The Insect Farm

by Stuart Prebble

  The flat we had found gradually became our home, and I set in motion the process of buying it from the landlord. The place had been fitted out with a fairly decent range of furniture – none of it of any particular note except perhaps for a rather grand but worn and battered maroon leather chesterfield sofa. The owner was happy to include it all, along with the other fixtures and fittings, in the purchase price.

  We were even adopted by a cat. The woman in the flat downstairs had lived there for twenty years, and her pet Siamese called Olly had obviously decided that our flat was as much his home as the one below. Mrs Chambers explained to us that when she had first moved into the building, her husband was still alive and she had two children. At that time they had occupied the top two floors, but when her husband died and the children left home, she had given up the upper floor. However, her cat Olly probably still believed that he owned the place.

  For the time being I was allowed to take Roger over to the old house a couple of times a week to check on his precious insects. Roger showed absolutely no concern about having to pick his way through the debris of our former lives to access the back garden and the garden shed. To him it was as though none of it had ever existed, and once or twice I found myself envying his dislocation. I knew we would have to find an alternative arrangement for the insect farm once the builders started clearing the site, but it looked as though it would be a while before that happened.

  It was several weeks before our lives got back into anything like a routine, but eventually Harriet and I found an opportunity to sit down together to discuss the future.

  “I could decide not to go back. I could get a job – I’m sure I could get a job as a session musician or in a BBC orchestra with my education so far.”

  “You could,” I said, “but you’re not going to. Bad enough that all this has screwed up my education, without it doing the same for yours.”

  “Don’t you want me to stay with you? I thought you’d want us to be together.”

  “That’s a cheap shot,” I said. “You know I do” – and I did – “and we will be together. I’m letting you go back to Newcastle to finish what you started, but you’re going to come down to see me every three or four weeks, and by next May you’ll be finished.”

  “And what then?”

  “What do you mean?

  “I’ll be finished at university. So what then?”

  “Then you’ll come back to me.”

  “As what?”

  “As what? As my girlfriend? My lover? My partner? What were you thinking?”

  “I was thinking as your wife.”

  Which is how Harriet and I came to be married, with about twenty of our friends in attendance, and with Roger as my best man, on 7th September 1972.

  I recall feeling that Harriet’s parents seemed to be mildly irritated to have to return to London so quickly after the funeral, almost as though we should have made up our minds to get married sooner in order to spare them the inconvenience. Maybe we had even done it precisely to cause them maximum trouble. Our marriage took place in Lewisham Register Office, which is an entirely unprepossessing public building right next door to the library where I was about to begin work as a clerical assistant. Mr and Mrs Chalfont left us to make all the arrangements for the marriage of their only daughter, merely undertaking to contribute the sum of £400 to the costs of the occasion. Actually, in those days that was more than enough to fund the modest luncheon party for forty that we hosted in an upstairs room at the unlikely named Waggoner’s Arms in Catford. I think we even had some change left over with which to buy a set of saucepans.

  Harriet’s father’s speech might as well have been taken verbatim from a reference book under the section “the father of the bride”, perhaps only omitting the part where he was supposed to welcome his new son-in-law into the family.

  None of this offended me, however, and it became a constant source of amusement between Harriet and me to recall how they had struggled to remember their manners when they walked into the Waggoner’s and been shown to the upstairs room. What I found far less amusing was the supercilious attitude they always took towards Roger. Perhaps it’s easy to understand why any parents might have reservations about their daughter marrying someone whose family included any kind of handicap, but I inferred that it was more a question of what people would think. They came from a background in which the family idiot had traditionally been locked away in a wing of the country home and conveniently forgotten, so no doubt Roger was a bit too much in evidence for their comfort.

  “Jonathan,” I heard Roger say. It was the morning after the wedding and Harriet was sleeping late while I made breakfast for Roger. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

  “Of course not, Roger. You can always ask me anything.”

  “What does ‘for ever’ mean?”

  “For ever?” I repeated. “That’s a funny question to ask. What’s put that in your mind?”

  “It was what you said yesterday: you and Harriet. You both said that you promised to love each other for ever.” Roger had his own particular way of turning things over in his mind, and it was often fun to see how they would emerge.

  “That’s right, Roger,” I said. “Harriet and I are in love, and we know that we are going to love each other for ever.”

  “But what does ‘for ever’ mean?”

  “It means for the rest of time. Never stopping. It means always.”

  “But how long is it?”

  “I don’t know what you mean Roger,” I said. “It means what I said. It means never stopping. ‘For ever’ means never stopping. Not ever.”

  Roger stopped speaking and I could almost hear the cogs inside his brain turning and grinding. It was a full minute before he spoke again.

  “But you aren’t going to live for ever,” he said.

  “No, of course not. When two people in love talk about ‘for ever’ they’re talking about all of their lives.”

  “So it’s a lie, then.”

  “It’s not a lie exactly,” I said, “but it’s not one hundred per cent accurate. The other person knows that when their lover says ‘for ever’, it means all of their lives. Harriet knows that I will love her until the day I die, just as I know that she will love me.” I felt a bit foolish saying it like that to my brother, but this was just how it was coming out.

