Authors: Iain Banks
The Wasp Factory (17 page)
In the evening it rained, so I had stayed in and watched television. I went to bed early. Eric didn’t call.
After I’d got rid of about half the beer I’d drunk in the Arms, I went to have another look at the Factory. I clambered up into the loft, all sunlight and warmth and smelling of old and interesting books, and I decided to clear the place up a bit.
I sorted out old toys into boxes, got a few rolls of carpet and wallpaper back into their places from where they’d fallen, pinned a couple of maps back on to the sloping wooden under-roof, cleared away some of the tools and bits and pieces that I’d used to repair the Factory, and loaded the various sections of the Factory that needed to be loaded.
I found some interesting things while I was doing all this: a home-made astrolabe I’d carved, a box containing the folded-flat parts for a scale model of the defences around Byzantium, the remains of my collection of telegraph-pole insulators, and some old jotters from when my father was teaching me French. Leafing through them, I couldn’t see any obvious lies; he hadn’t taught me to say anything obscene instead of ‘Excuse me’ or ‘Can you direct me to the railway station, please?’, though I’d have thought the temptation would have been all but irresistible.
I completed tidying the loft, sneezing a few times as the golden space filled with motes of shining dust. I looked over the refurbished Factory again, just because I love looking at it and tinkering with it and touching it and tipping some of its little levers and doors and devices. Finally I dragged myself away, telling myself that I’d get a chance to use it properly soon enough. I would capture a fresh wasp that afternoon to use the following morning. I wanted another interrogation of the Factory before Eric arrived; I wanted more of an idea what was going to happen.
It was a little risky, of course, asking it the same question twice, but I thought the exceptional circumstances demanded it, and it was my Factory, after all.
I got the wasp without any difficulty. It more or less walked into the ceremonial jam-jar which I have always used to hold subjects for the Factory. I kept the jar, sealed with the lid with the holes in it and stocked with a few leaves and a morsel of orange peel, standing in the shade of the river bank while I made a dam there that afternoon.
I worked and sweated in the sunlight of late afternoon and early evening while my father did a bit of painting at the back of the house and the wasp felt its way around the inside of the jar, antennae waving.
Halfway through building the dam - not the best time - I thought it might be amusing to make it an Exploder, so I set the overflow going and trotted up the path to the shed for the War Bag. I brought it back and sorted out the smallest bomb I could find wired for electrical detonation. I attached it to the wires from the torch-firer by the bared ends poking out of the drilled hole in the black metal casing and wrapped the bomb in a couple of plastic bags. I shoved the bomb backwards into the base of the main dam, leading the wires away and back behind the dam, past the static waters backed up behind it to near where the wasp crawled in its jar. I covered the wires over so that it looked more natural, then went on building the dam.
The dam system ended up very big and complicated and included not one but two little villages, one between two of the dams and one downstream from the last one. I had bridges with little roads, a small castle with four towers, and two road tunnels. Just before tea-time I played out the last of the wire from the torch body and took the wasp jar up on to the top of the nearby dune.
I could see my father, still painting the window surrounds of the lounge. I can just remember the designs he used to have on the front of the house, the face turned towards the sea; they were fading even then, but they were minor classics of tripped-out art, as I recall; great sweeping sworls and mandalas that leaped about the house front like Technicolor tattoos, curving round windows and arching over the door. A relic from the days when my father was a hippy, they are worn and gone now, erased by wind and sea and rain and sunlight. Only the vaguest outlines are still discernible now, along with a few freak patches of real colour, like peeling skin.
I opened the torch-firer up, shoved the cylindrical batteries inside, secured them, then clicked the flasher button on top of the torch body. The current flowed in series with the nine-volt pack-battery taped to the outside, down the wires leading from the hole where the bulb used to go, and into the casing of the bomb. Somewhere near its centre, steel wool glowed dully, then brightly and started to melt, and the white crystal mixture exploded, tearing the metal - which it took me and a heavy-duty vice a lot of sweat, time and leverage to bend at all - as though it was paper.
