The Insect Farm (16 page)

“I don’t suppose you know yet when you’ll next be able to come down?”

Harriet smiled half-heartedly. It was a gentle scratch on an open wound, but she seemed keen to pour balm on it.

“I don’t know yet. I’ll have to see what the timetable does, and what essay or project commitments I’ll have for the next
few weeks. They’ve already warned us that this year is going to be the toughest so far.”

I was about to remind her that the long, slow train journey provided excellent quiet time for reading and study, but thought better of it and just nodded.

“Listen,” I said, “I know you’ll do your best. Just remember that we are here to support you. It isn’t easy for you, and the very last thing I want is to be an extra pressure on you.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I really appreciate that.”

“I mean it. I know that I haven’t properly acknowledged that this is all every bit as tough for you as it is for me. And I don’t want to take for granted that you don’t do everything every other student does to have a good time.” Harriet smiled a lovely little half-smile that told me the frost was melting. At that moment her face seemed to me to be the loveliest thing I had ever looked at, and I stepped forward and put my arms around her waist. “It’s only that I love you so much, and if anything ever happened to you I just don’t know what I would do.”

Instead of looking at me, Harriet pushed her face into my shoulder. After a few seconds I could feel little convulsions rippling through her body and could tell that she was crying.

“Hey,” I said. “No need for tears. I just wanted to make sure you know how much you mean to me.”

She didn’t move, but the trembling continued. After a while I heard her voice, muffled because her face was pushed hard into my jacket.

“I do know it, Jonathan. I really do.”

Chapter Fifteen

Over the next few weeks, our lives slipped back into the same familiar routine. Each morning I would wake up at around 7 a.m. and lie in bed collecting my thoughts about the day. I can’t pretend that I thought anything terribly profound in these meanderings. I suppose I wondered what Harriet was doing, what time she would be waking, how she might have slept. These were days when a long-distance telephone call was an event, so it did not occur to me that I could call her to find out. Anyway, this was her final year and Harriet had moved into a university-owned house with three other girls from her department. I never had the opportunity to see it, but I knew that the shared telephone was in a public area, and so our conversations were not completely satisfactory.

After about ten minutes I would ease myself out of bed, slip on my dressing gown and pad into Roger’s bedroom to wake him. In all the time I had lived with Roger, and indeed in all the years since, I don’t think I ever went into his room in the morning and found him already awake. God, I envied him that. Not that my own sleep patterns were not regular and more or less satisfactory, but Roger just seemed to be able to sleep like a baby.

What’s more, when gently aroused from the deepest of deep sleeps, Roger always came to life in a way you’d want to wake up yourself. It was like he felt a mix of surprise and pleasure to have woken up at all, coupled with an inbuilt joy at finding himself in such a happy place as the world. A bit like waking up in a strange bed and realizing that you are somewhere lovely on holiday and outside the bright sun is shining and the blue sea is beckoning. That’s what each day seemed to be like for Roger.

There is no doubt that his generally very sunny disposition was a significant factor in helping me to keep my equilibrium through some of the difficult times. Not infrequently at the end of the day and partway through my third drink of the evening, I found that the life I had chosen would feel humdrum and routine, and the long separations from Harriet would make me feel sad and lonely. But it wasn’t easy to be for long in Roger’s company and remain immersed in your own depression. It was as though he was inviting you into his world, where everything was far less complicated than it was for the rest of us.

“What’s for breakfast?”

Roger had the same breakfast every day of his life, and had never to my knowledge accepted any of the hundreds of offers he had had to try something different. Two pieces of brown toast with butter and Marmite, a cup of milk and a banana. That was it. It was what he had been having regularly when I took over his care from our deceased parents, and it was what I made for him every single morning.

When Harriet was at home with us, and I anticipated an extended early morning of lovemaking, I might occasionally go for the “full English”. In the early days I assumed that Roger would want to participate; but no, what Roger wanted each and every day was two slices of brown toast with Marmite, a cup of milk and a banana. That didn’t stop him, though, from asking the same question every morning. “What’s for breakfast?”

