A cyclist, wearing a coat and hood but no helmet, came suddenly from behind the old police phone box a few metres ahead. He set off in the same direction as she was going, disappearing into the distance.
A few minutes later, Cat was in her small street. A loud motorbike went past the end of the street, briefly shattering the peace, but the noise quickly faded.
She turned her key in the lock. The familiar warmth and smells drew her in and she pulled the door shut behind her. A cyclist could be heard passing as she did so. A shiver ran down her neck before she closed the door firmly, and put from her mind all thoughts of her earlier fear.
Cat McPherson was safe.
CHAPTER 4
AN INSECT-LOVER
THE following day, an innocent September Wednesday. In the flickering unnatural twilight of the insect room of the National Museum of Scotland, a hand gently strokes the glass above the rows of beetles: Coleoptera. Beneath his fingers are legs, many legs. Thin, jointed, some of them long, some hunched as if ready to pounce.
Cerambycidae: long-horned beetles, with impossibly long antennae. Here, small and unobtrusive, is Xestobium rufovillosum: the deathwatch beetle. Some people say that it warns of approaching death. He hovers his hand above it, closes his eyes a little, tries to imagine. They are silly people who say this: it’s a myth. The real reason for its name, he knows, is that this wood-boring beetle is often heard tapping in the floorboards and walls during the quietness around death, as people wait and watch in unusual silence.
Mind you, insects are clever enough: they could know when death was approaching. He wonders what it would feel like to know.
As he moves to the next cabinet, there is a commotion. Through the door at the far end come some schoolkids with their teacher. Their silly, high-pitched voices grate, the girls squealing at an enormous model of a beetle. He clenches his teeth.
He must do what he has come to do. Replace the light bulbs in all cabinets where there is the sign: “Lighting failure reported by Visitor Services.”
He doesn’t need light. He’s spent a lot of time here and could reel off the names easily. These are dragonflies, in serried ranks like army tanks or Chinese soldiers. Odonata Anisoptera.
Taking a special key from his toolbag, he opens the glass lid of the cabinet. He cannot stop a small smile, which seems to start from the pit of his stomach. It’s a melting feeling, a softening as edges blur. When he has a cup of tea, he always holds the sugar-lump on the surface of the liquid and watches the tea rise into the sugar and dissolve it out of his fingers – this feeling is like that.
He needs to touch. And slowly, gently, hesitantly, he stretches his fingers towards his beautiful dragonflies.
He strokes them so softly that their dead gossamer wings barely shiver. With his eyes closed, he focuses all his senses into the surface of his fingers, feeling the invisible film of the insect fibres, his skin almost hearing rather than touching, the sensation as soft as breath.
Now he opens his eyes. It’s a poor display, he often thinks. Just the names, no information, and so much unsaid. So much more he knows. You can not tell from his brown coat, or from the fact that his task seems merely to be to change light bulbs, but he has been a professor of entomology – insects, to the rest of us. It has been his passion and life’s work. He was once at the top of his profession, though not any longer.
“The most successful animals on earth” says a sign at the entrance to the room. And those kids, they know none of it. Do they know, for example, that dragonflies stalk their prey? Or that the male of the species is so well able to mimic the movements of its rival that its enemy doesn’t even know it’s being stalked?
He smiles. Such things make life rich and wonderful.
The kids are all assembled now and the teacher’s strident voice breaks any chance he might have had to concentrate. He tries to shut out her words. And now the kids are coming nearer. They are so loud, so clumsy, so ignorant, so THERE. He glares in their direction, willing them to come nowhere near. Concentrating, needing to protect his insects now that their glass cover has been removed, he turns his body to shield them from prying eyes and fingers. Deftly he unscrews the faulty bulb and replaces it with one from his toolbag.
He is about to close the lid when, “Cool!” says a voice beside him. He jumps, his hand jerking away. A bitter juice of anger rises into his mouth. He snaps his head to the left and sees a boy standing there, sticky hair spiked, sweaty Biro-stained hands touching the cabinet edges.
