The Insect Farm (4 page)

I have the clearest memory of her softness, of smooth and perfect skin, and I placed the palms of my hands on her hips, level with the top of her jeans, and pulled
her towards me. Her face was just a breath away from mine, but now, once again, she pulled back, but was no longer resisting, rather seeming to prolong the moment. I could not, and I pulled her harder towards me and we kissed a kiss which threw me down the well into Wonderland, falling headlong and not ever wanting to reach firm ground.

Chapter Four

“Tell me again about Roger.”

It was a Sunday afternoon and my parents had gone for a drive in the country and were not due back for several hours. Since I was constantly preoccupied by the question of how and where to have sex with Harriet, I imagine the thought must have been somewhere in my mind, and I’d probably used the idea of getting Harriet to meet Roger as an excuse to bring her to the house.

In some ways, the fact that Roger looked perfectly normal was a disadvantage. It meant that people made no allowances for him. Had he had the familiar look of Down syndrome, then probably no one would have jostled or cursed at him when he was unable to make up his mind, at the last minute, whether or not to board the bus he had been queuing for. Had he walked with the awkward and staccato gait of the cerebral-palsy sufferer, it is unlikely that people would have become irritated as he fumbled at the supermarket checkout. But Roger had none of those characteristics. He had retained the good looks he had as a boy and, dressed as he was by my parents and therefore in their taste in clothes, he came across as a very straightforward and normal bloke in a world where the generality of youth had apparently gone crazy.

Over the years of living alongside Roger, I think I must have seen every variation of reaction to him, from confusion and awkwardness at one end, to pity and patronizing at the other. I’d seen it all. In a cafeteria where the too loud voice of the six-year-old would ring out, “What’s the matter with that man, Mummy?” only for the child to be shushed and dragged away to another table. In the supermarket, where the vacant or benign expression on the face of the checkout girl would scroll within about five seconds through curiosity to concern to pity. The “I’ve seen it every day” routine of the professionals who talked about the need to behave normally, but then gave their advice at a speed just a little faster than dictation to an arthritic short-hand typist.

What I had never seen, even from my own parents, was anyone who treated Roger just exactly the same as they treated everyone else. No better, no worse, with no apparent consideration for any perceived limitations on his side, and all without any evident effort to do so. That was to be the unique quality of what would turn out to be the special relationship between Roger and Harriet.

I opened the front door and went into the hallway. I had never been sure about the best way to describe Roger and his problems to people who were due to meet him for the first time, and so I have very little idea what Harriet might have been expecting. I had done my best to describe the insect farm to her, and Roger’s growing preoccupation with it, but in the end decided it was better for her to see
it for herself than to try to make sense of my inarticulate ramblings.

“Are you OK?” I asked her, maybe worrying that perhaps she was hiding her nerves.

“Sure thing,” she said, bright and breezy. “Any reason I shouldn’t be?”

“None whatever, it’s just that…” I trailed away. Of course there wasn’t any reason why she should be anything other than perfectly relaxed. It’s just that other people in the same circumstances frequently were not.

There was neither sight nor sound of Roger in the house, and already I knew that he would be in the shed at the back of the garden where these days he spent most of his time. Having been studying hard for much of the autumn term, I hadn’t actually been inside the shed for some months. The last time I looked at the insect farm, it consisted of a crude structure made of wood and glass, enclosing an inch thickness of soil in which a variety of grubs of one kind or another did their thing.

“I hope you don’t mind worms and creepy things,” I warned Harriet.

“I put up with you, don’t I?” she squeezed my arm.

I stood at the back door of the house and hollered, “Roger, are you in the shed?” There was no reply and no sound of movement, so I told Harriet to wait in the kitchen while I walked down the garden path towards the garage. “Roger, are you in there?” I knocked on the door and pulled on the
handle at the same moment that Roger was pushing from the inside, as a result of which he came close to tumbling out onto the path. He had no idea that I was bringing anyone to see him, or indeed any idea who Harriet was at all, but as always he was pleased to see me. At five foot ten, Roger was still a couple of inches taller than me, and he put his arm around my shoulder just as he had when we were aged twelve and six. “I’ve brought a friend to meet you, Roger,” I said, and at the same time beckoned Harriet from the kitchen.

