The Insect Farm Read Online Free PDF Page B

Harriet was picking up those signals, there was nothing whatsoever in her manner or response to indicate it. I know that I was always a bit tense when introducing people to Roger for the first time. Who would be embarrassed, or do or say something inappropriate? So when it was immediately obvious that no one was embarrassed and that no one was going to do anything inappropriate, I felt a wave of relief flow through me. A wave which no doubt further contributed to my already totally out-of-control feelings of love and lust.
    “What are you doing?” Harriet asked, peering into the darkness behind Roger. His face fell momentarily into confusion, as it might if she had been asking him the square root of pi, but she was undeterred. “In the shed. What have you been doing in the shed?”
    He seemed to hesitate, but then suddenly Harriet made this unexpected movement that I had not seen before, wiggling her head from side to side like a comic caricature of anIndian manservant. At the same time she raised her eyebrows in the interrogative. Roger seemed delighted, and he turned and ducked inside.
    Our family had gone up in the world just a bit since those very early days in the Fifties. My father had worked for the Prudential Insurance Company since he left the army, and had been promoted a number of times, from an agent who went door to door collecting premiums, to a deputy manager counting the money collected by the agents, and eventually to district manager, which seemed ever so exalted. A framed photograph on the mantelpiece showed him receiving an award of a gold watch for long or dedicated service, and as I write these words today that very same watch is fastened to my left wrist, a daily reminder of my link to the past. I glance at it just as my dad used to glance at it, adjust it and wind it as he used to, a passport across the decades of our fleeting lives.
    The upshot was that in recent years our house had received something of a makeover. This included the replacement of the rickety old garden shed which Roger and I had used as a den, and which had housed his early interest in the insect farm. The new shed was made of planks of varnished wood, fixed together in a horizontal pattern, and with a green sloping roof. Maybe it was large as garden sheds go – perhaps fifteen feet by eight. There was only one small window at the far end, itself overshadowed beneath the overhanging branches of an apple tree, and so we had to wait for our eyes to adjust to the darkness.
    There was no point of comparison between what I had expected and the sight which met me. When I had last been here, the sum total of the equipment that Roger kept in the place was an ancient wooden barrel in which I believe he was keeping worms, and a couple of old fish tanks converted for use by ants and spiders. It wasn’t much like that now. All along one wall of the shed was a series of glass screens, some of them illuminated with a dull blue glow, and each of them filled with different kinds of gravel, soil, small stones and foliage.
    My first reaction was amazement at how impressive it all seemed, and then curiosity about how all this could have been made possible. My dad had made no mention of getting involved with Roger in his hobby, and there was no way to match up the construction of this amazing project with what I knew of Roger’s limitations. I was about to speak when Harriet beat me to it.
    “Wow, Roger. You’ve got an entire civilization in here. Your own world in miniature.” Roger was plainly delighted, and his face beamed.
    “Come and take a closer look.”
    Roger led the way as we shuffled slowly and carefully between the racks of shelves which displayed his various bits of apparatus. He seemed to have been experimenting with different shapes and styles of containers, and some of them were clearly work in progress. At one point we came to a glass screen, about eighteen inches square, and behind it wasa maze of tunnels and shapes which had