“Be careful!” says the man.
But the boy has gone, laughing. “Chill, mister!”
The man takes several deep breaths. He closes the lid, carefully. He wants to apologize to the dragonflies, for disturbing their rest, but that would be foolish and so he does not. But he thinks it. He wishes everyone could appreciate them as he does. People should not be so ignorant of the astonishing cleverness of insects.
He goes to the next cabinet with a broken light. The kids are moving quickly from place to place, never focusing for long, interested only in how big, or how ugly, or how gruesome each insect is.
“They’ve got them bigger than that in London, Miss!”
“Look at its LEGS!”
“Oh wow, that one’s EVIL!”
“Imagine finding that inside your shower!”
“I saw one like that in Thailand, Miss!”
And the squealing – God, the squealing! Won’t they just shut up? He feels the rising of panic. His hands suddenly slip with sweat.
Two are looking at the cabinet next to him. He can smell them: washing powder and fried food. One hits the green button to turn the light on. Nothing happens, of course. Can’t they read, the ignorant brats? The kid hits the button again. “It’s not working, Miss!” And the kid hits it again.
He wants to tell the boy that hitting the button won’t help, but the boy has run off to another display. The boy doesn’t care what he looks at as long as he doesn’t have to look at it for long. He has the attention span of a gnat.
But the other kid, a girl, is still standing there. He glimpses her and then forces his gaze to his insects, as he unlocks the cabinet lid. He repeats silently in his head, forcing his panic away with calming words, “Odonata Anisoptera. Libellula forensis. Odonata Epiophlebiidae.”
Blonde hair, big hair, kind of swept back. Too much make-up. She is at least silent. She does not shriek and squeal like the others. He steals a glance again and that is when he sees it on her face.
Two things: hate and fear. She hates his insects. And she fears them.
He wants to tell her that she has nothing to fear, but he can’t. He doesn’t know how to talk to kids. Besides, nowadays, you talk to a kid and suddenly you’re being accused of something horrible. And there’s nothing horrible in his mind. Except a dislike of people. He likes insects more than people, much more. He understands and respects the creatures.
Ignoring the girl, he wipes his hands and gets on with replacing the bulb. And locks the lid again, wrapping his insects up. Protecting them, that’s all he wants to do.
He concentrates on finishing his work, replacing all the light bulbs and removing the signs put there by Visitor Services. He has done a good job. He is not ashamed that this is his job, even though he has spent his life researching insects, has lectured in America and Australia in his time, has travelled the world with his work. But after his illness – nervous exhaustion or breakdown it used to be called; stress they call it nowadays – he just didn’t feel like going back to it, the lecturing, the constant demands to publish research. Then his wife died, and he’d opted out of life, and what a relief that was.
Now he spends his days quietly, caring for the collection, and other things in the museum, just to be there, just to breathe the air, with its faint and probably imaginary tang of formaldehyde. Occasionally he gives a talk to the nice ladies of the Women’s Guild. Things like that. It’s a soft and gentle life. And he likes it. Away from the pressure and expectation o
f success.
Back at the doorway, carrying his bag, he turns and looks at the kids. At such a distance he can watch them more easily. They flit from cabinet to cabinet, bashing green buttons. Silly kids. He doesn’t want to be close to them. He hates children. Maybe that’s a horrible thing to have in his mind. He finds them disgusting, primeval, uncivilized, ugly.
He has a moment of cruel pleasure as he recalls one of the traditional names for a dragonfly: the Devil’s Darning-needle. So called because they are said to sew up the eyes and mouth of a misbehaving child. Some children could do with such a threat, he thinks.
Children frighten him because you can never be sure what they’ll do. In a sudden flash of intuition, he thinks the girl must feel the same about the insects. His insects.
She shouldn’t be frightened.
Not of insects. She should be frightened of other things maybe, but not insects.
