Turtle Diary

by Russell Hoban

  34

  Neaera H.

  At two o’clock in the morning near Exeter William topped up the tank again. I was glad there weren’t more petrol stations open. He seemed to want to arrive at Polperro with a full tank, as if he had information that all the petrol stations on the road back would disappear by morning.

  At a quarter to three we had more sandwiches and coffee about twenty miles from Plymouth. We’d done two hundred miles by then, only about fifty to go. I wondered if he’d stop for petrol between here and Polperro. The road was quiet, there were long intervals between cars, I listened to the turtles breathing. Ahead of us in the lay-by a big articulated lorry was resting like a tired monster. The crabs in the road marched on inscrutably towards London. What would they say when they got there?

  We went on through Plymouth, wakeful through the sleeping streets. We crossed the Tamar Bridge at half past three under bluish lights that seemed quite outside of time, like the yellow ones earlier. Lear’s words about the silent-roaring ocean had got into my head and I felt myself filled with silent roaring. It may in fact have been snoring although if it was, William was too tactful to say so. I dozed off and woke up as we came down the hill into Polperro. The sky had cleared completely and there was bright moonlight over everything.

  BEYOND THIS POINT ONLY EXEMPTED VEHICLES PERMITTED 9 A.M.-6 P.M., said the sign. We went beyond this point down the main street, past the model village in its model sleep, past the dark and silent cream teas and souvenirs, turned into the street that led to Jonathan Couch’s house and parked on the little bridge in front of it. We could have turned into the very narrow street that went the remaining two hundred yards or so to the outer harbour but William drew the line at that, he didn’t want to risk scratching the van or waking anybody up with the noise of our manoeuvres. As it was we kept expecting lights to go on, windows to fly up and policemen to appear.

  We’d neither of us bothered to find out about the tide in advance. Whether it was in or out we’d launch the turtles. But I think we both felt the same: if the tide was in the ocean was with us and our venture would prosper, if it was out it meant that things were no different from the way they always were, just a lot of damned bother and aggravation. Then I stopped caring about signs and omens and whether it would go well or badly. Our part in the rhythm of things was to put the turtles in the sea and however it went would be the way it went. Getting stuck in the mud or drowning or breaking a leg or being had up by the police might or might not be part of it. I stopped caring about people waking up, I felt relaxed and invulnerable.

  We rounded the corner, went down the street. The boats in the inner harbour were all afloat. ‘It’s in,’ we both said at the same time. The wind hit us in the face, we heard the crashing of the waves as we half ran round the next corner and up the incline to the outer harbour. The low-tide beach was gone, under the full moon the tide was surging wildly against the breakwater, spray was flying and the sea was breaking halfway up the steps. And the wind, the wind, the full-moon spring-tide turtle wind.

  Back to the van we went without a word. William dragged out the first crate, tipped it on to the trolley and wheeled it away with an amount of noise that would have waked the dead. I followed with the rope. I thought it would take both of us to get the trolley up the incline but William did it by himself. At the breakwater we wrestled the crate off the trolley, laid it on the steps as on a slipway and lowered it with the rope through the ringbolts. ‘Don’t be alarmed, ladies and gentlemen,’ I said, ‘those chains are made of chrome steel.’ William must have seen the film, he was laughing whilst standing on the steps with the tide breaking over his feet.

  I gave him slack as he up-ended the crate on the edge of a step, he tilted it forward and with a great splash the turtle hit the water and dived. We hugged and kissed each other, ran back for the next turtle, launched it, then the next. Each one dived under the wild water and was gone. It was done, it had actually happened. Three empty crates and the turtles safely off.