Seeing my signal, and without hesitation, Harriet strode forward, touching and adjusting her hair briefly as she walked, just as she might when meeting any other boy of our age on whom she wanted to make a good impression. By the time she reached us, she had her hand outstretched for a manly handshake, another of the many little ways that made Harriet not quite typical of other young women of the time.

“Great to meet you, Roger,” she said. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

I’m not sure whether it was because few people had ever greeted him for the first time with such warmth and apparent ease, or because she was so lovely – but Roger’s face burst into a sunny smile which I had rarely seen since our carefree days as kids at the seaside.

“Lovely to meet you too.”

Would you have been able to tell from those few words, if you hadn’t been warned in advance, that Roger had problems? I think that maybe his voice was just a bit more of
a monotone than one might expect, but probably just a fraction. I think that perhaps there was just a slight lilt in his tone which indicated delight more suited to a small boy, but probably just a trace. Just possibly his eyes moved the smallest bit more slowly from object to object, as though the process of registering what they saw took a fraction longer than it might for you and for me. A combination of tiny signals, none of them decisive on their own, but taken together in a package producing an overall effect which transmitted something. This person is not quite one of us.

If Harriet was picking up those signals, there was nothing whatsoever in her manner or response to indicate it. I know that I was always a bit tense when introducing people to Roger for the first time. Who would be embarrassed, or do or say something inappropriate? So when it was immediately obvious that no one was embarrassed and that no one was going to do anything inappropriate, I felt a wave of relief flow through me. A wave which no doubt further contributed to my already totally out-of-control feelings of love and lust.

“What are you doing?” Harriet asked, peering into the darkness behind Roger. His face fell momentarily into confusion, as it might if she had been asking him the square root of pi, but she was undeterred. “In the shed. What have you been doing in the shed?”

He seemed to hesitate, but then suddenly Harriet made this unexpected movement that I had not seen before, wiggling her head from side to side like a comic caricature of an
Indian manservant. At the same time she raised her eyebrows in the interrogative. Roger seemed delighted, and he turned and ducked inside.

Our family had gone up in the world just a bit since those very early days in the Fifties. My father had worked for the Prudential Insurance Company since he left the army, and had been promoted a number of times, from an agent who went door to door collecting premiums, to a deputy manager counting the money collected by the agents, and eventually to district manager, which seemed ever so exalted. A framed photograph on the mantelpiece showed him receiving an award of a gold watch for long or dedicated service, and as I write these words today that very same watch is fastened to my left wrist, a daily reminder of my link to the past. I glance at it just as my dad used to glance at it, adjust it and wind it as he used to, a passport across the decades of our fleeting lives.

The upshot was that in recent years our house had received something of a makeover. This included the replacement of the rickety old garden shed which Roger and I had used as a den, and which had housed his early interest in the insect farm. The new shed was made of planks of varnished wood, fixed together in a horizontal pattern, and with a green sloping roof. Maybe it was large as garden sheds go – perhaps fifteen feet by eight. There was only one small window at the far end, itself overshadowed beneath the overhanging branches of an apple tree, and so we had to wait for our eyes to adjust to the darkness.

There was no point of comparison between what I had expected and the sight which met me. When I had last been here, the sum total of the equipment that Roger kept in the place was an ancient wooden barrel in which I believe he was keeping worms, and a couple of old fish tanks converted for use by ants and spiders. It wasn’t much like that now. All along one wall of the shed was a series of glass screens, some of them illuminated with a dull blue glow, and each of them filled with different kinds of gravel, soil, small stones and foliage.

My first reaction was amazement at how impressive it all seemed, and then curiosity about how all this could have been made possible. My dad had made no mention of getting involved with Roger in his hobby, and there was no way to match up the construction of this amazing project with what I knew of Roger’s limitations. I was about to speak when Harriet beat me to it.

“Wow, Roger. You’ve got an entire civilization in here. Your own world in miniature.” Roger was plainly delighted, and his face beamed.