She should be much more frightened of people than of insects.
The girl is still standing there. She begins to walk towards him. Or towards the door. Suddenly he recognizes her – he has seen her somewhere before. Does she live near him? Yes, he’s seen her near by, definitely; maybe at a bus-stop or something. She is quite striking.
For a moment their eyes meet. Only for a moment, for they both look away. He is embarrassed, because he didn’t mean to be looking at her and there was nothing bad in his mind, only recognition. She moves to the spider display – for there are spiders here, even though they are not insects – and he runs from the room, finding himself suddenly in a room with some pointless exhibition of data processing technology or something.
He will leave now, and go to his next task. Light bulbs in the bird room. Birds are boring, but they still need their light bulbs changed. Before he moves on, carrying his toolbag, he glances back.
She is standing there, her face screwed up in slight horror, as she looks at the bird-eating spider. Another girl joins her, with big eyes and thick, dark hair. The second girl speaks. “How does it eat the whole bird, do you think?”
He is out of sight now, but he hears his girl answer, “I don’t think it eats it all in a oner.”
And she is quite right, he thinks. Bit by bit the spider eats the bird. Bit by bit. It takes its time.
CHAPTER 5
MONDAY MORNING NEWS
CAT McPherson and her friends pushed their way through the mess of bodies towards the hall for assembly. Jostling and noise, the usual. Always louder on a Monday – so much more to say.
And today, today especially, there was plenty to say. News had spread of Cat’s success on Friday. She’d won the under-16 age group at the regional biathlon competition. Biathlon was a tough discipline – swimming and running, using her body to its maximum – and not many people could do it, with its different demands on the muscles and body shape. She was still high on the feeling of winning, buzzing with it. It made the training worthwhile, made her think perhaps she could do this for the rest of her life. Though she’d probably feel differently next time she had to train in the rain instead of going shopping with her friends.
Anyway, as well as winning, she’d broken a club record in the swimming, had personal bests in both swimming and running, and her face was in the papers today. Some of her friends’ parents had seen it at breakfast. Several teachers had seen it too. The Deputy Head had already congratulated her. He had actually sounded quite sincere, and for one horrible moment she’d thought he was going to shake her hand. Mr Grime looked like some kind of leggy spider, with spindly legs that seemed too flimsy to support a body, tiny amounts of thin black hair, and an oddly protruding stomach.
One thing she didn’t tell anybody. It wasn’t that she deliberately didn’t tell them. She had simply forgotten. It had happened just before the announcement of her victory, and the excitement of all that had put this incident from her mind. Well, it would, wouldn’t it? After all, there must have been a few hundred people who watched her that day, so why would she remember particularly this one man?
But yes, she had noticed him. Not that she’d recognize him again – he’d had a hood up so she hadn’t been able to see his face clearly or his hair. She had seen he was writing something in a notebook, standing apart from the other spectators. And she’d been sure he was watching her, maybe writing something about her. He’d been near the entrance when she’d come off the track. Her imagination had begun to take over: he could be a talent spotter for the national squad. She had felt a lurch of excitement. Even if she was not sure how much she wanted to be in the national squad, who would not want to be asked?
She’d seen him again afterwards. Talking on a mobile phone. And looking at her, she was sure. For a crazy moment, she imagined that he was phoning the Olympic selectors about her. Ever since she could remember, she’d had daydreams about competing in the Olympics and it didn’t take long to conjure up that particular gold-medal-winning fantasy.
Or maybe the mobile conversation was to tell his wife he’d be late home for tea.
Anyway, then she’d got caught up in the congratulations and the excitement of winning. So she had forgotten about the man with the notebook. Completely forgotten about him.
Now they were all in the hall, finding positions on the floor, trampling over each other’s feet. Bethan and Ailsa were on each side of her, Josh and Marcus messing around behind her, and others from her year all about. Bethan, loud-voiced, dramatic, dark-haired, was acting the part of her manager or agent. Priya and Alison and Amrit and the others all wanting to talk to her, be seen with her. The first and second years were looking at her. This was what fame would feel like.
