Turtle Diary (11 page)

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.

‘Assistant in a bookshop,’ I said.

‘I thought it might be something literary in one way or another,’ he said. He turned on the machine, set the volume. ‘It’s a wave frequency filter and amplifier,’ he said. ‘You’ll hear the alpha waves.’

I listened. Dead silence.

‘Close your eyes,’ he said.

‘I don’t think I’ve got any alpha waves,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I’ve got anything but noise and static in my head.’

‘You’d be surprised,’ he said. ‘Everybody has alpha waves. Are you into meditation at all?’

‘No,’ I said. I closed my eyes. Silence from the machine. I thought of a grey heron I’d seen once flying over a marsh flapping very slowly. A nice serene thought. Silence from the machine. I let go of the heron, let myself sink back into whatever there might be to sink back into in my mind.

Cluck cluck cluck, said the machine quietly.

‘That’s alpha waves,’ said the young man.

I drifted into it again. Cluck cluck cluck cluck, said the machine in another little burst of chicken talk.

I went on with it for a while, I’d paid
£2
for the hour. Sometimes I got bursts of ten or fifteen clucks together and was quite pleased with myself. That accounts for my not having gone mad, I thought. There must be quiet places in my head where I get a little rest now and then without knowing about it. A cheering thought.

I took off the electrodes. ‘What about
your
alpha waves?’ I said. ‘Are you good at it?’

‘Don’t you want to keep going?’ he said. ‘You still have more time.’

‘I don’t think I have the patience for a whole hour of it,’ I said. ‘I’d like to hear you do it.’

He wired himself up with the electrodes, closed his eyes and looked even more serene than before. Cluck cluck cluck cluck cluck cluck, went the machine steadily and smoothly like a Geiger counter next to a piece of uranium. It clucked almost continuously, with only the briefest of pauses.

I shook my head. What was there to say? He wiped the jelly off my dandruff.

‘Thank you,’ I said, and got up to leave.

‘Do you think you’d like to do it again?’ he said.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘But it’s nice to know the alpha waves are there sometimes.’

As I was going out he said, ‘I didn’t give you quite a straight answer when you asked me what I did for a living.’

‘Please,’ I said, ‘there’s no need to, I only asked out of curiosity.’

‘Actually I’ve been living on money from the States,’ he said. ‘But I hope to get going with this.’

I went home with my alpha waves. You never know what you’ve got going for you. Who knows what other kinds of waves are clucking along inside me, maybe homing me in on something good somewhere, sometime.

I didn’t go straight home. When I changed from the Bakerloo Line at Paddington I went up into the Main Line Station. I felt like being with a lot of people in a big open place. Ordinarily I don’t like pigeons but I like them under the
glass roof of Paddington Station. Mingling with the rush of people the pigeons are quite different from the way they are when plodding about in squares and being fed by people who have nothing better to feed. Intolerant of me to think that. Pigeons, turtles, what’s the odds.

So much purposeful movement at Paddington, so many individual directions crossing one another, so many different lines of action! I always think that everyone else has good places to go to, they all seem so eager to get there. I sat on the low flat wooden railing by the Track One buffers and watched the figures passing in front of the light from the news-stand and under the grey glass sky of the roof. So many pretty girls! They were never so pretty when I was twenty. Two men were talking and one of them taking some change from his pocket dropped a ½p. While looking to see what he’d dropped he kicked it without seeing it. I watched it roll along the floor to be kicked in the opposite direction by another man who didn’t see it. By then the man who’d dropped it had moved on and when the ½p stopped rolling I went over and picked it up, put it in my pocket and went home.

In this morning’s
Times
I read that the astronauts on
Skylab-2
have got two spiders with them. One of the spiders, named Arabella, has spun something like a normal web. ‘Weightlessness disorientated her at the start,’ says the news item from Houston, ‘and her first attempts produced only a few wisps, mainly in the corners of her cage. But today, on the thirteenth day of the
Skylab-2
flight, Dr Owen Garriott was quite pleased with the work done by the spider. “This time the web is essentially, at first glance, like one you would find on the ground,” Dr Garriott said.’

That Arabella should have spun any sort of web, should have made the effort at all, overwhelms me. In her place I should have sulked or been sick I am sure. She didn’t even know which way was up let alone where she was or why and yet she spun a reasonably workable web out there in space. I hope they had the decency to bring some flies for her to catch, I can’t think they’d make her eat tiny frozen dinners squeezed out of tubes or whatever astronauts subsist on. And if they did bring flies those flies must appear somewhere on
Skylab-2’s
manifest:
Flies, 12 doz.
If there are flies up there no mention is made of them or how they adapted to weightlessness. Perhaps they’d use dead flies just as they use dead mice to feed the owls at the Zoo. In any case Arabella deserves a plaque on
Skylab-2.
But of course she doesn’t need one, hasn’t got the sort of mind that thinks about plaques. She needs no recognition, can recognize herself and spin a web wherever she may be. What good things instincts are!

