Turtle Diary

1 William G

I don’t want to go to the Zoo any more.

The other night I dreamt of an octopus. He was dark green, almost black, dark tentacles undulating in brown water. Not sure what colour an octopus is really. Found colour photos in two of the books at the shop. One octopus was brown and white, the other was grey, pinky, brown. They change colour it seems. Their eyes are dreadful to look at. I shouldn’t like to be looked at by an octopus no matter how small and harmless it might be. To be stared at by those eyes would be altogether too much for me, would leave me nothing whatever to be. There was a black-and-white photo of octopuses hung up to dry on a pole at Thasos on the Aegean Sea, black against the sky, black bags hanging, black tentacles drooping and drying, behind them the brightness over the sea. They’re related to the chambered nautilus which I’d always thought of only as a shell with nothing in it. But there it was in the book full of tentacles and swimming inscrutably.

Then I wanted to see an octopus. On Friday, my half-day at the shop, I went to the Zoo. Grey day, raining a little. Went in by the North Gate past the owls. Bubo this and Bubo that, each one sitting on its bar with wet feathers and implacable eyes. Over the bridge past the Aviary towering high against the sky, a huge pointy steel-mesh thing of gables and angles full of strange cries and dark flappings. There were little shrill children eating things. There was steam coming up in the rain from three square plates in the paving at the end of the bridge. Two girls and a boy bathed their bare legs in it. The tunnel on the other side of the bridge was echoing with children. Copies of cave-paintings on the walls of the tunnel. They didn’t belong there, looked heavy-handed, false. One wanted to see SPURS, ARSENAL.

Very dark in the Aquarium. Green windows, things swimming. People black against the windows murmuring, explaining to children, holding them up, putting them down, urging them on, calling them back. Echoing footsteps of children running in the dark. Very shabby in the Aquarium, very small. Too many little green windows in the dark. Crabs, lobsters, two thornback rays, a little poor civil-servant-looking leopard shark. Tropical fish, eels, toads, frogs and newts. There was no octopus.

Sea turtles. Two or three hundred pounds the big ones must have weighed. Looping and swinging, flying in golden-green silty water in a grotty little tank no bigger than my room. Soaring, dipping and curving with flippers like wings in a glass box of second-hand ocean. Their eyes said nothing, the thousands of miles of ocean couldn’t be said.

I thought: when I was a child I used to like the Zoo. The rain had stopped. I went to the Reptile House. No. Didn’t want to see thė snakes on hot sand under bright lights behind glass. Left the Reptile House, approached the apes. The gorilla lay on his stomach in his cell, his chin resting on his folded arms. No. I couldn’t think which was worse: if he could remember or if he couldn’t.

I went out of the Zoo to the 74 bus stop at the North Gate. There was a young woman with a little boy and girl. Maybe the boy was eight or nine. He had a little black rubber gorilla on a bit of elastic tied to a string and he danced the little black gorilla up and down in a little puddle, spat spat spat, not splashing. It was only a bit of wet on the pavement.

‘Stop that,’ said his mother. ‘I told you to stop that.’