The Insect Farm (8 page)

“Whoa, Harriet! Be careful with that. You could do some serious damage.” She didn’t reply. “Listen, I’m not saying that people didn’t appreciate the music. Of course they did. You sounded great, but so do loads of other quartets, several others of which were there tonight.” I was nursing my arm. “Let’s face it, you look bloody lovely, and even you cannot have failed to notice the army of gibbons lusting after you half the night. I nearly had to call the keeper once or twice.” Her silence confirmed that what I had said was undeniable, and her slight smile indicated that she did not mind at all.

Harriet’s parents were still living abroad, but by now her father had retired from his job with the government. As far as I could tell, he was now some sort of go-between on behalf of Arabs who wanted to sell oil and newly emerging nations which wanted to buy it. The point was that she had nowhere to live out of university term time. My parents were happy for her to stay at our house, but were not sufficiently enlightened to allow us to sleep together, and so during the holidays I slept on a made-up campbed in the corner of Roger’s bedroom, while Harriet took the single bed in my old room.

On this night, however, I would have given anything to be able to do with Harriet exactly what all those morons at the awards ceremony had fantasized about. I put my hands on
her hips as she walked ahead of me up the stairs, and when she turned towards me she was smiling.

“Jonathan, I don’t think so,” she whispered. “It would wake your parents.”

I was disappointed, but knew she was probably right. By now it was the early hours of the morning, and there was complete silence in the house. “Anyway, to be honest, I’m shattered.” She bent down from her exalted position on the stair ahead of me and kissed me on the forehead. “Maybe tomorrow?”

I put a brave face on the inevitable and managed a halfhearted smile.

“Yes, tomorrow.”

Despite the very long day and emotional exhaustion, I found sleeping on an air mattress in Roger’s room a challenge. I closed my eyes and tried to empty my head of all the unwelcome thoughts which had filled it during the evening. My best efforts were to little avail, and my mind was invaded by images of this exquisitely beautiful creature surrounded by ever more grotesque and multiplying caricatures of sweating and salivating men. No matter how determined I was to convince myself that my anxieties were unfounded, somehow I was simply unable to accept that Harriet was entirely mine, and that niggling sharp edge of doubt was enough to drive me to distraction.

It was already getting light before I dozed off, and when I woke four hours later, everyone was up and about, and I was
glad to see Harriet and my parents chatting over breakfast in the kitchen. I asked where Roger was.

“See if you can guess,” said my dad. I opened the back door into the garden and walked down the path to see him. For some reason it seemed appropriate that I should knock on the door of the shed – the insect farm felt like his exclusive domain. Hearing no response, I turned the handle carefully and stepped into the gloom.

“Hi, Roger. How did you sleep?”

My brother turned to look up from the workbench and smiled at me but, as quite often happened, he did not feel it necessary to answer my question. I walked towards him and stood by his shoulder. Lying flat on the surface in front of him on the desktop was a perspex sheet, covering what looked like an aerial view of a huge and busy metropolis. As usual I needed time for my eyes to adjust to the light, and as they did I could see thousands upon thousands of oversized ants, some larger than others, some with red markings and others with black markings, scurrying around as if in the Tokyo rush hour.

“Wow, Roger,” I said. “This is great. What’s going on here?” Clearly he was delighted to be asked.

“These are my new red tropical fire ants,” he announced proudly. “They come from Western Australia. I sent for them. They are as old as the dinosaurs, and they have an advanced social system where they look after the young and the old, and all of them take care of their queen.”

Neither of us spoke for a while as I looked more closely at the apparently frantic activity going on beneath me. I noticed a piece of polythene tubing extending from a hole which had been drilled in the perspex. Just at the open end of the tube, lying on the bench, lay the half-decomposed carcass of a caterpillar. Perhaps three hundred ants were clambering all over it, nudging and prodding and nibbling.

“Some of the soldier ants stand guard while the others feed – but the ones climbing all over it don’t actually eat what they are consuming. They take it into what’s called their ‘social stomach’. When they have had their fill, they return to the nest, and regurgitate the food to their young and the old.”

