The Insect Farm

by Stuart Prebble

“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?”

  “Jonatha
n,” 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.

  “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.