Turtle Diary

32 Neaera H

On our way to the M4 William stopped at an off-licence and bought a bottle of champagne. ‘We owe it to the turtles,’ he said. Before we started off again he showed me our route on the map. ‘We stay on the M4 until after Swindon,’ he said, ‘then we go through Chippenham, Trowbridge, Frome, Shepton Mallet, Glastonbury, Taunton, Exeter, Plymouth, cross the Tamar, go through Looe and there’s Polperro.’ The rain was running down the windscreen, our heads were close together as we bent over the map, the light of the torch playing on the red and blue and green roads made me feel young again, daring the illicit after bedtime. But it was difficult to make out the place names without my reading-glasses, the map was only a beautiful abstraction.

We drove off, the windscreen wipers took up their steady beat. We were still missing kerbs and cars by scant inches on my side. ‘Too close,’ I kept saying as I leant away from anticipated scrapes, always expecting to hear the rending of metal. William’s head was held in such a way that I knew his neck would ache before he’d been driving an hour. I don’t drive, couldn’t relieve him, he’d have to do it all himself.

I was determined to be alert, to take in everything and not miss anything. I continued alert on the Hammersmith Fly-over and past the Chiswick Roundabout but soon it was like concerts where I vowed to listen carefully but drifted off and dozed. I didn’t actually doze in the van but fell into a sort of travel trance that alternated with an intense uneasiness about the too-closeness of everything on my side. Whatever William used to drive must have been about two feet narrower than this van. If he was still sitting in a car that wasn’t there any more, was he still in his mind sitting with whoever had been in it with him? There was a long stretch of yellow lights, utterly placeless. The road seemed to come from nowhere and lead to nowhere, it seemed wholly outside of time. I listened to the hum of the engine, the hiss of the tyres, the swish of the windscreen wipers. William had said that he’d worked in advertising but he hadn’t told me much else about himself.

‘Were you ever married?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said. He opened his mouth and I thought he was going to say more but he closed it again. Then he said, ‘Were you?’

‘No,’ I said. I too opened my mouth, closed it again.

‘Turtles,’ I said, and shook my head.

‘Yes,’ said William. ‘Turtles.’

Suddenly it seemed to me quite incomprehensible that for the last fifteen years I’d been writing and illustrating Gillian Vole, Delia Swallow and that lot. Drawing birds was what got me into it. I was working at an art studio and I’d done a little advertising campaign with cartoon birds. Somebody said I ought to try children’s books and I sold my first one to Bill Sharpe. Delia Swallow’s Wedding, that was.

A little after ten o’clock we stopped somewhere near Swindon and topped up the petrol tank. We’d done about sixty-five miles, William said, and the tank took something over three gallons. That seemed to please him, getting twenty miles to the gallon. When the van was stopped and the engine switched off we could hear the turtles breathing.

When we turned off the M4 and drove through Chippenham and the other towns William was still shaving things too close on my side. I kept saying ‘Too close’ and being irritated at the sound of my voice and his having to be told. This wasn’t whatever he used to drive and this wasn’t the time when he used to drive it, it was here and now and us and the turtles, damn it. There was something insulting about it, like having a man continually call you by the name of the woman he used to be with.

‘Here,’ I said. ‘Now. Tonight. This week, this month, this year. Turtles. Us. Ford Transit 90, 18 Cwt.’

‘Yes,’ said William. ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ He knew what I meant. He changed the poise of his head, brought his neck up out of his shoulders. ‘It’s not too bad actually, this,’ he said. ‘In-between is really where I feel best. Neither here nor there.’

‘There isn’t any in-between,’ I said. ‘Any place you pass through is this moment’s here. In-between is an illusion.’

‘Thanks very much,’ he said. ‘You’ve just invalidated most of my life.’

‘Mine as well,’ I said. There were reflecting studs in the road shaped like crabs without legs, each with two little eyes like crabs, continually advancing out of the darkness. Each one stared at me as the van swallowed it up. I stared back.

By 11.30 we’d done a little over a hundred miles and we stopped outside of Frome for sandwiches and coffee. The turtles breathed patiently. Crated and lying on their backs as they were they couldn’t even look up at the ceiling of the van. Their ocean smell seemed fainter now, mixed with the petrol fumes from the five-gallon container. The three plastrons were pale in the light of the torch, looked heraldic: three plastrons supine on a field Ford Transit. ‘Navigare necesse est. Vivere non est necesse.’

I’ve seen films of newly hatched turtles racing to the sea, whole fleets of them almost flying over the sand in their rush to the water. These three lay on their backs ponderous with the finding in them, passively waiting. Looking at them I couldn’t think there was any expectation in them. When they felt themselves once more in ocean they would simply do what turtles do in ocean, their readiness was whole and undiminished in them. If permitted to live they would navigate by the sun, by chemical traces in the water, by the imprint in their genes of an ancient continent now sundered. They were compacted of finding, finding was embodied in them. There were the five gallons of petrol. I thought of the turtles burning in silence.

I got out of the van. The rain had stopped. I stood by the van, leant my forehead against the cool wet metal. The crab reflectors in the road looked at me or not as cars went past or didn’t. In the pocket of my mac was the Caister two-stone. It must have been there from the last time I wore the mac, I hadn’t put it there today.