The Wasp Factory Page 0,75

the bread over my soup while my father looked at me darkly.

‘It’s summer,’ Mrs Clamp explained.

‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘I’d forgotten.’

‘Frank,’ my father said rather unclearly, his mouth full of vegetables and wood shavings, ‘I don’t suppose you recall the capacity of these spoons, do you?’

‘A quarter-gill?’ I suggested innocently. He glowered and sipped some more soup. I kept on flapping, stopping only to disturb the brown skin that was forming over the surface of my broth. Mrs Clamp sipped again.

‘And how are things in the town, Mrs Clamp?’ I asked.

‘Very well, as far as I know,’ Mrs Clamp informed her soup. I nodded. My father was blowing at his spoon. ‘The Mackies’ dog has gone missing, or so I was told,’ Mrs Clamp added. I raised my brows slightly and smiled in a concerned way. My father stopped and stared, and the noise of his soup dribbling off his spoon - the end of which had started to drop slightly just after Mrs Clamp’s sentence - echoed round the room like piss going into a toilet bowl.

‘Really?’ I said, keeping on flapping. ‘What a shame. Just as well my brother’s not around or he’d be getting the blame of it.’ I smiled, glanced at my father, then back at Mrs Clamp, who was watching me with narrowed eyes through the rising steam from her soup. Dough fatigue set into the piece of bread I was using to fan the soup, and it fell apart. I caught the falling end smartly with my free hand and returned it to my side plate, raising my spoon and taking a tentative sip from the surface of the broth.

‘H’m,’ Mrs Clamp said.

‘Mrs Clamp couldn’t get your beefburgers today,’ my father said, clearing his throat on the first syllable of ‘couldn’t’, ‘so she got you mince instead.’

‘Unions!’ Mrs Clamp muttered darkly, spitting into her soup. I put one elbow on the table, rested my cheek on a fist and looked puzzledly at her. To no avail. She didn’t look up, and eventually I shrugged to myself and carried on sipping. My father had put his spoon down, wiping his brow with one sleeve and using a fingernail in an attempt to remove a piece of what I assumed to be wood shaving from between two upper teeth.

‘There was a wee fire down by the new house yesterday, Mrs Clamp; I put it out, you know. I was down there and I saw it and I put it out,’ I said.

‘Don’t boast, boy,’ my father said. Mrs Clamp held her tongue.

‘Well, I did,’ I smiled.

‘I’m sure Mrs Clamp isn’t interested.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ Mrs Clamp said, nodding her head in slightly confusing emphasis.

‘There, you see?’ I said, humming as I looked at my father and nodded towards Mrs Clamp, who slurped noisily.

I kept quiet through the main course, which was a stew, and only noted during the rhubarb and custard that it had a novel addition to the medley of flavours, when in fact the milk it had been made from had obviously been most profoundly off. I smiled, my father growled and Mrs Clamp slurped her custard and spat her stumps of rhubarb out on to her napkin. To be fair, it was a little undercooked.

Dinner cheered me up immensely and, although the afternoon was hotter than the morning, I felt more energetic. There were no slits of distant brightness out over the sea, and there was a thickness about the light coming through the clouds that went with the charge in the air and the slack wind. I went out, going once round the island at a brisk jog; I watched Mrs Clamp depart for the town, then I walked out in the same direction to sit on top of a tall dune a few hundred metres into the mainland and sweep the sweltering land with my binoculars.

Sweat rolled off me as soon as I stopped moving, and I could feel a slight ache start in my head. I had taken a little water with me, so I drank it, then refilled the can from the nearest stream. My father was doubtless right that sheep shat in the streams, but I was sure I had long since grown immune to anything I could catch from the local burns, having drunk from them for years while I had been damming them. I drank more water than I really felt like and returned to the top of the dune. In the distance the sheep