Free The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks Page A

taking flight, but nothing more happened. I just avoided the boys in the town for a while, only going in with my father or at times when I knew they would be in school.

    The cache system survives, and I’ve even added a couple of petrol bombs to one or two of the secret stores, where a likely avenue of attack comes in over terrain the bottles would smash on, but the trip-wires I’ve dismantled and left in the shed. My Defence Manual, which contains things like maps of the island with the caches marked, likely attack routes, a summary of tactics, a list of weapons I have or might make, includes within this last category quite a few unpleasant things like trip-wires and snares set a body-length away from a concealed broken bottle sticking up in the grass, electrically detonated mines made from pipe-bombs and small nails, all buried in the sand, and a few interesting, if unlikely, secret weapons, like frisbees with razors embedded in the edge.

    Not that I want to kill anybody now, but it is all for defence rather than offence, and it does make me feel a lot more secure. Soon I’ll have enough money for a really powerful crossbow, and that I’m certainly looking forward to; it’ll help make up for the fact that I’ve never been able to persuade my father to buy a rifle or a shotgun that I could use sometimes. I have my catapults and slings and air-rifle, and they could all be lethal in the right circumstances, but they just don’t have the long-range hitting power I really hanker after. The pipe-bombs are the same. They have to be placed, or at best thrown at the target, and even slinging some of the purpose-built smaller ones is inaccurate and slow. I can imagine some unpleasant things happening with the sling, too; the sling-bombs have to be on a pretty short fuse if they’re to detonate soon enough after they land not to be throw-backable, and I’ve had a couple of close calls already when they’ve gone off just after they left the sling.

    I’ve experimented with guns, of course, both mere projectile weapons and mortars which would lob the sling-bombs, but they have all been clumsy, dangerous, slow and rather prone to blowing up.

    A shotgun would be ideal, though I’d settle for a .22 rifle, but a crossbow will just have to do. Perhaps sometime I’ll be able to devise a way round my official non-existence and apply for a gun myself, though even then, all things considered, I might not be granted a licence. Oh, to be in America, I occasionally think.

    I was logging the cache petrol bombs which hadn’t been inspected for evaporation recently when the phone went. I looked at my watch, surprised at the lateness of the hour: nearly eleven. I ran downstairs to the phone, hearing my father coming to the door of his room as I passed it.

    ‘Porteneil 531.’ Pips sounded.

    ‘Fuck it, Frank, I’ve got luna maria callouses on me feet. How the hell are ye, me young bucko?’

    I looked at the handset, then up at my father, who was leaning over the rail from the floor above, tucking his pyjama top into his trousers. I spoke into the phone: ‘Hello there, Jamie, what are you doing calling me this late?’

    ‘Wha—? Oh, the old man’s there, is he?’ Eric said. ‘Tell him he’s a bag of effervescent pus, from me.’

    ‘Jamie sends his regards,’ I called up to my father, who turned without a word and went back to his room. I heard the door close. I turned back to the phone. ‘Eric, where are you this time?’

    ‘Ah, shit, I’m not telling you. Guess.’

    ‘Well, I don’t know . . . Glasgow?’

    ‘Ah ha ha ha ha ha!’ Eric cackled. I clenched plastic.

    ‘How are you? Are you all right?’

    ‘I’m fine. How are you?’

    ‘Great. Look, how are you eating? Have you got any money? Are you hitching lifts or what? They’re looking for you, you know, but there hasn’t been anything on the news yet. You haven’t—’ I stopped before I said something he might take exception to.

    ‘I’m doing