Free The Insect Farm by Stuart Prebble Page A

be able to do with Harriet exactly what all those morons at the awards ceremony had fantasized about. I put my hands onher hips as she walked ahead of me up the stairs, and when she turned towards me she was smiling.
    “Jonathan, I don’t think so,” she whispered. “It would wake your parents.”
    I was disappointed, but knew she was probably right. By now it was the early hours of the morning, and there was complete silence in the house. “Anyway, to be honest, I’m shattered.” She bent down from her exalted position on the stair ahead of me and kissed me on the forehead. “Maybe tomorrow?”
    I put a brave face on the inevitable and managed a halfhearted smile.
    “Yes, tomorrow.”
    Despite the very long day and emotional exhaustion, I found sleeping on an air mattress in Roger’s room a challenge. I closed my eyes and tried to empty my head of all the unwelcome thoughts which had filled it during the evening. My best efforts were to little avail, and my mind was invaded by images of this exquisitely beautiful creature surrounded by ever more grotesque and multiplying caricatures of sweating and salivating men. No matter how determined I was to convince myself that my anxieties were unfounded, somehow I was simply unable to accept that Harriet was entirely mine, and that niggling sharp edge of doubt was enough to drive me to distraction.
    It was already getting light before I dozed off, and when I woke four hours later, everyone was up and about, and I wasglad to see Harriet and my parents chatting over breakfast in the kitchen. I asked where Roger was.
    “See if you can guess,” said my dad. I opened the back door into the garden and walked down the path to see him. For some reason it seemed appropriate that I should knock on the door of the shed – the insect farm felt like his exclusive domain. Hearing no response, I turned the handle carefully and stepped into the gloom.
    “Hi, Roger. How did you sleep?”
    My brother turned to look up from the workbench and smiled at me but, as quite often happened, he did not feel it necessary to answer my question. I walked towards him and stood by his shoulder. Lying flat on the surface in front of him on the desktop was a perspex sheet, covering what looked like an aerial view of a huge and busy metropolis. As usual I needed time for my eyes to adjust to the light, and as they did I could see thousands upon thousands of oversized ants, some larger than others, some with red markings and others with black markings, scurrying around as if in the Tokyo rush hour.
    “Wow, Roger,” I said. “This is great. What’s going on here?” Clearly he was delighted to be asked.
    “These are my new red tropical fire ants,” he announced proudly. “They come from Western Australia. I sent for them. They are as old as the dinosaurs, and they have an advanced social system where they look after the young and the old, and all of them take care of their queen.”
    Neither of us spoke for a while as I looked more closely at the apparently frantic activity going on beneath me. I noticed a piece of polythene tubing extending from a hole which had been drilled in the perspex. Just at the open end of the tube, lying on the bench, lay the half-decomposed carcass of a caterpillar. Perhaps three hundred ants were clambering all over it, nudging and prodding and nibbling.
    “Some of the soldier ants stand guard while the others feed – but the ones climbing all over it don’t actually eat what they are consuming. They take it into what’s called their ‘social stomach’. When they have had their fill, they return to the nest, and regurgitate the food to their young and the old.”
    “That’s cute,” I said. “How do they do that?”
    Again Roger did not hesitate. “Through kissing,” he said. “They clamp their mouths together and transfer it, and when the younger and older ants have had enough to eat, the soldier ants digest what’s left for themselves.”
    “And they all