Turtle Diary

3 William G

It must have been soft plastic, that gorilla the little boy had. I don’t think they make those things out of rubber any more.

There are green turtles whose feeding grounds are along the coast of Brazil, and they swim 1,400 miles to breed and lay their eggs on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, half way to Africa. Ascension Island is only five miles long. Nobody knows how they find it. Two of the turtles at the Aquarium are green turtles, a large one and a small one. The sign said: ‘The Green Turtle, Chelonia mydas, is the source of turtle soup …’ I am the source of William G. soup if it comes to that. Everyone is the source of his or her kind of soup. In a town as big as London that’s a lot of soup walking about.

How do the turtles find Ascension Island? There are sharks in the water too. Some of the turtles get eaten by sharks. Do the turtles know about sharks? How do they not think about the sharks when they’re swimming that 1,400 miles? Green turtles must have the kind of mind that doesn’t think about sharks unless a shark is there. That must be how it is with them. I can’t believe they’d swim 1,400 miles thinking about sharks. Sea turtles can’t shut themselves up in their shells as land turtles do. Their shells are like tight bone vests and their flippers are always sticking out. Nothing they can do if a shark comes along. Pray. Ridiculous to think of a turtle praying with all those teeth coming up from below.

Mr Meager, manager of the shop and the source of Meager soup, stood in front of me for a while. When I noticed him he asked me if I’d got something on my mind. Green turtles, I said. Was that something we’d subscribed, he wanted to know. No, I said, it was the source of turtle soup. He went away with a hard smile.

It’s hard to believe they do it by observing the angle of the sun like a yachtsman with a sextant. Carr doubts it and he’s about the biggest turtle authority there is. But that’s what penguins do on overland journeys. They’re big navigators too. I think of the turtles swimming steadily against the current all the way to Ascension. I think of them swimming through all that golden-green water over the dark, over the chill of the deeps and the jaws of the dark. And I think of the sun over the water, the sun through the water, the eye holding the sun, being held by it with no thought and only the rhythm of the going, the steady wing-strokes of the flippers in the water. Then it doesn’t seem hard to believe. It seems the only way to do it, the only way in fact to be: swimming, swimming, the eye held by the sun, no sharks in the mind, nothing in the mind. And when they can’t see the sun, what then? Their vision isn’t good enough for star sights. Do they go by smell, taste, faith?

In the evening I went downstairs for a cup of tea with Mrs Inchcliff, my landlady. She wasn’t in the kitchen, I found her in the lumber-room. Her boyfriend Charlie when he lived here used to spend a lot of time in that room. There’s a workbench there and she was sitting on it under a green-shaded light with her feet on a saw-horse. She’s sixty years old, still a good-looking woman, must have been beautiful when she was younger. Goes about in jeans and shirts and sandals mostly, wears her hair long. From the back she looks like a girl except that her hair is grey.

‘With just a little more capital Charlie and I could have made a go of the antique shop,’ she said. ‘If we could have hung on for another year we’d have been all right. Charlie loved it.’

Charlie had indeed been very good at finding things, stripping off paint and varnish, rebuilding and restoring. He was twenty-five when they broke up a couple of years ago. He went off with a woman of fifty who had a stall on the Portobello Road.

When he and Mrs Inchcliff had been in business a good many of their antiques had cost them nothing at all. They used to go out scavenging in her old estate-car almost every day. They’d had a regular route of rubbish tips and she still kept her hand in. When a building was due to be condemned she usually beat everyone else to the knocker on the front door and she seemed to find the most profitable skips on both sides of the river. She was always shifting odd doors and dressers and various scraps of timber and ironmongery, more out of habit than anything else though I daresay she made a few pounds a week selling things to dealers.

‘If you ever want to do any woodworking,’ she said, ‘shelves or anything, you can use the tools and everything here whenever you like.’ She’s said that to me several times.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing I need to make right now.’ When I had a house I used to make things. When I had a family. When the girls sat on my lap and I read to them.

I sat down on a chest. There was a sack trolley leaning in the corner, left over from the antique-shop days. I saw myself walking down a dark street in the middle of the night wheeling a turtle on the sack trolley. Just a flash and it was gone. There was a pebble in the pocket of my cardigan, left there from the last time I stopped smoking. From the beach at Antibes. Look, Dad, here’s a good one. It was cool and smooth between my fingers.

‘I wonder what Charlie’s doing now,’ said Mrs Inchcliff.

There must be a lot of people in the world being wondered about by people who don’t see them any more.