The Insect Farm (7 page)

These were some of the fun times we all had with Roger, and was part of what marked him out as the unique individual that he was. They were the best of times for him. The idea that he was now becoming so immersed in one subject, albeit something as apparently harmless as his insect farm, felt wrong.

“Have you tried restricting the times he can be down there?”

My father said that they had, and at first had prevented him from going down there for more than an hour in the early mornings and half an hour in the evenings.

“Well, what happened?” I asked.

“What happened was that he would do as he was told, of course, but he would just spend the rest of the time sitting next to the kitchen window and staring down the garden at the outside of the shed. It didn’t matter what we did, all he
was doing was passing the time until he was allowed back there. In the end it just seemed cruel to keep him away from it, and so we let him go back. At least he was doing something, rather than just staring out of the window.”

“But what does he do down there for such a long time?” I asked. “There must be a limit to what you can do? It’s only a heap of soil and some bugs, for Christ’s sake.”

“That’s what you think.”

Dad opened the door from the kitchen leading to the back garden and headed off down the path. I stepped out into the sunshine and fell in behind him, noticing for the first time that my father had begun to adopt a trace of the shuffling gait of an older man. I watched as his bumpy fingers fumbled with the keys in the padlock. He was only in his mid-fifties at that time, but I knew that he had been suffering from progressive arthritis for some years. Only now did I notice that his knuckles were swollen and his fingers were distorted out of shape, and as I watched him it seemed to me that his hand was shaking.

“Are you OK, Dad?”

“Yes,” he said, turning to face me. “Why do you ask?”

“No reason. I thought that maybe your hand was shaking a bit.”

My dad laughed, apparently carelessly, and turned back to the task. “Too much coffee I expect. Since your mother got that new percolator I think I must be suffering from a caffeine addiction.” I looked at his profile as his frustration
mounted, and once again he seemed to be a much older man than the one I thought of as my father. “Bloody thing,” he said, “it gets stiff after the rain.” I was on the brink of offering to help when the lock snapped open, and I realized that it would have been an error to have intervened.

He pulled open the door and his hand fumbled against the inside wall as he sought the switch. A series of strip lights had been mounted on the walls and on the ceiling, and for a few seconds it seemed like the first flickering hint of an electrical storm. Moments later the blackness inside was illuminated by a strange blue half-light, more in keeping with the interior of a spacecraft than a garden shed.

“Bloody hell, Dad. What on earth has been going on here?”

You know what it’s like when your mind thinks it knows what it expects to see, but then what happens next is completely different? It takes a while to become reorientated. That’s what happened here. I had a mental image from the last time I had been in there with Harriet, when the contents of the shed had been a series of glass-fronted display-cases, stacked up against the wall one on top of another. What I now saw looked more like the inside of one of those animal-experimentation laboratories you read about in the Sunday supplements.

Not that there was anything recognizable as an animal. No ugly experiments going on involving chemicals or electrodes, but all of the walls were now obscured by glass-fronted cases of various shapes and sizes, and all of the containers held
different materials of every texture and colour. Some seemed to be nothing more than deep-brown soil or mud, while others consisted of bigger grains and sometimes pale blue, sometimes pale green gravel or tiny stones.

At first glance, and with my eyes still adjusting, it was not possible to detect much movement or anything of great interest. Only if you concentrated on one tank, in one spot, and focused in tight close-up, could you begin to make out the interconnecting highways and tunnels which made up the networks of these communities. The first one I looked at, close to the door and benefiting from some extra light from outside, contained what seemed like ordinary soil. I recognized it as the project Roger had been working on when I first brought Harriet to meet him. Looking closer at it now, I could make out the grooves which had been excavated next to the glass, enabling tens and then hundreds of oversized ants to tumble over each other, darting this way and that, apparently indiscriminately.

“Dad,” I said, “what on earth is in all of these?”

