Turtle Diary

20 Neaera H

It was past three in the morning and I was staring into the green murk of Madame Beetle’s tank. The plants are all shrouded in long green webs of algae, there are white and ghostly bits of old meat hanging about blooming with mould, the sides of the tank are very dim. It’s like the setting for a tiny horror film but Madame Beetle doesn’t seem to mind. I can’t think now how it could have occurred to me that I might write a story about her. Who am I to use the mystery of her that way? Her swimming is better than my writing and she doesn’t expect to get paid for it. If someone were to buy me, have me shipped in a tin with air-holes, what would I be a specimen of?

I went to the bookshelves, got The Duchess of Malfi, sat down in my reading chair, turned to the scene where the executioners enter ‘with a coffin, cords, and a bell’. I read the Duchess’s speech:

I know death hath ten thousand several doors

For men to take their exits; and ‘tis found

They go on such strange geometrical hinges,

You may open them both ways …

While I sat there looking at the lines I drifted out of wakefulness but I wasn’t asleep. I was seeing Breydon Water at low tide, the oyster-catchers on the mussel beds and the water silver in the sunlight. Then it wasn’t low tide any more but high water, green ocean, deep. I was in it swimming, flying, green ocean over me, under me, touching every part of me. And a glimmering white shadow coming up from below. Ah yes, my mind said, the shark’s mouth too is after all a place of rest, they call them requin.

This is not mine, I thought, coming awake again. This is someone else’s ocean, someone else’s shark. I hadn’t asked William G. for his telephone number when I gave him mine. I looked in the directory, not expecting to find it. He probably lived in a bedsitter and the telephone would be in someone else’s name. There were seven William G.s.

It was a quarter to four. I looked at the calendar. Saturday morning. I looked at the telephone. Sometimes when I look at the telephone at that time in the morning it looks as if it just happens to be that shape at that time. I simply didn’t have it in me to make possibly seven calls on the chance of finding him when I felt certain he wasn’t in the directory.

I don’t know how I’d got it into my head that he lived in a bedsitter and not a flat of his own but when I thought of him at home that’s where I saw him. With a very tall brown Victorian wardrobe, a sort of Palaeozoic brown upholstered chair, an indeterminate bed that metamorphosed into an indeterminate couch during the day and wallpaper that baffled the eye. Still he might be one of the seven William G.s. in the directory. I believed it to be a matter of life or death but I couldn’t make myself ring up any of the William G.s. The bookshop is open on Saturday mornings and I should have to wait until 9.30 to find out if he was there or at home.

I sat in my reading chair waiting but nothing came to me. I am not after all a telepath or a clairvoyant. I left the flat and sat in the square resting my mind on the fountain that wasn’t there. The air was heavy and still, the bronze girl would be dim in the bluish light of the street lamps, her bronze would be cool and damp, the fountain jet would be shut off, the pebbles would be glistening with dew. A police constable’s footsteps approached, then the glimmer of his shirt, then the constable, one of the ones I know. They’re used to seeing me about at all hours.

‘Very close, isn’t it,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s very close.’ The constable passed on, the shirt became a glimmer again, the footsteps receded.

I could scarcely sit still. I had one of those thoughts that sometimes come in dreams and put themselves into words that stay in the mind: the backs of things are always connected to the fronts of them. This is the back of the turtle thing, I thought. What? What is it? I had a feeling of dread. The back of the turtle thing was despair. Mine? His? Not mine. My despair has long since been ground up fine and is no more than the daily salt and pepper of my life. Not mine.

The square was moving towards morning. Railings that had gleamed under the street lamps were black against the first light of day. But it was a dark dawn. Weekend weather. I went back to the flat. It was much closer inside. I felt as if I were being smothered in wet sheets. I opened all the windows. The window frames were sooty and my hands got dirty. The air outside joined the air inside, all of it was like wet sheets.

I looked down at where I had been sitting in the square. The bench was empty, the square was green and vacant in the early light like one long uniflected vowel. It seemed to have lost all particularity. The trees, the bushes, the benches had no reference to anything, were altogether incomprehensible. The fountain that wasn’t there was doubly not there, was incapable of being associated with the square.

It was half-past five. I was drowsy but I didn’t want to go to sleep, I didn’t want to dream. I lay down and of course I did fall asleep. I dreamt that nothing had a front any more. The whole world was nothing but the back of the world, and blank. No shape to it, no colour, just utter blankness. How could even the buses have lost their shape and colour, I thought. Even from the back they’re red and bus-shaped. Some part of all this blankness must be a bus. But there was no bus, no anything. Just blank terror.