Last night I had a dream thought that I held on to carefully until this morning. It was: Those who know it have forgotten every part of it, those who don’t know it remember it completely. Aggravating. Those who know or don’t know what? I haven’t a clue and what’s most annoying is that something in me knows what was meant.

There was a week of nature films on the South Bank and I went to see one about sharks. The film was made by a man of apparently unlimited wealth who fitted himself out with a large ship and any amount of special underwater gear for shark photography. He and his companions all agreed that diving among sharks was for them the ultimate challenge. They were particularly keen to encounter a great white shark, a rare species and the one most feared as a man-eater. They went from ocean to ocean looking for the great white shark and I couldn’t help wondering all the time how much it was costing. I think the money spent on even one of the special diving cages would keep me in high style for half a year at least.

For a large part of the time they followed whaling ships, photographing sharks feeding on whale carcasses. Sometimes they took their pictures from inside a cage but often they swam fearlessly among the sharks. They swam among blue sharks, dusky sharks, oceanic white-tipped sharks and several other kinds but they were continually frustrated by the absence of great white sharks.

Eventually they found a great white shark which they attracted with whale oil, blood and horsemeat. It was a truly terrifying creature and they very wisely stayed in their cage while the shark took the bars in his teeth and shook it about. The wealthy man said that it had been fantastic, incredible, beyond his expectations. His friends congratulated him on the success of the expedition and the film came to an end.

I found myself resenting that man, however unreasonable it might be of me. All the money in the world does not give him the right to muck about with a direful secret creature and shame the mystery of it with words like ‘fantastic’ and ‘incredible’. The divers were not the ultimate challenge for the shark, I’m certain
of that. Socially they were out of their class, the shark would not have swum from ocean to ocean seeking
them.
It would have gone its mute and deadly way mindlessly being its awful self, innocent and murderous. It was the people who lusted for the fierce attention of the shark, like monkeys they had to make him notice them.

Money can do many things, even the great white shark can be played with by wealthy
frotteurs
in posh diving gear. But they have not really seen him or touched him because what he is to man is what is he to naked man alone-swimming. They have not found the great white shark, they have acted out some brothel fantasy with black rubber clothing and steel bars. Aluminium they were actually.

When I came out of the Queen Elizabeth Hall with the crowd there was a threadbare man playing a mouth organ. The lamps were lit along the promenade and on the bridges, trains rattled across the Hungerford Bridge, boats apparently powered by music went past with people dancing, lights glittered on the river and in the buildings across the river, there was a full moon, the night was balmy. The mouth organ buzzed its little music fiercely, the man’s eyes looked out fiercely over the mouth organ. I gave him 10p, he thanked me, sent his music after me like bees.

At a party I drank more than I should have done and found myself going on and on about Oedipus and Peter Rabbit, Thebes and Mr McGregor’s garden to Harry Rush of Pryntward Rush & Hope. Two days later there was a letter affirming his strong interest in my forthcoming
From Oedipus to Peter Rabbit: The Tragic Heritage in Children’s Literature
and offering me a £1,000 advance on signing.

On the morning when the letter came I was thinking that possibly the biggest tragedy in children’s literature is that people won’t stop writing it. It was one of those mornings when there suddenly seemed nothing whatever that could be taken for granted. I felt a stranger in my own head, as if the consciousness looking out through my eyes were some monstrous changeling. Here was the implacable morning light on all the books and
litter that were always there but nothing was recognizable as having significance. What in the world was it all about, I found myself wondering.

People write books for children and other people write about the books written for children but I don’t think it’s for the children at all. I think that all the people who worry so much about the children are really worrying about themselves, about keeping their world together and getting the children to help them do it, getting the children to agree that it is indeed a world. Each new generation of children has to be told: ‘This is a world, this is what one does, one lives like this.’ Maybe our constant fear is that a generation of children will come along and say: ‘This is not a world, this is nothing, there’s no way to live at all.’

Somebody’d told Harriet about a free demonstration of something called Original Therapy and she asked me if I’d like to go with her. Neither of us had any idea of what it might be and I couldn’t care less but I went. Anything to keep my mind off the turtles.

The place was in Maida Vale, the people had long hair and wore sandals which they mostly took off. There were a lot of good-looking feet in the crowd. The bearded men looked like Great Men of History from the neck up: Darwin, Pasteur, Mendeleyev, Faraday. From the neck down they looked like layabouts. The girls looked better to me but then girls usually do, there seems to me to be more human solidity in women than in men. Odd how one says
girls
and men. More than half the men were boys and more than half the girls were women who looked as if they’d seen a good deal of a certain kind of life and had cooked many hundredweights of brown rice. Oriental pillows on the floor, Buddhist and Zen books on the shelves, the
I Ching,
Laing, Castaneda, Hermann Hesse,
The Whole Earth Catalog.
Smell of old incense in the air.