Turtle Diary Read online

  7

  William G.

  What a weird thing smoking is and I can’t stop it. I feel cosy, have a sense of well-being when I’m smoking, poisoning myself, killing myself slowly. Not so slowly maybe. I have all kinds of pains I don’t want to know about and I know that’s what they’re from. But when I don’t smoke I scarcely feel as if I’m living. I don’t feel as if I’m living unless I’m killing myself. Very good. Wonderful.

  One time I grew a beard. I didn’t want to see my face in the mirror any more while shaving so I stopped shaving. I’d already stopped looking at myself when brushing my teeth and washing my face and I used to comb my hair without a mirror, feeling the parting with my fingers. It was a relief at first but when the beard reached a state of full growth I was constantly aware of walking around behind it so I got rid of it. Since then I’ve had to see my face almost every morning. I don’t shave on my Saturdays off nor on Sundays unless I’m going out in the evening.

  I used to think when I shaved and looked at my face that that bit of time didn’t count, was just the time in between things. Now I think it’s the time that counts most. It’s those times that all the other times are in between. It’s time when nothing helps and the great heavy boot of the past is planted squarely in your back and shoving you forward. Sometimes my mind gives me a flash of road I’ll never see again, sometimes a face that’s gone, gone. Moments like grains of sand but the beach is empty. Millions of moments in forty-five years. Letters in boxes, photos in drawers.

  So breakfast is a useful thing, a rallying point for all the members of me. We all sit together at the table by the window to start the day off. My face comes along as well. Breakfast is always the same, perfectly reliable, no decisions, no conflicts: orange juice, muesli, a three-minute boiled egg, a slice of buttered toast, coffee that I grind myself.

  There’s a tiny kitchen on the landing just outside my door, a cooker and a little fridge and a sink. Mr Sandor uses it before me in the morning, Miss Neap comes after me. Mr Sandor always leaves the cooker sticky and smelling heavily organic. I don’t know what he has for breakfast. Squid maybe. Kelp. Nasty-looking little parcels in the fridge. I always leave the cooker clean for Miss Neap. I could have a word with Sandor about it but cleaning the cooker seems less tiresome. The problem only arises in the mornings. Even on weekends he always has lunch and supper out. Once I attempted a conversation with the man and he waved a foreign newspaper about and grunted something through his heavy moustache about scoundrels in government. He seems violent and heavily burdened with thoughts of whatever country the newspaper is from. He carries a briefcase, the kind that looks as if it might be full of sausages. I’ve no idea what he does for a living. Miss Neap works at a theatre-ticket agency and visits her mother in Leeds some weekends. Her hair is that kind of blonde that only happens after fifty, she wears a pince-nez and a tightly-belted leopardskin coat and has blue eyes like ice. If Sandor breakfasted after me and before her I think he’d leave the cooker clean.

  The sea turtles are on my mind all the time. I can feel something building up in me, feel myself becoming strange and unsafe. Today one of those women who never know titles came into the shop. They are the source of Knightsbridge lady soup and they ask for a good book for a nephew or something new on roses for a gardening husband. This one wanted a novel, ‘something for a good read at the cottage’. I offered her Procurer to the King by Fallopia Bothways. Going like a bomb with the menopausal set. She gasped, and I realized I’d actually spoken the thought aloud: ‘Going like a bomb with the menopausal set.’

  She went quite red. ‘What did you say?’ she said.

  ‘Going like a bomb, it’s the best she’s written yet,’ I said, and looked very dim.

  She let it pass, settled on Lances of Glory by Taura Strong and did not complain to Mr Meager about me, which was really quite decent of her. But I have to be careful.

