The Insect Farm (21 page)

“Roger.” I spoke loudly enough for him to hear if he was awake, but not so loudly as to wake him if asleep. I felt a sudden need to cough, which I suppressed, and swallowed hard as I looked around for the glass of water that I usually left beside his bed. I could not see it. There was no response from Roger and I stepped into the room and walked around the bed, just far enough to be able to get a glimpse of his face.
The soft creaking sound from a loose floorboard made me pause, but after a few steps the light from the lamp outside fell onto his face, and I could see in his expression nothing to cause concern. Close up, I could tell that he was breathing deeply, apparently without a care.

Now my concern shifted to Harriet. My mind was still swimming with momentary flashbacks of recalled images as I walked back down the corridor towards the living room. I felt I was wading through the shattered fragments that had exploded in my mind. I had come across no sign of her, and when my hands touched the walls inside the door, feeling for the switch, I found it and flicked it on. The electric light was dim, but instantly I could see that my fingers had left traces of blood on the wall. I looked again at my hands, turning them over to try to find the wound, but could not do so.

My eyelids felt heavy and my head ached, but with difficulty I raised my eyes to scan the room. Immediately I saw her, and from that first moment I had no doubt. I have no idea why it should have been so. It was not that she was lying in a contorted shape; there was nothing obviously broken, no instant sign of violence or of flowing blood. There was just something in her stillness, the artificial stillness of her, which left no room for error. Harriet, my sweet Harriet, the first and last love of my short life, was lying on the floor in front of me, quite lifeless, her soul having fled from her body.

There was a vacuum inside of me, as though someone had taken a suction pump and attached it to my body, dragging
out the air and the blood and my organs and my muscles and my flesh. I felt a sudden weakness and thought I would faint; my skin was empty and unable to hold itself up.

I fell to my knees and then shuffled across the floor towards the spot alongside the sofa where Harriet was lying. I realized that she was positioned only a few inches from where previously I had awoken, but her stillness had prevented me from seeing or feeling her.

At first it was not even possible for me to make out which way she was facing; her long and curled brown hair was in disarray. For that moment, God help me, I had an image of her lying underneath me, when we were in the throes of our lovemaking and her hair was wild and uncontrolled, sometimes falling and flowing forward over her face as she was overcome by our passion. In that moment I would reach out for her, pushing her hair aside with my hands, gently, to be able to see her lovely face in her ecstasy and to be able to find her mouth and draw it towards me.

In the stillness and unusual silence, my fingers lightly touched her face and pushed back the stray strands from her forehead. Mercifully her eyes were closed, and there was no indication on her face of the trauma which must have been her last moments. She did not look alarmed, or hurt, or in fear. She just looked like Harriet. My Harriet.

In an instant I wondered how I knew that she was dead. For the first and only time I had a moment of hesitation. Could I be wrong? Was the blood from something else? But the idea
was there and was gone just as quickly. It was her stillness that put the matter beyond doubt. No reaction to my hand on her face. No sign of life or breath.

I sat on the floor, leaning back against the sofa, and lifted Harriet’s head onto my lap. I could feel the soft squelch from the area behind her ear where the bones had been shattered and the flesh was damp from oozing blood. With the tips of my fingers, I traced the contours of her lovely face, as so often I had done in life. Beginning at the top of her forehead, at the point of her widow’s peak, the end of my index finger traced down towards the bridge of her nose, along its length, onto that area above her mouth which I had so often kissed, and then all around the edges of her beautiful lips. Then around her tiny chin, small and shaped like a doll’s, and onto the nape of her neck, where I had pressed my face after we had made love and were falling asleep.

No one who has not experienced it can ever understand the physical pain of such a moment. No poet, no novelist, no historian, no film-maker – no matter how erudite or eloquent or empathetic – can ever begin to convey the sense and depth of desolation and despair. There simply are no words, and every one of us, every member of the human species who has experienced that moment, knows that what I say here is true. Nothing I have known or read or seen or experienced before or since comes close. Thank God, because I would not know how to survive it twice.