“God knows. I lost track of them months ago. Worms, beetles, butterflies, locusts, spiders – you name it, he is collecting it.”

My attention shifted further into the shed, where I could see some glass tanks which were not filled with soil, but instead were more like very narrow aquariums – with bits of stick and leaves where you might expect to see weeds and a sunken shipwreck. At first glance there seemed to be nothing moving,
but then my dad pointed out the shape of a huge moth, its wings more or less indistinguishable from its surroundings, sitting motionless on a fragment of twig. “I believe they’re from South America,” said my dad, “very rare apparently.”

“Astonishing. Does he send for them, or what?”

“Some he does. He spends everything he earns – from whatever bits of work he does at the day centre and anything your mum and I give him – on mail order, and so there’s a constant stream of parcels arriving at the door.” He gestured towards the wall at the back of the shed, which was piled high with cardboard boxes, most of them small and square. I walked across to look more closely and examined the labels.

“
Lep-tin-o-tarsa decem-lineata
.” The words were entirely unfamiliar and I pronounced each syllable slowly and separately, and then again, trying to get a flow. “I wonder what that is in English.” I picked up several others and squinted at the names through the half-light.
Timarcha tenebricosa
.
Dorcus parallelipipedus
.
Sinodendron cylindricum
. I tried another one aloud: “
Xestobium rufovillosum
. Are all these inside these tanks and starting up their own colonies?”

“That’s one of the few names I recognize,” said Dad. “It’s the deathwatch beetle. Over here.” I walked across to where he was standing and he indicated one of the tanks which, like most of the others, seemed to contain only decaying twigs and leaves. Once again I had to wait for my eyes to adjust to be able to make out the tiny creatures. “Press your ear to the glass,” said my dad. I did so, and after a few moments I
could hear a faint clicking sound. “That’s a mating call which they make when they are boring holes in your floorboards. I told Roger to make sure they are secure, because they’ll eat the bloody house if you give them the chance.”

“You see, that’s extraordinary,” I said, “and illustrates what I was saying earlier. You can’t see anyone else on that bus being capable of even embarking on something like this. We all know that Roger has his problems, but you’ve got to have grasped a huge amount of stuff to be able to put all this together.”

“All I can tell you is that his doctors and carers say he is too obsessed by it. After all,” my dad’s tone of voice changed a bit, as if he was reverting to a matter of greater gravity, “after all, by the time your mum and I can’t look after him any more, Roger is going to have to be as independent as he can be. He needs to be able to do some kind of work which will pay a few bills and keep him occupied, but he will need extra support as well as that – and will have to find a way to pay for it. And I don’t think the insect farm is going to do it.”

The subject had gone away, but now, in the absence of my mother, it had come back again. At eighteen or nineteen, you still assume that your parents are going to live for ever. They seem to have been put on the earth to serve you and your needs, and the idea that that may one day stop is far off your horizon. Obviously at that time I had no way of knowing that the life-changing decisions which were going to be necessary were in fact coming up quite so soon.

Chapter Seven

Life at university gave Harriet the freedom to develop her individuality even further than before, and wherever she went and whatever we were doing, she could always be relied upon to stand out. At college discos, when most students cultivated studied neglect, she might wow the crowds by dressing as a Spanish flamenco dancer, complete with corsets, cleavage and roses in her hair. Often the men found it impossible to disguise the effect she had on them, and I would catch a glimpse of some of the girls who made little effort to hide their disapproval. One day I was struggling to finish an essay when she burst into my room bubbling over with the news that the quartet had been booked to play at a dinner and award ceremony for the Royal Television Society at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London. There would be TV producers and even some celebrities there, and who knew what might follow from such a gig? It was their first really grown-up and professional engagement, and they had been told that they would have to wear formal dress.

