The wooden rafters which had supported the roof had burnt, and now protruded through what was left of the plaster like the ground-down stubs of bad teeth. All that remained was the bare brick walls, with nothing which would even indicate where one floor had finished and another had begun. No staircase, not a picture, not a piece of furniture, nothing had been spared. Ironically of course, the only things on the property which remained intact were the garage at the far end of the garden and the garden shed.
“Is it OK for me to go in?” The policewoman thought that it was. I unfastened the catch and entered, and was immediately struck by the fact that nothing in here gave any hint of the mayhem that had occurred just a few yards away. All of Roger’s glass tanks, stacked one upon the next, remained undamaged, and if I half-closed my eyes in the gloom I could see his little creatures hurrying and scurrying across their own little landscapes. Hundreds of pairs of eyes, thousands of tiny legs, all going about their business as though nothing untoward had happened. Of course they were just going about their business. Why wouldn’t they? The tragedy that had unfolded next door was nothing whatsoever to do with them.
“Will these be all right until someone can work out what to do with them?” It was the voice of the policewoman who was now standing in the doorway. I didn’t know for sure, but assumed so.
“I’ll ask Roger. I have no idea what care they need, if any.”
Having urged me not to visit the house, I at first found it surprising that the police encouraged me to view the bodies of my dead parents. Their rationale was that, after a fire, the bereaved are often left with a dreadful mental image of their loved ones as charred cadavers. In a case like this one, where they had died of smoke inhalation rather than in the flames, they believed that it might be a relief to me to find that they looked peaceful.
It was. They did look peaceful. They also looked far younger than their years. Somehow in death the skin on my father’s face seemed to have stretched, smoothing out the worry lines. My mother’s face was covered with far more make-up than she would ever have permitted in life, and I remembered the perfume of the powder she was wearing as she hugged me when I left home for university. The police were right to advise me to see them. Now, my last memory of my mum and dad was of them lying alongside each other, not touching but as close as could be, leaving this world together, just as they had lived in it.
My most urgent concern was where Roger was going to live and, for that matter, how and where I was going to live myself. Most of my clothes, books and essential stuff were away with me at university. I had no passport, no birth certificate, no family photographs, no pots, pans, plates, towels, anything. Until I could find time to go back to Newcastle to collect a few items, all I had was more or less what I was wearing.
Recognizing my predicament, a doctor at the hospital arranged that Roger would remain there for a week while I worked out what to do. The assumption being made by everyone around me seemed to be that Roger would be taken into the care of the social services, at least for a period, while I returned to university to finish my degree. That would give everyone enough time to see how he settled in to a new institutional environment. After that, I was assured, we would all be in a better position to decide on a plan for the longer term. I was told that something called a “case conference” would take place at the hospital in two days, when everyone involved in Roger’s welfare would be invited to give their views.
“It’ll be attended by at least one or two senior members of the staff from the day centre, where they know Roger well.” All this was being explained to me by a very good-hearted woman from the local social-services department called Mrs Willis. “There will be a clinical psychologist from the hospital where he is being looked after now, I will be there, and of course there needs to be someone from the family. I presume that’s you?” I confirmed that it would be.
“What about Roger?” I asked. Mrs Willis looked surprised. “I was wondering whether Roger himself would be at the case conference? He’s not totally incapable and he’s not a mute. I think he should be there while a whole lot of people he hardly knows decide his future. Don’t you?”
After some hurried phone calls and whispered discussions in corridors, I was informed that, though it was very unusual, Roger would be invited to his own case conference.
I did not get a chance before the meeting to speak to my older brother about what was going to happen, and half a dozen people were already present when I turned up at the appointed time at a glass-walled meeting room at the hospital. Mrs Willis was going to be chairing the discussion, and invited me to sit next to her. Everyone took their places around a large table and started to introduce themselves. I was about to ask about Roger when, through the window into the corridor, I saw a porter pushing a wheelchair in our direction. I was momentarily confused, and then horrified, to see that the forlorn figure apparently slumped in the chair and staring fixedly ahead of him was my brother. I leapt to my feet and went to hold open the door.
“Hi, Roger.” I spoke in as cheerful a voice as I could manage and placed my hand on his shoulder. “Quite an entrance. You OK? What’s with the wheelchair?” Roger seemed not to have heard my greeting and showed no sign of responding. It was something he did from time to time, and was one of his habits which left people unsure of how to react. Mrs Willis explained to me that it was a hospital rule that patients were not allowed to walk unaided through corridors for fear of accidents. “But Roger isn’t a patient, is he? There’s nothing wrong with him. They’re just looking after him for a few days while we decide what to do?” I was quick enough to see the exchanged glances between the case workers around the table. Roger’s wheelchair was positioned in the only available space, more or less opposite me and just set back slightly from the rest of us.
