The Insect Farm

by Stuart Prebble

  The point was that, on this summer’s evening when I was lured by the unique charms of Harriet, Roger was due to return home from a trip which had been organized by a group at the local church. I don’t remember where they had been or for how long they had been away. All I recall is that Roger was due to arrive home in Croydon by midnight, and that I had promised to be back before then to be there to make sure he was OK. My parents had said they would like to take the opportunity to go to bed early, and I was responsible for ensuring that Roger was safe and settled.

  “I have to go,” I said, dragging myself to my feet. “My brother Roger needs me.”

  Nothing in Harriet’s face gave a clue as to whether she regarded this as good news or bad news or even particularly any news at all. What was perfectly clear was that she by no means shared or even sensed my desolation. What appeared to her to be no more than a casual meeting for me was an evening that was to change my short life.

  Chapter Three

  Just how strange is it to become as obsessed as people do? Just how potty can you become? Little wonder that it has been the cause of wars. Even now I recall pondering for many hours the configuration of three honey-coloured freckles on one side of Harriet’s nose, which to me looked as though they had been painted on in watercolours by some marvellous pre-Raphaelite artist. I remember the exquisite thrill arising from the ever-so-faint suggestion of the rise of her nipples as seen through a thin woollen pullover in pink. I still get a visceral charge from calling up the memory.

  I cannot now remember whether Angela finished things with me or whether I finished things with her. There was no row or break-up, it just seemed that one day we were and then one day we were not. Maybe on my side it was to do with my new-found preoccupation with Harriet. Who knows what it was on hers – probably she just got bored.

  It was scarcely a couple of weeks after that first party back at her flat in Carnaby Street when I contrived to call on Harriet, apparently by chance, while browsing around shops. I don’t imagine that she was fooled for a moment, and she seemed to be amused as she held open the door in welcome. The flat smelt of the recent smoke from marijuana, which felt in contrast with the operatic music that was playing in the background. I caught a glimpse of the album cover, but quickly decided against pretending more knowledge than I possessed.

  “The Pearl Fishers,” I said. “Do you like this kind of thing?”

  “I like it sometimes,” she said. “Like now. I love to listen to music when I’m reading, but if it is something with words I recognize, I find I can’t concentrate on the text. Anything sung in a foreign language works well for me.”

  We drank black coffee and smoked a little bit of grass I had brought with me, and we talked about ourselves and our ambitions. She spoke more about her love of music in terms as weird and unworldly to me as those she had used following the concert, and then I asked if she played a musical instrument herself.

  Harriet – of course, it must be obvious from what I have said of her already – played the flute. Perhaps the impact of the sound upon me was so great because I had not heard the music of a solo flute before I heard it played by Harriet. I still recall in microscopic detail watching her as she opened the black wooden box and assembled the instrument from three pieces, carefully adjusting the fit so that the mouthpiece would sit at a precise angle. I remember the dull silver plate and the distorted reflections of stars from a chandelier. She placed the rim of the mouthpiece against the top front of her chin, just below her lips, which formed into a chaste kiss. As she prepared to play it was as though her whole body animated, and she seemed hardly to breathe into it, but rather to become the instrument. The sound was forming all around us, not from her mouth or the flute itself, but from the walls and the furniture in the room – anywhere but from this small being and this thin metallic tube.

  I could not wait for her to finish the closing bars of the piece, but leaned towards her and took the flute. For a second she resisted, but I felt the warmth of the instrument in my hands and suddenly it made me more insistent. Her slight wrist was in my grasp and, without speaking, I led her down the corridor. The bed was covered with a blanket that her uncle had brought back from a trip to India, and the thick lace curtains filtered the sunshine which threw patterns of light across the floor. Harriet wore a white shirt made of fine cotton, with a multicoloured design crocheted into a one-inch-wide stripe on either side of the buttons at the front, allowing tiny glimpses of her flesh beneath. She looked at me steadily, never taking her eyes from mine, and I unfastened the tiny white pearl buttons, one at a time. At one moment she covered my hands with hers, as though unsure of whether to allow me to proceed, but I shook her away. I did not feel able to stop and was glad when she acquiesced. Now her shirt lay open to her waist.

  I have the clearest memory of her softness, of smooth and perfect skin, and I placed the palms of my hands on her hips, level with the top of her jeans, and pulled her towards me. Her face was just a breath away from mine, but now, once again, she pulled back, but was no longer resisting, rather seeming to prolong the moment. I could not, and I pulled her harder towards me and we kissed a kiss which threw me down the well into Wonderland, falling headlong and not ever wanting to reach firm ground.

  Chapter Four

  “Tell me again about Roger.”

  It was a Sunday afternoon and my parents had gone for a drive in the country and were not due back for several hours. Since I was constantly preoccupied by the question of how and where to have sex with Harriet, I imagine the thought must have been somewhere in my mind, and I’d probably used the idea of getting Harriet to meet Roger as an excuse to bring her to the house.