  ‘The champagne!’ said William. He rushed off, came back with the bottle and the two cups from the Thermos flask. He popped the cork into the wind, the champagne foamed up in the moonlight. ‘Here’s wishing them luck,’ we said, and drank to the turtles. The waves were silver under the moon, the spray flew up from the rocks on either side of the harbour entrance, there was a beacon on the headland. The champagne tasted like clear and bubbling bright new mornings without end. We gulped it greedily and threw the empty bottle into the ocean. The ocean was rough and real, always real, only real. It wasn’t Polperro’s fault that the place had to go begging with souvenirs and money-boxes and a model village. I forgave Polperro, loved it for what it had been and what it now was, for its happiness and sorrow by the sea. I forgave myself for not loving it before, loved myself for loving it now. I forgave everybody everything, felt the Caister two-stone in the pocket of my mac, flung it out into the moonlit ocean.

  35

  William G.

  When I felt the wind on my face and saw that the tide was in it seemed all at once that I didn’t need any answers to anything. The tide and the moon, the beacon on the headland and the wind were so here, so this, so now that nothing else was required. I felt free of myself, unlumbered. Where the moon ended and I began and which was which was of no consequence. Everything was what it was and the awareness of it was part of it.

  The crates came out of the van and on to the trolley easily, went up the incline smoothly, there was no separation between crate and trolley and me and motion. It happened, turtles happened into the ocean, champagne happened in the moonlight.

  On the way back to the big car-park we stopped at the public lavatory. Adamant, said the urinal. There was a device like the Order of the Garter but with a lion on top. Something that looked like an owl’s face in the middle. Here, now. Coming out I listened to the stream that runs through the village, heard an owl quavering in the dark. Not adamant, nothing adamant.

  We pulled into the car-park, I switched off the engine. We got into the back of the van with the eiderdown and the blankets and the pillows. We lay down with our clothes on, side by side with a little space between us. First we lay on our backs then we rolled over on our sides. The space rolled over with us, stayed quietly between us all night, shaped of the front of me and the back of her.

  36

  Neaera H.

  I woke up in the van. Ah yes, I thought, this is where I went to sleep. There was wood near my face smelling salty, oceany. Empty turtle crate. I put my ear to it, listened: silent-roaring ocean. There was rope, I touched it, licked my fingers: salt. I touched the trolley, salty as well. I rolled over, there was William still asleep. It seemed like spying to look at his sleeping face so I got out of the van.

  It was afternoon. Vans with curtains in the windows were parked on either side of us and people inside them were being domestic. Refreshment and souvenir stands were open at the car-park entrance. A man with a horse and a bedizened yellow wagon half full of passengers beckoned to me like the coachman who took Pinocchio to the Land of Boobies.

  Stupid really, to feel as I did just then: low-spirited and dissatisfied. There was no reason for it. We had come to Polperro to put turtles into the sea and we’d done it.

  The sunlight was hot, the sky was blue. I felt all astray. At home the day and I always approached each other by slow degrees: brushing my teeth, washing my face, the first cup of coffee, the first cigarette, opening the post. Here I had nothing, just suddenly some rough beast of a day with vans and curtains and people feeding children.

  Scale is a funny thing. Sometimes on hot days everything seems too big and spread out. Not to be grasped by the mind, not to be held in the eye. I thought of winter. Winter grey skies, winter early evenings make London small like a model town. Lighted windows in shops are like model shop windows, tobacconist, launderette, bakery. I saw the little model streets in my mind, the shops. In the model bakery, a three-tiered wedding-cake, great in its tinyness. P
ictures of other wedding-cakes: the ‘Windsor’, the ‘Paradise’, the ‘Wedgwood’. Small, small, astonishing detail in the model memory, all there to be found. The model Polperro here at Polperro was still in my mind, I compared it to the model London. The Polperro one was much bigger, huge and thick, not to be held in the mind or in the eye.

  37

  William G.

  When I woke up and saw the bright sunlight the night before seemed far away and small. I was stiff and sore all over. Neaera wasn’t there. I opened the doors and saw her leaning against the concrete wall of the car-park. I thought about the turtles and I couldn’t believe they’d got out to sea against that heavy tide. Surely they’d been beaten back against the breakwater or swept into the harbour through a gap where the boats go in and out. They were probably in the harbour now, they’d probably been picked up by fishermen.

