The Insect Farm

by Stuart Prebble

  There is no doubt that his generally very sunny disposition was a significant factor in helping me to keep my equilibrium through some of the difficult times. Not infrequently at the end of the day and partway through my third drink of the evening, I found that the life I had chosen would feel humdrum and routine, and the long separations from Harriet would make me feel sad and lonely. But it wasn’t easy to be for long in Roger’s company and remain immersed in your own depression. It was as though he was inviting you into his world, where everything was far less complicated than it was for the rest of us.

  “What’s for breakfast?”

  Roger had the same breakfast every day of his life, and had never to my knowledge accepted any of the hundreds of offers he had had to try something different. Two pieces of brown toast with butter and Marmite, a cup of milk and a banana. That was it. It was what he had been having regularly when I took over his care from our deceased parents, and it was what I made for him every single morning.

  When Harriet was at home with us, and I anticipated an extended early morning of lovemaking, I might occasionally go for the “full English”. In the early days I assumed that Roger would want to participate; but no, what Roger wanted each and every day was two slices of brown toast with Marmite, a cup of milk and a banana. That didn’t stop him, though, from asking the same question every morning. “What’s for breakfast?”

  It became one of our many standing jokes that I’d say, “I thought we might have a toasted rhinoceros today Roger” – and Roger would start to giggle – “perhaps with some prunes and a devilled kidney.” It would take him a few seconds to enjoy the idea before he knew that he had his line to say:

  “No, thank you, Jonathan,” he always said as though it was for the first time, “I think I’ll just have the toast and Marmite today.”

  I made it my personal challenge to describe an offering which was ever more extravagant and eccentric each day and, good old Roger, he anticipated my weak humour with the same undiluted glee, and was guaranteed to think my joke to be the funniest thing he had ever heard.

  “I thought we might have a scabby tortoise today, Roger,” I might say, “with a little toasted cheese on top to enhance the crust,” and Roger would chortle away until he could collect himself sufficiently to come in with his line. Oh, what a double act we were.

  Anyway, one way or another, every day started off with only the slightest of variations on a narrow theme. For the most part, Roger was more or less able to get himself ready for his day. Our dad had spent many hours with him in the bathroom, showing him how to wash himself in all his private places. Sometimes, when our mother was alive, he would overdo it and emerge smelling like a perfume factory. Mostly though, he was pretty good.

  He shaved with an electric razor, but it was beyond the patience of my father first, and then of me, to persuade him to do the job thoroughly, so that frequently Roger would walk around with thick tufts of facial hair in clumps jutting out at odd angles, usually the prerogative of the absent-minded professor or the vagrant. Roger made a strange sight as a twenty-eight-year-old with the shaving style of an alcoholic.

  More amusing, if you were in the right mood, were Roger’s various attempts at getting dressed without any help. You might have expected that this, being essentially a repetitive activity, was something that Roger would be able to manage, but for some reason he had a blind spot on the subject. His ability to put on a pullover the right way round was entirely subject to the laws of chance. If there were two possibilities, he would get it right fifty per cent of the time. And once the sweater was on, even if it meant that the collar was now tight around his neck, he would never seem to be aware that there was any problem. Sometimes I would try to nudge him towards discovering the matter for himself.

  “Does that feel OK round your throat, Roger?”

  He would respond with more or less the same facial expression as I might have expected if I had asked him to describe the movement of the solar system.

  The same went for vests, and the same went for pants. Sometimes it was not until he needed to go to the lavatory that he discovered that his pants were on back to front, which could lead to a whole world of confusion.

  Socks, of course, were a particular challenge, because putting on socks involves getting a number of things right at the same time. However, it didn’t seem to matter much, and I reckon that Roger went out of the house wearing odd socks rather more often than he went out wearing a matching pair.

  All in all though, our routine worked well, so that by the time Roger had emerged from the bathroom, washed and dressed, I would have his Marmite toast and cup of milk ready for him, with the banana ready to go so that he could eat it on the way to the day centre.

  I also tried to make sure that he and I had a few minutes together in the mornings, just so that he would have the chance to tell me anything that might be on his mind about the day ahead. I had discovered that it was an easy matter for Roger to misunderstand something, in which case it might then begin to build up and fester in his mind until it got out of all proportion, before he would tell anyone what it was. Usually it would be something fairly trivial, such as that someone had said something to him which had hurt or been misunderstood. Rarely was it something worse, like a bit of bullying.

  For that reason, I knew that it was important to give Roger the chance to unload anything that might get bigger if left alone, and experience had also taught me that it was better to do this in the mornings rather than in the evenings. Maybe most minor confusions were filtered out in his apparently untroubled sleep, leaving only the more difficult matters still needing to be shared. So it became a routine that while Roger sat eating his toast and drinking his milk, I’d ask him if everything was all right.

  “Yes,” he’d say – then he would usually smile and shake his head, a bit like a small boy whose mum was fussing.

  “And is there anything you want to talk to me about? Anything on your mind?”

