The Insect Farm (17 page)

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 it 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.

“I was hoping we would eat first and have a chat, then if you like I’ll go down there with you and you can show me some of your latest stuff.”

That was a treat for Roger, because usually I would walk down to the allotments with him and leave him
on his own while I came back and tidied up. He loved showing me around, even though I had seen the vast majority of it all a hundred times at least. He agreed, and while I got on with cooking the food, I asked him about his day.

“Miss Tresize brought in her parrot today,” he told me. “You should have seen it. Great big blue-and-green thing. I taught it to speak.”

“Really?” I said. “What did you teach it to say?” Once again, Roger dissolved into the same mini-fit of giggles which had overcome him this morning, covering his mouth and looking away. It was all I could do to remain calm. “Seriously, Roger, what did you teach the parrot to say?”

It took him a few more seconds to get sufficiently over the hilarity of the situation so that he was able to get the words out, and when he did so it was like a five-year-old trying out a mild swear word in front of his parents.

“I love you,” he said at last.

“Well, that’s a nice thing to teach it, Roger,” I said. “Now whenever anyone speaks to the parrot, it’ll say ‘I love you’, and that will give everyone a good laugh.”

“I love you,” he said again, as though, having said it and not got into trouble, he now wanted to see how the words felt on his tongue. “I love you. I love you.”

“Yes, thanks, Roger,” I said. “You are beginning to sound like the parrot. I think the novelty might wear out quite quickly.” But he was still going on.

“I love you. I love you. I love you.” And then it was as though, having pushed his luck thus far, he was pausing to wonder whether to push it just a little bit further. Then he did.

“I love you, Harriet. I love you, Harriet. I love you, Harriet.”

The grill tray hit the floor with the sound of a thunderclap, and Roger’s hand went instantly to his mouth, this time covering it. When I turned round to face him, I could see that his eyes were wide and pleading with me to tell him that everything was all right. It took me a second or two of struggling to regain self-control, but I managed to do so.

“It’s OK, Roger,” I said. “It was just an accident. The handle was hot and it slipped out of my hand.” I bent to start picking up the fragments of half-cooked fish fingers which had come apart and were spread across the kitchen floor. “That’s a shame. Looks like we’ll have to start again.” I felt a squelch under the heel of my foot, but failed to recoil fast enough to avoid squashing a grilled tomato into the rug.

* * *

Fifteen minutes later I had cooked more fish fingers and Roger and I were sitting opposite each other at the tiny table which took up about a third of the entire space of the kitchen. It was covered with a plastic, easy-to-clean cloth which featured old-fashioned kitchen utensils against a white background. There was a mangle, and a washboard, and a smoothing iron. It had been one of the items I picked up from the charity shop when I was trying to equip the flat quickly.

“So, Roger,” I said, making my very best effort to seem as calm and casual as I knew how. “You were asking me this morning about Harriet.” I put another forkful of food in my mouth and chewed it for a little while, trying to give the impression of being in no hurry for the conversation to continue. “You were asking what I thought Harriet saw in… who was it… Brendan, I think you said?” I went on chewing, and then folded a piece of bread and dabbed it in the tomato ketchup which was now in place of what would have been the grilled tomatoes. “I think you said you had seen them kissing? Was that what you said?”

I glanced up from my plate towards Roger and saw that he was not sure how to respond. Plainly he wasn’t entirely comfortable, but he didn’t seem too ill at ease either. He nodded his head. I went back to my food, torn in two by the feeling of urgency to get to the point, but fighting against the certainty that any sign of it would have the opposite effect.

“So when was that, Roger? When did you see them kissing?” Roger was looking back at me, but was neither moving nor speaking. It was as though he was trying to weigh up what to tell me. Or maybe he was trying to weigh up exactly what it was he thought he saw. “Was it at the garden party we went to? When we dropped the other lads off?” He shook his head. No, that was very definitely not what he was thinking of. “When was it then?” I kept chewing. “Roger?” Still chewing. “When did you see Harriet and Brendan kissing?”

I thought I was going to burst with impatience when I could see that Roger was struggling to get his words out. Almost as though he had a stammer, which he did not. I tried hard to force myself to say nothing, to put no more pressure on him. Finally he spoke.

“At the market square.”

“Oh, really?” I said. “What market square was that?

“Was it called Convent Garden?”

“Oh,” I said, “Covent Garden. You mean when the quartet was playing downstairs in the piazza, and you and I were collecting money from bystanders?” He nodded his head. We had got there. This was what he meant. “And was it when we had finished? When we had all packed up and everyone was going our separate ways?” Maybe I was grasping at straws now. Maybe I was simply reluctant to go where this was going. Roger shook his head. “When was it then?” I think that my voice was still calm, but any hope I had that there was an innocent explanation was disappearing fast.

“It was when you and I went to the shops to get coffee for everyone. Martin and Jed went off to look in the museum shop, and Harriet and Brendan were on their own. You sent me back to find out if anyone wanted any biscuits, and I saw them.”

At last a coherent sentence, but even now his account was short of the final coup. His words were coming our breathlessly, as if they had been a burden to him and were being offloaded in a rush. Now it was as though I didn’t want to
hear it. I said nothing to encourage him to continue, but having got himself into a state where he was telling it, he was going to spill it all out. He had passed the point of no return. He had lost sight of any concern about whether I was going to be happy, or sad or angry or to totally lose my fucking mind. He had crossed the Rubicon, and here it was, heading towards me, now unstoppable.

“They were standing in the corner of the square, away from everyone else. They were holding each other. He was kissing her, and it took a long time. I watched them for a minute, but I knew that I had to ask them about the sweets. I was about to ask them when I heard Brendan tell Harriet that he loved her. Just like I taught the parrot. ‘I love you, Harriet,’ he said. They still hadn’t seen me so I came back. I said that no one wanted anything, but I hadn’t really asked them.”

I’ve heard people describe moments like this as being like going into a long tunnel, and have always thought that it was just a turn of phrase. Actually that image is about as good an expression of what was happening to me at that moment as I can think of. I had entered a long tunnel, there were no exits on either side, and all I could do was to head forward and downwards in a long, numb, desolate hollow of disbelief. As my mind wrestled with what Roger was saying, I remembered the moment. I remembered Roger shaking his head when I asked if anyone had said yes to sweets or biscuits. I wondered if I had thought anything odd about it then. Odd that no one wanted anything. Odd that Roger had just shaken his head.
Had I seen anything unusual in his expression at the time? Had he even registered properly that he had seen something amiss… something he was not supposed to see?