“That’s cute,” I said. “How do they do that?”

Again Roger did not hesitate. “Through kissing,” he said. “They clamp their mouths together and transfer it, and when the younger and older ants have had enough to eat, the soldier ants digest what’s left for themselves.”

“And they all take care of the queen?”

“Yes,” he said, “that seems to be the purpose of their lives. To look after the queen.”

“A feeling I know well,” I said. Roger looked sideways at me, not quite understanding what I was talking about. After a moment that seemed not to matter, and next time I glanced at him he was absorbed once more in his project, apparently unaware that I was even present alongside him.

Chapter Eight

Two weeks later Harriet and I were back in Newcastle for the new term. It was 3 a.m. and she and I were asleep in my single bed when I became aware of a soft but determined knock on the door. The previous night there had been a discotheque in the halls of residence and we had gone to bed late, our sleep deepened by an excess of alcohol. Only gradually did the sound permeate my consciousness. I mumbled something which would have been incomprehensible even had anyone else been awake to hear it, and swung my legs out of bed, searching for my underpants among the detritus of student life. I’m not sure if I even dozed off again in the process, because half a minute later I heard the same knocking, as if to nudge me.

When whatever will be the modern equivalent of the Gestapo eventually comes for me, 3 a.m. would be the best time to do it. I felt totally disorientated, with no more idea of what could be causing this interruption than I had any sense of my surroundings or time of day. “Just a second. Just a second. I’ll be there,” I called out, pulling on the T-shirt I had discarded a few hours earlier.

Eventually I was able to pull open the door a few inches, and I squinted into the corridor, which was barely illuminated
by emergency night lights. I found myself trying to focus on the face of Mr Stroud, who was the hall warden. Behind him I could see the uniformed shape of Wilf, the hall porter who did double shifts as the nightwatchman.

“Sorry to disturb you, Jonathan,” said the warden. “Are you alone?”

I wasn’t immediately clear about the reason for asking and considered lying, but even in my confused state, I soon realized that this would be a pointless deception. “No, Warden, I have my girlfriend with me. We were just—”

“That doesn’t matter.” I was clearly on the wrong track. “Would you mind just popping on your dressing gown and coming down to the Lodge for a moment? I need a quick word with you.”

Something about his manner prevented me from saying “at three in the morning?”, because my brain was gradually beginning to sharpen up, and even I could work out that he would know what time it was.

“Sure thing, give me a couple of minutes. But what is it about?”

“Just pop a few clothes on and come down,” he said. “Better to speak downstairs.”

Harriet was resting on her elbows when I came back into the room and I should be ashamed to admit that it crossed my mind how that position made her breasts stick up in a way which made me want to climb back into bed with her.

“What’s happening?”

I told her that I had no idea, but that the warden needed to have a word with me downstairs in his residence. Even slower to become alert than I was, Harriet asked the question I had resisted.

“At three a.m.?”

“Evidently.”

“I can’t be about me being here, can it?”

“No, I don’t think so.” Even then, it still hadn’t really occurred to me that this was something serious. “I’ll come straight back up when I’ve spoken to him.”

I walked through the silent corridors, my mind searching for the possible explanation but failing to reach any conclusions. The door to the warden’s residence was ajar when I got there, but I tapped on it anyway. “Come on in, Jonathan,” I heard him say. I had been in his sitting room months before, at a reception for Freshers. It was altogether like an upgraded version of the junior common room, except that there were books everywhere. The pictures on the walls looked as though they had been bought at the local department store and had been purchased to be innocuous rather than arresting. My confusion increased when I saw that he was there with his wife, who was wearing her dressing gown, her hair still dishevelled.

“Can I get you some tea, Jonathan?”

I declined, still more confused than anxious to find out what was going on. The warden asked me to sit down and I did.

“Jonathan, I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.” Looking back on it, I can see that he knew what he was going to
say, but was measuring the pace at which to say it. Just as, when you are imparting words of great import, you need to ensure that each one is going in before moving on to the next, and you don’t want to cause confusion by getting ahead of yourself. His words came out one at a time, with no joins between them, all carefully enunciated. Exactly, in fact, as though he was talking to an idiot.