  We slowly made our way through tourists and their children to the public lavatory. I hadn’t brought a toothbrush or shaving things or anything. I brushed my teeth with my finger, washed and let it go at that. Slowly and blinking in the sunlight we went to a teashop where we had sausages and eggs. It was while we were eating that I most felt the awkwardness of this morning after. Afternoon actually, worse than a morning. Sometimes I’ve felt that way after sleeping with the wrong person, and the intimacy of sex is nothing compared with the intimacy of driving two hundred and fifty miles at night and putting turtles into the sea. But it wasn’t that, it wasn’t that she was the wrong person for the turtles. I didn’t know what it was. There seemed to be little for us to say to each other. Nothing in fact.

  We walked to the harbour. The tide was out when we got there, the boats were standing on their legs or sitting on the mud. The little beach beyond the breakwater displayed broken glass and contraceptives. There were some fishermen sitting on the quay and I asked them when high water had been. Seven in the morning, they said. No one said anything about turtles and there were none in sight. They must have got out to sea all right. We walked back to the car-park, got into the van and drove back to London.

  38

  Neaera H.

  Well, then. This was the back of the turtle thing. Not quite despair as I had thought before. Just a kind of blankness, as blank and foolish as a pelmet lying face-down on the floor with all the staples showing. That’s all right, a pelmet can have a front and a back, it’s only a thing. A dress can have an inside and an outside. A drawing is only on one side of the paper, even a drawing by Rembrandt.

  But an action, no. An action with a front and back is no good.

  We drove back to London. We scarcely spoke a word. We had lunch and supper at road-side places full of motion and absence where there was ketchup in red tomato-shaped plastic bottles. The people who sat in the booths seemed to be played on a tape that erased itself. Only the motion remained, the absence. Outside on the road, inside with the ketchup. Red, heavy.

  Night came but there was no rain. William only stopped for petrol once. I’d forgotten to look at the millwheel on the inn near the car-park in Polperro. I still don’t know whether or not it was turned by water that came out of a pipe.

  39

  William G.

  Sometimes I can’t believe that some mechanical happenings are only chance and nothing more. K257 in the pavement, the escalator owl at Charing Cross. At the place where we had supper on the way home I went to the lavatory. No sooner had I opened the door than there was a metallic belch and three 10p pieces leapt out of the contraceptive machine and clanged on the floor. Why, for God’s sake? Why did it do it when I walked in? I was fully ten feet away when it happened. There was something insulting about it, contemptuous. Here, it seemed to be saying, here’s a refund. Bloody cheek.

  The miles rushed towards us, shot under the van. I felt absurd, couldn’t find a place to put myself in relation to the three turtles now in the sea. What in the world did it all mean? Why was I in this van with this woman? Would it keep on for ever, going round and round like chewing gum on a tyre? Could it be made to stop and if it were stopped would there be anything else to do?

  I had a lot of trouble with my eyes after it got dark. The road kept going abstract. Confusion, fixed and flashing. Flat shadows assumed bulk, distances lost depth, the red tail-lights of cars half a mile ahead appeared to be up in the air.

  In time the Chiswick Roundabout appeared, the Hammersmith Fly-over. It was after eleven when we got to Neaera’s place. I switched off the engine and we sat there ticking over in silence for a few moments.

  ‘Have you kept track of the expenses?’ she said.

  ‘I haven’t got all the figures yet,’ I said. ‘I’ll add it up after I take back the van tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll ring you up,’ she said, and sat there, not quite knowing how to leave. I knew she didn’t want to ask me up to her flat for coffee or anything.

  ‘There isn’t an exit line for this sort of thing,’ I said. ‘About all you can do is shake your head and walk away kicking a stone if you have a stone to kick.’