Then another of those dream thoughts came to me: every action has a mother and a father and is itself the mother or the father of the action that comes out of it. An endless genealogy branching back into the past, forward into the future. There is no unattached action. I woke up and it was half-past seven.

I looked at the telephone again. Don’t be ridiculous, the shape of it said. The daylight in the windows threatened rain. I had breakfast and a cigarette and then another cigarette. I walked about the flat picking things up and putting them down, shuffling through unanswered letters and unpaid bills and dire things in brown envelopes On Her Majesty’s Service. In the spare room are cartons of books demoted from the active shelves. 16 Giant ARIEL, said one. OUTSPAN Lemons, said another, and in my lettering: SITTING ROOM BOTTOM. That cardboard box is twenty years old, I labelled it when we emptied the shelves at home and packed the books to move to London. The longevity of impermanent things! I sat down in the chair again, dozed off, woke up at a quarter to nine, left the flat quickly and went down to the bus stop.

The bus came sooner than I expected, they always do when I’m early. I sat next to a man with a newspaper in which I read about a ‘Vice girl’ who’d entertained various businessmen for a pop singer. She’d been instructed to sleep with Mr X for a fee of £5, said the girl. She’d been requested to dress and act like an eleven-year-old schoolgirl and to refer frequently in her conversation to certain breakfast cereals and other products by their brand names. Mr X was in advertising it seemed. He proved incapable, said the girl. Incapable of sleeping, I thought, smiling at the ambiguities of polite speech. I shouldn’t be surprised if Mr X did have difficulty in sleeping what with all those brand names dancing in his head.

It occurred to me then to imagine lives packaged and labelled and ranged on shelves waiting to be bought. I couldn’t think of any likely brand names right off except Brief Candle. And what if the ingredients were listed on the box? Many lives would go unsold, they’d have to discontinue some of the range. Sorry, we don’t stock that life any more, there was no demand for it really. Hard Slog for example or Dreary Muddle, how many would they sell a year? On the other hand Wealth and Fame would move briskly even with a Government Health Warning on the packet.

It was only five past nine when I got to the bookshop, and I spent the next twenty minutes looking at the books in the window. I observed that Taura Strong continues to be productive, ecology was enjoying a rising market, sex was holding its own but a little more quietly than formerly: there were glossy books with photographs of naked people kneading each other thoughtfully. Gangsterism in government was under examination in America and government in gangsterism was being looked at as well. The backs of things are getting into print more and more these days and heterosexuality is increasingly thin on the ground in biographies. Fallopia Bothways, smiling a virile smile on the showcard for her new novel, has changed her haircut. Through the glass doors I could see the books on tables and shelves resting quietly and holding themselves in reserve until opening time. I found myself mentally turning away from the too-muchness of them.

At 9.25 a girl who seemed to have bought Hard Slog arrived with keys and unlocked one of the glass doors top and bottom. She smiled briefly, went in and locked the door behind her. I waited while she picked up the morning post, turned on the lights, went to the office at the rear of the shop, came back with brown paper bags and put money into the till. Then she looked up, seemed gratified by my patience, smiled and opened the door.

‘Good morning,’ I said.

‘Good morning,’ she said. ‘Can I help you?’

‘Will Mr G. be here today?’ I said.

She shook her head. ‘It’s his Saturday off.’

‘Can you tell me where to reach him, his phone number?’ I said. ‘It’s rather urgent.’

She looked at me carefully. Did I look like an old girl friend who rings up and breathes into the telephone, I wondered. I didn’t think so. She shook her head with some reluctance I thought but still she shook it.

‘Our manager, Mr Meager, is quite firm about that,’ she said. ‘Best thing is to come in again on Monday, Mr G.’ll be here then.’

‘I think he might not be,’ I said. I watched a bus go past the door, first the front then the back. ‘I think he may be quite ill. Would you mind ringing him up yourself just to make sure he’s all right? I think it really is urgent.’ By then I was quite possessed by my fixed idea and feeling a little demented about it.

‘He looked perfectly well yesterday,’ she said. ‘He’s probably not up yet. It’s early for a Saturday off.’

I didn’t say anything. I must have looked a fright.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll ring him. It’s a little odd, you know. After all if you’re a friend of his you’d have his number, wouldn’t you?’