  In some ways, the fact that Roger looked perfectly normal was a disadvantage. It meant that people made no allowances for him. Had he had the familiar look of Down syndrome, then probably no one would have jostled or cursed at him when he was unable to make up his mind, at the last minute, whether or not to board the bus he had been queuing for. Had he walked with the awkward and staccato gait of the cerebral-palsy sufferer, it is unlikely that people would have become irritated as he fumbled at the supermarket checkout. But Roger had none of those characteristics. He had retained the good looks he had as a boy and, dressed as he was by my parents and therefore in their taste in clothes, he came across as a very straightforward and normal bloke in a world where the generality of youth had apparently gone crazy.

  Over the years of living alongside Roger, I think I must have seen every variation of reaction to him, from confusion and awkwardness at one end, to pity and patronizing at the other. I’d seen it all. In a cafeteria where the too loud voice of the six-year-old would ring out, “What’s the matter with that man, Mummy?” only for the child to be shushed and dragged away to another table. In the supermarket, where the vacant or benign expression on the face of the checkout girl would scroll within about five seconds through curiosity to concern to pity. The “I’ve seen it every day” routine of the professionals who talked about the need to behave normally, but then gave their advice at a speed just a little faster than dictation to an arthritic short-hand typist.

  What I had never seen, even from my own parents, was anyone who treated Roger just exactly the same as they treated everyone else. No better, no worse, with no apparent consideration for any perceived limitations on his side, and all without any evident effort to do so. That was to be the unique quality of what would turn out to be the special relationship between Roger and Harriet.

  I opened the front door and went into the hallway. I had never been sure about the best way to describe Roger and his problems to people who were due to meet him for the first time, and so I have very little idea what Harriet might have been expecting. I had done my best to describe the insect farm to her, and Roger’s growing preoccupation with it, but in the end decided it was better for her to see it for herself than to try to make sense of my inarticulate ramblings.

  “Are you OK?” I asked her, maybe worrying that
perhaps she was hiding her nerves.

  “Sure thing,” she said, bright and breezy. “Any reason I shouldn’t be?”

  “None whatever, it’s just that…” I trailed away. Of course there wasn’t any reason why she should be anything other than perfectly relaxed. It’s just that other people in the same circumstances frequently were not.

  There was neither sight nor sound of Roger in the house, and already I knew that he would be in the shed at the back of the garden where these days he spent most of his time. Having been studying hard for much of the autumn term, I hadn’t actually been inside the shed for some months. The last time I looked at the insect farm, it consisted of a crude structure made of wood and glass, enclosing an inch thickness of soil in which a variety of grubs of one kind or another did their thing.

  “I hope you don’t mind worms and creepy things,” I warned Harriet.

  “I put up with you, don’t I?” she squeezed my arm.

  I stood at the back door of the house and hollered, “Roger, are you in the shed?” There was no reply and no sound of movement, so I told Harriet to wait in the kitchen while I walked down the garden path towards the garage. “Roger, are you in there?” I knocked on the door and pulled on the handle at the same moment that Roger was pushing from the inside, as a result of which he came close to tumbling out onto the path. He had no idea that I was bringing anyone to see him, or indeed any idea who Harriet was at all, but as always he was pleased to see me. At five foot ten, Roger was still a couple of inches taller than me, and he put his arm around my shoulder just as he had when we were aged twelve and six. “I’ve brought a friend to meet you, Roger,” I said, and at the same time beckoned Harriet from the kitchen.

  Seeing my signal, and without hesitation, Harriet strode forward, touching and adjusting her hair briefly as she walked, just as she might when meeting any other boy of our age on whom she wanted to make a good impression. By the time she reached us, she had her hand outstretched for a manly handshake, another of the many little ways that made Harriet not quite typical of other young women of the time.

  “Great to meet you, Roger,” she said. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

  I’m not sure whether it was because few people had ever greeted him for the first time with such warmth and apparent ease, or because she was so lovely – but Roger’s face burst into a sunny smile which I had rarely seen since our carefree days as kids at the seaside.

  “Lovely to meet you too.”

  Would you have been able to tell from those few words, if you hadn’t been warned in advance, that Roger had problems? I think that maybe his voice was just a bit more of a monotone than one might expect, but probably just a fraction. I think that perhaps there was just a slight lilt in his tone which indicated delight more suited to a small boy, but probably just a trace. Just possibly his eyes moved the smallest bit more slowly from object to object, as though the process of registering what they saw took a fraction longer than it might for you and for me. A combination of tiny signals, none of them decisive on their own, but taken together in a package producing an overall effect which transmitted something. This person is not quite one of us.

  If Harriet was picking up those signals, there was nothing whatsoever in her manner or response to indicate it. I know that I was always a bit tense when introducing people to Roger for the first time. Who would be embarrassed, or do or say something inappropriate? So when it was immediately obvious that no one was embarrassed and that no one was going to do anything inappropriate, I felt a wave of relief flow through me. A wave which no doubt further contributed to my already totally out-of-control feelings of love and lust.

