, imploded; plumes of wet sand flew from my soles, rising as I sped on, falling in little curves and spattering back as I raced on into the distance. I brought my face up and put my head back, baring my neck to the wind like a lover, to the rain like an offering. My breath rasped in my throat, and a slight light-headedness I had started to feel owing to hyperoxygenating earlier waned as my muscles took up the slack of the extra power in my blood. I boosted, increasing speed as the jagged line of dead seaweed and old wood and cans and bottles skittered by me; I felt like a bead on a thread being pulled through the air on a line, sucked along by throat and lungs and legs, a continual pounce of flowing energy. I kept the boost up as long as I could; then, when I felt it start to go, relaxed, and went back to merely running fast for a while.

I charged across the sands, the dunes to my left moving by like stands on a racetrack. Ahead I could see the Bomb Circle, where I would stop or turn. I boosted again, head down and shouting to myself inside, screaming mentally, my voice like a press, screwing down tighter to squeeze a final effort from my legs. I _flew_ across the sands, body tilted crazily forward, lungs bursting, legs pounding.

The moment passed and I slowed quickly, dropping to a trot as I approached the Bomb Circle, almost staggering into it, then flinging myself on to the sand inside to lie panting, heaving, gasping, staring at the grey sky and invisible drizzle, spreadeagled in the centre of the rocks. My chest rose and fell, my heart pounded inside its cage. A dull roaring filled my ears, and my whole body tingled and buzzed. My leg muscles seemed to be in some daze of quivering tension. I let my head fall to one side, my cheek against the cool damp sand.

I wondered what it felt like to die.

The Bomb Circle, my dad's leg and his stick, his reluctance to get me a motorbike perhaps, the candles in the skull, the legions of dead mice and hamsters - they're all the fault of Agnes, my father's second wife and my mother.

I can't remember my mother, because if I did I'd hate her. As it is, I hate her name, the idea of her. It was she who let the Stoves take Eric away to Belfast, away from the island, away from what he knew. They thought that my father was a bad parent because he dressed Eric in girl's clothes and let him run wild, and my mother let them take him because she didn't like children in general and Eric in particular; she thought he was bad for her karma in some way. Probably the same dislike of children led her to desert me immediately after my birth, and also caused her only to return on that one, fateful occasion when she was at least partly responsible for my little accident. All in all, I think I have good reason to hate her. I lay there in the Bomb Circle where I killed her other son, and I hoped that she was dead, too.

I went back at a slow run, glowing with energy and feeling even better than I had at the start of the Run. I was already looking forward to going out in the evening - a few drinks and a chat to Jamie, my friend, and some sweaty, ear-ringing music at the Arms. I did one short sprint, just to shake my head as I ran and get some of the sand out of my hair, then relaxed to a trot once more.

The rocks of the Bomb Circle usually get me thinking and this time was no exception, especially considering the way I'd lain down inside them like some Christ or something, opened to the sky, dreaming of death. Well, Paul went about as quickly as you can go; I was certainly humane that time. Blyth had lots of time to realise what was happening, jumping about the Snake Park screaming as the frantic and enraged snake bit his stump repeatedly, and little Esmerelda must have had some inkling what was going to happen to her as she was slowly blown away.

My brother Paul was five when I killed him. I was eight. It was over two years after I had subtracted Blyth with an adder that I found an opportunity to get rid of Paul. Not that I bore him any personal ill-will; it was simply that I knew he couldn't stay. I knew I'd never be free of the dog until he was gone (Eric, poor well-meaning bright but ignorant Eric, thought I still wasn't, and I just couldn't tell him why I knew I was).

Paul and I had gone for a walk along the sand, northwards on a calm, bright autumn day after a ferocious storm the night before that had ripped slates off the roof of the house, torn up one of the trees by the old sheep-pen and even snapped one of the cables on the suspension foot-bridge. Father got Eric to help him with the clearing-up and repairs while I took myself and Paul out from under their feet.

I always got on well with Paul. Perhaps because I knew from an early age that he was not long for this world, I tried to make his time in it as pleasant as possible, and thus ended up treating him far better than most young boys treat their younger brothers.

