The Wasp Factory Read Online Free PDF Page A

flowers growing by the path-side.

    I ran upstairs, pausing by the back stairwell window to watch my father disappear round the dune before the bridge, ran up the stairs, got to the door to the study and twisted the handle briskly. The door was firm; it didn’t shift a millimetre. One day he’d forget, I was sure, but not today.

     
After I had finished my meal and done the washing-up, I went to my room, checked the home-brew and got my air-rifle. I made sure I had sufficient pellets in my jacket pockets, then headed out of the house for the Rabbit Grounds on the mainland, between the large branch of the creek and the town dump.

    I don’t like using the gun; it’s almost too accurate for me. The catapult is an Inside thing, requiring that you and it are one. If you’re feeling bad, you’ll miss; or, if you know you’re doing something wrong, you’ll miss, too. Unless you fire a gun from the hip it’s all Outside; you point and aim and that’s it, unless the sights are out or there’s a really high wind. Once you’ve cocked the gun the power’s all there, just waiting to be released by the squeeze of a finger. A catapult lives with you until the last moment; it stays tensed in your hands, breathing with you, moving with you, ready to leap, ready to sing and jerk, and leaving you in that dramatic pose, arms and hands outstretched while you wait for the dark curve of the ball in its flight to find its target, that delicious thud.

    But going after rabbits, especially the cunning little bastards out on the Grounds, you need all the help you can get. One shot and they’re scurrying for their holes. The gun is loud enough to frighten them just as much; but, calm, surgical thing that it is, it improves your chance of a first-time kill.

    As far as I know, none of my ill-starred relations has ever died by the gun. They’ve gone a lot of funny ways, the Cauldhames and their associates by marriage, but to the best of my knowledge a gun has never crossed one off.

    I came to the end of the bridge, where technically my territory stops, and stood still for a while, thinking, feeling, listening and looking and smelling. Everything seemed to be all right.

    Quite apart from the ones I killed (and they were all about the same age I was when I murdered them) I can think of at least three of our family who went to whatever they imagined their Maker was like in unusual ways. Leviticus Cauldhame, my father’s eldest brother, emigrated to South Africa and bought a farm there in 1954. Leviticus, a person of such weapon-grade stupidity his mental faculties would probably have improved with the onset of senile dementia, left Scotland because the Conservatives had failed to reverse the Socialist reforms of the previous Labour government: railways still nationalised; working class breeding like flies now the welfare state existed to prevent the natural culling by disease; state-owned mines . . . intolerable. I have read some of the letters he wrote to my father. Leviticus was happy with the country, though there were rather a lot of blacks around. He referred to the policy of separate development as ‘apart-hate’ in his first few letters, until somebody must have clued him in on the correct spelling. Not my father, I’m sure.

    Leviticus was passing police headquarters in Johannesburg one day, walking along the pavement after a shopping expedition, when a crazed, homicidal black threw himself, unconscious, from the top storey and apparently ripped all his fingernails out on the way down. He hit and fatally injured my innocent and unfortunate uncle whose muttered last words in hospital, before his coma became a full stop, were: ‘My God, the buggers’ve learned to fly . . .’

    A faint wisp of smoke rose ahead of me from the town dump. I wasn’t going that far today, but I could hear the bulldozer they used sometimes to spread the garbage around as it revved and pushed.

    I hadn’t been to the dump for a while, and it was