Wham!
The front of the main dam crashed up and out; a messy mix of steam and gas, water and sand leaped into the air and fell back spattering. The noise was good and dull, and the tremor I felt through the seat of my pants just before I heard the whump, single and strong.
The front of the main dam crashed up and out; a messy mix of steam and gas, water and sand leaped into the air and fell back spattering. The noise was good and dull, and the tremor I felt through the seat of my pants just before I heard the whump, single and strong.
The sand in the air slipped, fell back, splashed in the waters and thudded in little heaps on to roads and houses. The unleashed waters flooded out of the gap smashed in the sand wall and rolled down, sucking sand from the edges of the breach and spilling in a sloped brown tide down upon the first village, cutting through it, piling up behind the next dam, backing up, collapsing sand houses, tipping the castle to one side as a unit and undermining its already cracked towers. The bridge supports gave way, the wood slipped, fell in at one side, then the dam started to spill over and soon its whole top was awash and being eaten away by the flood still piling out of the first dam as the head of water pushed forward from fifty metres or more back up the stream. The castle disintegrated, falling over.
I left the jar and ran down the dune, exulting in the wave of water as it sped over the braided surface of the stream bed, hit houses, followed roads, ran through tunnels, then hit the last dam, quickly overwhelmed it and went on to smash into the rest of the houses, grouped into the second village. Dams were disintegrating, houses slipping into the water, bridges and tunnels falling and banks collapsing all over the place; a gorgeous feeling of excitement rose in my stomach like a wave and settled in my throat as I thrilled to the watery havoc about me.
I watched the wires wash and roll themselves to one side of the flood’s course, then looked at the front of the racing water as it headed quickly for the sea over the long-dried sand. I sat down opposite where the first village had been, where long brown humps of water surged, slowly advancing, and waited for the storm of water to subside, my legs crossed, my elbows on my knees and my face in my hands. I felt warm and happy and slightly hungry.
Eventually, when the stream was almost back to normal and there was virtually nothing left of my hours of work, I spotted what I was looking for: the black and silver wreck of the bomb, sticking ripped and gnarled in the sand just downstream from the site of the dam it had destroyed. I didn’t take my boots off but, with the tips of my toes still on the dry bank, walked with my hands until I was almost at full stretch out in the middle of the stream. I picked the remains of the bomb out of the stream bed, put its jagged body carefully into my mouth, then walked my hands back until I was able to throw myself back and stand up.
I wiped the almost flat piece of metal with a rag from the War Bag, put the bomb inside the bag, then collected the wasp jar and went back to the house for tea, leaping the stream just up from the highest point the waters had been backed up to.
All our lives are symbols. Everything we do is part of a pattern we have at least some say in. The strong make their own patterns and influence other people’s, the weak have their courses mapped out for them. The weak and the unlucky, and the stupid. The Wasp Factory is part of the pattern because it is part of life and - even more so - part of death. Like life it is complicated, so all the components are there. The reason it can answer questions is because every question is a start looking for an end, and the Factory is about the End - death, no less. Keep your entrails and sticks and dice and books and birds and voices and pendants and all the rest of that crap; I have the Factory, and it’s about now and the future; not the past.
I lay in bed that night, knowing the Factory was primed and ready and waiting for the wasp that crawled and felt its way about the jar that lay by my bedside. I thought of the Factory, above me in the loft, and I waited for the phone to ring.
The Wasp Factory is beautiful and deadly and perfect. It would give me some idea of what was going to happen, it would help me to know what to do, and after I had consulted it I would try to contact Eric through the skull of Old Saul. We are brothers, after all, even if only half so, and we are both men, even if I am only half so. At some deep level we understand each other, even though he is mad and I am sane. We even had that link I had not thought of until recently, but which might come in useful now: we have both killed, and used our heads to do it.