When medical and social workers speak about a disabled person, they often find it necessary to adopt a particular tone of voice that is never used for anything else. An odd lilt, rather like someone reciting poetry or delivering a sermon, which I assume is intended to suggest care and compassion, but to me only ever sounds sanctimonious. On that day and in that room, that special tone was all I could hear; no individual words, but the bounce of joined-up syllables recited as if by rote. Only the odd term such as “management” and “supervision” and “monitoring” dented the barrier being erected in my mind by the echoes of recent conversations with my parents.
“Roger is Roger, and he’s always going to need some support,” my mother was saying, “and we aren’t going to be able to provide it for him for ever.”
Obviously none of us had expected anything to happen so soon, but my own breezy reassurances came back uninvited into my head.
“I know that, but obviously, when that time comes, I’ll take care of him.”
“I’m sorry for wasting everyone’s time.” The people around the table stopped speaking. I had said it out loud, and heard myself continuing. “I will be looking after Roger. Full time. He will live with me. If you would be kind enough to keep him here for just a few more days while I collect my belongings and find a place to live, I will take responsibility for him from next week.” I glanced across the table and saw my brother Roger’s impassive face illuminate into a beam which penetrated like a rainbow through the storm clouds. His joy seemed to be unbounded; but what was it in his expression which made me wonder if this was the outcome he had expected all along?
* * *
I more or less sleepwalked through most of the next few days, but Mrs Willis, it should be said, was terrific. By the end of that week I had found and moved into a small furnished flat on the third floor of a large Victorian house in Clapham and had gathered together some bits and pieces of essentials. I was able to obtain from the charity shop enough clothes to tide over the pair of us. Roger would continue to attend his day centre, it was agreed, and we would meet with social workers and psychologists from time to time to keep an eye on his welfare and progress.
With every piece of
paper in the house burnt to a cinder, I had no idea of the status of my father’s insurance, or even if the house had a mortgage on it. I think I must have waded through the swamp of bureaucracy with the help of the solicitor who had been recommended by the local authority. My memory of it is hazy because of what I suppose must have been my confused mental state, and anyway it all feels like a very long time ago.
There was no clarity before the funeral, which was another thing that seemed to happen more or less on autopilot; only later did I learn that Harriet and her parents had made most of the arrangements. I had never met Harriet’s mother and father before this, and I recall that it was a revelation to me to learn on the day before the funeral that they had returned from Singapore, where her dad had recently taken up another new job with the embassy. There seemed at the time to be nothing memorable about them, or perhaps they simply faded into the background of the fog I was groping my way through. I had no reason to believe that I would get to know them both so much more fully later on. When in the following weeks it occurred to me to ask questions such as “Who chose the coffins?” the answer was invariably “You did” – but I can say with certainty that I had and still have no recall of having done so.
My memory of the funeral feels exactly as it would if I had seen it in a film rather than attended it myself. I have a series of ill-defined images of haggard-looking people traipsing past me, all of their faces a slight variation on a theme. I saw the many anxious glances in the direction of Roger. People are afraid of the unknown and, as no one was fully aware of the extent and type of the problem with Roger, no one knew quite what to expect of him on an occasion such as this. Did he “get it”? Did he know what was going on? Would he embarrass us all at the service itself?
My dad had one brother, Uncle Jim, and my mum had one sister, Margaret, neither of whom had been around Roger and me much for our entire lives, and both of whom attended the funeral with their spouses. Both Uncle Jim and Aunt Margaret did the “anything we can do” routine, but in a manner which positively pleaded for there to be nothing.
I must have been responsible for choosing the music, because the order of service lists a lot of my parents’ favourite pieces. All this was long before the days when anything goes at funerals, but I had asked Roger if there was a particular tune which he would like to have played as we said goodbye to the people who had brought us up and taken care of us for all these years. He thought for a moment and then said “What about ‘I Do Like to Be beside the Seaside’?” My reaction was to smile, and I was about the find a kindly way to say that that wouldn’t be appropriate, when Harriet interrupted.
“What a lovely idea,” she said, and reminded me that I had told her it was a song we had sung in the back of the car when, as kids, we used to head off to the coast on picnics. “It’s a lovely way to remember some of the happy times that you and Roger had with them.” And so it was that, after a couple of mawkish pieces by Mozart and Handel, the tiny chapel was filled to the rafters with the uninhibited sound of Reginald Dixon on the mighty Wurlitzer. After some audible gasps of surprise from the mourners, traces of smiles began to spread across hitherto grim faces, and the simple significance of the song lightened the load.
“Well done, Roger,” I said, and put my arm around him. Roger shrugged his shoulders but smiled anyway. The poor fucker didn’t have a clue what I was getting sentimental about.