“Jonathan, there has been an accident at your parents’ house,” he said, and waited for that thought to sink in. “There has been a fire.” He paused again. One step at a time, making sure it was all computing before proceeding. “I’m afraid that there has been some serious damage and that your parents have been badly hurt.” Another pause. “They were both taken to hospital.” One, two, three seconds. “But I’m afraid that they seem to have suffered from smoke inhalation.” One, two, three more seconds. “And Jonathan,” beat, beat, beat, “I cannot tell you how sorry I am to have to say that both are in a critical condition, and are being treated in intensive care.”

God knows what I was thinking. I was aware of the warden’s wife planting herself on the sofa beside me and taking one of my hands in both of hers. The face of the warden was a mix of sadness and apprehension, like someone standing at the bedside of a dying man, expecting at any moment for them to expire. But he was waiting, waiting for just a few more seconds. “Jonathan,” he said at last, “I am so so sorry.”

I can still vividly recall the feeling that the electronics of my brain were exploding, as thoughts and shock waves burst down the nerves, scrambling anything that got in their way. Even now I don’t know why this was the first more or less coherent thought that came into my mind.

“What about Roger?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Who’s Roger?” It was the first time the warden’s wife had spoken since the offer of tea. I looked at her as though the answer to her question was too obvious to justify a response.

“Roger. My brother Roger. He will have been in the house too.” I think the volume of my voice was increasing with the intensity of my panic. “What has happened to Roger?”

Now the warden was confused and obviously at a loss. “I’m so sorry, Jonathan. I am just passing on what we have been told.”

“By who?”

The warden stood up and went towards the window, pulling back the curtains. I could see that outside there was a police car. A uniformed officer was standing beside the car, apparently waiting for this signal, and another officer was sitting in the driver’s seat. The warden beckoned, and I saw the policeman walk around towards the front entrance to the halls.

I sat with my head in my hands, my fingers digging painfully into my scalp, and was only aware of the warden standing just inside the outer door, conferring in muted words with
the policeman. After a few moments I could see the officer step back into the hallway and bring his two-way radio to his lips. In a blur, through the maelstrom of thoughts in my head, I could just make out the odd word here and there.

“Brother… Roger… Yes, in the house apparently.”

There was a further conference between the policeman and Mr Stroud before the latter came back and knelt down in front of me. I remember thinking it was not a stance in which he could have been comfortable, and wanting to assure him that I had not suddenly become an invalid.

“The officer says they have no information that there was anyone else in the house. The fire brigade are still out there, and he has asked them to conduct a full search to be sure.” Now I wondered if Mr Stroud knew about Roger, because he added, “Could he have been out on his own?”

“No, he couldn’t.” It came in a louder volume than might have been appropriate, but I don’t think I was being rude, maybe just abrupt, the result of anxiety rather than of impatience. “Roger has a handicap. He is twenty-five, but he isn’t able to be out of the house at night on his own. He must be there; in the back bedroom. Tell them to look in the back bedroom.”

The warden’s wife went to speak to the police officer once more. I could half-hear snatches of the conversation in the hallway, but their words were interrupted by the crackle of life from the policeman’s hand-held radio. More muffled voices, and after a moment I heard Mrs Stroud suggest that maybe the officer should come in to speak to me himself.

He was a police sergeant, a big presence suddenly filling the room, the blue uniform and brass buttons bringing a new dimension to the occasion. Now it was official; now it was real.

As he entered the room, the officer took off his peaked cap, the first of many prescribed gestures of sympathy which were to characterize the coming weeks. Mrs Stroud was still in the hallway when there was another tapping on the door. She opened it to find Harriet standing outside. Instantly I could see the look of alarm on her face as she registered the warden, his wife and a bloody big policeman. Later she told me she thought it was about the little bit of pot we had been using, a thought which was banished by her first glimpse of the expression on the face of the officer. I got up and walked towards her, now concerned about what would be her reaction to the appalling news.