Turtle Diary

17 William G

Neaera H. The penny didn’t drop until a few minutes after we’d parted, then I remembered the Gillian Vole books, Delia Swallow, Geoffrey Mouse and all the others I used to read to the girls. Delia Swallow’s Housewarming was Cyndie’s favourite for a long time, she never tired of it. This must be the same Neaera H., she looked too much like a writer-illustrator not to be one.

Back at the shop I went to Picture Books in the Juvenile section and looked at a copy of Delia Swallow’s Housewarming. No photograph or biographical details on the back flap. All it said was that Delia Swallow, though the stories were written for children, had long been a favourite with readers of all ages, as had Gillian Vole etc. I looked at the first page:

‘Just any eaves won’t do,’ said Delia Swallow to her husband John when they were looking for a nest.

‘I’d like eaves on the sunny side and with a view.’

‘Field or forest?’ said John.

‘Field with forest at the edge I think,’ said Delia.

‘Riverside or hill?’ said John.

‘Riverside with a hill behind,’ said Delia.

‘Right,’ said John, and went to sleep.

He always kipped after lunch.

Ariadne and Cyndie always liked it that John Swallow kipped after lunch. In the evenings he usually dropped in for a pint or two and a game of darts at the Birds of a Feather, after which:

He sometimes flew a little wobbly going home.

Strange. While I was married to Dora and living in Hampstead and working at the agency Neaera H. was writing those books. Now here we are, both of us alone and thinking turtle thoughts. At least I assume she’s alone. She looks as if she’s always been alone. Of course I’m seeing her out of alone eyes, I could well be wrong.

The turtles share a tank at the Zoo. I share a bath at Mrs Inchcliff’s. Hairy Mr Sandor. I taped a little sign to the bathroom wall:

PLEASE CLEAN BATH AFTER USING

Not that it’ll do much good. It’s not too bad really, he only baths a couple of times a week. Miss Neap baths daily and when she’s been before me the bathroom smells very blonde and militantly fragrant, as if mortality could be kept at bay by lavender in the same way that garlic repels vampires. If Dracula and Miss Neap were to have a go I think he’d be the one to come away with teeth marks in his throat.

When I had a bathroom of my own. I think about that sometimes. When I was an account executive. When I owned a house. When my daughters sat on my lap and I read to them. When they collected pebbles with me on the beach. Ariadne’s twenty now, Cyndie’s eighteen. I haven’t seen them for three years. I don’t know where they are.

The past isn’t connected to the future any more. When I lived with Dora and the girls the time I lived in, the time of me was still the same piece of time that had unrolled like a forward road under my feet from the day of my birth. That road and all the scenes along it belonged to me, my mind moved freely up and down it. Walking on it I was still connected to my youth and strength, the time of me was of one piece with that time. Not now. I can’t walk on my own time past. It doesn’t belong to me any more.

There’s no road here. Every step away from Dora and the girls leads only to old age and death whatever I do. No one I sleep with now has known me young with long long time and all the world before me. Rubbish. I remember how it was lying beside Dora in the night. O God, I used to think, this is it and this is all there is and nothing up ahead but death. The girls will grow up and move out and we’ll be left alone together. I remember that very well. It’s the thisness and thisonlyness of it that drives middle-aged men crazy.

Why turtles for God’s sake? Helping them find what they’re looking for won’t bloody help me. And now I’m lumbered with it. I’ll have to find out what it costs to hire a van. I wonder if the two of us can get the turtles on to the trolley. She doesn’t look that strong. We’ll need a board or something for a ramp. Maybe I should build crates for them, they’d be easier to handle that way. I hate details. And now it’s got to be Polperro just to make life more difficult. I know there’ll be some kind of physical problem like having to climb a million steps or lower ourselves by ropes or the tide will be out and we’ll have to drag the turtles across a mile of mud in the dark. What on earth can Polperro mean to her?

I saw a film years ago, The Swimmer, with Burt Lancaster. In it he was an American advertising man whose mind had slipped out of the present. He thought he still had a wife and children and a house but it was all gone. The film began with a golden late-summer afternoon. He turned up at the swimming pool of some friends who hadn’t seen him for a long time. They looked at him strangely, he wasn’t part of their present time any more. While he was there it occurred to him that there were so many swimming pools in that part of Connecticut that he could almost swim all the way home. So he went from pool to pool, public and private, swimming across Fairfield County meeting people from different bits of his life whilst swimming home as he thought. And wherever he went people became angry and disturbed, he didn’t belong in their present time, they didn’t want him in it. At the end of the film he was huddled in the doorway of the empty locked house that had been his while rain came down and he heard the ball going back and forth on the empty tennis court and the voices of his daughters who were gone. Dora and I saw the film together.

No swimming pools for me. Just a bath that I have to clean Mr Sandor’s pubic hair out of while Miss Neap’s lavender scent marches up and down the walls like a skeleton in armour. The water is not relaxing. Or indeed it may be relaxing, may be totally relaxed but I’m not. I don’t want to be naked with anybody now, especially myself.

Haven’t smoked for three days. Busy night and day not smoking. Already I can climb stairs better but that’s not much of a life. With smoking one has a life while dying. How did the Greeks ever run a whole culture without it? Maybe that’s why there was so much homosexuality. The turtles are no substitute for smoking. I’m tired of playing with pebbles and sucking wine gums. Breathing straight air seems an empty exercise. I may kill somebody if I don’t smoke. Mr Sandor’s life is hanging by a thread if he only knew it.

Shamans in a state of ecstasy fly, travel long distances or think they do, say they do. When 1 was between twelve and thirteen I was lying in bed one night not asleep, not awake, and all at once I was looking down at myself from the ceiling. It wasn’t a dream, I don’t know what it was. I don’t know anything about ecstasy. It happened another time that year too. I was standing by the window looking at myself lying in bed. Twice in my life I’ve been out of myself in that way. I don’t think I’ve been into myself yet. In myself like a prisoner. But not into my self.

Ocean. When I think that word I want to be immersed in it and at the same time contain it all. Great green deeps of ocean. A medium of motion and being. And of course the sharks. Walking on the ground is not comparable to that underwater flying, green water touching every part.

I walk a lot at night now, sit on benches in squares feeling the dark on my face, looking at the street lamps. Most of the other people on the street are young. I don’t want to sit in my room. I don’t want to do anything particularly.

Actually we’re all swimmers, we’ve all come from the ocean. Some of us are trying to find it again.

Eliade says in his book on shamanism:

In the beginning, that is, in mythical times, man lived at peace with the animals and understood their speech. It was not until after a primordial catastrophe, comparable to the ‘Fall’ of Biblical tradition, that man became what he is today — mortal, sexed, obliged to work to feed himself, and at enmity with the animals. While preparing for his ecstasy and during it, the shaman abolishes the present human condition and, for the time being, recovers the situation as it was in the beginning. Friendship with animals, knowledge of their language, transformation into an animal are so many signs that the shaman has re-established the ‘paradisal’ situation lost at the dawn of time.

That’s the crux of it: abolishing the present human condition. Shamans wear bird costumes and they fly. Somehow they experience flying. They’re gone and they come back with answers. Could I abolish the human condition? Could I swim, experience swimming, finding, navigating, fearlessness, unlostness? Could I come back with an answer? The unlostness itself would be the answer, I shouldn’t need to come back.