The Wasp Factory Page 0,30

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?

As we walked along the sand in the quietness, stopping to look at all the interesting things which had been washed up, the beach gradually disappeared. Where the sand had stretched in an unbroken line of gold towards the horizon, now we saw more and more rock exposed the farther up the strand we looked, until in the distance the dunes faced a shore of pure stone. The storm had swept all the sand away during the night, starting just past the river and continuing farther than the places I had names for or had ever seen. It was an impressive sight, and one that frightened me a little at first, just because it was such a huge change and I was worried that it might happen to the island sometime. I remembered, however, that my father had told me of this sort of thing happening in the past, and the sands had always returned over the following few weeks and months.

Paul had great fun running and jumping from rock to rock and throwing stones into pools between the rocks. Rock pools were something of a novelty for him. We went farther up the wasted beach, still finding interesting pieces of flotsam and finally coming to the rusted remnant I thought was a water-tank or a half-buried canoe, from a distance. It stuck out of a patch of sand, jutting at a steep angle, about a metre and a half of it exposed. Paul was trying to catch fish in a pool as I looked at the thing.

I touched the side of the tapered cylinder wonderingly, feeling something very calm and strong about it, though I didn’t know why. Then I stepped back and looked again at it. Its shape became clear, and I could then guess roughly how much of it must still be buried under the sand. It was a bomb, stood on its tail.

I went back to it carefully, stroking it gently and making shushing noises with my mouth. It was rust-red and black with its rotund decay, smelling dank and casting a shell-shadow. I followed the line of the shadow along the sand, over the rocks, and found myself looking at little Paul, splashing happily about in a pool, slapping the water with a great flat bit of wood almost as big as he was. I smiled, called him over.

‘See this?’ I said. It was a rhetorical question. Paul nodded, big eyes staring. ‘This,’ I told him, ‘is a bell. Like the ones in the church in the town. The noise we hear on a Sunday, you know?’

‘Yes. Just after brekast, Frank?’

‘What?’

‘The noise jus after Sumday brekast, Frank.’ Paul hit me lightly on the knee with a podgy hand.

I nodded. ‘Yes, that’s right. Bells make that noise. They’re great big hollow bits of metal filled up with noises and they let the noises out on Sunday mornings after breakfast. That’s what this is.’

‘A brekast?’ Paul looked up at me with mightily furrowed little brows. I shook my head patiently.

‘No. A bell.’

‘“B is for Bell,”’ Paul said quietly, nodding to himself and staring at the rusting device. Probably remembering an old nursery-book. He was a bright child; my father intended to send him