  To be honest, I was so programmed to hearing the answer “no” that on this particular day I was slightly taken aback when the answer was “yes”. “Yes” wasn’t a totally rare answer, but it was unusual for it to come right out of the blue. Usually other aspects of Roger’s behaviour would have given me an inkling. If something was troubling him, there were multiple indications that it was so.

  “Really?” I said, catching myself just before I revealed too much surprise. I had to take care not to discourage him. “That’s good. What is it you’ve been thinking about?”

  “Well,” he said, popping the last piece of toast into his mouth and allowing me a panoramic view of it being minced between his tongue and his teeth as he spoke, “you know Harriet?”

  “Yes, Roger, I know Harriet. She’s my wife.” This didn’t sound as patronizing at the time as it reads on the page. I was just trying to put his mind at ease that I knew whom he was talking about.

  “Well, I was wondering” – another agonizingly long pause as he seemed to consider the best way of expressing it. After a few moments, he did. “What I was wondering was: what does she see in that Brendan?”

  Of all the things that Roger could have come out with, this was right up there in the top five things that would get my attention. I looked at him, turning down my mouth at the corners and shrugging my shoulders, in a gesture designed to indicate that he needed to say more. It didn’t work, so I asked him.

  “What have you got in mind, Roger? You mean Brendan who plays in the quartet with Harriet?”

  “Yes,” he said, as though it was obvious, which of course it was. “Brendan with the red hair.”

  “What do you mean, what does she see in him? Why do you think she sees anything in him?” Now I was anxious not to scare Roger off from what he was intending to say by overreacting. Still, I was more than averagely keen to know what it was he was talking about. I waited for a few seconds, and was about to give him a further prompt when the words came out. He said them in the way that a schoolboy
does when he has stumbled on something he knows is naughty and doesn’t know if he’s allowed to talk about it. His left hand half-covered his mouth, and he broke into a little giggle as he said it.

  “I saw them kissing.”

  * * *

  Six hours later I was sitting in the kitchen, watching the hands of the clock tick around the dial at apparently about a quarter of their usual pace, waiting waiting waiting for the moment I could head off to collect Roger from the bus. With the possible exception of the day I received the news about the fire, this had been the worst day of my life thus far. I say “possible exception” because, if completely honest, I’d probably have to admit that I was more freaked out by what Roger had told me that morning than by what the nurse had told me in the foyer of the Croydon Hospital rather more than two years earlier.

  When Roger said what he said, my instant reaction was to go up in the proverbial blue light. Somehow I managed to control myself, knowing that if I succumbed to my instinct Roger would be likely to retreat into his shell and to say nothing more on the subject. The idea of being the cause of dispute or disharmony would be sure to make him stay silent. Only if I managed to behave casually, as though there was nothing amiss, did I stand a chance of discovering everything there was to know about what was inside Roger’s head. So it was with a supreme effort of will that I told Roger there was nothing to worry about; that he should head off for his day at the centre, and that we would talk about it again over tea this evening. This seemed to satisfy him.

  “Can we have fish fingers?” he said, and of course I confirmed that he could, indeed, have fish fingers for his tea. At that moment I was so distracted that I would have acquiesced if he had asked for kippers and caviar. My mind was racing at one thousand miles an hour as I gave Roger his banana for later and we walked together to catch the bus, but I think I managed to remain apparently calm, giving little hint of the turmoil that was going on inside my head.

  “Have a nice day, Roger,” I said to him as he got on the bus, but already his attention had been completely absorbed by one of the kids with Down syndrome who seemed to be his particular friend. I tried to catch his attention as the bus pulled away from the pavement, but he took no notice of me, standing on the edge of the kerb, my eyes already brimming over with salty tears which flowed down freely, creating large fresh raindrops on the front of my T-shirt.

  My usual routine would be to pop home quickly after taking Roger to the bus, to pick up my book and bits and pieces, and then head off for the Underground on my way to Lewisham. As I waved goodbye to Roger, I knew that there could be no work for me today; no chance of freeing up space in my head to the degree necessary to carry out even the most mundane tasks of stamping in books and stamping out books and making reservations for books and shelving books and stacking books. No free capacity to spare for anything other than my attempts to find a way to cope with the monster that had burst its way into my head through my ears and now was busily marauding around my brain and plundering my sanity.

  All day I could feel the fight going on – between the beast whose weapons were images of passionate lovemaking between the woman I loved and the man I hated, and the defenders who said that of course Roger had obviously misinterpreted something trivial and that it was all a misunderstanding. A case of mistaken identity, or more probably he had mistaken a peck on the cheek for something more.

  Yes, as likely as not that would be it. A goodbye kiss on the cheek, maybe last Christmas. Maybe at another time? Maybe at Frost’s? That might be it: perhaps Brendan and the others had kissed Harriet as they left the Transit after the garden party. I tried to remember. I revisited the scene in my mind. Did they? Had they? And if they had, had Roger turned around at that moment and seen them? Could he have caught sight of something in a mirror? And if so, was it something innocent? Or had he inadvertently witnessed a secret moment?