  “Until one of you dies,” he corrected me.

  “Yes, I guess so,” I said, and suddenly felt sad. It was not a thought I had spent any time on.

  “Or until one of you meets someone else you fall more in love with.”

  “That’s not going to happen,” I was relieved to be back on territory I felt confident about. “We are both certain that we will love each other for all of our lives.” I had been about to say “for ever”, but had been duly put right.

  “But it does happen though, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, it does, all too often, I’m afraid. But it’s not going to happen to us.”

  Once again Roger was silent for a while before he spoke again.

  “So when two people in love say they will love each other for ever, they don’t actually have a clue what they are talking about, do they?”

  I thought more about what Roger had said, and how odd is the lover’s “for ever”. It’s like the greengrocer’s apostrophe – in there because we feel it should be, but most of those who use it are not quite sure what it means or where to put it. We say “for ever” at a time of our lives when we have not the smallest idea of what that means in reality. Yet when we say it, we mean it, and would vehemently defend the sincerity of our intentions. As far as Harriet and I were concerned just then, any idea that our union was less than permanent was inconceivable, because now we felt ourselves to be inseparable.

  On the Monday following the wedding, however, Harriet returned to Newcastle to finish her degree course, and I started work in Lewisham Public Library – the main attraction of which was that I could work what later came to be know
n as flexi-time, thereby enabling me to drop off and collect Roger at the bus stop every day. It was a pattern which was to serve us all well in the months to come.

  Chapter Eleven

  Sometimes in the early mornings I would sit and watch Roger for a few minutes before waking him. It was at those times that he seemed at his most vulnerable and, perhaps, at his most pathetic. Here he was, a man in his mid-twenties, with firm dark overnight stubble on his chin, but occupying the world of an eight-year-old. Anyone coming upon him while asleep, with no prior knowledge, would expect him to wake as a fully grown man, perhaps with sour breath, having overindulged in alcohol or reminiscing about some sexual conquest from the previous night.

  Instead of this, Roger woke up like a small child, blinking his way back into cognizance of a world which required constant explanation and held unknown mysteries. Often when I would go to wake him in the mornings, I would find Roger looking like a victim of a long-term coma, his face squashed into the pillow and with little traces of saliva caked on his cheek and dampening the sheets. His sleep was apparently entirely untroubled by the cares that come with being an adult.

  I envied Roger his ability to sleep the sleep of the innocent, and apparently to remain peacefully in another world until roused into this one. All evidence suggested that his sleep remained undisturbed by dreams or concerns, and any enquiry on the matter was always met with an entirely non-committal reply, much as if he didn’t know what he was being asked, as most probably he did not.

  “Do you ever think about our parents, Roger?” I asked him. It was a Sunday afternoon and Harriet had been visiting for the weekend. We had just returned from King’s Cross, where we had seen her off on the train back to Newcastle. I had opened a bottle of beer, as I frequently did on these occasions, but had made a mental note to stop after just one. These were the times when I was most vulnerable to my circumstances, and on more than one occasion after Harriet had gone for the train a single beer had turned into a few more than I had planned to have.

  “No,” he said, as though he had been expecting the question, “do you?”

  I thought for a moment. “No, not much,” I said. “But I do sometimes find myself wondering how the fire started.”

  Roger seemed to consider. His mouth drooped down at the corners and his brow furrowed, as if someone had asked an eight-year-old who had left a scratch on the piano. I thought he might be about to say something which would make me wish I hadn’t asked the question, but after a few seconds he said: “I don’t know.” Then a moment later: “Good job it didn’t affect the insect farm.”

  If Roger had not mentioned the insect farm at that moment, the question would probably have fizzled out into something else. But he had planted a seed in my mind, and so I asked him: “Is it true that Dad had suggested that you would have to get rid of the insect farm?”

  Sometimes, when something happened to Roger that he didn’t expect or understand, he would react by involuntarily hitting himself on the head with the inside of his wrist. It was an alarming gesture which he had made occasionally from quite early in childhood. Maybe it arose out of the frustration he felt at not being able to get an idea into his head, or perhaps he was punishing his head for not being up to what he required of it. Whatever and whenever, it always took me by surprise when it occurred, and that’s what happened now.

  “What?” he said. I had no doubt that his alarm was real. “Get rid of the insect farm? You don’t mean it?”

  “I don’t mean now, Roger. No one is suggesting that now. I just wondered if Dad had ever suggested it before they…” I let the sentence peter out.

  “Why would he do that? It’s not hurting anything!” Once again he used his wrist to bang on his forehead, as though physically trying to force information into his brain that he could not otherwise compute.

  “Don’t worry, Roger. As I said, no one is suggesting that now. Nothing is going to happen to the insect farm. It is safe and you are safe.”

