The Wasp Factory (2 page)
Authors: Iain Banks
Ever since I can remember there have been little stickers of white paper all over the house with neat black-biro writing on them. Attached to the legs of chairs, the edges of rugs, the bottoms of jugs, the aerials of radios, the doors of drawers, the headboards of beds, the screens of televisions, the handles of pots and pans, they give the appropriate measurement for the part of the object they’re stuck to. There are even ones in pencil stuck to the leaves of plants. When I was a child I once went round the house tearing all the stickers off; I was belted and sent to my room for two days. Later my father decided it would be useful and character-forming for me to know all the measurements as well as he did, so I had to sit for hours with the Measurement Book (a huge loose-leaf thing with all the information on the little stickers carefully recorded according to room and category of object), or go round the house with a jotter, making my own notes. This was all in addition to the usual lessons my father gave me on mathematics and history and so on. It didn’t leave much time for going out to play, and I resented it a great deal. I was having a War at the time - the Mussels against the Dead Flies I think it was - and while I was in the library poring over the book and trying to keep my eyes open, soaking up all those damn silly Imperial measurements, the wind would be blowing my fly armies over half the island and the sea would first sink the mussel shells in their high pools and then cover them with sand. Luckily my father grew tired of this grand scheme and contented himself with firing the odd surprise question at me concerning the capacity of the umbrella-stand in pints or the total area in fractions of an acre of all the curtains in the house actually hung up at the time.
‘I’m not answering these questions any more,’ I said to him as I took my plate to the sink. ‘We should have gone metric years ago.’
My father snorted into his glass as he drained it. ‘Hectares and that sort of rubbish. Certainly not. It’s all based on the measurement of the globe, you know. I don’t have to tell you what nonsense
that
is.’
that
is.’
I sighed as I took an apple from the bowl on the window sill. My father once had me believing that the earth was a Möbius strip, not a sphere. He still maintains that he believes this, and makes a great show of sending off a manuscript to publishers down in London, trying to get them to publish a book expounding this view, but I know he’s just mischief-making again, and gets most of his pleasure from his acts of stunned disbelief and then righteous indignation when the manuscript is eventually returned. This occurs about every three months, and I doubt that life would be half as much fun for him without this sort of ritual. Anyway, that is one of his reasons for not switching over to a metric standard for his stupid measurements, though in fact he’s just lazy.
‘What were you up to today?’ He stared across the table at me, rolling the empty tumbler around on the wooden table-top.
I shrugged. ‘Out. Walking and things.’
‘Building dams again?’ he sneered.
‘No,’ I said, shaking my head confidently and biting the apple. ‘Not today.’
‘I hope you weren’t out killing any of God’s creatures.’
I shrugged at him again. Of course I was out killing things. How the hell am I supposed to get heads and bodies for the Poles and the Bunker if I don’t kill things? There just aren’t enough natural deaths. You can’t explain that sort of thing to people, though.
‘Sometimes I think you’re the one who should be in hospital, not Eric.’ He was looking at me from under his dark brows, his voice low. Once, that sort of talk would have scared me, but not now. I’m nearly seventeen, and not a child. Here in Scotland I’m old enough to get married without my parents’ permission, and have been for a year. There wouldn’t be much point to me getting married perhaps - I’ll admit that - but the principle is there.
Besides, I’m not Eric; I’m me and I’m here and that’s all there is to it. I don’t bother people and they had best not bother me if they know what’s good for them.
I
don’t go giving people presents of burning dogs, or frighten the local toddlers with handfuls of maggots and mouthfuls of worms. The people in the town may say ‘Oh, he’s not all there, you know,’ but that’s just their little joke (and sometimes, just to rub it in, they don’t point to their heads as they say it); I don’t mind. I’ve learned to live with my disability, and learned to live without other people, so it’s no skin off my nose.
I
don’t go giving people presents of burning dogs, or frighten the local toddlers with handfuls of maggots and mouthfuls of worms. The people in the town may say ‘Oh, he’s not all there, you know,’ but that’s just their little joke (and sometimes, just to rub it in, they don’t point to their heads as they say it); I don’t mind. I’ve learned to live with my disability, and learned to live without other people, so it’s no skin off my nose.