I think I may have passed out again, because I remember regaining my senses once more, and feeling a renewed sting of loss. I felt my head starting to spin and tried to recall how much wine I had drunk. It was a lot – far more than would have been safe and sensible – and I wondered whether the alcohol was having an anaesthetic effect on my pain. I shuddered at the terrible prospect of eventual sobriety.

Here was the love of my life, lying dead in my arms, and I had killed her. To one side of me, still, was the top of the broken bottle, covered in blood. I could tell now that there was no cut on my hands. The blood which had congealed there was from the fatal wound in Harriet’s skull.

I cannot be certain how long I sat there, maybe it was a few minutes, maybe an hour. I was stunned and paralysed by my grief. I felt an irritation on my neck and touched it, to find it soaking wet from the rivers of tears which were still running freely. Now and then a huge welter of grief would rise up and wrack me uncontrollably, as if my own soul was trying to escape from my body, and I had to swallow back hard to remain alive.

Now, and only now, did I begin to think about the consequences of what had occurred. I had killed my wife. Yes, unbelievable though it seemed, I was a killer. A few hours ago I was a man, and now I was a murderer, someone who had taken the life of another person. It all seemed so strange, so surreal, that all these events which had happened in our private lives now also would be played out in public. My
wife’s adultery had been a personal matter, and somehow, in a way I cannot explain, my wife’s death also seemed to me to be our business and our business alone; something which existed between her and me. But my wife’s murder was not just going to be a matter of our business, it was going to be everyone else’s business. Adultery was a private matter, but murder most certainly was not.

While for all these weeks I had been left alone with the torment which arose from discovering my wife’s unfaithfulness, now my pain would become of consuming interest to the outside world. People I had never met would be privy to my most intimate feelings. Everyone would have an opinion. The neighbours, the newspapers, their readers, everyone would have their little piece to say. No one who read our story would care that I loved her as much as I did, or that at this moment I would gladly change places with her. No one would believe it or care about it if they did. All they would see is a killer, a man with blood on his hands.

However intense and sincere my private shame and regret, however real my grief, was a matter of no consequence. Society demands that justice must be done, and that it must be seen to be done. The law would have to take its course, the murderer must be punished. But there, in that flat, with Harriet’s lifeless head resting on my legs, it all seemed so inappropriate. Still it seemed to me to be a private tragedy, in which the loss of her was my punishment, and would be for the remainder of my life.

For now, though, the woman who had given me a reason to live was lying beside me, utterly lifeless, and never to return to me. People say they feel that a part of them has died, and something like that is how I felt now. My life could never again be whole. I was bereft.

But Harriet was not my sole reason to be. I had another important role in my life, another responsibility, and now my thoughts turned back to Roger. In a very few hours he would be waking. I did not know exactly when he had returned to the flat, or indeed why. Entering through the front door and going directly to his bedroom, it was entirely possible that he might have seen nothing. Perhaps he had heard raised voices and done exactly that – put himself directly to bed. The look of serenity on his sleeping face gave me hope that this might have been so. Equally, even if he had come in at the end of my argument with Harriet, it must be questionable what, if anything, he would remember in the morning. It was by no means unknown for Roger to experience events which might seem traumatic to others, and for them to have been entirely erased from his mind by the following day. Then I began to think, and instantly to become alarmed, about how he would be likely to react to the present scene. Most probably he would be confused and then thrown into a panic, and then the situation would be beyond recall.

What then? When the police arrived, I would be taken away. What would happen to Roger? Difficult though it must be to believe, at that moment I was instantly more concerned
about what would befall my brother as a consequence of the previous night’s events than about what would befall me. My path was obvious and inexorable. Even at so young an age, I knew that clearly. I was going to be arrested, I was going to trial, I was going to prison, and that would be the end of me. There was no “after that”. That was it, my lot, the unavoidable consequences of what I had done. Roger’s destiny was something else. I began to consider the possibilities. Probably he would be taken immediately into some compulsory care facility. He would be confused, lost, and heaven knows what trauma he would go through in his mind as he failed to comprehend what was happening to him. The idea appalled me.

