The Insect Farm Read Online Free Page A

while seeming not to do so.
    I have now had many years in which to turn over in my mind the conversation I had on that evening with Harriet. So frequently have I done so that I believe I can recall it – if not precisely word for word – then as near to accurately as makes no difference. Since I have recalled it so often, what she said has gained the sense of the everyday that comes with familiarity, and so now I have entirely lost any perspective I may ever have had on how weird or otherwise it must have appeared at the time. She had a glass of red wine in one hand and a joint in the other, but seemed to be neither drunk nor stoned. I, on the other hand, had by now had too much to drink, which no doubt added to the mesmeric effect of her words.
    “I am not all that good at drinking alcohol or taking drugs,” she said, as though continuing some earlier conversation of ours without a pause, “but at the right volume and in the right place and time, rock music can do something for me that no narcotic can.” It was as if she had been thinking about this for ages, and had decided that this was the moment to express it. No doubt her mood was partially drug-induced, but still there was something within and about her that made what would usually come across as pretentious rubbish sound real.
    “Music comes into your body through the ears, right?” She raised her eyebrows in enquiry. “But in a weird sort of way I also feel that somehow it comes in through my eyes, my nose and through every pore of my skin.” She paused, her pupils darting left and right and joining the dots between the silver stars upon the purple sky of the ceiling, searching for the right simile. Then she seemed to find it. “It’s like the lovemaking between two people who have come to know each other over many years. A little stimulation here, a hint of a caress somewhere else, the brush of lips across your skin. The music has the power to join all my senses together, each one overlapping the last, to build me up and up, finally reaching a level where to go forward would tip you over, but to go back would disappoint. And to stay there, for seconds, maybe minutes, before being taken gently or convulsively back down to earth.”
    Maybe it was just adolescent rubbish, but I didn’t think so then, and I still don’t think so now. What I do know for sure is that Harriet wasn’t like anyone else I had met before. Leave aside what she said about the music: I was seventeen for heaven’s sake, and here was this wonderful girl talking about soft kissing and experienced lovers and caresses on the skin.
    “I love the opera,” she continued, “and in the right time and place I love jazz. But there is something about rock music the way we heard it tonight. Something about how those guitar notes seem to come from a union of the soul with the instrument, and flow from the musician to the hearer like thebolt of lightning passing life from God to Adam.” I know, I know, but this is what she said. I was lost. Lost for words, lost for an appropriate reaction, lost in Harriet.
    The Carnaby Street flat was small and there were probably a dozen of us, and so, even if it had been anywhere on her agenda, there was no chance that she and I could have been alone, and that’s not to mention the matter of my current girlfriend. Harriet and I were sitting on the landing on the stairs just outside the door of the flat when Angela put her head halfway out.
    “Aren’t you supposed to be doing something with Roger?”
    Oh God! I was supposed to be home for Roger.
    In the year since I had started studying seriously for my A-level exams, the duty of taking care of Roger had fallen entirely on my parents, and the strain was showing. This is not to suggest that I had been of all that much help before, but just the fact of having me around, able to go with Roger to the cinema or to the football, gave my parents an occasional break from the otherwise continuous