Turtle Diary (7 page)

They won’t stop killing the whales. They make dog- and cat-food out of them, face creams, lipstick. They kill the whales to feed the dogs so the dogs can shit on the pavement and the people can walk in it. A kind of natural cycle. Whales can navigate, echo-locate, sing, talk to one another but they can’t get away from the harpoon guns. The International Whaling Commission is meeting here in London right now but they won’t stop the killing of whales.

The drinking fountain on the common is gone. It was there for years and years, probably ever since the footpaths and the playground and the paddling pool and the football pitch were made. The people next door have been here for twenty years and it was there when they moved in. Vandals pushed it over the other night, broke the pipes. Now it’s been taken away. There’s a little square hole full of water with a Coca-Cola tin in it and that’s all.

There’s something about the common at night, something about the dark open space facing the lighted houses that provokes savagery and terrorism. Youths on the common at night yell horribly as they pass the houses. They feel themselves to be part of the night outside and they want the people inside to be afraid. They get into the playground and scream and shout and hurl the swings about with a savage clashing of the chains as if they could destroy the world by pulling down the playground. In the morning the chains are all wound round the crossbar and the maintenance man has to come with a ladder to disentangle the swings.

The drinking fountain and the whales are all part of the same thing in my mind. I feel as if the life is being torn out of the world.

Fear. Some days I have to go to the loo three times before I leave the house in the morning. I can feel the fear thrilling in me the same way the rails feel the trains coming. Fear of everything. I wasn’t sorry to give Dora the car when we parted, I hated to drive it, always felt as if something dreadful might happen at any moment. I never felt as manly and powerful as other male drivers. When I stopped at traffic lights I never pulled up nose to nose with other cars, always stopped a little way back so as not to challenge anyone. If I take the turtles to Brighton I’ll have to drive the van but that’ll be all right. The turtles are depending on me.
Something’s
depending on me.

I was looking at a book on shamanism at the shop, by Mircea Eliade. In Siberia and South America, wherever they have shamans, they’re always the unstable, the epileptics, the weird ones of the group, people prone to terrors and depression as I am. But unlike me they get initiated into power and a place of importance, they become seers and healers. There’s something between them and animals, a bond, a connection, channels of power. Speech with animals, magical transformations. Could I be a turtle? Could I through an act of ecstasy swim unafraid and never lost, finding, finding? Swimming with Pangaea printed on my brain and bones, the ancient continent that was before the land masses drifted apart. That’s part of it too: there were no seas between, the land was one, there was one thing, unbroken. Now there are thousands of miles of open water and the strong ones, the swimmers, the unlost, are driven to trace the paths between, maintain the ancient connection. I don’t know whether I can keep going. A turtle doesn’t have to decide every morning whether to keep on bothering, it just carries on. Maybe that’s why man kills everything: envy.

A confusion of fixed and flashing lights confronts the navigator, that’s what the sign on the Port Liberty model says. That’s how life seems to me sometimes. At other times it’s a confusion of fixed and flashing darknesses. More darknesses than lights I
think. Port Liberty doesn’t exist and Pangaea having separated will never again come together. Unless he is already doomed, Fortune favours the man who keeps his nerve.
Beowulf.
Of course it’s easy to keep your nerve when you’ve got a grip that can tear the arm right off a sea monster. Am I doomed? Flashing darkness is pretty much the same as flashing light really. Fear isn’t at all the same as courage but after a certain point perhaps being afraid of everything is the same as being afraid of nothing. It doesn’t feel that way now but then I haven’t reached that point yet. If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise, said Blake. If the coward persists in his cowardice does he become brave?

Maybe I could stop smoking, that would give me more years to get brave in. It’s getting to my legs, they seize up on me now whenever I climb stairs. When I stopped smoking for nine days not long ago I could run right up the stairs in the Underground like other people.

I’ve met several other men who were divorced and didn’t see their children any more because their wives had left the country. It didn’t seem to bother them all that much. I feel as if it’ll kill me but then when I was with the children I felt that being married to Dora was taking my life away. Maybe I’m just one of those people so accustomed to being miserable that they use the material of any situation to fuel their misery.