  Mangling and torturing these thoughts over and over in my mind through the day, I completely lost sight of whether they were likely scenarios, or whether I was grasping at straws. I honestly did not have a clue. One minute the green-eyed monster was ripping out my intestines with imagined scenes of kissing and sweating and fucking and betrayal. The next minute I was casting my mind over the wonderful words of reassurance spoken by Harriet before the start of the new term, and was sure that it was all a mistake. She could not have been more open, more honest, more sincere. She could not have seemed to be more full of love for me. It was simply not possible that she could have said those things, and yet secretly be deceiving me. No, not possible. Surely.

  Tick tock, tick tock. It was twenty past three and still an hour and a half to go before I could head out to meet the bus which might bring me the answer I so desperately needed.

  I considered calling Harriet, but then even if I was able to locate her, what would I say? I never called her during the day, and would only ever have done so in an emergency. What was my emergency? “Hello, Harriet, Roger tells me that you are having an affair with Brendan, and I just wanted to ask you about it,” I would say. “Yes, Jonathan, I am. I’ve wanted to tell you for ages,” she might respond, one possibility that felt like the emotional equivalent of a knife through the heart. “Jonathan, are you bloody mad?” she might say instead. “Are you really going to get yourself stressed out and even take a day off work because of something Roger has obviously completely misunderstood?”

  No, clearly I had to try to discover from Roger what was going on before I decided what to do next, and if I was to be able to do that, I knew that I would have to handle things carefully. If it had been a struggle to suppress my instincts this morning, how much harder would it be now that I had experienced this day of mental torture? Every bit of me wanted to grab Roger by the arms, shake him hard and yell “what did you see? what did you see?” into his face. Yet if I gave in to that urge, or to anything approaching it, I could be certain never to learn anything further.

  I persuaded myself that the ten-minute walk to meet the bus actually took twenty minutes, and ended up getting there even faster than usual, with the result that I was waiting on the pavement with a good ten minutes to spare. Usually I had it all timed to perfection, so that I hardly had to pause in my step as I arrived at the stop at the same time as the bus, put my arm briefly around Roger’s shoulders in greeting, and then marched back home. Today I remembered why.

  I’m not proud of this, but to be completely honest I never liked small-talking with the relatives or carers of other people with problems comparable to Roger’s. I suppose it was because I never really accepted that their problems were similar to his.

  “You’re Roger’s brother aren’t you?” In this case, the man speaking to me was the father of the Down-syndrome kid with whom I knew Roger was great mates. Looking at him, I reckon he was about seventy-five years of age, which meant that he would have been sixty when his son had been born. I often wondered whether people in that situation blamed themselves, which in turn made me blame myself for being such a complete arse.

  “Yes, I am,” I said tersely. Then that feeling of being an arse took a lunge at me. “And sorry, I don’t know your son’s name, but he’s a friend of Roger’s, isn’t he?”

  The old man confirmed that he was, and that, indeed, Roger and his son Terry were the very best of mates. He was probably used to the idea that his son’s name didn’t matter – that to so many people like me he was just “the Down-syndrome kid”.

  “Once or twice I’ve suggested that Roger might want to come back to tea with us,” he said. “Terry would like that. Maybe he could even stay the night. It would give you a break and I could pop him back to get picked up here in the morning?”

  There were so many aspects of this idea that I didn’t like that I had difficulty in immediately choosing one. Anyway, my mind was far too full of other stuff to allow me to give it proper consideration.

  “Actually, Roger and I both really like our routine,” I told him. “Neither of us is very good at having i
t changed or interrupted.” I should have said more, about what a kind thought it was, and how otherwise we would have been delighted, but the truth is that I just didn’t feel like it. I was so preoccupied with getting Roger home and finding out what I needed to know that I could barely remain civil.

  Thankfully, just at that moment the bus appeared at the corner of the street and I could begin to seem distracted away from the conversation. I don’t know if he tried to start it up again, because as soon as the side windows came into view I was waving and shouting like a madman welcoming home a triumphant football team. When Roger’s face came into focus he first of all looked startled, and then overjoyed by my apparent enthusiasm to see him. Careful, I told myself. Keep calm or you’ll worry him.

  It took all my restraint to keep the conversation light and general on the way back to the flat. To my consternation, Roger repeated the invitation I had just heard from Terry’s father that he should go to eat with them and maybe stay the night. Obviously the suggestion had been the subject of wider discussion before being broached with me. I tried never to imply that I made all of his decisions for him, so I told Roger that we should both think about it and decide whether it was a good idea or not. Obviously I was hoping that it would go away.

  Roger was always ravenously hungry when he got home, and so I had everything ready to stick his fish fingers under the grill. I used to make sure he also had some vegetables, so we had a can of peas and some tomatoes which we both liked to have grilled. Today though, I was about to turn on the oven when Roger said he thought he would like to go to check on the insect farm before we sat down to eat. I was dismayed.