My father seemed to be trying to hurt me, though; he wouldn’t say something like that normally. The news about Eric must have shaken him. I think he knew, just as I did, that Eric would get back, and he was worried about what would happen. I didn’t blame him, and I didn’t doubt that he was also worried about me. I represent a crime, and if Eric was to come back stirring things up The Truth About Frank might come out.
I was never registered. I have no birth certificate, no National Insurance number, nothing to say I’m alive or have ever existed. I know this is a crime, and so does my father, and I think that sometimes he regrets the decision he made seventeen years ago, in his hippy-anarchist days, or whatever they were.
Not that I’ve suffered, really. I enjoyed it, and you could hardly say that I wasn’t educated. I probably know more about the conventional school subjects than most people of my age. I could complain about the truth of
some
of the bits of information my father passed on to me, mind you. Ever since I was able to go into Porteneil alone and check things up in the library my father has had to be pretty straight with me, but when I was younger he used to fool me time after time, answering my honest if naïve questions with utter rubbish. For
years
I believed Pathos was one of the Three Musketeers, Fellatio was a character in
Hamlet
, Vitreous a town in China, and that the Irish peasants had to tread the peat to make Guinness.
some
of the bits of information my father passed on to me, mind you. Ever since I was able to go into Porteneil alone and check things up in the library my father has had to be pretty straight with me, but when I was younger he used to fool me time after time, answering my honest if naïve questions with utter rubbish. For
years
I believed Pathos was one of the Three Musketeers, Fellatio was a character in
Hamlet
, Vitreous a town in China, and that the Irish peasants had to tread the peat to make Guinness.
Well, these days I can reach the highest shelves of the house library, and walk into Porteneil to visit the one there, so I can check up on anything my father says, and he has to tell me the truth. It annoys him a lot, I think, but that’s the way things go. Call it progress.
But I am educated. While he wasn’t able to resist indulging his rather immature sense of humour by selling me a few dummies, my father couldn’t abide a son of his not being a credit to him in some way; my body was a forlorn hope for any improvement, so only my mind was left. Hence all my lessons. My father is an educated man, and he passed a lot of what he already knew on to me, as well as doing a fair bit of study himself into areas he didn’t know all that much about just so that he could teach me. My father is a doctor of chemistry, or perhaps biochemistry - I’m not sure. He seems to have known enough about ordinary medicine - and perhaps still have had the contacts within the profession - to make sure that I got my inoculations and injections at the correct times in my life, despite my official non-existence as far as the National Health Service is concerned.
I think my father used to work in a university for a few years after he graduated, and he might have invented something; he occasionally hints that he gets some sort of royalty from a patent or something, but I suspect the old hippy survives on whatever family wealth the Cauldhames still have secreted away.
The family has been in this part of Scotland for about two hundred years or more, from what I can gather, and we used to own a lot of the land around here. Now all we have is the island, and that’s pretty small, and hardly even an island at low tide. The only other remnant of our glorious past is the name of Porteneil’s hot-spot, a grubby old pub called the Cauldhame Arms where I go sometimes now, though still under age of course, and watch some of the local youths trying to be punk bands. That was where I met and still meet the only person I’d call a friend; Jamie the dwarf, whom I let sit on my shoulders so he can see the bands.
‘Well, I don’t think he’ll get this far. They’ll pick him up,’ my father said again, after a long and brooding silence. He got up to rinse his glass. I hummed to myself, something I always used to do when I wanted to smile or laugh, but thought the better of it. My father looked at me. ‘I’m going to the study. Don’t forget to lock up, all right?’
‘Okey-doke,’ I said, nodding.
‘Goodnight.’
My father left the kitchen. I sat and looked at my trowel, Stoutstroke. Little grains of dry sand stuck to it, so I brushed them off. The study. One of my few remaining unsatisfied ambitions is to get into the old man’s study. The cellar I have at least seen, and been in occasionally; I know all the rooms on the ground floor and the second; the loft is my domain entirely and home of the Wasp Factory, no less; but that one room on the first floor I don’t know, I have never even seen inside.
I do know he has some chemicals in there, and I suppose he does experiments or something, but what the room looks like, what he actually does in there, I have no idea. All I’ve ever got out of it are a few funny smells and the tap-tap of my father’s stick.
