Authors: Iain Banks
The Wasp Factory (20 page)
Before I could say anything, the line went dead, and I was left fuming and belligerent, holding the telephone and glaring at it like it was to blame. I considered hitting something with it, but decided that would be too much like a bad joke, so I slammed it down on the cradle instead. It chimed once in response and I gave it another glare, then turned my back on it and stamped downstairs, threw myself into an easy chair and punched the buttons on the remote control for the television repeatedly through channel after channel time after time for about ten minutes. At the end of that period I realised that I had got just as much out of watching three programmes simultaneously (the news, yet another awful American crime series and a programme on archaeology) as I ever got from watching the damn things separately. I hurled the control unit away in disgust and stormed outside in the fading light to go and throw a few stones at the waves.
9
What Happened to Eric
I slept fairly late, for me. My father had arrived back at the house just as I returned from the beach, and I had gone to bed at once, so I had a good long sleep. In the morning I called Jamie, got his mother, and found out he had gone to the doctor’s but would be straight back. I packed my day-pack and told my father I’d be back in the early evening, then set off for the town.
Jamie was in when I got to his house. We drank a couple of cans of the old Red Death and chatted away; then, after sharing in elevenses and some of his mother’s home-made cakes, I left and made my way out of town for the hills behind.
High on a heathered summit, a gentle slope of rock and earth above the Forestry Commission’s tree line, I sat on a big rock and ate my lunch. I looked out over the heat-hazed distance, over Porteneil, the pastureland dotted white with sheep, the dunes, the dump, the island (not that you could see it as such; it looked like part of the land), the sands and the sea. The sky held a few small clouds; it beat blue over the view, fading to paleness towards the horizon and the calm expanse of firth and sea. Larks sung in the air above me and I watched a buzzard hover as it looked for movement in the grass and heather, broom and whin beneath. Insects buzzed and danced, and I waved a fan of fern in front of my face to keep them away as I ate my sandwiches and drank my orange juice.
To my left, the mounting peaks of the hills marched off northward, growing gradually higher as they went and fading into grey and blue, shimmering with distance. I watched the town beneath me through the binoculars, saw trucks and cars make their way along the main road, and followed a train as it headed south, stopping in the town then going on again, snaking across the level ground before the sea.
I like to get away from the island now and again. Not too far; I still like to be able to see it if possible, but it is good to remove oneself sometimes and get a sense of perspective from a little farther away. Of course, I know how small a piece of land it is; I’m not a fool. I know the size of the planet and just how minuscule is that part of it I know. I’ve watched too much television and seen too many nature and travel programmes not to appreciate how limited my own knowledge is in terms of first-hand experience of other places; but I don’t want to go farther afield, I don’t need to travel or see foreign climes or know different people. I know who I am and I know my limitations. I restrict my horizons for my own good reasons; fear - oh, yes, I admit it - and a need for reassurance and safety in a world which just so happened to treat me very cruelly at an age before I had any real chance of affecting it.
Also, I have the lesson of Eric.
Eric went away. Eric, with all his brightness, all his intelligence and sensitivity and promise, left the island and tried to make his way; chose a path and followed it. That path led to the destruction of most of what he was, changed him into a quite different person in whom the similarities to the sane young man he had been before only appeared obscene.
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 were 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.
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 worldly 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 child 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.
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