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Excerpt

Excerpt

The Insect Farm

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 all the time 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 defense 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 what Roger was, most people 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 notice boards displaying posters 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 plowed 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 whoever 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 over 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.

The Insect Farm
by by Stuart Prebble