  ‘I’ve thrown my stone away,’ she said. She gathered up her blankets and pillows and got out of the van. She looked in through the window. ‘I shan’t say anything now,’ she said. She walked away without shaking her head.

  I drove home, parked the van, unloaded it. Not a dent or a scratch on the great bulgy thing, I couldn’t believe it. It took me a long time to get to sleep that night. I lay in bed listening to cars going down our street. I don’t know why they have to go so fast, the sound of those roaring engines always fills me with rage. I kept expecting to hear one of them scrape the van. It’s quite a narrow street.

  40

  Neaera H.

  When I opened the door to my flat it was like opening a box of stale time. Old time, dead time. The windows were all closed, the place was quite airless. I opened the windows, looked out over the square. I think I’ve read that grains of wheat taken from Egyptian tombs have grown when planted. Wheat yes, time no. There’s a mummy at the British Museum, a woman if I remember rightly, I haven’t been to the Egyptian Antiquities collection for a long time. Strange, to be dead and collected. She’s lying on her side in a sleeping position and as I see her in my mind she looks more alone than if she were lying formally on her back with folded hands. Her skin is old parchment, there’s nothing personal about it, her bones are just bones. But her sleeping attitude is naked and private, the privacy of her sleep remains even though there’s no longer a person inside it.

  When I turned on the lights the night outside looked so black that I switched them off again. Shutting out the night makes it blacker. I remembered being a child out of doors in the dark of summer evenings, winter evenings, late dark and early. One saw perfectly well, it never seemed really dark until I came into the house. Then the night outside the windows would be very black.

  I didn’t know what to do really, didn’t know how to pick up where I left off. There no longer seemed to be continuity in my life. The road went up to the turtle-launching and ended there at a chasm where the bridge was out.

  I turned on the light in Madame Beetle’s tank. There were snails in the tank, red ones, six or seven of them. They were cleaning up the algae, there were little clear meanders on the glass where they’d been working. Yesterday’s and today’s meat lay pale and wan on the bottom. The snails were working on that as well. Madame Beetle was in the corner of the tank under the filter sponge. There was a note under the china bathing beauty, I read it by the light of the tank:

  Took the liberty of dropping in

  a clean-up squad. Can take them

  back if you don’t want them.

  Best wishes,

  WEBSTER DE VERE

  Cheek, I thought. If I wanted to run a dirty aquarium that was my business. Come to think of it Madame Beetle was a predator, why hadn’t she had a go at the snails? Tired maybe.

  I looked in my bag for cigarettes and there was the letter to Harry Rush still unposted. I lit a cigarette, went out of the flat and d
own to the corner. There are two telephone kiosks and a pillar box there. The telephone kiosks aren’t the same size, one of them’s larger and more heavily built than the other. I always think of them as bull and cow. They stood there, red in the dark, dark in the light of the street lamp, the bull telephone and the cow telephone and the pillar box. None of them said a word as I pushed the letter through the slot and it dived into the dark. Goodbye £1,000. It was never really there.

  41

  William G.

  I woke up. There you are, I thought: life goes on. There was an old German film I saw at the National Film Theatre, Harry Bauer was in it. Massive man, head like a bald granite statue. In the film he was in prison for a long stretch, twelve years I think. He marked off the days on the wall of his cell with a bit of charcoal. When he got to the half-way mark he threw back his head and let out a hoarse cry. I thought of trying a hoarse cry, decided not to. Anyhow I was past the half-way point.

  Saturday it was. Nine o’clock. I looked out of the window. The day was grey and wet. Harriet would be on her way to the shop. My mind turned away from everything all at once. I realized at that moment that the end of all things need not be difficult. No effort of any kind, just a turning away by whatever means might come to hand.

  I went to the bathroom. Sandor hadn’t cleaned the bath. A ring of Sandor dirt round it, Sandor pubic hair. Rage coursed through my veins. I’d had a whole life, a house and a family! And it had come to this: Sandor’s pubic hair in a rented bath.