Turtle Diary

46 Neaera H

When I got back to my flat after leaving George Fairbairn the sky went hard and blue, the sun came out in real postcard style. I didn’t like it. Sunny days have always been more difficult for me than grey ones.

The snails grazed slowly on the sides of Madame Beetle’s tank, the little china bathing beauty turned her back on them, Madame Beetle stayed under the filter sponge. Everything seemed stupid. I walked about from room to room, took books from shelves and put them back, dug up old letters and read lines here and there.

The place seemed suddenly intolerably full of things. The cupboards were bursting with clothes and shoes I’d never wear again, the drawers were full of rubbish, the files choked with defunct correspondence.

I began to thin out my belongings, tied up clothes in bundles, stacked old newspapers, filled carrier bags with what had filled the drawers. Then I felt exhausted, had some lunch, drank coffee, smoked.

I didn’t want to be in my flat for the rest of the day. I put some paper in a file envelope and went to the British Museum. I sat on a wooden bench on the porch. Pigeons and tourists were active all round, the sunlight seemed tolerable there. I held the envelope on my lap, feeling the weight and thickness of the blank paper inside. I closed my eyes, thought of all the years of Gillian Vole, Delia Swallow and the other animals and birds I’d written about and drawn. They led such cosy cheerful lives, that lot. I’d written them but there no longer seemed a place in their world for me.

With my eyes closed I could still see the sunlight. For a moment I saw ocean, sharp and real, the heaving of the open sea, the sunlight dancing in a million dazzling points. The turtles would be swimming, swimming. It had been a good thing to do and not a foolish one. Thinking about the turtles I could feel the action of their swimming, the muscle contractions that drove the flippers through the green water. All they had was themselves but they would keep going until they found what was in them to find. In them was the place they were swimming to, and at the end of their swimming it would loom up out of the sea, real, solid, no illusion. They could be stopped of course, they might be killed by sharks or fishermen but they would die on the way to where they wanted to be. I’d never know if they’d got there or not, for me they would always be swimming.

I was in my ocean, this was the only ocean there was for me, the dry streets of London and my square without a fountain. No one could make me freer by putting me somewhere else. I had as much as the turtles: myself. At least I too could die on the way to where I wanted to be. Gillian Vole! Not enough, not nearly enough.

I took paper out of the envelope, took a pen out of my bag. What was there to write? Anything, everything:

Madame Water-Beetle lived in a plastic shipwreck in a tank by the window. In the same tank lived seven red snails. The snails did the snail work and she did the beetle work.

The perversity of the human mind! I folded the sheet in half, put a fresh one on top of the stack, sat there with it blank for a long time. I wished I had somewhere to go besides my flat. Somewhere bright and empty with uncluttered shadows, somewhere not crusted with years of me. Like George’s place.