Someone had brought the newspaper article and they were showing it round. Backchat, insults, laughter, messing about. She was fired up by excitement. There were few better feelings than winning.
There was a face she didn’t want to see. Danny. She’d split with him during the summer and it still wasn’t easy seeing him. He was looking at her now. If their eyes met, his always seemed to linger just a little long, seeming to say nothing at all, dead eyes, and yet the nothingness said everything. He was still angry, she knew. Or assumed. Well, she hadn’t exactly treated him brilliantly, she knew that, but she hadn’t fancied him any more, so it had seemed right to stop seeing him. And yes, she should have told him sooner, not let him find out from someone else. And she kind of regretted that, but what had happened had happened.
Mostly, they could go for days without bumping into each other. They were in different sets for most subjects. And he did all the sciences, whereas she only did one, because you couldn’t avoid it totally. He was sciencey. It was one of the things they didn’t have in common. There were a lot of things, actually. In fact, she’d started to go off him the first time she saw his collection. Insects. She shuddered.
Cat did not like insects or spiders. Well, why would you? What sort of a person kept dead insects in plastic boxes? And what sort of a girl would want to go out with a boy who did that?
Horrible brown things. Insects, not boys. With legs. More legs than a creature needed. And Danny kept them. He’d started collecting them when he was about ten, apparently, and those ones were a bit mouldy and their legs were somewhat curled up and not looking fully functional. They looked seriously dead. But others looked so well preserved they could have been alive. Those were the ones he’d bought. Bought! What kind of a person BUYS insects?
You could laugh or you could shudder. Cat shuddered.
She’d pretended to be interested at first. After all, at that point she’d still fancied him. And she wasn’t stupid – no way was she going to tell him she hated insects. She had a brother, and she knew very well what boys do when they know a girl hates insects.
Mind you, of course Danny had found out.
Anyway. Moving on. Life was too short to keep thinking about Danny. He’d get over it. He’d have to.
When her success was announced in assembly, there was a round of applause and cheers and whistles. Cat blu
shed, but enjoyed the attention.
Danny said nothing. But that was OK. There was no rule that everyone had to say well done. She hadn’t noticed whether he’d joined in the clapping in assembly. Maybe he had; maybe he hadn’t.
In pretty much every lesson, a teacher said something about it. It got to the stage when Cat wished they’d all stop. Friends could easily go off you for less than that.
When Maureen, the dinner lady, said, “Well done, hen! What a wee star!” Bethan and Ailsa groaned.
“Sorry,” said Cat, as they took their trays to a table. “It’s actually getting to me too.”
“We’re all just jealous really,” said Bethan, with a grin. Bethan was not the jealous type. She had nothing to be jealous about anyway, not with those looks. Bethan oozed confidence, was never short of attention. She’d been Mary three times in primary school. That sort.
“Anyway, we’re basking in your glory,” added Ailsa. “Should we get your autograph now before you’re too famous?”
“That’s not going to happen,” said Cat.
“How not? It could.” Bethan nicked two chips off Ailsa’s plate. “Though maybe not if you eat chips and slob around and get fat like the rest of us.”
“Sometimes I’d rather do that.”
“You saying we’re fat?” demanded Ailsa, waving a chip in her face.
“You know I’m not! But it’s starting to get to me. I don’t think I can face a life obsessing about food and exercise.”
“I thought you were really into it, the training and things.”
“I don’t know any more. I don’t like the others at the club. There’s, you know, bitchiness, and when I’m there on Saturdays I’m thinking about you all doing stuff without me. And when I’m swimming before school, you’re all still in bed!”
“But you could be rich and famous,” said Ailsa.
“And go to the Olympics. And we would know you! We’d have a famous friend!” Bethan added.
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