We saw that the storm had changed a lot of things as soon as we came to the river that marks the end of the island; it had swollen hugely, carving immense channels out of the sand, great surging brown trenches of water streaming by and tearing lumps from the banks continually and sweeping them away. We had to walk right down almost to the sea at its low-tide limit before we could get across. We went on, me holding Paul by the hand, no malice in my heart. Paul was singing to himself and asking questions of the type children tend to, such as why weren't the birds all blown away during the storm, and why didn't the sea fill up with water with the stream going so hard?

As we walked along the sand in the quietness, stopping to look at all the interesting things which had been washed up, the beach gradually disappeared. Where the sand had stretched in an unbroken line of gold towards the horizon, now we saw more and more rock exposed the farther up the strand we looked, until in the distance the dunes faced a shore of pure stone. The storm had swept all the sand away during the night, starting just past the river and continuing farther than the places I had names for or had ever seen. It was an impressive sight, and one that frightened me a little at first, just because it was such a huge change and I was worried that it might happen to the island sometime. I remembered, however, that my father had told me of this sort of thing happening in the past, and the sands had always returned over the following few weeks and months.

Paul had great fun running and jumping from rock to rock and throwing stones into pools between the rocks. Rock pools were something of a novelty for him. We went farther up the wasted beach, still finding interesting pieces of flotsam and finally coming to the rusted remnant I thought was a water-tank or a half-buried canoe, from a distance. It stuck out of a patch of sand, jutting at a steep angle, about a metre and a half of it exposed. Paul was trying to catch fish in a pool as I looked at the thing.

I touched the side of the tapered cylinder wonderingly, feeling something very calm and strong about it, though I didn't know why. Then I stepped back and looked again at it. Its shape became clear, and I could then guess roughly how much of it must still be buried under the sand. It was a bomb, stood on its tail.

I went back to it carefully, stroking it gently and making shushing noises with my mouth. It was rust-red and black with its rotund decay, smelling dank and casting a shellshadow. I followed the line of the shadow along the sand, over the rocks, and found myself looking at little Paul, splashing happily about in a pool, slapping the water with a great flat bit of wood almost as big as he was. I smiled, called him over.

'See this?' I said. It was a rhetorical question. Paul nodded, big eyes staring. 'This', I told him, 'is a bell. Like the ones in the church in the town. The noise we hear on a Sunday, you know?'

'Yes. Just after brekast, Frank?'

'What?'

'The noise jus affer _Sun_day _brek_ast, Frank.' Paul hit me lightly on the knee with a podgy hand.

I nodded. 'Yes, that's right. Bells make that noise. They're great big hollow bits of metal filled up with noises and they let the noises out on Sunday mornings after breakfast. That's what this is.'

'A brekast?' Paul looked up at me with mightily furrowed little brows. I shook my head patiently.

'No. A bell.'

'"B is for Bell,"' Paul said quietly, nodding to himself and staring at the rusting device. Probably remembering an old nursery-book. He was a bright child; my father intended to send him off to school properly when the time came, and had already started him learning the alphabet.

'That's right. Well, this old bell must have fallen off a ship, or perhaps it got washed out here in a flood. I know what we'll do; I'll go up on the dunes and you hit the bell with your bit of wood and we'll see if I can hear it. Will we do that? Would you like that? It'll be very loud and you might get frightened.' I stooped down to put my face level with his. He shook his head violently and stuck his nose against mine. 'No! Won't get frigh' end!' he shouted. 'I'll -'

He was about to skip past me and hit the bomb with the piece of wood - he had already raised it above his head and made the lunge - when I reached out and caught him round the waist.

'Not _yet_,' I said. 'Wait until I'm farther away. It's an old bell and it might only have one good noise left in it. You don't want to waste it, do you?'

Paul wriggled, and the look on his face seemed to indicate that he wouldn't actually mind wasting anything, just so long as he got to hit the bell with his plank of wood. 'Aw-right,' he said, and stopped struggling. I put him down. 'But can I hit it really _really_ hard?'

'As hard as you possibly can, when I wave from the top of the dune over there. All right?'

'Can I prakiss?'

'Practise by hitting the sand.'

'Can I hit the puddles?'

