Turtle Diary

11 William G

A lady came into the shop one afternoon, arty-intellectual type about my age or a little younger. She was wearing a long orange Indian-print skirt, an old purple velvet jacket, a denim shirt and expensive boots. Not at all bad-looking. Rather troubled face, circles under her eyes. All at once I felt a strong urge to talk to her for hours and hours about everything. And at the same time I felt an urge not to talk to her at all.

She drifted about the Natural History shelves for a time in a sleepwalking sort of way, picking up books and turning the pages without always looking at them. Then she picked up a book on sea turtles by Robert Bustard and read about a quarter of it where she stood. Eerie, the way she read, as if she’d simply forgotten to put the book down. And eerie that she was reading about sea turtles. Obviously I can’t be the only one thinking about them but I had the shocking feeling that here was another one of me locked up alone in a brain with the same thoughts. Me, what’s that after all? An arbitrary limitation of being bounded by the people before and after and on either side. Where they leave off I begin, and vice versa. I once saw a cartoon sequence of a painter painting a very long landscape. When he’d finished he cut it up into four landscapes of the usual proportions. Mostly one doesn’t meet others from the same picture. When it happens it can be unsettling.

Had we anything new on sea turtles other than the Bustard, she asked. Her voice was as I expected, low and husky. She spoke as if she’d come a long way from wherever she’d been in her mind and couldn’t stop long.

No, I said. Nothing else new. Had she read Carr?

Yes, she had. She looked directly at me when I mentioned Carr as if registering the fact that I knew of him. Then it seemed her mind went elsewhere, she thanked me and left the shop.

Pity, in a way. If she’d been young and pretty would I have tried to extend the conversation? Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t really want to talk to a woman who’s accumulated the sort of things in her head that I have in mine. And I haven’t had much interest in women at all for a while, not in a realistic way. Fantasies, yes. But not actualities, not practicalities. For a time after the break-up I went to bed with as many girls as I could but nothing lasted and I didn’t want it to. They wanted attention paid to them, attention paid to a present they were part of and a future that belonged to them, and my mind was elsewhere.

I used to want to find someone to listen to Chopin with. Now I don’t even like to hear Chopin. Nor Scarlatti. Nor the Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven quartets. Not even Bach. I haven’t listened to the B Minor Mass for more than a year. The idea of music has seemed totally foreign to me for some time now. I can’t think any more why anyone would want to bother with sounds in that way. I can stand on the platform in the Underground and listen to the wincing of the rails as the train comes in, listen to the rumble as it goes. I can listen abstractly to the football players on the common, trains going by, aeroplanes overhead. Raw sound I don’t mind but music has nothing to do with me any more. And it’s not as if I can meditate or anything like that. It’s just that plain sounds and silence are all I want to hear.

On my Friday half-day I went to the Zoo again. One of the keepers in the Aquarium came out of a PRIVATE door and I asked him about the turtles. The big ones have been there twenty or thirty years, he said. I asked him if it was possible to look at the tank from the other side. Yes, he said, and took me into PRIVATE.

One had to go up a few steps and climb through a hole in the wall, then there were planks across the back of the tank. It was brightly lit, had a backstage feeling. The turtles looked different seen from above.

‘That’s not the colour they’d be in natural light,’ the keeper said. ‘Their colour fades here.’

‘Would it be a big job moving them out of here?’ I said.

‘We do it sometimes when we clean the tank,’ he said. ‘Put them in the filters. Bit awkward getting them through the hole, you have to mind their jaws. But it’s not too difficult.’

‘Suppose,’ I said, ‘some sort of turtle freak decided to steal the turtles and put them back in the ocean. What would he need for the job?’

‘You’re talking about me,’ he said. ‘That’s what I’ve wanted to do. I’ve told them we ought to let the big ones go, replace them with little ones. We go fishing off Southampton for specimens two or three times a year, and I’ve said why don’t we take the big turtles along and put them into the Channel. Apart from wanting them to go free I’m tired of cleaning up after them. But they don’t want to know, they’re not interested in the turtles here.’

‘Wouldn’t transport be a problem?’ I said. ‘Don’t they have to be kept from drying out? And isn’t the Channel too cold for them?’

‘Funny,’ he said. ‘You’re the second this week that’s asked me about turtle transport. A lady was chatting to me about the turtles the other day. Sometimes no one asks about them for six months at a stretch. Drying out’s no problem on a trip as short as from here to Southampton. Put them on wet sacks, they’d even be all right without anything for that distance. I don’t think the water’d bother them. Cold water makes them a little sluggish but I think they’d backtrack up the North Atlantic Current till they hit the Canary Current or the Gulf Stream. I bet they’d be in home waters in three months.’

‘The lady,’ I said, ‘was she rather arty-intellectual looking? Husky voice?’

‘That’s the one,’ he said. ‘Friend of yours?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Then there isn’t all that much to it, is there? Just a matter of hiring a van and taking along a trolley or something. But the place must be guarded at night?’ I wondered when he’d start looking at me hard and ask me about the questions I was asking.

‘Securicor,’ he said. ‘But they make their rounds on a regular schedule. That’s no problem.’

Was he inviting me to have a go at it? I liked the look of him, he seemed a right sort of man. Suddenly it all seemed hugely possible, I began to go trembly. ‘It’s been nice talking to you,’ I said, and got his name and telephone number. George Fairbairn. He’s the Head Keeper. It seemed almost too much to think about at the moment, almost as if it were thrusting itself upon me. And what had she in mind for the turtles? Probably the same sort of lark or at least the same sort of fantasy. Funny, two minds full of turtle thoughts.