The Insect Farm Read online

  The Insect Farm

  STUART PREBBLE

  ALMA BOOKS LTD

  London House

  243–253 Lower Mortlake Road

  Richmond

  Surrey TW9 2LL

  United Kingdom

  www.almabooks.com

  First published by Alma Books Limited in 2015

  Copyright © Stuart Prebble, 2015

  Stuart Prebble asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  ISBN: 978-1-84688-354-5

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-84688-361-3

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Acknowledgements

  The Insect Farm

  Prologue

  There was no particular sense of urgency about the first call that had come in. The duty sergeant’s log said that an unpleasant smell had been reported coming from a shed on a site of allotments, and that the caller had been advised to contact the local council. It was not until three days later, when a complaint was received from the head teacher of a primary school situated next to the allotments, that any notice was taken. A supply teacher who had previously served in the army had mentioned it was a smell he had known before, one he associated with decaying flesh. Even then, it was coincidental that the Chief Inspector of the Serious Crimes Unit was within hearing distance when two constables were being briefed to go to take a look.

  “What did the original caller say it was?” asked one of the constables.

  “An insect farm, whatever that is.”

  The unfamiliar phrase triggered a distant memory in the Chief Inspector. He asked if he could hitch a ride.

  Thirty minutes later the patrol car pulled up at the allotments. Already parked outside were another police car and a van from the Environmental Health Department. In the middle distance, beyond the wire fence and padlocked gate, the Chief Inspector could see the outline of the building, which was surrounded by half a dozen men dressed in overalls and a policewoman.

  It took a few moments for the policewoman to unlock the gate, and all four officers set off towards the abandoned shed. Ahead of them they could see that two men from the council wearing what looked like bee-keeper outfits were just about to open the door. The Inspector winced as the rank smell of rotting flesh was picked up by the breeze. On one side of the path he noticed a man wearing working clothes.

  “That’s Mr Bolton, who reported the problem,” said the policewoman. “He says the shed has been here since well before he took over his own allotment from his father years ago. He first noticed the smell at the weekend and reported it to us and the council on Monday.”

  “What made him call us?”

  “I think everyone was a bit freaked out by the stench. Shall we stop them from going in?”

  The senior officer shook his head.

  At first it seemed as though the door had been holding back a mound of powdery soil, which was now spilling out onto the ground in front of the shed like waves on a shoreline. A few steps nearer, what had appeared to be a swamp of inert particles was now a growing mass, swirling and churning within itself. Close up, it became clear that the rising tide was made up of hundreds of thousands of tiny insects, crawling and tumbling over each other as if they were a moving seascape. The officers took a step back.

  “What the hell?…”

  The two men in protective clothing waited for the initial surge of tiny bodies to subside and then edged forward through the open door, wading above their ankles in the teeming creatures; multitudes of them, all shapes and sizes, still being driven outwards by the pressure of their own weight. Minuscule red ants were clambering over larger beetles, which scrambled across the backs of grasshoppers and cockroaches. Mixed in haphazardly were worms and moths, all spreading out like an oil slick. Millions of legs waved wildly in the air, as though trying to gain a foothold.

  Within less than a minute the men re-emerged, in a state of agitation and trying to kick off the insects still clinging to their boots. They struggled to remove their face masks, as though in panic, then bent over as the masks fell to the floor, coughing violently and gasping for air. After a few seconds one of them straightened up and turned towards the police officers.

  “You need to get some of your people to look in there.” He was still trying to catch his breath as the other man removed his helmet.

  “I think there are two of them, but there is just about nothing left. Two human skeletons, both picked almost clean.”

  Chapter One

  If you have been lucky enough to be able to tell the truth for most of your life, you probably cannot imagine how exhausting it is to spend forever living a lie. The never-ending necessity to police the gap between the thoughts going on inside your head and what is being conveyed to the outside world by your words, your actions and your eyes.

  From the cheating wife or husband who spends years in the most intimate relationship with their spouse while living a parallel life with someone else, to the double agent whose safety depends on appearing as one thing to one side while being entirely something else to the other. In the end, it’s usually the sheer exhaustion of it which is their undoing.

  In my defence I would say that the effort has been hard for me, because deception was not something which came naturally. I had to learn how to conceal the appalling secret which I have kept for all these years, and I made many mistakes along the way. As for my brother Roger? Who knows? Who could ever really know what was going on in the mind of Roger?

