Turtle Diary (3 page)

Victoria Beetle or Victoria Water-Beetle? The hyphenated name sounds better. How would Snugg & Sharpe feel about gangsters? After all they’re part of modern life even at schools nowadays, according to the newspapers. Big Sam knows where the lolly is but he needs Victoria’s help because it’s at the bottom of the pond. Dropped there by Jimson Crow perhaps, whilst making a getaway. He’s always stealing things. He was flying over the pond with Detective Owl hot on his trail.

I wanted to see an oyster-catcher so I went to the Zoo, not feeling at all good about it. The Zoo is a prison for animals who have been sentenced without trial and I feel guilty because I do nothing about it. But there it was, I wanted to see an oyster-catcher and I was no better than the people who’d caged oyster-catchers for me to see. And I myself have caged a water-beetle. On the other hand perhaps some of the birds and animals don’t feel the Zoo to be a prison. Maybe they’ve been corrupted by it.

At the Waders Aviary a little sandpiper who would never have allowed me to come that close in real life perched on a sign a foot away from me and stared. He knew that he was safe because the wire mesh of the cage was between us. He has lost his innocence. He appeared to have lost a leg as well, and for a long time stood steadfastly on the one very slender remaining member whilst looking at me through half-closed eyes. Having kept me there for nearly half an hour he revealed a second leg that matched the other perfectly, then flew down to the sand and entertained a lady sandpiper with an elegant little dance that seemed done less for the lady than for the thing itself. He made his legs even longer and thinner than they were, drew himself up quite tall in his small way, spread his wings, wound himself up and produced a noise like a tiny paddle-wheel boat whilst
flapping his wings stiffly and with formal regularity. At the same time he executed some very subtle steps almost absent-mindedly, with the air of one who could be blindingly nimble if he let himself go. The lady watched attentively. At a certain point, as if by mutual agreement that the proprieties had been observed, he stopped dancing, she stopped watching. They went their separate ways like two people at a cocktail party.

Oyster-catchers were what I’d come to see and there were two or three of them mooching about but there was something wrong that made the seeing of them flat and uneventful. I’d never been that close to them before, part of their character had been that they were always seen from a distance on the open mudflats with a wide and low horizon far away. These oyster-catchers were so accessible as to be unobservable. One of them wound himself up as the sandpiper had done and released quite an urgent kleep kleep kleep. The sound independently hurried off round the pool and the bird hurried after it like a cat or a child working up interest in a toy. When the sound stopped the oyster-catcher abandoned it and began to potter about with some rather old-looking mussels.

There were all sorts of waders in the Waders Aviary, not all of whom would ordinarily have been seen in the same place I think. The sign showed pictures of a redshank, guillemot, razorbill, eider duck, oyster-catcher, ruff, kittiwake, white-breasted waterhen, rufous laughing thrush, curlew, laysan duck and hooded merganser. They had their concrete pool to wade in, they had reeds and bushes and a strip of sand. The Zoological Society had pieced together a habitat that was like the little naif towns one sometimes sees in model railway layouts. The elements of it were thing for thing a rough approximation of reality but the scale wasn’t right and the parts of it didn’t fit together in a realistic way.

The birds were all quite good-natured and reasonable about it, they seemed more grown-up than the Zoo management, as if they’d been caught and caged not because they weren’t clever enough to avoid it but because they simply didn’t think in terms of nets and cages, those were things for cunning children. So
here they all were, interned for none of them knew how long. They made the best of it better than people would have done, I think, and all of them appeared to get on rather neatly together. The sandpipers, the curlews and the redshanks, all pure Bewick, seemed to draw serenity from the sheer detail of their markings. A ruff was bathing with its ruff spread out as large as possible. It looked of the film world and as if it might call everyone ‘Darling’.

I felt dissatisfied, as one does when morally strong preconceptions have to be questioned. The birds were not silent prisoners wasting away like Dr Manette in the Bastille nor were they beating pitiful wings against the wire mesh of their captivity. Their understanding of the whole thing seemed deeper and simpler than mine. Of course it may be that they’re going decadent. I’ve seen a film in which Dr Lorenz pointed out the difference between two colonies of cattle egrets, one free and one caged. The free ones, who had to provide for themselves, were monogamous and energetic and kept their numbers within ecologically reasonable limits. The captive egrets were promiscuous, idle, overbreeding and presumably going to hell fast.

I passed the gibbons who seemed at the same time active and reflective, of more mature understanding than the party of French girls who stood before the cage shouting, ‘
Allez, allez
!’ at their aerial artistry. I avoided the lions, the rhinoceroses and the elephants, walked along with my head down, not wanting to see anything and not wanting to go home. I fetched up at the Aquarium as it began to rain, and went inside.

Aquaria have always been interesting to me as sources of illumination, the fish are secondary. Madame Beetle’s tank with its sunken wreck, water plants, pebbles and one bit of sea-china is very pretty when lit in the evening. Madame Beetle is more active than she was at first, submarining elegantly, her red fringed hind legs going like perfectly coordinated oars. I like the sound of the pump and filter too, it’s better than the ticking of a clock.

When I was a child I had a fishless aquarium. My father set it up for me with gravel and plants and pebbles before he’d got the fish and I asked him to leave it as it was for a while. The
pump kept up a charming burble, the green-gold light was wondrous when the room was dark. I put in a china mermaid and a tin horseman who maintained a relationship like that of the figures on Keats’s Grecian urn except that the horseman grew rusty. Eventually fish were pressed upon me and they seemed an intrusion, I gave them to a friend. All that aquarium wanted was the sound of the pump, the gently waving plants, the mysterious pebbles and the silent horseman forever galloping to the mermaid smiling in the green-gold light. I used to sit and look at them for hours. The mermaid and the horseman were from my father. I have them in a box somewhere, I’m not yet ready to take them out and look at them again.

Here in the dark of the Aquarium were many green-and-gold-lit windows, huge compared to mine but not magical. The fish all looked bored to death but of course fish aren’t meant to be looked at closely, will not bear close examination. The lobsters scarcely looked more alive than those I’ve seen waiting to be selected by diners at sea-food restaurants. I don’t think the Aquarium ought to do a shark at all if they’re not going to lay on a big one. The leopard shark they have is so small that his vacant stare and receding chin make him seem nothing more than a marine form of twit rather than a representative of a mortally dangerous species. Rays I think ought not to be seen at all outside their natural habitat, too many questions arise.

I’d been aware of the turtles for some time before I went to look at them. I knew I’d have to do it but I kept putting it off. When I did go to see them I didn’t know how to cope with it. Untenable propositions assembled themselves in my mind. If these were what they were then why were buildings, buses, streets? The sign said that green turtles were the source of turtle soup and hawksbills provided the tortoise-shell of commerce. But why soup, why spectacles?

Relative to her size my beetle has more than twice as much swimming-room as the turtles. And in that little tank the turtles were flying, flying in the water, submarine albatrosses. I’ve read about them, they navigate hundreds of miles of ocean. I imagined a sledge-hammer smashing the thick glass, letting out
the turtles and their little bit of ocean, but then they’d only be flopping about on the wet floor.

I’m always afraid of being lost, the secret navigational art of the turtles seems a sacred thing to me. I thought of the little port of Polperro in Cornwall where they sell sea-urchin lamps, then I felt very sad and went home.

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.