Eventually Roger would no doubt be placed in an institution of some kind where he would be surrounded for all of his time, for ever, by others with problems parallel to his, or worse. This thought horrified me even more, and instantly I rebelled against it. Then I thought about my parents, our mum and dad who had always allowed themselves some consolation in knowing that I would do whatever I could to look after Roger. I had a momentary flashback of the original case conference at the hospital which would have consigned him to an institution, and which had impelled me to take over responsibility for Roger’s care in the first place. Now I would be unable to do so, and my older brother would pay a higher price than I would for my terrible crime.

After I had been completely in a daze, a stupor, these thoughts began to galvanize me. Was there any alternative to
the horrors which currently seemed inevitably to flow from my actions? Were there any choices to be made? Was there, in short, any way that I might be able to get away with what had happened here in my flat this evening?

As I looked around, down at Harriet’s inert body, across at the bloodstains on the rug, over to the bloodstains on the wall by the light switch, at the bloodstains on my clothes, I thought that there was nothing to be done. It was 3.30 a.m. and evidence of a violent crime was everywhere. In a very few hours it would be the dawn of a new day, and with it would come unavoidable discovery.

With a growing sense of urgency, I began to move in what now may seem like a surprisingly controlled way. I knew that I had to think quickly. The first issue was Harriet’s body. From having viewed it only moments ago with overwhelming regret, I was now very quickly looking at it as a problem to be resolved. If she was still here, in the flat, by the time Roger awoke, all would progress beyond salvation. I knew immediately that I had to get her out of here to somewhere safe, where she would remain undiscovered while I returned to clear up, and then have time to consider a longer-term plan.

Instantly I knew that I had a single option. There was only one place outside of the flat over which we had any control, and that was the insect farm. If I could get Harriet’s body there, it would give me a chance to clear my head and to think about what to do next. I swear that my motivation at this point was not about me; now I was utterly preoccupied
with what would happen to Roger, to his welfare, to his life, if I was not around to take care of him.

It was a distance of less than 250 yards to the allotments, and I knew that the chances of being able to take Harriet’s body all that way without meeting anyone, without being observed and without leaving any trace, were close to zero. Still, if there was any chance at all, it was better than the alternative. If I did nothing, discovery would be inevitable. It might be a very slim chance that I could get away with it, but it was better than no chance at all. The only thing I had in my favour was that it was December, bitterly cold outside, and no one with any choice in the matter would be likely to be out in the small hours of the morning. Anyone who was on the streets would be going about their business and, with any luck, might take little notice of anything else going on around them. Or so I could only hope.

Most of the blood from the wound in Harriet’s head had spread on the rug in front of the sofa, and so I knew that this had to go too. I remember thinking it was fortunate that the rug was just a bit longer than Harriet’s body; amazing how quickly, in emergency, we can start changing our perspectives. I dared not allow myself to look any more at Harriet’s face, and was grateful that once again her hair fell to conceal it as I began to roll her over. One turn, two turns, and now what had just hours ago been a lively and lovely human being, my beautiful and most loved wife, was a parcel, bundled up and ready for disposal.

I have heard people before and since say how heavy a dead weight can be. I have to say that this was not my experience. Harriet had never been a big or heavy person, and had become even more slight since the summer. Also I think that my state of desperation and the powerfully flowing adrenalin may have given me additional strength. In any event I had less difficulty than I had imagined in hauling my newly wrapped bundle up to a standing position and then over my shoulder. I looked around, decided that I had no choice but to leave everything else until I could get back to the flat, and opened the door. I grabbed the keys to the insect farm off their hook, and walked out.