The Insect Farm (3 page)

I was besotted with Harriet from the very first. It’s a rarely used word which sounds like something out of Jane Austen, and ordinarily you would never use it or think deeply about its meaning. In this case, though, “besotted” is the right word for what I was. It even sounds like it. Being “sotted”, to be “sotted” – somehow the word suggests that all reason has been lost.

My most vivid first memory is of the view of her from the south-east – one row back and a few seats along – the back right-hand side of Harriet’s head. The fine silhouette of her chin, partially obscured by her long and curling brown hair, a few stray strands stuck in place by perspiration to that tantalizing area of skin just in front of the ears. Even in the multicoloured glow of psychedelic lights, Harriet shone pink and white.

No doubt the passage of time filters any negatives from the memory, but I do know that it was not only I who recognized that Harriet was unlike those around her. For one thing, her look was unique. When everyone else of her age was wearing
dungarees or tie-dye, Harriet’s big-print floral dresses marked her out from the crowd. When Dusty Springfield wore spiders on her eyelids and Kathy Kirby’s lips shone like a warning to low-flying aircraft, Harriet remained unmade-up. When the world was going barefoot, Harriet delighted in wearing wool socks pulled up to her knees.

My girlfriend Angela dressed in variations on the theme adopted by all the girls of the same age – flowing clothes, patched jeans, tumbling tresses, tassels and beads in multicolours. All the other girls were cool and sexy and slightly exotic and certainly desirable, but Harriet was not one of them. Where Angela and her friends were of the moment, Harriet’s look seemed timeless. While their femininity was just being discovered and then reinvented in the spirit of the age, Harriet’s brand of sexiness would have worked its magic in any decade past or future. Something about her had a particular way of reaching out and taking an intensely discomforting grip around your groin. To see her was to want her, and it was on that day in November 1969 that I saw her.

After the concert we all headed onto the street. Angela went into a huddle with the other girls and I stood on the fringes of the group. We discussed what to do next and I saw Harriet hanging back, not quite part of the inner circle. Had she noticed me? She said later that she had, but there was nothing at the time to suggest it. As we reconciled ourselves to the fact that the pubs were closed and we would soon miss
the last train home, I tried to make it seem an accident that I fell in alongside her.

“Some concert, huh?” Her smile was a tiny flicker of warmth, but she said nothing.

“I don’t like to talk about it.” I expected her to continue, but she did not.

“Don’t like to talk about the concert?”

“Not for a little while, no.”

“Oh,” I said. “Is that just this one, or don’t you like to talk about any concerts?”

“I don’t like to talk about rock concerts,” said Harriet, “because everything that everyone says about them seems utterly facile, and somehow talking about it devalues the experience I feel I’ve just had.”

“I think I know what you mean,” I said, but I didn’t really, and I hadn’t often met people who used words like “facile” in ordinary conversation.

“Some of us are going back to my place,” she said. It sounded like a statement of fact rather than an invitation and, in my adolescent infatuation, I failed to understand.

“That’s nice.” I felt like an idiot.
That’s nice?
I sounded like Alec Guinness.

There was a pause.

“You could come too if you’d like.”

It turned out that she lived above a shop in Carnaby Street, and she said it with an interrogative in her voice which seemed to question whether it was possible to live anywhere else.

A dozen of us ended up walking the couple of miles or so from the Albert Hall to Harriet’s flat in the West End. There were far fewer cars on the road in those days, and by now the streets were emptying fast. Angela was immersed in conversation with two friends, and so seemed not to notice my instant infatuation with another girl.

We were headed towards a flat above a clothes shop, halfway down the street, and next to a pair of red telephone boxes. Despite being one of the most famous streets in the world, at that time of night it was all surprisingly quiet. I learnt that the place belonged to Harriet’s uncle, who lived in the country and used it when he was in town on business; I cannot now remember the actual words she used, but they were designed, I think, to give the impression that he was some kind of a spy. Certainly Harriet’s father worked for the Foreign Office, and he and her mother were on a temporary posting in Hong Kong. They had left Harriet to finish at boarding school. The uncle was on an extended trip somewhere far away, and so she had been allowed to stay in it long term. Seventeen years old, with independence and her own flat in the West End of swinging London.