  Every evening a lady and her husband and their greyhound bitch go slowly past the house. The husband and wife must be in their early sixties and the greyhound isn’t young. The husband drags one leg and when the windows are open I can always hear them coming and know who it is even if I don’t look out. They walk on opposite sides of the street, wife and greyhound on one side, husband on the other. The husband works for London Transport I think. Why a greyhound? Perhaps it’s a retired racer. The street is very narrow and so are the pavements, which may explain why they walk on opposite sides although I’ve seen other couples walk side by side. Perhaps he needs more space around him because of his bad leg. The greyhound of course walks very slowly too, as if she’s forgotten any other way of going. When I see them in the evening slowly passing by they look larger than life and allegorical.

  The Underground trains are above ground where the District Line passes the common. On the right the tracks disappear behind a wall, on the left they converge towards Parsons Green and Putney Bridge. I watch the trains a lot. There are six lights on the front of each train, two vertical rows of three, and the pattern in which some are lit and some are dark tells the destination. For Special trains all six are lit. Three on the left and the bottom one on the right say Upminster, and so forth. There’s a little sign as well that says where they’re going. By watching with binoculars I’ve learnt most of the light code, I still don’t know all of the signals. I rather like seeing the lights pass in the dark and thinking: Tower Hill or whatever. Sometimes I look at the empty tracks with my binoculars. The solid grey iron is peculiarly pleasing to the eye, the coloured lights almost taste red and green in the mouth. I used to go birdwatching with the binoculars. Sometimes I hear an owl on the common.

  Weekends are dicey. Saturdays aren’t too bad, there’s the shop to go to or errands to do and lots of people on the street, football crowds in the afternoon. Sundays are dangerous, the quiet waits in ambush. Close the museums and there’s no telling what might happen.

  Saturday afternoon I did not go to the Zoo, I went to the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich to look at Port Liberty.

  8

  Neaera H.

  There is a connection between my turtle thoughts and my Polperro thoughts but I’m not sure I can find it. Polperro is mentioned in the guide-books as one of the prettiest fishing villages on the Cornish coast. I’d never seen it until last spring when I was visiting friends in Devon. We drove along many narrow roads winding between hedgerows, crossed the Tamar Bridge into Cornwall, passed through Looe and arrived at a car-park. Near it was a whitewashed inn on which was mounted a mill wheel smartly painted black and slowly revolving. I don’t remember seeing any stream to turn the wheel, I have the impression that a little gush of water had been piped in for that purpose.

  One of the principal industries in Polperro is parking cars. We parked, then joined many people walking slowly through the narrow streets eating ice-cream, leading, pushing and carrying infants and scowling at such cars as had not parked. There were many postcards, many sea-urchins, many pottery things and shiny coppery things for sale, many Cream Teas. There was a model village, the entrance to which was through an orange-lit souvenir shop with music. We passed through the souvenirs, the orange light and the music as under a waterfall, paid 10p and came out into what must have been the garden once and was now the model village.

  There was organ music, very reduced and scant-sounding, playing ‘Abide with Me’. I guessed it was coming from the model church and I was right. The model village was Polperro itself, as could be observed by looking over a low wall towards the real street. There one saw a full-size sign that said GARNER and next to it the Claremont Hotel, then looking down saw the miniature GARNER and the Claremont Hotel, lumpish and simplified in the model.

  The model houses and shops, thick and awry, had an air of stolid outrage. It was as if the anima of each place, private and indwelling, had been nagged into standing naked in the little streets before the deformed buildings. As if someone had said, ‘We need the money, you must help.’ The very boats in the model harbour,
oafish and out of scale in the still water, cursed almost aloud, denied any connection whatever with real boats, fishing and the sea, tried by dissociating themselves to make amends to the poor household gods of the port.

  A large orange tiger cat settled comfortably on one of the model roofs and a black-and-white cat picked its way through the streets as if looking out for model sinners on a model Day of Judgement. There were pence and halfpence on the bottom of the model harbour. People do that everywhere in fountains I know. Is it possible that they made wishes here when they threw in their coins?