Sometimes I think it must help to have a conviction in one’s birthplace, to feel a significance in having been born in one place rather than another. Perhaps if more of my childhood had been spent in Polperro I’d feel stronger about it. My father retired there to paint, met my mother in the teashop where she worked, married her and died two years later. I was one year old when Mother and I came to London and I still can’t see the point of my having been born in Polperro. I’ve never been back there.

For some time now on bad days I’ve been falling back on a news item I read last month. An important witness in the current American government scandal was said to be desperately afraid of going to prison because he’s so good-looking that all the homosexuals will be after him. I have many problems but not that one.

The one beach pebble I have from my childhood is the one I call my Caister two-stone. It’s an amalgam of two different kinds of material, half grey and half brown.

My father took me to the Caister Lifeboat Station once. There was no boathouse like the one that’s there now, the boat, the
Charles Burton,
was on skeets on the sand. It had saved seven lives that year. One of the vessels the Caister men had helped was the
Corn Rig
of Buckie. ‘Rendered assistance’ was the expression used. ‘We rendered assistance to the
Corn Rig
of Buckie,’ said the brown-faced man my father was talking to. It had a gallant sound like a line in a narrative poem. My father said to me afterwards that Caister men never turn back. ‘They may die, they may drown, but they never turn back,’ he said wonderingly and shook his head. His words and the words of the other man have stayed together in my mind:

We rendered assistance to the
Corn Rig
of Buckie,
We may die, we may drown, but we never turn back.

As if to reprove the Caister men for their obstinate courage the Royal National Lifeboat Institution took away their boat and shut down the station several years ago, economizing the service. The Caister men of course got themselves another boat and carry on unofficially. The stone is on my desk and I handle it often.

This preoccupation with the turtles, this project that insists on
forming itself in my mind, wants to be seen in its proper light. I have got to try to understand it a little better. Not perhaps entirely, I’m not given to examining too closely the actions that really matter. I can deliberate long over a dinner-party invitation, considering carefully every aspect of the occasion and what it will cost me in time and equilibrium but when the venture is crucial I simply trust to luck and plunge into the dark. And even now at the age of forty-three I still can’t say whether I’ve been lucky or unlucky. Sometimes it looks one way and sometimes the other.

On reflection I really don’t want to understand it better. It may be silly and wrong and useless, it may be anything at all but it seems to be a thing that I have to do before I can do whatever comes after it. That it seems to involve other people is inevitable, everything does in one way or another.

I went to the bookshop. The man and I said hello to each other and I went to the Natural History section where I turned the pages of books without looking at them. My heart was pounding somewhat and I found myself mentally rehearsing what I would say. I always do that, I can’t help it. Even when I go to the Post Office I say in my mind before I reach the window, ‘Twenty stamps at 3p, please.’ Then I say it aloud at the window. ‘I wonder if you too are thinking about the turtles?’ I would say. Or ‘Perhaps we had better discuss the turtles?’ I cursed him for not being man enough to speak up and broach the subject when it loomed so large and visible between us.

I became aware that he was standing near me emanating silence and in my mind I cursed him again. ‘The turtles …’ I blurted out.

‘The turtles …’ he mumbled at the same time. We both laughed.

‘It’s almost lunch-time,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we could talk about it then. Can you wait a few minutes?’

I nodded and went to the Poetry section, opened A. E. Housman at random and read:

The world is round, so travellers tell,
And straight though reach the track,
Trudge on, trudge on, ‘twill all be well,
The way will guide one back.

But ere the circle homeward hies
Far, far must it remove:
White in the moon the long road lies
That leads me from my love.

