Turtle Diary

by Russell Hoban

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, leaning close to the opening in the glass partition. ‘I couldn’t hear you.’

  ‘We’ll …’ he said as a plane screamed low overhead.

  I sank back in the seat, didn’t ask again.

  The house was on a crescent opposite a football pitch, a paddling pool and a playground. The far end of the crescent looked more posh, the houses a little grander and overlooking the common. William G.’s end was Georgian terraced houses, three storeys, quite plain. I paid the driver and as he drove off I wished I’d asked him about 1975 again. I really did want to know what he’d do if it came and went without the Lord’s taking a stand either way. Too late, the chance was gone.

  There were no nameplates, only one bell. I rang it. A fiery-looking foreign-looking man with a violent moustache answered the door. He was wearing a Middle-Eastern sort of dressing-gown that had more colour and pattern than one really cared to see in a single garment. Red velvet slippers, very white feet and ankles with very black hair. He looked as if he had strong political convictions.

  ‘I’ve come to see Mr G.,’ I said.

  ‘Top,’ said the man and stood aside.

  I went up, stood outside William G.’s door waiting for my heart to stop pounding. Too many cigarettes. The violent-moustached man had come upstairs too and was producing violent smells in a tiny kitchen on the landing. I could ask him to force the door if necessary. I tried not to think of what we might find. I knocked.

  William G. opened the door, looked startled. ‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘Come in.’

  I gasped, found nothing to say. The room was not as I had imagined it, had white walls, an orange Japanese paper lamp. Modern furniture, mail-order Danish.

  ‘You look quite done up,’ he said. ‘I’ll get you some coffee.’

  21

  William G.

  It was absolutely uncanny, gave me the creeps. That woman actually thought I’d been thinking of suicide.

  I had been thinking of it right enough, I often do, always have the idea of it huddled like a sick ape in a corner of my mind. But I’d never do it. At least I don’t think I’d do it, can’t imagine a state of mind in which I’d do it. Well, that’s not true either. I can imagine the state of mind, I’ve been in it often enough. No place for the self to sit down and catch its breath. Just being hurried, hurried out of existence. When I feel like that even such a thing as posting a letter or going to the launderette wears me out. The mind moves ahead of every action making me tired in advance of whatever I do. Even a thing as simple as changing trains in the Underground becomes terribly heavy. I think ahead to the sign on the platform at the next station, think of getting out of the train, going through the corridor, up the escalator, waiting on the platform. I think of how many trains will come before mine, think of getting on when it comes, think of the signs that will appear, think of getting out, going up the steps, out into the street. As the mind moves forward the self is pushed back, everything multiplies itself like mirrors receding laboriously to infinity, repeating endlessly even the earwax in the ears, the silence in the eyes.

  When I was a child there was a mirror in the hallway and at some point I became aware that the mirror saw more than what was simply right in front of it. It privately reflected a good deal of hallway on both sides out of the corner of its eye so to speak. By putting my nose right up against the glass I could almost see round those corners, could almost see what the mirror was keeping to itself, the whole hallway perhaps. All of it, everything, things I couldn’t see. Spiders in webs in the shadows, the other side of the light through the coloured leaded glass of the door. The shadow of the postman today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow.

  My father did, I think. Commit suicide. Although they called it an accident. His car went over a cliff into the sea. On to some rocks that you can see at low tide but not high water. No collision, no skid marks or anything. My mother kept the newspaper cutting, I still have it somewhere. Who knows what might have appeared in the road coming towards him. The rest of his life maybe. At Paddington I’ve seen pigeons on the tube platform walk into a train and out again while the doors were still open, knowing where they didn’t want to go.

  Neaera H. can’t be in very good shape either if her mind is running on that sort of thing. She was deathly pale when she turned up at my door. It took her a while to come out with it, then she said in a half-whisper looking down at her coffee cup that she’d had all this green water in her mind and a white shark coming up from below. Well of course they’re always in me I suppose, coming up from the darkness and the deep-water chill. But I wouldn’t say I’m broadcasting sharks, and if she’s pulling them in out of the air she must be pretty well round the bend.

