The Insect Farm

by Stuart Prebble

  She was still struggling with what seemed to be the totally new thought that she had given me any reason to be jealous, and that I was plainly feeling so.

  “But what the fuck are you saying?…” Clearly the “laugh” option was receding. “I’ve never given you the slightest reason. After all, you fuck me just about every night of the week. What on earth are you talking about?”

  The word “fuck” did not pop up frequently in Harriet’s usual vocabulary, and so now I knew I had to try to put the genie back into the bottle, but there was nowhere to retreat to. As I looked at her I could see the heat of her incandescence increasing.

  “I’m not saying anything. Obviously I’m talking bollocks, but surely you can understand. I love you so much and I guess it’s hard for me to see you so close to guys who obviously fancy you so much.”

  “Neither Martin nor Jed fancy me. And it wouldn’t make any difference if they did, because I am committed to you, for all the difference it seems to make to you.”

  “Obviously I don’t mistrust you, and I know you are committed and I love that you are. But please don’t tell me that Martin and Jed don’t fancy you. It couldn’t be any more obvious if they stood under your balcony and sang sonnets to music.”

  “What… the hell… are you on?” I don’t think I had ever heard Harriet’s voice go above an everyday volume before this, and it made me feel nervous to see her losing control. I could feel my own pulse quickening as I wondered whether to escalate or defuse. Something about Harriet’s demeanour – evidently simmering just short of total explosion – told me that defusing was the better option.

  “I’m not on anything. Or if I am on anything, I’m on you. And maybe my addiction to you has made me a bit deranged, but nothing is going to convince me that these guys don’t fancy you. They’re blokes, for fuck’s sake, and if they’ve got red blood in their veins, they fancy you.” I paused for a second to let the compliment seep in. “So possibly you have sent out signals to them that they haven’t got a hope, but that won’t stop most blokes from trying – it wouldn’t stop me from trying if I didn’t have you already – and it won’t stop them.”

  “So I guess that all you’ve got to do is to trust me.”

  “It is. That’s right, it’s all I have to do, and I do. Of course I do. But what you’ve got to realize is that I am so exposed with you: I love you so much and I’m so vulnerable that you’ve got to make allowances for a little bit of occasional lunacy. Because I am lunatic about you. Fucking potty about you, and so I am deranged. I just am and that’s that. You are going to have to try to find a way to get used to it.”

  You know that moment when things have been headed in either one direction or the other, either towards thermonuclear or back from the brink, and you see a turning point and realize it’s all going to be OK? That’s what it was like. As I spoke these words I could see the tension draining from Harriet’s face and almost feel the temperature dropping in the room. Her expression morphed before my eyes from one of tempestuous and righteous indignation to what I choose to believe was a wave of love. She came towards me and took my right hand in hers. “So what’s the bottom line on this musical group then?”

  “What do you mean, what’s the bottom line? You’re doing it, obviously, and I had better get used to the idea.”

  “No, I’m not. Not if you don’t want me to.”

  And just like that, she had turned the tables on me and I was the one who was cornered. As if there was any way I could stop her now – but I had achieved most of what I wanted.

  “So you’re saying that if I don’t want you to do it, you won’t do it.” I said, unable to resist the temptation.

  “Yes that is what I’m saying,” she responded without hesitation. “I have to form a quartet for my course, but if you are unhappy about me hooking up with Jed and Martin, then I’ll try to find some other women and get together with them. I’m sure it will be possible.”

  “OK, so I’d have to be some kind of an arse to insist on that, but thank you for offering it. I appreciate that. I really do. But no, you go ahead… and I’ll just get used to the idea of these guys drooling over you.”

  “That’s right. You can think of them getting to drool over me, while you get to take me home every night and make love to me. If you can get your head around it, that should feel rather good to you.”

  “I can see its merits, certainly,” I said. “On which topic…”

  We made love, and for that time, she and I were alone in the world. She was me, and I was her, and I would have staked my life that we would never part.

  Chapter Six

  For all this time, still there was Roger. Roger Roger Roger. Still living at home with my parents, of course, but now attending full-time at an adult centre of some sort and staying home at evenings and weekends. I don’t think I ever knew exactly what he did there. All I knew was that each day Mum used to walk with him to the end of the road where a mini-bus would stop at 8.30 a.m. and pick him up. Then she would be at the same spot at 6 p.m. that evening to bring him home.

  I spent that first summer vacation from Newcastle back at my parents’ house, and a few times I walked with Roger to the bus. The first time I did it, I recall that I walked down the road with Roger but that I hadn’t given much thought to what his day would be like. I remember that the van pulled alongside us at the pavement and I looked through the windows at the other passengers.

  Maybe half of the fifteen or so seats in the bus were occupied. A couple of the people in them had Down syndrome – one of them was apparently about fourteen years old and the other maybe twice that age. I remember seeing the younger kid laughing and giggling with apparently untarnished delight when he saw Roger, greeting him like a great old friend he hadn’t seen for six months, when in fact they had of course been together just the previous day. A couple of people were bent and twisting in their seats and making involuntary movements, jerky and uncontrolled.

  I found myself looking hard at one man in particular. From the neck upwards he could have been a bank clerk or a stockbroker – groomed hair, smooth skin, passive face. However from the neck down he seemed to be nothing less than a person possessed, apparently locked in a perpetual battle with some malevolent demon which was wrestling him from the inside out. Like an innocent man in a full-body straitjacket, struggling for freedom against ungiving leather straps. It was a shock.

  Another young man sat and rocked backwards and forwards, seemingly oblivious to any adverse consequences arising from the fact that he was banging his head against the back of the seat with alarming force.