The decor and furniture looked and felt like something out of a 1950s film set – a bolt-upright sofa and two armchairs, a small Formica-topped table with four wooden chairs, standard lamps with shades made of discoloured fabric. Someone began playing 45s on the record player and someone else started rolling some joints. It was a small work of art to paste
together three Rizlas and roll up the end of a cigarette packet to make a roach, and it was an art form we had all practised. Angela and her friends went into the kitchen to make tea, and I did my best to position myself as close to Harriet as I could, while seeming not to do so.

I have now had many years in which to turn over in my mind the conversation I had on that evening with Harriet. So frequently have I done so that I believe I can recall it – if not precisely word for word – then as near to accurately as makes no difference. Since I have recalled it so often, what she said has gained the sense of the everyday that comes with familiarity, and so now I have entirely lost any perspective I may ever have had on how weird or otherwise it must have appeared at the time. She had a glass of red wine in one hand and a joint in the other, but seemed to be neither drunk nor stoned. I, on the other hand, had by now had too much to drink, which no doubt added to the mesmeric effect of her words.

“I am not all that good at drinking alcohol or taking drugs,” she said, as though continuing some earlier conversation of ours without a pause, “but at the right volume and in the right place and time, rock music can do something for me that no narcotic can.” It was as if she had been thinking about this for ages, and had decided that this was the moment to express it. No doubt her mood was partially drug-induced, but still there was something within and about her that made what would usually come across as pretentious rubbish sound real.

“Music comes into your body through the ears, right?” She raised her eyebrows in enquiry. “But in a weird sort of way I also feel that somehow it comes in through my eyes, my nose and through every pore of my skin.” She paused, her pupils darting left and right and joining the dots between the silver stars upon the purple sky of the ceiling, searching for the right simile. Then she seemed to find it. “It’s like the lovemaking between two people who have come to know each other over many years. A little stimulation here, a hint of a caress somewhere else, the brush of lips across your skin. The music has the power to join all my senses together, each one overlapping the last, to build me up and up, finally reaching a level where to go forward would tip you over, but to go back would disappoint. And to stay there, for seconds, maybe minutes, before being taken gently or convulsively back down to earth.”

Maybe it was just adolescent rubbish, but I didn’t think so then, and I still don’t think so now. What I do know for sure is that Harriet wasn’t like anyone else I had met before. Leave aside what she said about the music: I was seventeen for heaven’s sake, and here was this wonderful girl talking about soft kissing and experienced lovers and caresses on the skin.

“I love the opera,” she continued, “and in the right time and place I love jazz. But there is something about rock music the way we heard it tonight. Something about how those guitar notes seem to come from a union of the soul with the instrument, and flow from the musician to the hearer like the
bolt of lightning passing life from God to Adam.” I know, I know, but this is what she said. I was lost. Lost for words, lost for an appropriate reaction, lost in Harriet.

The Carnaby Street flat was small and there were probably a dozen of us, and so, even if it had been anywhere on her agenda, there was no chance that she and I could have been alone, and that’s not to mention the matter of my current girlfriend. Harriet and I were sitting on the landing on the stairs just outside the door of the flat when Angela put her head halfway out.

“Aren’t you supposed to be doing something with Roger?”

Oh God! I was supposed to be home for Roger.

In the year since I had started studying seriously for my A-level exams, the duty of taking care of Roger had fallen entirely on my parents, and the strain was showing. This is not to suggest that I had been of all that much help before, but just the fact of having me around, able to go with Roger to the cinema or to the football, gave my parents an occasional break from the otherwise continuous responsibility.

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.