  She told me a little about herself, and her kind of life isn’t much better than mine. At least in the shop I’m out in the world, get out of myself a little. She goes for days sometimes without seeing anyone, staying up till all hours. No wonder she gets morbid. And now it seems she’s on my wavelength. That’s all I need. My mind isn’t much of a comfort to me but at least I thought it was private. She’s going to wear herself out if she keeps tuning in like that. The inside of my head is a pretty tiresome place for someone whose own head isn’t all that jolly.

  I must find out about a van. It’s well over two hundred miles to Polperro, closer to three hundred I should think. Night driving. I’d rather drive at night than during the day but either way the thought of it fills me with dread. And I’m scared of the turtles. That big male loggerhead could take your hand off with one bite. I could ask George Fairbairn to come with us and he might do it but that’s no good. Whatever this awful thing is that I’ve got myself into, it’s my thing and I’ve got to do it alone with that weird lady.

  I can’t imagine that it’ll come off without some sort of disaster. If we drive all night we’ll have to sleep part of the next day before starting back. I’ll be away from the shop one whole day, maybe more. I can always say I’m sick. Things are pretty slow now, Mr Meager and Harriet can get along without me for a day or two. I won’t say I’m sick but I won’t say turtles either. I need the time off for personal reasons.

  Good God, is she going to become some sort of responsibility now? Have I got to keep happy thoughts singing and dancing in my mind so as not to plunge her into a suicidal depression? How much do I know about her actually when it comes right down to it? She lives alone, writes and illustrates children’s books, doesn’t seem very happy. She’s not interested in me romantically, I’d have felt it if she were. But we’ve fallen into something together whatever it might be. I don’t think I want to know any more about it just now.

  22

  Neaera H.

  Oh, dear. What have I done now? Where are my bees? Suddenly I feel a stranger in my own flat. The clutter on the drawing table, the books and papers on the desk, the typewriter, Madame Beetle in her tank and the plants in the window have all gone blank and baffling.

  Caister men never turn back. But I’m not a Caister man. My Caister two-stone confers no magic, it’s only a touchstone for the terrors that I try to cover up with books and papers and plants in the window. My mind feels as if it’s gone into hiding from me and is reflecting privately on matters of its own. Identity is a shaky thing. This is my place, my work, my water-beetle. Silly. Water-beetles can’t be owned any more than bees can. Nothing can be owned for that matter. A typewriter? Not really. You pay for the machine, keep it in your flat, use it. But I might go out one day and never come back and the typewriter would remain, belonging only to itself. When a ewe licks a new-born lamb all over I believe that’s called owning it but the ewe never really owns the lamb. That awful gathering-up feeling is in me again. My life can’t be drawing to a close yet. I’m not greedy but it can’t be ending so soon. Who will tell my bees and will they make honey for their next mistress? Same bees, different people, over and over.

  If I could see an oyster-catcher … No, it isn’t just the bird, it’s the distance, the widene
ss. I am so unquiet. What have I done? Making a fool of myself is the least of it. What’s happening to my mind? The green water, the white glimmer and the open jaws: my ocean and shark, not his? Mine as well as his, that certainly. I wish I’d never seen those turtles, never seen Polperro. Could someone tell the turtles, give them a bit of crape to stream behind them in the water? If it hadn’t been the turtles I suppose it would have been something else.

  I can’t get it out of my mind, how I must have looked sitting there with the cup clattering in the saucer. ‘Are you all right?’ he said. ‘Is anything the matter? You don’t look well.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘You must think I’m insane, I’ve never done anything like this before, I had such a dreadful feeling, I thought you might be … They gave me your address at the shop, I said it was urgent, possibly a matter of… There was all that green water and a shark coming up from below, terrible, terrible.’ I actually went on like that, blurted out all those things.

  He lit a cigarette and kept shaking the match but it wouldn’t go out. He blew it out. ‘Why did you think I … Why did you think it had anything to do with me?’ he said, and certainly his voice was shaking.

  ‘Well, it wasn’t mine,’ I said lamely, hearing how idiotic I sounded.