It became one of our many standing jokes that I’d say, “I thought we might have a toasted rhinoceros today Roger” – and Roger would start to giggle – “perhaps with some prunes and a devilled kidney.” It would take him a few seconds to enjoy the idea before he knew that he had his line to say:

“No, thank you, Jonathan,” he always said as though it was for the first time, “I think I’ll just have the toast and Marmite today.”

I made it my personal challenge to describe an offering which was ever more extravagant and eccentric each day and, good old Roger, he anticipated my weak humour with the same undiluted glee, and was guaranteed to think my joke to be the funniest thing he had ever heard.

“I thought we might have a scabby tortoise today, Roger,” I might say, “with a little toasted cheese on top to enhance the crust,” and Roger would chortle away until he could collect himself sufficiently to come in with his line. Oh, what a double act we were.

Anyway, one way or another, every day started off with only the slightest of variations on a narrow theme. For the most part, Roger was more or less able to get himself ready for his day. Our dad had spent many hours with him in the bathroom, showing him how to wash himself in all his private places. Sometimes, when our mother was alive, he would overdo it and emerge smelling like a perfume factory. Mostly though, he was pretty good.

He shaved with an electric razor, but it was beyond the patience of my father first, and then of me, to persuade him to do the job thoroughly, so that frequently Roger would walk around with thick tufts of facial hair in clumps jutting out at odd angles, usually the prerogative of the absent-minded professor or the vagrant. Roger made a strange sight as a twenty-eight-year-old with the shaving style of an alcoholic.

More amusing, if you were in the right mood, were Roger’s various attempts at getting dressed without any help. You might have expected that this, being essentially a repetitive activity, was something that Roger would be able to manage, but for some reason he had a blind spot on the subject. His ability to put on a pullover the right way round was entirely subject to the laws of chance. If there were two possibilities, he would get it right fifty per cent of the time. And once the sweater was on, even if it meant that the collar was now tight around his neck, he would never seem to be aware that there was any problem. Sometimes I would try to nudge him towards discovering the matter for himself.

“Does that feel OK round your throat, Roger?”

He would respond with more or less the same facial expression as I might have expected if I had asked him to describe the movement of the solar system.

The same went for vests, and the same went for pants. Sometimes it was not until he needed to go to the lavatory that he discovered that his pants were on back to front, which could lead to a whole world of confusion.

Socks, of course, were a particular challenge, because putting on socks involves getting a number of things right at the same time. However, it didn’t seem to matter much, and I reckon that Roger went out of the house wearing odd socks rather more often than he went out wearing a matching pair.

All in all though, our routine worked well, so that by the time Roger had emerged from the bathroom, washed and dressed, I would have his Marmite toast and cup of milk ready for him, with the banana ready to go so that he could eat it on the way to the day centre.

I also tried to make sure that he and I had a few minutes together in the mornings, just so that he would have the chance to tell me anything that might be on his mind about the day ahead. I had discovered that it was an easy matter for Roger to misunderstand something, in which case it might then begin to build up and fester in his mind until it got out of all proportion, before he would tell anyone what it was. Usually it would be something fairly trivial, such as that someone had said something to him which had hurt or
been misunderstood. Rarely was it something worse, like a bit of bullying.

For that reason, I knew that it was important to give Roger the chance to unload anything that might get bigger if left alone, and experience had also taught me that it was better to do this in the mornings rather than in the evenings. Maybe most minor confusions were filtered out in his apparently untroubled sleep, leaving only the more difficult matters still needing to be shared. So it became a routine that while Roger sat eating his toast and drinking his milk, I’d ask him if everything was all right.

“Yes,” he’d say – then he would usually smile and shake his head, a bit like a small boy whose mum was fussing.

“And is there anything you want to talk to me about? Anything on your mind?”

To be honest, I was so programmed to hearing the answer “no” that on this particular day I was slightly taken aback when the answer was “yes”. “Yes” wasn’t a totally rare answer, but it was unusual for it to come right out of the blue. Usually other aspects of Roger’s behaviour would have given me an inkling. If something was troubling him, there were multiple indications that it was so.