  Roger was six years older than me, and a six-year gap normally means you have very little in common with your older brother. No shared friends, toys, mysteries or secret camps. The ten-year-old will have defrocked the tooth fairy before the four-year-old has lost his first teeth. The twelve-year-old will be wondering where Mum and Dad have hidden the presents, while the six-year-old is expecting them to arrive down the chimney. The fifty-year-old isn’t far from the forty-four-year-old, but the sixteen-year-old is a whole generation apart from his ten-year-old sibling. Normally.

  But Roger was never like any ordinary kid. I always knew that, though at the time I had no idea of why or how. These were the Fifties and Sixties, and while it’s true that Roger always was a bit difficult to categorize, if pressed to put a label on him, most peo
ple would have chosen the word “simple”.

  I remember forbidding hospitals with long echoing corridors painted green and cream, and smelling of the unequal battle between stale urine and antiseptic. We waited for many hours on hard chairs in cold rooms, with posters on noticeboards warning of everything from tooth decay to rabies. I watched from a distance as my beloved brother crouched over wooden shapes set out on a small table, trying his best to piece one to another. I saw the tiny lines ploughed in his forehead as he struggled to understand what it was that was being asked of him, and even then, when I was maybe two or three myself, I broke loose from whomever held me to rush over and hand him the round wooden tube that so very obviously was designed to go into the round wooden hole.

  I remember our mother sitting on the long bench seat at the back of the 54 bus on the journey home, her self-control faltering as she struggled to make sense of it all. Her whispered conversations with Dad behind closed doors, a mix of frustration and despair. “Why us?” and “What will become of him?”

  From my own point of view though, any awareness of a problem relating to Roger was way in the future. All I knew was that I had an older brother who was much taller than I was, but who liked to do the same stuff I liked. I was far too young to worry about what would become of him – I just loved that he did not treat me with the same contempt with which most older brothers treated their younger brothers, and that he was happy to play the same games that I wanted to play.

  Roger was content to take all the turns at being Silver, so that I could take all the turns in being the Lone Ranger. He was happy to be the camel so that I could be Lawrence of Arabia. He would blunder around for hours with a scarf tied around his eyes, while I shrieked and ducked and weaved as though one touch of his outstretched fingertips would spell instant electrocution.

  Photos taken at that time show two young boys, one tall and gangly, the other smaller and with more puppy fat; obvious siblings, one just a newer imprint of the other. Without exception they show two lads with smiling faces, perhaps carrying buckets and spades, or sitting side by side in a dodgem car or on a carousel, often with the bigger boy’s arm draped protectively over the shoulder of the younger.

  There seems to be nothing in those fading photographs to give any hint of what was to come. Here we are, Roger and I, sitting on the bank of a river holding fishing rods made out of bits of bamboo with a length of nylon attached. Here we are again sitting astride a concrete lion guarding the gates of a stately home. Two lads, one aged maybe four, the other ten, floppy haircuts and floppy limbs, neither with a care in the world.

  The younger brother in the photographs is undoubtedly the less good-looking, unquestionably the less athletic of the two. His beam into the camera is more guarded and less unswerving than the clear gaze of his older sibling. Though it is not comfortable to admit it, if forced to identify the retard in this picture, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the average observer would choose me.

  Of the two of us, I was the one who thought it a good idea to use my colouring crayons to join up the polka dots on the wallpaper in the bedroom we shared, while Roger confined his involvement to a fit of giggling. I was the one who experimented with the possibility of human flight by jumping off the garage roof, breaking my ankle in the attempt, and leaving Roger collapsed in tears on the grass as the ambulance took me away. And I was the one who took our home-made go-kart and careered within inches of the path of an oncoming bus.

  One day I was playing hopscotch near our house with three friends of my own age when a bigger boy who lived nearby decided to wreck our game by rubbing out our chalk lines on the pavement. Brian Maddox was the same age as Roger, but far bigger and stronger. More important than that, members of the Maddox family were used to fighting in a way that we were not. We were not soft, but neither were we quite that sort of family. Not like the Maddoxes.

  Brian pushed me to one side when I protested, and in a moment of recklessness much like the one which had propelled me off the garage roof and into space, I summoned all my strength and shoved him backwards. He regained his balance quickly and came back strong and hard, lashing out with closed fists. Instinctively I fought back, but I was no match for him.

  I still remember the look on Roger’s face when I came into the house, shedding floods of tears and bleeding from scraped knees. He seemed in that instant to become another person, someone I did not recognize, and I watched in amazement as he strode along the street towards a group of boys which included Brian, and attacked without pause or hesitation. There was a brief whirlwind of flailing limbs as Roger advanced and more or less fell onto the bully, both of them thudding down onto the concrete. It took three kids to pull Roger off the boy, who limped away with a stream of blood and saliva flowing from his mouth. After that, no one in the area bullied me again.