  ‘How could it not be yours?’ he said. He looked cruel when he said it. ‘You had a dreadful feeling, a terrible dream or thought or something and you say it wasn’t yours but mine. That’s rather curious, isn’t it?’ His voice seemed to be coming from a dark and tiny place, he seemed clearer and smaller and sharper and farther away as he spoke. I felt as if I might faint.

  ‘Stop it,’ I said. ‘You’re not being honest.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re not either,’ he said. ‘Some people won’t look at what’s in them, they sweep everything under the carpet. Everything’s quite all right with them, they’re never depressed. When the shark comes up out of the dark and the chill that’s somebody else’s shark not theirs. They’re all right, Jack.’

  I almost hated him for that. Any situation imposes rules of some kind and a gentleman abides by them. By coming to his door in a half-crazed state I’d created a situation in which a gentleman would have been equally open even if it made him look as crazy as I was. William G. was not wholly a gentleman and I was sorry for us both.

  ‘You’re being careful,’ I said.

  ‘I’m being careful!’ he said. ‘What about you? You’ve had green water and a shark and now you’re trying to put it on me so it won’t be you that’s falling apart.’

  We were both frightened and angry, a long silence followed. Then we began to speak calmly and politely, avoiding the shark. We exchanged humdrums, presentable bits of ourselves: what I did, what he did, how this was and that. We became slightly acquainted in the dreariest conventional way. I wanted to be shot of the whole turtle affair and I knew he did too but there it was like a massive chain welded to leg irons on both of us and clanking maddeningly.

  We couldn’t get to a better place in our conversation. It simply became a matter of sitting there until we could move away from our common discomfort and go back to our separate individual ones. We repeated things that needed no repetition: I said of course we must share the cost of the van, he said he’d let me know as soon as George Fairbairn got in touch with him. We both mumbled about the possible inconvenience of having to act on short notice, both agreed that that’s how it was with this sort of thing.

  I went home by bus.

  23

  William G.

  ‘Did Miss H. ever reach you?’ Harriet said when I came into the shop on Monday.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘she did.’

  ‘I hope it was all right,’ she said, ‘giving her your address and telephone number.’

  ‘Perfectly all right,’ I said. ‘Silly of me not to have given it to her before.’

  ‘I had no idea she was a friend of yours,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Haven’t known her long actually,’ I said busying myself unwrapping a shipment.

  ‘Funny when you meet authors,’ said Harriet. ‘Mostly they don’t look as you’d imagine them.’

  ‘How would you have imagined her?’ I said.

  ‘Short rather than tall,’ said Harriet, ‘plump rather than thin. Married rather than not. She isn’t married, is she?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘She isn’t.’ I made a lot of noise with the wrapping paper and the conversation lapsed.

  Harriet is next in line to Mr Meager and senior to me at the shop. She’s about thirty and I can remember when she did her hair in the style of the Ladies-in-Waiting at the Coronation. She’s a tall thin girl from quite a good family, her father is an MP and her face is a constant reproach even though she’s not at all bad-looking. She used to dress very conservatively, lived at home, walked as if the streets were full of rapists and wore shoes that looked as if they were designed for self-defence.

  I don’t recall just when it happened but all of a sudden she came in one day wearing sandals, the kind you get at shops where they sell Arab dresses and incense. There were her white naked startled feet at the bottom of the still conservatively dressed pleated-skirt Harriet and I guessed she’d lost her virginity but little else. Her nervous-looking feet still hadn’t left home. Thank God my feet are in shoes most of the time. They don’t look as if they will ever walk in happy ways and I’m pleased not to see them.

  Harriet’s feet walked easier after a time. She took to wearing long full skirts and cheesecloth blouses, her hair came down. She got herself a room, stopped wearing a bra every day and bought Time Out every week.