“Come and take a closer look.”

Roger led the way as we shuffled slowly and carefully between the racks of shelves which displayed his various bits of apparatus. He seemed to have been experimenting with different shapes and styles of containers, and some of them were clearly work in progress. At one point we came to a glass screen, about eighteen inches square, and behind it was
a maze of tunnels and shapes which had been carved out of wood. Some of the tunnels led to dead ends, but there was one main thoroughfare.

“Did Dad make that with you?” I asked. I was keen to know how it had all been possible, but also didn’t want to detract from Roger’s achievement.

“He got the wood for me and showed me how to use a chisel,” said Roger, and then smiled proudly, “but I did all the carving. Do you like it?”

Harriet said that it looked fabulous, and asked what it was for. Roger did not hesitate.

“It’s called a formicarium. It’s a way of keeping and studying ants. When you first put them in you can see how they are scared and confused. They run around this way and that and seem to be in a panic. They hurry down whatever route is in front of them and bump into the ends and don’t know what to do. But then gradually you see them learning about their surroundings, and after a while they know their way around, and you can see them scurrying back and forth carrying food. Before you know it they have organized themselves into their own way of doing things.”

I was watching Roger carefully as he spoke, and realized, not for the first time, how little I really knew about what went on inside that strange mind of his. I had always known that he lived in a little world of his own, but the world he had constructed around him was far more elaborate and sophisticated than I ever would have thought possible.

Once again, it was Harriet who picked up the conversation. “A bit like Adam and Eve when they were first put into the Garden of Eden,” she said. It was a reference Roger recognized from the times that he and I used to be sent to Sunday School as kids, and the comparison seemed to delight him. There was a brief silence as he absorbed the thought.

“Yes,” he said, “exactly like that.” When I looked again at him he was smiling and his face was glowing. “I am, indeed, a benevolent God.”

Chapter Five

The group of teenagers who hung out together at that time came from very similar backgrounds, and no doubt we had very similar interests, tastes and idiosyncrasies. We were young and badly wanted to be different from the grown-ups who seemed to rule our lives, but few of us wanted to be different from one another. We all lived in the same neighbourhood and went to one of two or three similar schools. We all had parents who had jobs, some more exalted than others, no doubt, but none of us were likely to be short of the basics of living. Some of us were painfully thin, but none of us was especially fat. We all dressed alike and had untidy hair and affected accents which were a bit more working class than the ones we were brought up with.

We dabbled in a small way with marijuana, some took a few French blues or purple hearts, but none was into anything harder. Like most kids of that age, from time to time we all drank a bit too much beer or wine, and I worked out quite early that I seemed to lack the off switch in my brain which told most of my friends that they had consumed enough.

Among this otherwise rather homogeneous group was the man who was eventually going to change all of our lives for
ever. He was called Brendan Harcourt, and from the very first he was not quite like the rest of us.

When most of us were keen, within limits, to conform within our group, Brendan did not seem to care. If we all wore denims, he wore cords. If we were wearing T-shirts and granddad vests, he wore a polo shirt. We all wore scruffy-looking walking shoes known as desert boots, and Brendan would think nothing of turning up in a pair of business shoes that even my dad would have thought were a bit old-fashioned. While most of the kids with a talent for music were trying their best to play Bob Dylan songs on the guitar, we heard that Brendan was learning to play the cello.

I have saved to the last the main differentiating factor which made Brendan Harcourt so different from everyone else in our group. While most of us had brown hair or black hair, and one or two had blond hair, Brendan’s hair was red. I don’t mean just auburn in the run-of-the-mill kind of way. Brendan’s was bright red, the sort of colour that if you saw it in a TV advertisement for hair dye you’d say it looked obviously artificial. It seemed implausible that it had occurred in nature, and yet it had. I never liked Brendan too much from the beginning, and no doubt this was partly due to the fact that he did not seem to care much about fitting in. However, I should admit straight away that much more of it was because Brendan fancied Harriet. Even that might have been OK – others in our group fancied her too – but the problem with Brendan was that he made no secret of the
fact, even after the point where it was clear and public that she and I were an item.