Iain Banks - The Wasp Factory

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.

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?