It occurred to me then, as it has before, that that is what men are really
for
. Both sexes can do one thing specially well; women can give birth and men can kill. We - I consider myself an honorary man - are the harder sex. We strike out, push through, thrust and take. The fact that it is only an analogue of all this sexual terminology I am capable of does not discourage me. I can feel it in my bones, in my uncastrated genes. Eric must respond to that.
for
. Both sexes can do one thing specially well; women can give birth and men can kill. We - I consider myself an honorary man - are the harder sex. We strike out, push through, thrust and take. The fact that it is only an analogue of all this sexual terminology I am capable of does not discourage me. I can feel it in my bones, in my uncastrated genes. Eric must respond to that.
Eleven o’clock came, then midnight and the time signal, so I turned the radio off and went to sleep.
8
The Wasp Factory
In the early morning, while my father slept and the cold light filtered through the sharp overcast of young cloud, I rose silently, washed and shaved carefully, returned to my room, dressed slowly, then took the jar with the sleepy-looking wasp in it up to the loft, where the Factory waited.
I left the jar on the small altar under the window and made the last few preparations the Factory required. Once that was done I took some of the green cleaning jelly from the pot by the altar and rubbed it well into my hands. I looked at the Time, Tide and Distance Tables, the little red book that I kept on the other side of the altar, noting the time of high tide. I set the two small wasp candles into the positions the tips of the hands of a clock would have occupied on the face of the Factory if showing the time of local high tide, then I slid the top off the jar a little and extracted the leaves and the small piece of orange peel, leaving the wasp in there alone.
I set the jar on the altar, which was decorated with various powerful things; the skull of the snake which killed Blyth (tracked down and sliced in half by his father, using a garden spade - I retrieved it from the grass and hid that front part of the snake in the sand before Diggs could take it away for evidence), a fragment of the bomb which had destroyed Paul (the smallest bit I could find; there were lots), a piece of tent fabric from the kite which had elevated Esmerelda (not a piece of the actual kite of course, but an off-cut) and a little dish containing some of the yellow, worn teeth of Old Saul (easily pulled).
I held my crotch, closed my eyes and repeated my secret catechisms. I could recite them automatically, but I tried to think of what they meant as I repeated them. They contained my confessions, my dreams and hopes, my fears and hates, and they still make me shiver whenever I say them, automatic or not. One tape recorder in the vicinity and the horrible truth about my three murders would be known. For that reason alone they are very dangerous. The catechisms also tell the truth about who I am, what I want and what I feel, and it can be unsettling to hear yourself described as you have thought of yourself in your most honest and abject moods, just as it is humbling to hear what you have thought about in your most hopeful and unrealistic moments.
Once I had gone through this I took the wasp without further ado to the underside of the Factory, and let it in.
The Wasp Factory covers an area of several square metres in an irregular and slightly ramshackle tangle of metal, wood, glass and plastic. It is all based around the face of the old clock which used to hang over the door of the Royal Bank of Scotland in Porteneil.
The clock face is the most important thing I have ever recovered from the town dump. I found it there during the Year of the Skull and rolled it home down the path to the island and rumbled it over the footbridge. I stored it in the shed until my father was away for the day, then I strained and sweated all day to get it up into the loft. It is made of metal and is nearly a metre in diameter; it is heavy and almost unblemished; the numerals are in roman script and it was made along with the rest of the clock in Edinburgh in 1864, one hundred years exactly before my birth. Certainly not a coincidence.
Of course, as the clock looked both ways, there must have been another face, the other side of the clock; but, although I scoured the dump for weeks after I found the face I do have, I never did discover the other one, so that it, too, is part of the mystery of the Factory - a little Grail legend of its own. Old Cameron in the ironmonger’s shop in the town told me that he heard a scrap-metal dealer from Inverness took the workings of the clock, so perhaps the other face was melted down years ago, or now adorns the wall of some smart house on the Black Isle built from the profits of dead cars and the varying price of lead. I’d rather the former.
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