The Wasp Factory Page 0,52

again and tapped the screen above a formation of red and green flapping things, just as one of them, peeling off to the side of the main pack, dived down firing at Jamie’s craft, missing it with its shots but clipping him with one green wing as it disappeared off the bottom of the screen, so that Jamie’s craft detonated in a blaze of flashing red and yellow.

‘Shit,’ he said, sitting back. He shook his head.

I sat forward and waited for my craft to appear.

Just a little drunk on my three pints, I cycled back to the island whistling. I always enjoyed my lunch-time chats with Jamie. We sometimes talk when we meet on Saturday nights, but we can’t hear when the bands are on, and afterwards I’m either too drunk to talk or, if I can speak, I’m too drunk to recall much of what I’ve said. Which, come to think of it, is probably just as well, judging by the way people who are normally quite sensible dissolve into gibbering, rude, opinionated and bombastic idiots once the alcohol molecules in their blood-stream outnumber their neurons, or whatever. Luckily, one only notices this if one stays sober oneself, so the solution is as pleasant (at the time, at least) as it is obvious.

My father was asleep in a deckchair in the front garden when I got back. I left the bike in the shed and watched him from the shed door for a while, poised so that if he happened to wake up it would look as though I was just in the act of shutting the door. His head was tilted a little to me and his mouth was slightly open. He had dark glasses on, but I could just see through them to his closed eyes.

I had to go for a piss, so I didn’t watch him for very long. Not that I had any particular reason for watching him; I just liked doing it. It made me feel good to know that I could see him and he couldn’t see me, and that I was aware and fully conscious and he wasn’t.

I went into the house.

I had spent Monday, after a cursory check of the Poles, making one or two repairs and improvements to the Factory, working through the afternoon until my eyes got sore and my father had to call up to me to come down for my dinner.

In the evening it rained, so I had stayed in and watched television. I went to bed early. Eric didn’t call.

After I’d got rid of about half the beer I’d drunk in the Arms, I went to have another look at the Factory. I clambered up into the loft, all sunlight and warmth and smelling of old and interesting books, and I decided to clear the place up a bit.

I sorted out old toys into boxes, got a few rolls of carpet and wallpaper back into their places from where they’d fallen, pinned a couple of maps back on to the sloping wooden under-roof, cleared away some of the tools and bits and pieces that I’d used to repair the Factory, and loaded the various sections of the Factory that needed to be loaded.

I found some interesting things while I was doing all this: a home-made astrolabe I’d carved, a box containing the folded-flat parts for a scale model of the defences around Byzantium, the remains of my collection of telegraph-pole insulators, and some old jotters from when my father was teaching me French. Leafing through them, I couldn’t see any obvious lies; he hadn’t taught me to say anything obscene instead of ‘Excuse me’ or ‘Can you direct me to the railway station, please?’, though I’d have thought the temptation would have been all but irresistible.

I completed tidying the loft, sneezing a few times as the golden space filled with motes of shining dust. I looked over the refurbished Factory again, just because I love looking at it and tinkering with it and touching it and tipping some of its little levers and doors and devices. Finally I dragged myself away, telling myself that I’d get a chance to use it properly soon enough. I would capture a fresh wasp that afternoon to use the following morning. I wanted another interrogation of the Factory before Eric arrived; I wanted more of an idea what was going to happen.

It was a little risky, of course, asking it the same question twice, but I thought the exceptional circumstances