The Wasp Factory Page 0,40

parents have properly got to them, are sexlessly open and hence perfectly likeable. I did like Esmerelda (even if I thought her name was a bit soppy) and played with her a lot when she came to stay. She was the daughter of Harmsworth and Morag Stove, my half-uncle and half-aunt by my father’s first marriage; they were the couple who had looked after Eric when he was younger. They would come over from Belfast to stay with us in the summers sometimes; my father used to get on well with Harmsworth, and because I looked after Esmerelda they could have a nice relaxing holiday here. I think Mrs Stove was a little worried about trusting her daughter to me that particular summer, as it was the one after I’d struck young Paul down in his prime, but at nine years of age I was an obviously happy and well-adjusted child, responsible and well-spoken and, when it was mentioned, demonstrably sad about my younger brother’s demise. I am convinced that only my genuinely clear conscience let me convince the adults around me that I was totally innocent. I even carried out a double-bluff of appearing slightly guilty for the wrong reasons, so that adults told me I shouldn’t blame myself because I hadn’t been able to warn Paul in time. I was brilliant.

I had decided I would try to murder Esmerelda before she and her parents even arrived for their holiday. Eric was away on a school cruise, so there would only be me and her. It would be risky, so soon after Paul’s death, but I had to do something to even up the balance. I could feel it in my guts, in my bones; I had to. It was like an itch, something I had no way of resisting, like when I walk along a pavement in Porteneil and I accidentally scuff one heel on a paving stone. I have to scuff the other foot as well, with as near as possible the same weight, to feel good again. The same if I brush one arm against a wall or a lamp-post; I must brush the other one as well, soon, or at the very least scratch it with the other hand. In a whole range of ways like that I try to keep balanced, though I have no idea why. It is simply something that must be done; and, in the same way, I had to get rid of some woman, tip the scales back in the other direction.

I had taken to making kites that year. It was 1973, I suppose. I used many things to make them: cane and dowelling and metal coathangers and aluminium tent-poles, and paper and plastic sheeting and dustbin bags and sheets and string and nylon rope and twine and all sorts of little straps and buckles and bits of cord and elastic bands and strips of wire and pins and screws and nails and pieces cannibalised from model yachts and various toys. I made a hand winch with a double handle and a ratchet and room for half a kilometre of twine on the drum; I made different types of tails for the kites that needed them, and dozens of kites large and small, some stunters. I kept them in the shed and eventually had to put the bikes outside under a tarpaulin when the collection got too large.

That summer I took Esmerelda kiting quite a lot. I let her play with a small, single-string kite while I used a stunter. I would send it swooping over and under hers, or dive it down to the sands while I stood on a dune cliff, pulling the kite down to nick tall towers of sand I’d built, then pulling up again, the kite trailing a spray of sand through the air from the collapsing tower. Although it took a while and I crashed a couple of times, once I even knocked a dam down with a kite. I swooped it so that on each pass it caught the top of the dam wall with one corner, gradually producing a nick in the sand barrier which the water was able to flow through, quickly going on to overwhelm the whole dam and the sand-house village beneath.

Then one day I was standing there on a dune top, straining against the pull of the wind in the kite, gripping and hauling and sensing and adjusting and twisting, when one of those twists became like a