'Yes, practise hitting the pools of water. That's a good idea.'

'Can I hit _this_ puddle?' He pointed with the wood at the circular sand-pool around the bomb. I shook my head.

'No, that might make the bell angry.'

He frowned. 'Do bells _get_ an'ry?'

'Yes, they do. I'm going now. You hit the bell really hard and I'll listen really hard, right?'

'Yes, Frank.'

'You won't hit the bell until I wave, will you?'

He shook his head. 'Pomiss.'

'Good. Won't be long.' I turned and started to head for the dunes at a slow run. My back felt funny. I looked round as I went, checking there was nobody about. There were only a few gulls, though, wheeling in a sky shot with ragged clouds.

Over my shoulder when I looked back, I saw Paul. He was still by the bomb, whacking the sand with his plank, using both hands to hold it and bringing it down with all his strength, jumping up in the air at the same time and yelling. I ran faster, over the rocks on to the firm sand, over the driftline and on up to the golden sand, slower and dry, then up to the grass on the nearest dune. I scrambled to the top and looked out over the sand and rocks to where Paul stood, a tiny figure against the reflected brightness of the pools and wet sands, overshadowed by the tilted cone of metal beside him. I stood up, waited until he noticed me, took one last look round, then waved my hands high over my head and threw myself flat.

While I was lying there, waiting, I realised that I hadn't told Paul _where_ to hit the bomb. Nothing happened. I lay there feeling my stomach sinking slowly into the sand on the top of the dune. I sighed to myself and looked up.

Paul was a distant puppet, jerking and leaping and throwing back his arms and whacking the bomb repeatedly on the side. I could just hear his lusty yells over the whisper of the grass in the wind. 'Shit,' I said to myself, and put my hand under my chin just as Paul, after a quick glance in my direction, started to attack the nose of the bomb. He had hit it once and I had taken my hand out from under my chin preparatory to ducking when Paul, the bomb and its little halo-pool and everything else for about ten metres around suddenly vanished inside a climbing column of sand and steam and flying rock, lit just the once from inside, in that blindingly brief first moment, by the high explosive detonating.

The rising tower of debris blossomed and drifted, starting to fall as the shockwave pulsed at me from the dune. I was vaguely aware of a lot of small sandslips along the drying faces of the nearby dunes. The noise rolled over then, a twisting crack and belly-rumble of thunder. I watched a gradually widening circle of splashes go out from the centre of the explosion as the debris came back to earth. The pillar of gas and sand was pulled out by the wind, darkening the sand under its shadow and forming a curtain of haze under its base like you see under a heavy cloud sometimes as it starts to get rid of its rain. I could see the crater now.

I ran down. I stood about fifty metres away from the still steaming crater. I didn't look too closely at any of the bits and pieces lying around, squinting at them from the side of my eye, wanting and not wanting to see bloody meat or tattered clothing. The noise rumbled back uncertainly from the hills beyond the town. The edge of the crater was marked with huge splinters of stone torn up from the bedrock under the sands; they stood like broken teeth around the scene, pointing at the sky or fallen slanted over. I watched the distant cloud from the explosion drift away over the firth, dispersing, then I turned and ran as fast as I could for the house.

So nowadays I can say it was a German bomb of five hundred kilograms and it was dropped by a crippled He. III trying to get back to its Norwegian base after an unsuccessful attack on the flying-boat base farther down the firth. I like to think it was the gun in my bunker that hit it and forced the pilot to turn tail and dump his bombs.

The tips of some of those great splinters of igneous rock still stick above the surface of the long-returned sand, and they form the Bomb Circle, poor dead Paul's most fitting monument: a blasphemous stone circle where the shadows play.

I was lucky, again. Nobody saw anything, and nobody could believe that I had _done_ it. I was distracted with grief this time, torn by guilt, and Eric had to look after me while I acted my part to perfection, though I say it myself. I didn't enjoy deceiving Eric, but I knew it was necessary; I couldn't tell him I'd done it because he wouldn't have understood _why_ I'd done it. He would have been horrified, and very likely never have been my friend again. So I had to act the tortured, self-blaming child, and Eric had to comfort me while my father brooded.