  So there was her copy of Time Out in the kitchen at the shop and I had a look at the Classified adverts, CLAIRVOYANT and HYPNOTISM were available, ANOREXIA NERVOSA, CONSULTATIONS IN CONFIDENCE. Also NUDIST CLUB (Females free), MASSAGE TUITION, RUBBER ENTHUSIASTS, TAROT DIVINATION, NATURAL FOODS, CANDLE-MAKING, ATTRACTIVE ORIENTAL CHICK (Why was she in Miscellaneous instead of Lonely Hearts?), HOMOSEXUAL MEN AND WOMEN, PICNIC — Bring just one ingredient to share, ENCOUNTER, GROWTH CENTRE, QUAESITOR, KALEIDOSCOPE — Bio-Energetic Workshop. I glanced only briefly at Lonely Hearts in which Sensitive sensual male, 23, Handsome Aquarius, 37, and UP TO SIX DATES from only £1 offered themselves.

  There are times when I do something and then I say: It’s come to that. That is of course different things at different times. It’s come to a lot of thats in my life and I suppose they’ll keep happening right up to the last and final one when perhaps my last words will be: It’s come to that.

  BIO-FEEDBACK, said one advert. Alpha-Wave Machine. I’d read something about that in a magazine. People who can do proper meditation get into a state of quiet alertness in which their brain waves change, and there are now machines for monitoring the brain waves so you can hear yourself getting into or out of the state that produces alpha waves. I didn’t think I could make even one alpha wave, I didn’t think there was one quiet place in my brain. I just wished the turtles and Neaera H. would go away although sometimes I didn’t. I wished that I could turn off my head, stop thinking. My dreams are usually busy with Dora and the girls so I don’t even have any spare mental time when I’m asleep and I mostly wake up feeling worn out. Sexual fantasies offer a little distraction but aren’t really restful. Reading is all right but not always, Dostoyevsky overstimulates my mind. Cinemas are cosy until you have to go home, TV feels like self-abuse.

  Lately my fantasies have been of a place that doesn’t exist. Not Port Liberty. Port Liberty is for the clear-eyed, the competent, the strong. My fantasy is of a give-up place. At County Hall maybe, in a grotty corridor, a door with frosted glass: DEPARTMENT OF CAPITULATION AND UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER. The usual stand-up desks along the wall with dried-up biros on chains. Forms to fill in: Campaigns in which served, Terms if sought, Next of kin. A kindly Indian civil servant to give procedural advice. One capitulates or surrenders unconditionally, signs things over and is sent to some kind of refuge for non-contenders. I never imagine the refuge, just
the giving up. Whether they have TV or books or brothels I don’t know but it’s out of the struggle. Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas, ease after war and all that. At least there’s a model of Port Liberty but the Department of Capitulation and Unconditional Surrender doesn’t exist anywhere in any form. The loony-bin isn’t the same thing. I’m not crazy but then maybe nobody is. So I rang up Mr Bio-Feedback.

  The place was in St John’s Wood. Big bright spacious flat, high ceilings. The kind of flat that so many young Americans seem to have found or inherited from expatriate uncles before rents went up and unfurnished flats became impossible to find. Mattresses on the floor with Indian spreads, many colourful cushions, some modern things, some rattan. Home-made abstractions and blown-up photos on the walls. Lots of shelves, lots of books. Expensive sound-equipment, speakers about four feet high.

  The young man with the Bio-Feedback machine was a sleek and healthy beard-and-sandals American with a wonderful head of hair that looked as if it might charge him like a battery pack. Very peaceful and serene-looking, looked as if there were mostly alpha waves in his head. Cheques from home, I thought. Very likely never worked a day in his life. Family man too, the bathroom was full of toys and infant gear.

  The alpha-wave detector was quite a modest little plastic-box affair that didn’t look as if it had more than £5 worth of parts and labour in it. He’d set it up on an impressive scaffolding of planks and pipes but it still didn’t look like more than £5.

  ‘What do you do for a living?’ I said.

  ‘This,’ he said peacefully. ‘And I’m the company’s representative for the machines so I’ll be selling them too.’

  I sank into one of those big plastic hassocks that look like overripe tomatoes that have hit the ground and somehow not burst.

  ‘You?’ he said while he dabbed electrolytic jelly on the side and back of my head and fitted the electrodes. I felt ashamed of my dandruff.