I hadn’t ever seen Harriet wearing a ball gown before, and it’s not within my powers of vocabulary to express the effect it had on me. She looked absolutely fabulous, quite literally breathtaking and, as far as I was concerned, about ten years
older than her twenty years. Suddenly she was a proper adult, doing something properly grown up, in the real world, and getting paid real money for her efforts. It was a shock.

The quartet had been hired to provide background music while everyone gathered to drink champagne and get a bit oiled up before their dinner and the prizes. She had managed to wangle a job for me at the same event, walking around with trays of canapés, and as I look back on it I realize that she had probably done so because of the risk that otherwise I might actually be physically consumed by my own jealousy. After our falling-out on the subject, I obviously had to withdraw my objections to her teaming up with Martin and Jed, but my initial reservations were nothing compared to what I had felt a few weeks later when she came home and told me the proposed fourth member of the quartet.

“Brendan Harcourt? You have got to be fucking kidding me.”

“Why have I got to be kidding you?”

“Because, for one thing, fucking Brendan isn’t even in the fucking music department. And that’s before I get on to the 2.4 million other reasons why I don’t believe it.”

“Brendan’s major is Economics, but his minor subject is Music. But the most important thing is that he plays the cello, and everyone else in the department who plays the cello has already joined another group, so we didn’t have a lot of choice.”

The long and the short of it was that Brendan Harcourt was there that night, playing in a quartet with Martin and Jed and
Harriet, and I loved one of them and hated the other three. More accurately, I loved one of them, disliked two and hated the fourth, and now I also hated all these blokes dressed up like penguins who had no reason or occasion to disguise their lust for my girlfriend, while I had little choice but to listen quietly as more and more drunken jackasses made less and less subtle remarks about what they would like to do with her.

“Have you seen that fabulous bird in the quartet?” The speaker was an overweight ex-public-school boy who looked like a refugee from the Billy Bunter books, and this was the way over-educated hooligans talked to each other in those days. “What I wouldn’t do to her given half a chance.”

“I’m sure it would make her night to hear that, Roderick,” said his friend. “Shall I ask her if she’d like your telephone number?”

The leer on Bunter’s face turned quickly to pain as I walked past with my tray of drinks and the heel of my left shoe accidentally trampled his right foot.

“Oh I say, steady,” he squealed, and began to hop on one leg.

“I’m so very sorry,” I said, but it had been my single moment of pleasure of the entire event.

All things taken together, in fact, it was one of the worst evenings of my life, maybe actually the worst up until that point. Serving drinks and snacks, clearing huge stacks of empty glasses from tables, trying to stay calm and casual as these stuffed shirts got themselves more drunk and ill-mannered. Had the evening gone on for another half an hour,
I guess I would have ended up decking one of them and being thrown out, or worse. As it was, after five hours it was all over and Harriet and I were sitting on the train on the way home to my parents’ house in Croydon, where she and I were both staying. Neither of us had spoken since leaving the hotel.

“Well, that went well, I thought.”

“What went well?”

“Jonathan,” she said, clearly exasperated, “this was our first proper gig. It was important to me that it went well. I felt it did. I’m sorry that I have to ask you what you thought.”

It is part of the folly of youth that we think that every event is all about ourselves, and instantly I realized that I’d been a total fool in failing to see and respond to the significance of the thing for Harriet.

“Oh God, Harriet, I am so sorry.” I knew I had screwed up badly and it was too late to row back, but also that I had to try. “It was great. By which I mean that you were great. You looked great, you sounded great and you all went for it as though you’d been playing performances like that for years. You were fabulous.”

It was late but it was working, and instantly I could see her indignation beginning to melt away. Of course she wanted more.

“People seemed to enjoy it,” she said. “We got loads of people asking for contact details at the end of the evening.”

“I’ll bet,” I said, then, making my next mistake of the night, asked, “Did any of them also want to get in touch with the guys?”

It took Harriet a second to understand what I was talking about, but when she did, the blow across my arm from the case containing her flute nearly obliged me to divert to the nearest hospital.