  Even in those earliest days, though, Roger had his softer side. I remember that we were driving one day to the seaside in Dad’s car, singing songs and generally having a good time, when there was the sound of a splat on the windscreen as a large flying insect met a dramatic end. Roger suddenly stopped singing.

  “What would happen,” he said after a few moments, “if enough cars drove along enough roads and killed enough insects?” He paused. “In the end, would there be any insects left?”

  There was silence as my mother tried to formulate her answer.

  “I don’t think there is much danger of that, Roger. There are so many fields and hedges and forests where there aren’t any cars,” she said, trying to sound reassuring. “But it is a pity—”

  “Yes,” my father interrupted her, “apart from anything else, they make such a bloody mess on the windscreen.” I was ready to burst out laughing, but just in time I saw a look of sadness in Roger’s face which I don’t think I had seen before, and had to make an effort to suppress my amusement.

  So yes, even from the earliest days, Roger and I were inseparable. If Roger was a problem, or had a problem, or caused a problem, then none of these problems were mine. All I had was the sort of older brother that everyone would wish for: bigger than me, stronger than me, and who would do anything for me, as indeed I would for him.

  It was only a matter of time before some busybody – maybe a doctor or a teacher or a social worker – suggested that it wasn’t good for me to spend so much time with Roger. It was nice that we were so close, but perhaps I needed some other friends of my own if my development was not to be impaired. No doubt the idea of two kids with restricted development so alarmed our parents that they were thrown into a panic. For several days there were whispered discussions which were said, when I enquired, to be “nothing to do with you”. It turned out that they were everything to do with me, because the upshot was that in the summer holidays of 1959, when I was eight, my parents made me join the local cubs, and I was packed off on the annual camping trip to Torbay.

  A more loyal fellow than I would be able to report the distress from missing his older brother and only true friend, every hour and every day, and of pining for the opportunity to make an early return. However such is the promiscuity of youth and the enchanting nature of anything new, that I should admit that for most of my time away I hardly missed Roger at all. The novelty of cooking our own food around campfires, of going on treasure hunts, building rafts and singing songs to the accompaniment of out-of-tune guitars, and all of it way past my usual bedtime, absorbed my small life.

  Once we had made the phone call to reassure our parents that we had arrived safely, we were encouraged to contact our homes as seldom as possible, and in my case this involved an occasional brief call on a crackly phone line from the red telephone box in the nearby village. My memories are all overlaid by the smell of damp cloth and canvas. Damp socks and sleeping bags. Damp grass and plimsolls. If I was missing Roger, I don’t think I sent a message to say so, and if he was missing me – well, the unattractive truth is that I hardly gave it a thought.

  Time is distorted in the young mind, and at
this vantage point I cannot recall whether I was away for as little as a week or as much as two. Whatever the case, I know that it was not until the end of the holidays, as we were packing up our soggy clothes into sodden bundles and pledging lifelong allegiance to the new friends we had made over burnt sausages and dew-soaked sleeping bags, that my mind returned to my family. Only then, as coaches departed en route to Basildon and Dagenham and other places on the periphery of my tiny universe, did I give any thought at all to what had become of Roger during what seemed to be a long absence. For all this time I had enjoyed constant entertainment and companionship, while he, I had little doubt, would have had few activities provided for him, and few if any friends to play with.

  Before leaving for the six-hour bus ride, we were instructed to make one last phone call home to confirm our expected time of arrival. Having reassured my mother that everything was fine and that I was looking forward to seeing her again, I asked:

  “How is Roger?”

  “Roger?” she said, as though she didn’t know whom I meant. “Oh, Roger’s fine.”

  “Has he been missing me?”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” she said. It was obviously not something she had thought about. “He hasn’t mentioned it.”

  In my self-centred world, for a moment I was hurt not to have been missed, and thought nothing of the fact that I had hardly missed Roger either. “Will he be there?…” I began to say, but she was gone.

  The journey back from Torbay seemed to take for ever, and was only punctuated from time to time by some half-hearted attempts at singing the songs which had sounded so melodious when sung around the campfire.

  After the hilarity of making faces and V-signs at passing motorists wore off, some of us went to sleep and others retreated into our own thoughts. Eventually, any feeling of guilt I experienced at not having communicated with the brother from whom I had been all but inseparable, gradually gave way to anxiety to see him; an anxiety that grew as the miles passed by and the thatches and hedges of rural England merged into suburbs. Though I hadn’t missed him at the time, I now missed him awfully in retrospect, so that by the time the bus neared the gates of the school where we were due to be met by our families, I found myself craning my neck to catch an early glimpse of Roger among the gathering.