  We emerged, went on past Cream Teas and sea-urchins to the full-size harbour, a small one sheltered by a breakwater. The fishing boats were few, there was one called Ocean Gift. A young woman with a Polaroid camera repeatedly photographed her bald baby who had the face of a mature publican, showing him the picture each time. Gulls with cruel yellow eyes paced the quay. A jackdaw perched on the sea wall, neat, detached, seeming full of critical comment but saying nothing. There was a sign at the harbour which I copied:

  POLPERRO HARBOUR

  Polperro is the best example

  of the

  small Cornish fishing ports

  and the Harbour Trustees

  are anxious to retain

  its character without resorting

  to commercialization

  The cost of maintenance

  far exceeds the income

  WILL YOU PLEASE HELP?

  There was a box with a slot. A few feet away were a souvenir stand and a shop full of pottery things and coppery things and sea-urchin lamps with light bulbs in them shining through the sea-urchins. I put no money in the box. Polperro seemed to me like a street-walker asking for money to maintain her virginity.

  The tide hadn’t come all the way in and there was a patch of dry stony beach on the seaward side of the wall. I went down the steps and walked there. The beach offered little more than broken glass and contraceptives. At least there was some vitality left here, I thought. I contented myself with two stones and three lumps of glass and a bit of china worn smooth. As we left the harbour I saw a boat lying on the mud. It was full of loose planks and had a hole in its side. Someone had lettered SHIT on it with a paintbrush.

  Would it be just as well for Polperro to break up its boats and pave its harbour for a car-park? But of course without the harbour and the token boats no one would come to park there. If the turtles were set free, where is there for them to go really? To what can they navigate? They swim hundreds of miles to the beaches of their breeding grounds. The hundred eggs the female lays each time are just barely enough to ensure the race against wild dogs and predatory birds on the beaches, sharks in the water. I’ve read in Carr that wild dogs from far away travel to the beaches to wait for the arrival of the turtles. Still the hundred eggs would be enough, but nothing ensures the turtles against the manufacturers of turtle soup. Three-hundred-pound turtles navigate the ocean and come ashore to be slaughtered for the five pounds of cartilage that gets sold to the soup-makers. They’re torn open and mutilated, left belly-up and dead or dying on the beach.

  Is my wanting to set the Zoo turtles free a kind of Polperrization, a trying to pretend that something is when it isn’t? Would they have to swim with signs and slotted boxes begging for protection and support? There’s rubbish in the oceans now far from any land, Coca-Cola tins perhaps circling among the icebergs. If turtles have memories the beaches the old ones remember are not what they would find now. Perhaps the only decent thing would be a monster Turtlearium charging a proper admission, with turtle rides 10p and YOUR PHOTO WITH A SEA TURTLE 50p. Something has got to be whole in some way but my mind isn’t strong enough to work it out. Carr’s turtle station at Tortuguero in Costa Rica sounds a lovely place in his book. It sounds the sort of place where at night if you looked through the palm trees there’d always be lights on and coffee and people with clip-boards. Tortuguero. The name sounds like hot sun, blue water, white surf.

  Often in the evenings Madame Beetle hangs head-down in the water cleaning her legs with great diligence like a woman really looking after herself. She seems to have settled in quite nicely, has a good appetite. She attacks the raw meat vigorously when I drop it in, then hangs head-down holding it in her front legs while her mandibles are busy with it. I don’t know whether any of the meat actually disappears, there’s always a good deal of it about that goes white and filmy after a while, but she must get something out of it because she’s still alive. I remove the old bits from the tank with a skewer. When I first took the cover off to do that I thought Madame Beetle might fly away but she simply retired inside the shipwreck until I’d finished.

  I’ve bought a little china figure, a bathing beauty in a 1900s mauve bathing-suit and cap, red bathing-slippers. She’s sitting on a rock leaning back on her elbows, her right knee raised and her right ankle resting on her left knee. Her pretty rosy-cheeked face is turned to the side and as she sits before the aquarium on my desk she looks as if she’s been watching Madame Beetle and has just turned away towards me. Possibly there’s a story in her as well. Possibly there’s no story either in her or Madame Beetle. It may happen to me at any time that everything will be just what it is, with no stories in anything.