I stroked the long handle of the trowel, wondering if my father had a name for that stick of his. I doubted it. He doesn’t attach the same importance to them as I do. I know they are important.
I think there is a secret in the study. He had hinted as much more than once, just vaguely, just enough to entice me so that I want to ask what, so that he knows that I want to ask. I don’t ask, of course, because I wouldn’t get any worthwhile answer. If he did tell me anything it would be a pack of lies, because obviously the secret wouldn’t be a secret any more if he told me the truth, and he can feel, as I do, that with my increasing maturity he needs all the holds over me he can get; I’m not a child any more. Only these little bits of bogus power enable him to think he is in control of what he sees as the correct father-son relationship. It’s pathetic really, but with his little games and his secrets and his hurtful remarks he tries to keep his security intact.
I leaned back in the wooden chair and stretched. I like the smell of the kitchen. The food, and the mud on our wellingtons, and sometimes the faint tang of cordite coming up from the cellar all give me a good, tight, thrilling feel when I think about them. It smells different when it’s been raining and our clothes are wet. In the winter the big black stove pumps out heat fragrant with driftwood or peat, and everything steams and the rain hammers against the glass. Then it has a comfortable, closed-in feeling, making you feel cosy, like a great big cat with its tail curled round itself. Sometimes I wish we had a cat. All I’ve ever had was a head, and that the seagulls took.
I went to the toilet, down the corridor off the kitchen, for a crap. I didn’t need a pee because I’d been pissing on the Poles during the day, infecting them with my scent and power.
I sat there and thought about Eric, to whom such an unpleasant thing happened. Poor twisted bugger. I wondered, as I have often wondered, how I would have coped. But it didn’t happen to me. I have stayed here and Eric was the one who went away and it all happened somewhere else, and that’s all there is to it. I’m me and here’s here.
I listened, wondering if I could hear my father. Perhaps he had gone straight to bed. He often sleeps in the study rather than in the big bedroom on the second floor, where mine is. Maybe that room holds too many unpleasant (or pleasant) memories for him. Either way, I couldn’t hear any snoring.
I hate having to sit down in the toilet all the time. With my unfortunate disability I usually have to, as though I was a bloody woman, but I hate it. Sometimes in the Cauldhame Arms I stand up at the urinal, but most of it ends up running down my hands or legs.
I strained. Plop splash. Some water came up and hit my bum, and that was when the phone went.
‘Shit,’ I said, and then laughed at myself. I cleaned my arse quickly and pulled my trousers up, pulling the chain, too, and then waddling out into the corridor, zipping up. I ran up the broad stairs to the first-floor landing, where our only phone is. I’m forever on at my father to get more phones put in, but he says we don’t get called often enough to warrant extensions. I got to the phone before whoever was calling rang off. My father hadn’t appeared.
‘Hello,’ I said. It was a call-box.
‘Skraw-
aak
!’ screamed a voice at the other end. I held the receiver away from my ear and looked at it, scowling. Tinny yells continued to come from the earpiece. When they stopped I put my ear back to it.
aak
!’ screamed a voice at the other end. I held the receiver away from my ear and looked at it, scowling. Tinny yells continued to come from the earpiece. When they stopped I put my ear back to it.
‘Porteneil 531,’ I said coldly.
‘Frank! Frank! It’s me. Me! Hello there! Hello!’
‘Is there an echo on this line or are you saying everything twice?’ I said. I could recognise Eric’s voice.
‘Both! Ha ha ha ha ha!’
‘Hello, Eric. Where are you?’
‘Here! Where are you?’
‘Here.’
‘If we’re both here, why are we bothering with the phone?’
‘Tell me where you are before your money runs out.’
‘But if you’re
here
you must know. Don’t you know where you are?’ He started to giggle.
here
you must know. Don’t you know where you are?’ He started to giggle.
I said calmly: ‘Stop being silly, Eric.’
‘I’m not being silly. I’m not telling you where I am; you’ll only tell Angus and he’ll tell the police and they’ll take me back to the fucking hospital.’
‘Don’t use four-letter words. You know I don’t like them. Of course I won’t tell Dad.’
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