Turtle Diary

42 Neaera H

Something very slowly, very dimly has been working in my mind and now is clear to me: there are no incidences, there are only coincidences. When a photograph in a newspaper is looked at closely one can see the single half-tone dots it’s made of. There one sees the incidence of a single dot, there another and another. Thousands of them coinciding make the face, the house, the tree, the whole picture. Every picture is a pattern of coincidence unrecognizable in the single dot. Each incidence of anything in life is just a single dot and my face is so close to that dot that I can’t see what it’s part of. I shall never be able to stand back far enough to see the whole picture. I shall die in blind ignorance and rage.

The men who used to work in the hole in the street are gone, the hole is closed up. I don’t know if the street is different or not. In the shop where I’d seen the oyster-catcher on TV all the screens showed two men in sombreros shooting at each other with revolvers from behind rocks.

I passed an antique shop. There was a brown and varnished sea-turtle shell in the window. A black man — was he from the Caribbean? — was looking at it. He wore a white mac, it was a wet grey day. Next door was a fruiterer, there were oranges. The rain stopped, the sun came out into a gunmetal sky. ‘Well, yes,’ I said aloud. ‘Of course.’

The black man turned and looked at me. ‘Tortuguero,’ he said. He said it like a password but made no secret sign. He said it because he needed to say the name aloud just there and then to me. I nodded, felt dizzy with my face against the dot. How did he know that I knew where Tortuguero was? I shall never see the picture. I could grind my teeth and weep.

On my desk in the middle of the night does some tiny figure look at Madame Beetle and dream of setting her free? Is there any limit to smallness and largeness? Is it possible actually to hold an orange in the hand? Iron and wind are both grey. Would there be oyster-catchers in armour on the rooftops if I looked up?

The sea was wherever it was, and the turtles. It couldn’t be done again. Of those who did the launching there were no survivors. I passed an empty playground. The rocking horse was rocking, all its five seats empty.

I went to the Zoo, to the Aquarium. The turtle tank was empty, still being cleaned. I opened one of the PRIVATE doors, found George Fairbairn on the duckboards behind the fish tanks. There was a clean ocean smell, the illuminated water seemed like clear green time, the wood of the duckboards was like the wood in boats.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘they get off all right?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘they must have done, unless you’ve heard any reports of turtles being picked up off the Cornish coast.’

‘Not so far,’ he said.

I had nothing to say but I felt safe on the boat-feeling wood in the green light of salt-water time.

‘All right?’ he said. ‘You look a little peaky. Fancy a cup of tea?’

‘I’d just like to stay here a while and look at the water,’ I said.

‘I’ll bring it here,’ he said.

Below me the leopard shark swam his aimless urgent round like an office boy. Twit, I thought.

George Fairbairn came back with the tea-tray, set it down on a plank. I’d never really looked at him closely, he didn’t compel attention. He was a very medium-looking man, neither tall nor short, neither dark nor fair, about my age. His face was just a plain face, cheerful and undemanding.

‘How do you stay cheerful?’ I said.

‘I don’t mind being alive,’ he said. He poured the tea, took a tin of tobacco out of his pocket, rolled a cigarette, lit it. ‘There’s nothing you can do about this, you know,’ he said. ‘Nothing to be done really about animals. Anything you do looks foolish. The answer isn’t in us. It’s almost as if we’re put here on earth to show how silly they aren’t. I don’t mind. I just like being around them.’

I began to cry. I leant against him and sobbed.

‘It’s all right,’ he said, stroking my hair. ‘You needn’t hold back, these are all salt-water tanks.’