It was James Haylett of Caister who first said that Caister men never turn back. He was a lifeboatman for fifty-nine years, and at the age of seventy-eight he went into the surf and pulled out his son-in-law and one of his grandsons from under the lifeboat
Beauchamp
the night it capsized in November, 1901. At the inquiry it was suggested that the
Beauchamp,
which had gone to the rescue of a Lowestoft fishing-smack on the Barber Sands, might have turned back because of the force of the gale and the heavy seas. That was when James Haylett said, ‘Caister men never turn back.’ Nine of the lifeboat crew were lost including two sons and a grandson of James Haylett. The fishing-smack had got herself off the sands, anchored safely in deep water, and knew nothing of the disaster until later. Rescuers and those to be rescued don’t always come back together.

Lunch-time came. We went to a little place near by where the take-away queue waited partly in the street and partly at the counter. There were no empty booths so we shared one with two fresh-faced young executives eating eggs and sausages and grease.

‘The brief is really quite clear,’ said the one next to me.

‘We’ve put in the think time,’ said the one next to the bookshop man. ‘We’re ready to move on it.’

‘And we’d jolly well better do it soon,’ said mine. ‘Those chaps in the City can’t be kept dangling indefinitely. Once we’ve separated the sheep from the goats we’ve got to make our bid.’

‘Precisely what I said in my report,’ said the other as he wiped up some grease with a bit of Mother’s Pride sliced
bread. ‘When they get back from Stuttgart I want to see some action.’

Their faces were pink, their eyes were clear and bright, their shirts and ties what the adverts call coordinated I believe. Mine had dirty fingernails and his handkerchief was tucked into his jacket sleeve. The other had clean fingernails. Their voices were loud, they were eager to impart the dash and colour of their lives to the drabness about them.

I had a salad. If I were to say that today’s tomatoes are an index of the decline of Western man I should be thought a crank but nations do not, I think, ascend on such tomatoes. The bookshop man had fried eggs with sausages, chips, grease and Mother’s Pride sliced bread and butter. He put ketchup on the chips. No wonder he looks hopeless I thought.

‘I always bring a sandwich for lunch,’ he said. ‘But I can have it for tea.’

‘If the bananas aren’t unloaded soon they’ll spoil,’ I said. I felt like talking like a spy.

‘I’m waiting to hear from our friend at the docks,’ said the bookshop man, rising in my estimation. ‘I can’t arrange the haulage until he gives me a date.’

The two young executives raised their eyebrows at each other.

‘Have you booked them right the way through?’ I said. The waitress reached across us with sweets for the executives. Mine had trifle, the other fruit salad with cream.

‘Only tentatively,’ said the bookshop man. ‘Brighton’s close.’

‘I was thinking of Polperro,’ I said.

The bookshop man went very red in the face. ‘Polperro!’ he said. ‘Why in God’s name Polperro?’

I indicated the two executives with my eyes and busied myself with my salad. They were both having white coffee with a lot of sugar. Life mayn’t always be that sweet for you I thought.

There was a long silence during which the executives smoked a kingsize filter-tip cigarette and a little thin cheap cigar without asking me if I minded. The bookshop man took something from
his pocket and began to play with it. It was a round beach pebble, a grey one.

‘Where’s it from?’ I said.

‘Antibes,’ he said. ‘I haven’t smoked all morning.’

The executives excused themselves. We had coffee, no sweets. On the wall two booths away from us was a circular blue fluorescent tube in a rectangular wire cage. It was probably some kind of air purifier but it looked like a Tantric moon or some other contemplation object. I contemplated it. The bookshop man looked into his coffee as if viewing the abyss.

‘Did I say anything wrong?’ I said. ‘About Polperro?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It just took me by surprise. Why Polperro?’

‘If I said that Polperro and the turtles together add up to something, would that mean anything to you?’ I said.

He looked at me strangely. ‘Yes,’ he said.

On the way out I went over to the Tantric moon and read the nameplate on it. INSECT-O-CUTOR, it said.

‘I’ll ring you up when I hear from George Fairbairn,’ said the bookshop man.

I gave him my name and telephone number.

‘Neaera,’ he read. ‘Eldest daughter?’

I nodded.

‘My name’s William G.,’ he said.