  I was struck by the contrast between all these other people and the appearance and behaviour of Roger, but was brought back to reality when the bus driver opened the door and shouted what seemed to be a sincere welcome, but at the volume you usually reserve for an idiot. I found myself feeling grateful to the driver and cross with him at the same time. He nodded to me in the way that two white strangers might acknowledge each other if passing in a street in the Congo.

  Roger’s demeanour when he got on the bus was one of great enthusiasm, not looking back at me as he departed, and immediately he was absorbed with the undiluted joy of seeing his friends. I stood and watched as the old bus headed for the horizon, belching out black fumes as it did so. I was ready to wave goodbye to Roger, but he did not glance round.

  Back at the house, I waited for a few minutes, making tea for Mum and Dad and perching on the edge of the kitchen table before I spoke.

  “I was a bit amazed at the state of some of the people on the bus.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, most of them seem so much more damaged or troubled than Roger is. I know that Roger has lots of problems, but it can’t be too good for him to be hanging out with people with bigger problems than he has.”

  My father said nothing for a little while, obviously weighing carefully how to put what he wanted to get across. When he spoke, it was with a weariness which had
the instant effect of making me feel guilty for even having raised the subject.

  “I think Roger is a bit more damaged, as you put it, than we think of him as being. Because he is so used to us, his behaviour when he’s here can be much more predictable than when he is with people or in situations he finds unfamiliar. There have been a few problems…” I could see him hesitating, trying to work out what was the best way to express the next bit to the younger brother of the “damaged” person. “But basically we’re bloody grateful for it because it gives us a bit of a break.”

  I don’t think he intended it to cause me to experience an enormous wave of guilt, but that was what happened. I glanced at my mother, whose eyes were watering. She took a few steps to the kitchen table to tear off a piece of kitchen roll.

  “What your father is saying is that neither he nor I are getting any younger. You have reservations about Roger going into a place like that, and we have reservations about it too. But Roger is Roger, and he’s always going to need some support of that kind, and we aren’t going to be able to provide it for him for ever.”

  “I know that, but obviously when that time comes, I’ll take care of him.”

  I have no idea where the words came from. I had never really given serious thought to what I was now saying. I think I must have assumed that I would take care of Roger when my parents could not, but had never spelt it out, either to myself or to them.

  “It’s nice to hear you say so, Jonathan,” said my dad, “but realistically you won’t be able to do that.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because you won’t. One way or another, looking after Roger is more or less a full-time responsibility. And you won’t be able to take it on, because you’ll have a full-time job yourself. With luck you’ll have a wife who, heaven help her, will have enough bloody trouble looking after you, let alone your half-helpless brother.”

  If it was clear that I had not thought it through, it was every bit as clear that they had.

  “I understand all that, but I don’t agree that looking after Roger is a full-time job. Sure he’s got problems, but it’s not as though he’s going to fall out of a window or set fire to the house, is it?”

  The simple fact was that I had always been reluctant to accept that Roger was as far from normal as everyone else seemed to think he was. And obviously I now felt a strong sense of guilt that Roger had to spend his time with people in similar circumstances at all. Where was I, his only brother, when he needed me?

  “What are you planning to do with these holidays?” I’m not sure even now if there was any irony intended in the juxtaposition of this question with what had just passed. If so, at the time it was lost on me.

  “Oh, take some time off, do some college work, and I guess I had better get a job of some sort.” I think probably I had a brief moment of clarity, because I added, “and obviously take time to do some stuff with Roger.”

  “You’ll be lucky.” Even at the time, I thought that was an odd thing to say. Though I loved Roger every bit as much as any kid would love his brother, there was no escaping the fact that spending time with him was not much like spending time with any normal person. It wasn’t that I regarded doing so as an act of charity, but the idea that I’d be lucky to be able to do so was certainly an unfamiliar one to me.

  “Why so?”

  “Because you’ll do well to tear him away from that bloody insect farm of his. He spends every spare minute he’s got in the shed doing one thing or another with it.”

  The insect farm. I had scarcely given a thought to the insect farm since he had shown it to Harriet many months earlier.

  “Why do you say ‘bloody’? I’d have thought it was a perfect way for him to spend his time without having to trouble the pair of you.”

  “We thought so too,” said my dad, “but the doctor at his day school says that he is spending too much time with it, and is becoming obsessed to the exclusion of the other things he needs to do. They say that someone like Roger needs a variety of other types of stimulation if he’s to develop at all. It wouldn’t matter if he spent a few hours a week with the thing, but he spends every possible moment in the shed, and when he does it’s like he’s in a trance. After he comes out, he sort of goes blank for a few hours, and then he just heads off to bed.”

  It was easy to see the logic. Roger had always responded well to new things happening in his life. For example, he would get tremendously excited whenever Dad was about to buy a new car. From the moment it was first mentioned he would become preoccupied with what kind it would be, what would be the colour, what would be the features. Sometimes when we were younger he would prevail upon my mother to send off to the manufacturer for as much information as possible. For weeks on end glossy brochures would drop through the letter box, and would become the object of complete absorption, until Roger could recite by heart every detail of the horsepower, the type and configuration of brakes, and any and all modifications to the gearbox versus the earlier model. When the new car would eventually arrive he was like a five-year-old on Christmas morning, unable to know where to put himself for his excitement. He would want to sit in the driver’s seat, and then the passenger seat, and then in the rear seats. Once, memorably, he was desperately keen to remain in the boot when the lid closed, simply to ensure that the interior light went out.

  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 second
s 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.