  I wondered whether I should tell Roger what the police had suggested, and then I realized that there was no point in doing so. Already he was confused by what I was saying, and I could see that to go into the reason I was asking would only make matters worse. However, I did wonder: if the thought hadn’t come from Roger, where had it come from?

  “Bad enough to have had to move it” – as so often, his train of thought was now fixed in one direction and ploughing forward – “let alone the idea of getting rid of it altogether. That would be over my dead body, that would. That would be the end of the world.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Roger. No one is going to scrap the insect farm. In fact,” I said, “let’s go and have a look at it this afternoon.”

  * * *

  After weeks of searching for a suitable place, we had eventually alighted on the perfect location for Roger’s pride and joy, on a patch of allotments not more than about two hundred yards along the road from our flat. I had used some of the money we inherited from Dad to buy a new shed, bigger and better than the one it had previously been housed in, and probably only just a bit smaller than a standard single garage. With a bit of help from me and from a kindly older bloke who worked on the allotments, Roger had filled it with new shelving, and we had carefully transported his prized possession to its new home.

  “I hope you aren’t breeding anything in there that’s going to eat my bloody cabbages,” said Mr Bolton, as he and I manhandled one of Roger’s larger glass tanks from the back of a hired Ford Transit into the shed.

  “No,” said Roger, and pointed to a mangy Labrador that never seemed to wander farther than three feet from its master’s side. “But we do have a few that would be very happy to come and eat that dog of yours.” He giggled and put his hand across his mouth, as though unsure whether or not he had gone too far. Old Mr Bolton looked puzzled until I put on a convincing laugh and finally he got the joke.

  “I can see I am going to have to keep an eye on you,” he said.

  Roger and I did a lot of work together in the new shed, and you could say that immersing ourselves in it helped to heal some of the wounds we each were nursing in our own ways. We constructed a whole series of different containers of every shape and size to accommodate his worms and insects. Some had glass sides; others were wooden tubs or boxes. We had access to a tap and there was even a mains electricity supply provided through the goodwill of the headmaster of the primary school which was situated next door to the allotment site. The expanded space in the garage made Roger ambitious, and over the coming months he developed all sorts of plans to keep and to breed a still-greater range of exotic varieties.

  On evenings when we did not visit the farm, Roger would sit at our kitchen table and pore through magazines and catalogues containing a whole world of information about bugs and beetles and flies and worms from all parts of the globe. He would spend hours studying the appearance and behaviour of this or that newly discovered genus, and tell me in the greatest of detail what made each one of them unique. He would meticulously complete order forms and then queue up at the post-office counter to send off for some new addition to his collection, and then spend more hours planning how it would be housed, fed and temperature-controlled. From time to time we would receive through the post a sturdy cardboard box containing a selection of leaves and twigs and, on closer inspection, a little colony of bugs of one kind or another. Even someone with no interest at all would have to admit that Roger’s collection of worm and insect habitats was impressive.

  “Why do you keep all these different species in different containers?” I asked him. “Don’t they all have to live together when they are out in their natural habitats?” I was peering through the semi-darkness into the glass tanks that were lined up in rows at eye level. Some were filled with soil and others with bits of trees and other vegetation arranged on gravel.

  “They do, but if you leave them to themselves, they fight.” Roger was doing his favourite thing, which was pottering about, placing his finge
rtips against the cages and his eyes as close to the glass as he could get. Left to himself, Roger could and would spend every hour of the day and night doing just that, watching his creation.

  “But isn’t that the natural order of things? If some of them die, that’s their natural state.”

  “It is, but I love them, so why wouldn’t I try to do what’s best for them?”

  “That’s good, Roger,” I said, “Truly you are a good shepherd to your flock.”

  Roger gave me the look he adopted when he passed over the barrier between what he understood and what he did not, but it was a smile which sometimes left me with an impression that he knew so much more than I did. About everything.

  Chapter Twelve

  Harriet used to come to see us in London as often as she reasonably could, and I tried not to underestimate how difficult that was for her. She was studying hard and also she was obliged to accept as many offers as she could get for her quartet to play at functions. She and her group had become personal favourites of the Vice-Chancellor, and so he tended to invite them to play at any social gathering organized by the university. These events were not especially well paid, but often they would involve the bigwigs from the city and the local council, just exactly the sort of people who organized similar functions, and so the reputation of the quartet might spread.

  Quite a few of these engagements fell on weekdays, but others were at weekends, so although gigs helped us to be able to afford her visits to London, they also sometimes got in the way of her having the time to make the journey. And of course with Roger to think about, there was no real possibility that I could visit her.

  It was not often that we would quarrel or even disagree. For the most part we were both content to know that the other was as keen for us to be together as we were ourselves, and that the only barriers were practical. There was no lack of will on either side. Still it would be foolish to deny that I felt the occasional knot of resentment. This happened most often when we had a provisional arrangement for her to travel, but then a reasonably paid opportunity to perform came up at the last minute and she had to cancel. On these occasions, when I had looked forward to seeing her and had built myself up for the joy of it, the disappointment could be acute. Our conversations at these times would be agonizing.