  9

  William G.

  Briefcases. Businessmen, barristers carry briefs. When I was in advertising we always talked about what our brief was. Brief means letter in German. Brief is short. Life is a brief case. Brief candle, out, out. In the tube there was a very small, very poor-looking man in a threadbare suit and a not very clean shirt, spectacles. He made a roll-up, lit it, then took from his briefcase a great glossy brochure with glorious colour photographs of motorcycles. Many unshaven men carry briefcases. I’ve seen briefcases carried by men who looked as if they slept rough. Women tramps usually have carrier bags, plastic ones often. I carry one of those expanding files with a flap. Paper in it for taking notes, a book sometimes, sandwich and an apple for lunch. The apple bulges, can’t be helped.

  I took the tube to Surrey Docks, the 70 bus from there. There were some children on the bus singing ‘Oranges and Lemons’ and they seemed to spin it out very slowly. I found myself waiting, waiting for ‘Here comes a chopper to chop off your head, chop, chop, chop!’ which arrived in due course and very loudly.

  At Greenwich I went straight to the Port Liberty model after the guards at the door had looked into my envelope and found no bombs. They have to take precautions, that’s understandable. A place like Greenwich is a temptation. The greenness and the stillness, the augustness of the buildings and the observatory dome almost make one want to set off a bomb just out of respect.

  There seem to be more children than there used to be. Always lots of them about even on school days. Children seem to be the permanent population while adults drift in and out and fall away. Each year the schoolgirls in their white knee-socks seem more erotic, more secretly knowing, one thinks probably nothing would surprise them. There are always children at the Port Liberty windows. I looked over the shoulder of a girl who must have been about twelve, the scent of her hair was in my nostrils. I don’t know where my daughters are now. I don’t know if Dora’s remarried. Someone pressed the button and the three-minute sequence began. The model sky grew slowly dark. Such a perfect world, so small and yet so full of distance. A long time ago I copied the signs that tell about Port Liberty:

  APPROACHING PORT LIBERTY BY NIGHT

  When night falls the navigator has to rely on the navigation lights shown by other vessels to avoid colliding with them and the lights shown by buoys, beacons and lighthouses to keep him in safe waters.

  A confusion of fixed and flashing lights confronts him when he approaches a port but trained to interpret the various light colours and sequences in conjunction with his chart he can safely identify and follow the correct channel into port.

  What you can see

  The lighthouse on Patrol Point, whose white light is visible 20 miles out at sea, occults once
every 30 seconds, while dead ahead can be seen the white light of the Landfall buoy, flashing every second.

  A steady red light over a steady white light near the Landfall buoy identifies the pilot launch waiting for our arrival with a pilot ready to board and assist us through the channel to the anchorage.

  The white masthead lights and green starboard navigating lights of a large vessel can be seen moving down the main channel, while the navigation lights of a smaller ship are visible coming out through the secondary channel.

  Three white lights in a vertical triangle indicate a dredger working at the inner end of Crusher’s Bank and that it is safe to pass on either side of her.

  The masthead light and port and starboard lights of a small craft off our starboard bow indicate that she is heading towards us. The edges of the main channel are marked by the flashing lights of buoys, and further up the river the lights of fixed beacons can be discerned which assist the navigator to keep in the deeper water. Model made to the requirements of the Department of Navigation by Thorp Modelmakers Ltd.

  There were the lights fixed and flashing, each in its proper place in that perfect night miniature and vast. Then the night faded, there was sunlight on the distant hills of the port, sunlight on the water before me and on the vessels coming and going, and I was:

  APPROACHING PORT LIBERTY BY DAY

  When a ship approaches port the navigator has various aids to help him.