I couldn’t think of anything to say, just looked at her dumbly.

‘All right,’ she said again. ‘Who shall I say it is?’

‘Neaera H.,’ I said.

Her face changed, her manner as well. Little softenings and flutters. ‘The one who does the Gillian Vole books?’ she said. ‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Well,’ she said with a fleeting smile, ‘I’ll see if I can raise him.’ She went back to the office and closed the door. Through the little office window I saw her look up the number on a list she took from a drawer. She dialled, waited, spoke while watching me through the window. I couldn’t hear what she said.

‘I’ve rung the house where he lives,’ she said when she came out. ‘They say he doesn’t answer his door. He doesn’t seem to be at home.’

‘This isn’t anything personal,’ I said. ‘It’s nothing personal at all really.’ I could feel my face not knowing what to do with itself.

An American lady came in. ‘Have you anything on Staffordshire figures?’ she said.

The girl went to the shelves, took out three books.

‘I have all of those,’ said the American lady. ‘Is there anything else?’

‘That’s all there is just now,’ said the girl.

‘Oh, dear,’ said the American lady. ‘Thank you.’ She left.

An intense-looking young man with long hair, a beard, an immense mackintosh and a large shoulder-bag came in and headed for the Occult section.

‘Would you leave your bag at the counter, please,’ said the girl. The young man flashed her a dark look, left the shoulder-bag with her, went to the shelves and appeared to be deeply interested in alchemy.

‘Keep your eye on him for a moment,’ said the girl. ‘He pinches books.’ She went back to the office, returned quickly and handed me a slip of paper with William G.’s address and telephone number on it.

‘Here,’ she said. ‘You look as if it’s important.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, and hurried away.

Someone got out of a taxi and I got in. Just like a film, I thought. People never have to wait for taxis in films. Old films, that is. They never used to get change when they paid for anything either, they just left notes or coins and walked away. Now they get change. Perhaps they sometimes have to wait for taxis too. I gave the driver the address, it was in SW6.

‘Do you know the street?’ he said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Don’t you?’

‘I’m a suburban driver,’ he said as he turned down the Brompton Road. ‘I don’t know London all that well. Most of the lads graduate to London after a while, go about on a moped getting the knowledge but I haven’t bothered. I’m a Jehovah’s Witness and we think God’s going to step in and put things to right in a couple of years. There won’t be any taxis then.’

‘What will there be?’ I said looking in my A to Z. ‘I think it’s off the Fulham Road.’

‘The Lord will take care of the righteous,’ he said as we came to the Brompton Oratory and turned left into the Fulham Road. ‘We’ve been interested in the year 1975 for some time.’

‘You go to Fulham Broadway and turn left into Harwood Road,’ I said. ‘What’ll you do if nothing happens in 1975?’

‘A lot of people ask that question,’ said the driver. ‘We’ll…’ We’d come to a place where they were tearing up the street and I couldn’t hear what he said.

‘Sorry,’ I said, leaning close to the opening in the glass partition. ‘I couldn’t hear you.’

‘We’ll …’ he said as a plane screamed low overhead.

I sank back in the seat, didn’t ask again.

The house was on a crescent opposite a football pitch, a paddling pool and a playground. The far end of the crescent looked more posh, the houses a little grander and overlooking the common. William G.’s end was Georgian terraced houses, three storeys, quite plain. I paid the driver and as he drove off I wished I’d asked him about 1975 again. I really did want to know what he’d do if it came and went without the Lord’s taking a stand either way. Too late, the chance was gone.

There were no nameplates, only one bell. I rang it. A fiery-looking foreign-looking man with a violent moustache answered the door. He was wearing a Middle-Eastern sort of dressing-gown that had more colour and pattern than one really cared to see in a single garment. Red velvet slippers, very white feet and ankles with very black hair. He looked as if he had strong political convictions.

‘I’ve come to see Mr G.,’ I said.

‘Top,’ said the man and stood aside.

I went up, stood outside William G.’s door waiting for my heart to stop pounding. Too many cigarettes. The violent-moustached man had come upstairs too and was producing violent smells in a tiny kitchen on the landing. I could ask him to force the door if necessary. I tried not to think of what we might find. I knocked.

William G. opened the door, looked startled. ‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘Come in.’

I gasped, found nothing to say. The room was not as I had imagined it, had white walls, an orange Japanese paper lamp. Modern furniture, mail-order Danish.

‘You look quite done up,’ he said. ‘I’ll get you some coffee.’