  “What are you doing?” Harriet asked, peering into the darkness behind Roger. His face fell momentarily into confusion, as it might if she had been asking him the square root of pi, but she was undeterred. “In the shed. What have you been doing in the shed?”

  He seemed to hesitate, but then suddenly Harriet made this unexpected movement that I had not seen before, wiggling her head from side to side like a comic caricature of an Indian manservant. At the same time she raised her eyebrows in the interrogative. Roger seemed delighted, and he turned and ducked inside.

  Our family had gone up in the world just a bit since those very early days in the Fifties. My father had worked for the Prudential Insurance Company since he left the army, and had been promoted a number of times, from an agent who went door to door collecting premiums, to a deputy manager counting the money collected by the agents, and eventually to district manager, which seemed ever so exalted. A framed photograph on the mantelpiece showed him receiving an award of a gold watch for long or dedicated service, and as I write these words today that very same watch is fastened to my left wrist, a daily reminder of my link to the past. I glance at it just as my dad used to glance at it, adjust it and wind it as he used to, a passport across the decades of our fleeting lives.

  The upshot was that in recent years our house had received something of a makeover. This included the replacement of the rickety old garden shed which Roger and I had used as a den, and which had housed his early interest in the insect farm. The new shed was made of planks of varnished wood, fixed together in a horizontal pattern, and with a green sloping roof. Maybe it was large as garden sheds go – perhaps fifteen feet by eight. There was only one small window at the far end, itself overshadowed beneath the overhanging branches of an apple tree, and so we had to wait for our eyes to adjust to the darkness.

  There was no point of comparison between what I had expected and the sight which met me. When I had last been here, the sum total of the equipment that Roger kept in the place was an ancient wooden barrel in which I believe he was keeping worms, and a couple of old fish tanks converted for use by ants and spiders. It wasn’t much like that now. All along one wall of the shed was a series of glass screens, some of them illuminated with a dull blue glow, and each of them filled with different kinds of gravel, soil, small stones and foliage.

  My first reaction was amazement at how impressive it all seemed, and then curiosity about how all this could have been made possible. My dad had made no mention of getting involved with Roger in his hobby, and there was no way to match up the construction of this amazing project with what I knew of Roger’s limitations. I was about to speak when Harriet beat me to it.

  “Wow, Roger. You’ve got an entire civilization in here. Your own world in miniature.” Roger was plainly delighted, and his face beamed.

  “Come and take a closer look.”

  Roger led the way as we shuffled slowly and carefully between the racks of shelves which displayed his various bits of apparatus. He seemed to have been experimenting with different shapes and styles of containers, and some of them were clearly work in progress. At one point we came to a glass screen, about eighteen inches square, and behind it was a maze of tunnels and shapes which had been carved out of wood. Some of the tunnels led to dead ends, but there was one main thoroughfare.

  “Did Dad make that with you?” I asked. I was keen to know how it had all been possible, but also didn’t want to detract from Roger’s achievement.

  “He got the wood for me and showed me how to use a chisel,” said Roger, and then smiled proudly, “but I did all the carving. Do you like it?”

  Harriet said that it looked fabulous, and asked what it was for. Roger did not hesitate.

  “It’s called a formicarium. It’s a way of keeping and studying ants. When you first put them in you can see how they are scared and confused. They run around this way and that and seem to be in a panic. They hurry down whatever route is in front of them and bump into the ends and don’t know what to do. But then gradually you see them learning about their surroundings, and after a while they know their way around, and you can see them scurrying back and forth carrying food. Before you know it they have organized themselves into their own way of doing things.”

  I was watching Roger carefully as he spoke, and realized, not for the first time, how l
ittle I really knew about what went on inside that strange mind of his. I had always known that he lived in a little world of his own, but the world he had constructed around him was far more elaborate and sophisticated than I ever would have thought possible.

  Once again, it was Harriet who picked up the conversation. “A bit like Adam and Eve when they were first put into the Garden of Eden,” she said. It was a reference Roger recognized from the times that he and I used to be sent to Sunday School as kids, and the comparison seemed to delight him. There was a brief silence as he absorbed the thought.

  “Yes,” he said, “exactly like that.” When I looked again at him he was smiling and his face was glowing. “I am, indeed, a benevolent God.”

  Chapter Five

  The group of teenagers who hung out together at that time came from very similar backgrounds, and no doubt we had very similar interests, tastes and idiosyncrasies. We were young and badly wanted to be different from the grown-ups who seemed to rule our lives, but few of us wanted to be different from one another. We all lived in the same neighbourhood and went to one of two or three similar schools. We all had parents who had jobs, some more exalted than others, no doubt, but none of us were likely to be short of the basics of living. Some of us were painfully thin, but none of us was especially fat. We all dressed alike and had untidy hair and affected accents which were a bit more working class than the ones we were brought up with.

  We dabbled in a small way with marijuana, some took a few French blues or purple hearts, but none was into anything harder. Like most kids of that age, from time to time we all drank a bit too much beer or wine, and I worked out quite early that I seemed to lack the off switch in my brain which told most of my friends that they had consumed enough.