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been carved out of wood. Some of the tunnels led to dead ends, but there was one main thoroughfare.
    “Did Dad make that with you?” I asked. I was keen to know how it had all been possible, but also didn’t want to detract from Roger’s achievement.
    “He got the wood for me and showed me how to use a chisel,” said Roger, and then smiled proudly, “but I did all the carving. Do you like it?”
    Harriet said that it looked fabulous, and asked what it was for. Roger did not hesitate.
    “It’s called a formicarium. It’s a way of keeping and studying ants. When you first put them in you can see how they are scared and confused. They run around this way and that and seem to be in a panic. They hurry down whatever route is in front of them and bump into the ends and don’t know what to do. But then gradually you see them learning about their surroundings, and after a while they know their way around, and you can see them scurrying back and forth carrying food. Before you know it they have organized themselves into their own way of doing things.”
    I was watching Roger carefully as he spoke, and realized, not for the first time, how little I really knew about what went on inside that strange mind of his. I had always known that he lived in a little world of his own, but the world he had constructed around him was far more elaborate and sophisticated than I ever would have thought possible.
    Once again, it was Harriet who picked up the conversation. “A bit like Adam and Eve when they were first put into the Garden of Eden,” she said. It was a reference Roger recognized from the times that he and I used to be sent to Sunday School as kids, and the comparison seemed to delight him. There was a brief silence as he absorbed the thought.
    “Yes,” he said, “exactly like that.” When I looked again at him he was smiling and his face was glowing. “I am, indeed, a benevolent God.”

Chapter Five
    The group of teenagers who hung out together at that time came from very similar backgrounds, and no doubt we had very similar interests, tastes and idiosyncrasies. We were young and badly wanted to be different from the grown-ups who seemed to rule our lives, but few of us wanted to be different from one another. We all lived in the same neighbourhood and went to one of two or three similar schools. We all had parents who had jobs, some more exalted than others, no doubt, but none of us were likely to be short of the basics of living. Some of us were painfully thin, but none of us was especially fat. We all dressed alike and had untidy hair and affected accents which were a bit more working class than the ones we were brought up with.
    We dabbled in a small way with marijuana, some took a few French blues or purple hearts, but none was into anything harder. Like most kids of that age, from time to time we all drank a bit too much beer or wine, and I worked out quite early that I seemed to lack the off switch in my brain which told most of my friends that they had consumed enough.
    Among this otherwise rather homogeneous group was the man who was eventually going to change all of our lives forever. He was called Brendan Harcourt, and from the very first he was not quite like the rest of us.
    When most of us were keen, within limits, to conform within our group, Brendan did not seem to care. If we all wore denims, he wore cords. If we were wearing T-shirts and granddad vests, he wore a polo shirt. We all wore scruffy-looking walking shoes known as desert boots, and Brendan would think nothing of turning up in a pair of business shoes that even my dad would have thought were a bit old-fashioned. While most of the kids with a talent for music were trying their best to play Bob Dylan songs on the guitar, we heard that Brendan was learning to play the cello.
    I have saved to the last the main differentiating factor which made Brendan Harcourt so different from everyone else in our group. While most of us had brown hair or black