Read Online The Insect Farm by Stuart Prebble - Free Book Online Page A

bigger grains and sometimes pale blue, sometimes pale green gravel or tiny stones.
    At first glance, and with my eyes still adjusting, it was not possible to detect much movement or anything of great interest. Only if you concentrated on one tank, in one spot, and focused in tight close-up, could you begin to make out the interconnecting highways and tunnels which made up the networks of these communities. The first one I looked at, close to the door and benefiting from some extra light from outside, contained what seemed like ordinary soil. I recognized it as the project Roger had been working on when I first brought Harriet to meet him. Looking closer at it now, I could make out the grooves which had been excavated next to the glass, enabling tens and then hundreds of oversized ants to tumble over each other, darting this way and that, apparently indiscriminately.
    “Dad,” I said, “what on earth is in all of these?”
    “God knows. I lost track of them months ago. Worms, beetles, butterflies, locusts, spiders – you name it, he is collecting it.”
    My attention shifted further into the shed, where I could see some glass tanks which were not filled with soil, but instead were more like very narrow aquariums – with bits of stick and leaves where you might expect to see weeds and a sunken shipwreck. At first glance there seemed to be nothing moving,but then my dad pointed out the shape of a huge moth, its wings more or less indistinguishable from its surroundings, sitting motionless on a fragment of twig. “I believe they’re from South America,” said my dad, “very rare apparently.”
    “Astonishing. Does he send for them, or what?”
    “Some he does. He spends everything he earns – from whatever bits of work he does at the day centre and anything your mum and I give him – on mail order, and so there’s a constant stream of parcels arriving at the door.” He gestured towards the wall at the back of the shed, which was piled high with cardboard boxes, most of them small and square. I walked across to look more closely and examined the labels.
    “ Lep-tin-o-tarsa decem-lineata .” The words were entirely unfamiliar and I pronounced each syllable slowly and separately, and then again, trying to get a flow. “I wonder what that is in English.” I picked up several others and squinted at the names through the half-light. Timarcha tenebricosa . Dorcus parallelipipedus . Sinodendron cylindricum . I tried another one aloud: “ Xestobium rufovillosum . Are all these inside these tanks and starting up their own colonies?”
    “That’s one of the few names I recognize,” said Dad. “It’s the deathwatch beetle. Over here.” I walked across to where he was standing and he indicated one of the tanks which, like most of the others, seemed to contain only decaying twigs and leaves. Once again I had to wait for my eyes to adjust to be able to make out the tiny creatures. “Press your ear to the glass,” said my dad. I did so, and after a few moments Icould hear a faint clicking sound. “That’s a mating call which they make when they are boring holes in your floorboards. I told Roger to make sure they are secure, because they’ll eat the bloody house if you give them the chance.”
    “You see, that’s extraordinary,” I said, “and illustrates what I was saying earlier. You can’t see anyone else on that bus being capable of even embarking on something like this. We all know that Roger has his problems, but you’ve got to have grasped a huge amount of stuff to be able to put all this together.”
    “All I can tell you is that his doctors and carers say he is too obsessed by it. After all,” my dad’s tone of voice changed a bit, as if he was reverting to a matter of greater gravity, “after all, by the time your mum and I can’t look after him any more, Roger is going to have to be as independent as he can be. He needs to be able to do some kind of work which will pay a few bills and keep him