The Insect Farm Read Online Free PDF

to be the unique quality of what would turn out to be the special relationship between Roger and Harriet.
    I opened the front door and went into the hallway. I had never been sure about the best way to describe Roger and his problems to people who were due to meet him for the first time, and so I have very little idea what Harriet might have been expecting. I had done my best to describe the insect farm to her, and Roger’s growing preoccupation with it, but in the end decided it was better for her to seeit for herself than to try to make sense of my inarticulate ramblings.
    “Are you OK?” I asked her, maybe worrying that perhaps she was hiding her nerves.
    “Sure thing,” she said, bright and breezy. “Any reason I shouldn’t be?”
    “None whatever, it’s just that…” I trailed away. Of course there wasn’t any reason why she should be anything other than perfectly relaxed. It’s just that other people in the same circumstances frequently were not.
    There was neither sight nor sound of Roger in the house, and already I knew that he would be in the shed at the back of the garden where these days he spent most of his time. Having been studying hard for much of the autumn term, I hadn’t actually been inside the shed for some months. The last time I looked at the insect farm, it consisted of a crude structure made of wood and glass, enclosing an inch thickness of soil in which a variety of grubs of one kind or another did their thing.
    “I hope you don’t mind worms and creepy things,” I warned Harriet.
    “I put up with you, don’t I?” she squeezed my arm.
    I stood at the back door of the house and hollered, “Roger, are you in the shed?” There was no reply and no sound of movement, so I told Harriet to wait in the kitchen while I walked down the garden path towards the garage. “Roger, are you in there?” I knocked on the door and pulled on thehandle at the same moment that Roger was pushing from the inside, as a result of which he came close to tumbling out onto the path. He had no idea that I was bringing anyone to see him, or indeed any idea who Harriet was at all, but as always he was pleased to see me. At five foot ten, Roger was still a couple of inches taller than me, and he put his arm around my shoulder just as he had when we were aged twelve and six. “I’ve brought a friend to meet you, Roger,” I said, and at the same time beckoned Harriet from the kitchen.
    Seeing my signal, and without hesitation, Harriet strode forward, touching and adjusting her hair briefly as she walked, just as she might when meeting any other boy of our age on whom she wanted to make a good impression. By the time she reached us, she had her hand outstretched for a manly handshake, another of the many little ways that made Harriet not quite typical of other young women of the time.
    “Great to meet you, Roger,” she said. “I’ve heard so much about you.”
    I’m not sure whether it was because few people had ever greeted him for the first time with such warmth and apparent ease, or because she was so lovely – but Roger’s face burst into a sunny smile which I had rarely seen since our carefree days as kids at the seaside.
    “Lovely to meet you too.”
    Would you have been able to tell from those few words, if you hadn’t been warned in advance, that Roger had problems? I think that maybe his voice was just a bit more ofa monotone than one might expect, but probably just a fraction. I think that perhaps there was just a slight lilt in his tone which indicated delight more suited to a small boy, but probably just a trace. Just possibly his eyes moved the smallest bit more slowly from object to object, as though the process of registering what they saw took a fraction longer than it might for you and for me. A combination of tiny signals, none of them decisive on their own, but taken together in a package producing an overall effect which transmitted something. This person is not quite one of us.
    If