The police had the sensitivity to wait until a few days after the funeral before the questioning began. Two detectives, both men, came to the flat while Roger was away at the day centre. One was a “DS”, who introduced himself as Detective Sergeant Peter Wallace. The other a “DC”, Detective Constable Steve Pascoe. They explained that in a case such as this one, where the cause of the fire was undetermined, they were obliged to make enquiries. I made tea in the tiny kitchen which was set to one side of the living area, and we sat around a Formica-topped table which I had acquired courtesy of the Salvation Army. DC Pascoe took out his notebook and prepared to write, while the older man asked his questions.
Did my parents have any enemies that I knew of? Of course not, my dad was an insurance salesman, the most innocuous character anyone could wish to meet. Did anyone in the house have any hobbies which involved flammable liquids, or candles – anything like that? I didn’t think so. Did either of my parents smoke? No, they did not. My dad used to smoke twenty Capstan full-strength per day, but had given up altogether about five years earlier. Did any regular visitor to the house smoke cigarettes? I could not be sure, and anyway, I didn’t think I knew of any regular visitors.
Then they began to get to what turned out to be the point. Did I know that six months earlier my father had increased the insurance on his own life and that of my mother? No, I did not know that. I had no idea. How could I know?
“He had never discussed it with you?” asked Wallace.
“No, he had not, but my father spent his entire life selling insurance. He was a very prudent man,” I said. As I began to think about it, for the very first time, it was obvious to me that my dad would always have been concerned about the expense of taking care of Roger after he and my mum had passed away. But quite why he had chosen this time to increase his insurance was a mystery to me. Both of them were in their mid-fifties, and I was aware of no reason why they would have begun to contemplate their own mortality.
It turned out that my father had been paying into what at the time was an enormous policy which would pay out £10,000 on his death through illness or accident, and that the unusually large sum was the reason that the police were making enquiries. I can honestly say that I still had not given more than a passing thought to what our financial situation would likely be, and this new information took a while to sink in. As they continued with their questions, I began for the first time to be grateful that I had been three hundred miles away at the time of the fire. By the time the question came, I was half expecting it.
“Would your brother be capable of lighting a fire?” asked DS Wallace.
“What on earth do you mean? Are you asking if he is able to strike a match?”
No, that wasn’t what they were asking. They were asking if I thought there were any circumstances in which Roger could have started the fire that burnt down our house and killed our parents. I was about to speak when my mind was suddenly filled by a vivid image of my older brother squatting in the corner of a cold dark shed, the palms of his hands clamped over his ears and face, to try to keep out the sound and smell of a fire raging in the house just a few yards away. Roger would have had no idea what was going on, and no idea what to do about it. I shuddered to think of what must have been going through his brain when, sometime later, the firemen came in and found him. The whole scenario made me angry about the detectives’ line of questioning.
“No, there aren’t.” I immediately wondered if my extreme vehemence would seem inappropriate, but then realized that I didn’t care what they thought. They were suggesting that my older brother had torched our house and murdered our parents, and that didn’t seem like a subject to be neutral about. “Roger has some learning difficulties, all right? But he has never hurt a fly in his entire life. Never done anything that would get him into trouble. Never so much as taken a sweet from a bowl without asking permission.”
“So you are saying that he does know right from wrong?” said Wallace.
“Of course he does,” I said, becoming even more angry. “He’s not a bloody half-wit.” And I knew as soon as I said it that in fact Roger was indeed a half-wit.
The two detectives looked at each other, as if trying to decide whether to proceed with something. The DC continued writing and the DS continued talking.
“Were you aware that your parents had told Roger that they were going to dismantle his insect farm?”
“What?”
“Were you aware of that?
“No, I wasn’t. And what’s more, I don’t think it’s true.”
“Why do you say that?” asked Pasco
e.
“Because I think they would have told me.” And the thought occurred to me that perhaps these officers had spoken to Roger separately – maybe at his day centre – and no one had informed me. “Anyway, how do you know?”
“We were given the information by one of the members of staff at the day centre.”
“Has he told you this himself? Has he said anything about this to anyone else?”
“No, we haven’t interviewed him yet; but I wondered if you would mind if we did?”
“Yes, I do mind.” My response was instant. “Roger would be utterly confused and would be just as likely to give you wrong and self-incriminating answers if he thought that’s what you wanted to hear. Roger didn’t do anything relating to the fire – I would stake my life on it – and, if you don’t mind me saying so, it’s a bit of a cheap and easy answer to suggest that he did, just because he cannot properly account for himself and no one has a better idea.”
* * *
Days followed days, and gradually Roger and I emerged into some kind of routine. The two detectives came back after about three weeks to tell me that they were “keeping the file open”, but that their investigations had produced nothing tangible. I knew that they still harboured their doubts about Roger, but I was relieved that they did not articulate them.
Eventually the insurance money came through, and I did the mental arithmetic. By the time I’d found and bought a suitable place for Roger and me to live in, bought some decent furniture, clothes and everything we needed to start a new household, we’d still have more than half of the original £10,000 left over. I would need to put that away somewhere safe just in case – in case anything happened to me before it happened to Roger.
The Insect Farm Page 8