“Really?” I said, catching myself just before I revealed too much surprise. I had to take care not to discourage him. “That’s good. What is it you’ve been thinking about?”

“Well,” he said, popping the last piece of toast into his mouth and allowing me a panoramic view of it being minced
between his tongue and his teeth as he spoke, “you know Harriet?”

“Yes, Roger, I know Harriet. She’s my wife.” This didn’t sound as patronizing at the time as it reads on the page. I was just trying to put his mind at ease that I knew whom he was talking about.

“Well, I was wondering” – another agonizingly long pause as he seemed to consider the best way of expressing it. After a few moments, he did. “What I was wondering was: what does she see in that Brendan?”

Of all the things that Roger could have come out with, this was right up there in the top five things that would get my attention. I looked at him, turning down my mouth at the corners and shrugging my shoulders, in a gesture designed to indicate that he needed to say more. It didn’t work, so I asked him.

“What have you got in mind, Roger? You mean Brendan who plays in the quartet with Harriet?”

“Yes,” he said, as though it was obvious, which of course it was. “Brendan with the red hair.”

“What do you mean, what does she see in him? Why do you think she sees anything in him?” Now I was anxious not to scare Roger off from what he was intending to say by overreacting. Still, I was more than averagely keen to know what it was he was talking about. I waited for a few seconds, and was about to give him a further prompt when the words came out. He said them in the way that a schoolboy does
when he has stumbled on something he knows is naughty and doesn’t know if he’s allowed to talk about it. His left hand half-covered his mouth, and he broke into a little giggle as he said it.

“I saw them kissing.”

* * *

Six hours later I was sitting in the kitchen, watching the hands of the clock tick around the dial at apparently about a quarter of their usual pace, waiting waiting waiting for the moment I could head off to collect Roger from the bus. With the possible exception of the day I received the news about the fire, this had been the worst day of my life thus far. I say “possible exception” because, if completely honest, I’d probably have to admit that I was more freaked out by what Roger had told me that morning than by what the nurse had told me in the foyer of the Croydon Hospital rather more than two years earlier.

When Roger said what he said, my instant reaction was to go up in the proverbial blue light. Somehow I managed to control myself, knowing that if I succumbed to my instinct Roger would be likely to retreat into his shell and to say nothing more on the subject. The idea of being the cause of dispute or disharmony would be sure to make him stay silent. Only if I managed to behave casually, as though there was nothing amiss, did I stand a chance of discovering everything there was to know about what was inside Roger’s head. So
it was with a supreme effort of will that I told Roger there was nothing to worry about; that he should head off for his day at the centre, and that we would talk about it again over tea this evening. This seemed to satisfy him.

“Can we have fish fingers?” he said, and of course I confirmed that he could, indeed, have fish fingers for his tea. At that moment I was so distracted that I would have acquiesced if he had asked for kippers and caviar. My mind was racing at one thousand miles an hour as I gave Roger his banana for later and we walked together to catch the bus, but I think I managed to remain apparently calm, giving little hint of the turmoil that was going on inside my head.

“Have a nice day, Roger,” I said to him as he got on the bus, but already his attention had been completely absorbed by one of the kids with Down syndrome who seemed to be his particular friend. I tried to catch his attention as the bus pulled away from the pavement, but he took no notice of me, standing on the edge of the kerb, my eyes already brimming over with salty tears which flowed down freely, creating large fresh raindrops on the front of my T-shirt.

My usual routine would be to pop home quickly after taking Roger to the bus, to pick up my book and bits and pieces, and then head off for the Underground on my way to Lewisham. As I waved goodbye to Roger, I knew that there could be no work for me today; no chance of freeing up space in my head to the degree necessary to carry out even the most mundane tasks of stamping in books and stamping
out books and making reservations for books and shelving books and stacking books. No free capacity to spare for anything other than my attempts to find a way to cope with the monster that had burst its way into my head through my ears and now was busily marauding around my brain and plundering my sanity.