Russell Hoban - Turtle Diary

The idea of ringing up a van place and hiring a van and driving all those miles is so heavy I can hardly lift my head up. Bloody details. Too heavy. Too much.

It was past three in the morning and I was staring into the green murk of Madame Beetle’s tank. The plants are all shrouded in long green webs of algae, there are white and ghostly bits of old meat hanging about blooming with mould, the sides of the tank are very dim. It’s like the setting for a tiny horror film but Madame Beetle doesn’t seem to mind. I can’t think now how it could have occurred to me that I might write a story about her. Who am I to use the mystery of her that way? Her swimming is better than my writing and she doesn’t expect to get paid for it. If someone were to buy me, have me shipped in a tin with air-holes, what would I be a specimen of?

I went to the bookshelves, got The Duchess of Malfi , sat down in my reading chair, turned to the scene where the executioners enter ‘with a coffin, cords, and a bell’ . I read the Duchess’s speech:

I know death hath ten thousand several doors

For men to take their exits; and ‘tis found

They go on such strange geometrical hinges,

You may open them both ways …

While I sat there looking at the lines I drifted out of wakefulness but I wasn’t asleep. I was seeing Breydon Water at low tide, the oyster-catchers on the mussel beds and the water silver in the sunlight. Then it wasn’t low tide any more but high water, green ocean, deep. I was in it swimming, flying, green ocean over me, under me, touching every part of me. And a glimmering white shadow coming up from below. Ah yes, my mind said, the shark’s mouth too is after all a place of rest, they call them requin .

This is not mine, I thought, coming awake again. This is someone else’s ocean, someone else’s shark. I hadn’t asked William G. for his telephone number when I gave him mine. I looked in the directory, not expecting to find it. He probably lived in a bedsitter and the telephone would be in someone else’s name. There were seven William G.s.

It was a quarter to four. I looked at the calendar. Saturday morning. I looked at the telephone. Sometimes when I look at the telephone at that time in the morning it looks as if it just happens to be that shape at that time. I simply didn’t have it in me to make possibly seven calls on the chance of finding him when I felt certain he wasn’t in the directory.

I don’t know how I’d got it into my head that he lived in a bedsitter and not a flat of his own but when I thought of him at home that’s where I saw him. With a very tall brown Victorian wardrobe, a sort of Palaeozoic brown upholstered chair, an indeterminate bed that metamorphosed into an indeterminate couch during the day and wallpaper that baffled the eye. Still he might be one of the seven William G.s. in the directory. I believed it to be a matter of life or death but I couldn’t make myself ring up any of the William G.s. The bookshop is open on Saturday mornings and I should have to wait until 9.30 to find out if he was there or at home.

I sat in my reading chair waiting but nothing came to me. I am not after all a telepath or a clairvoyant. I left the flat and sat in the square resting my mind on the fountain that wasn’t there. The air was heavy and still, the bronze girl would be dim in the bluish light of the street lamps, her bronze would be cool and damp, the fountain jet would be shut off, the pebbles would be glistening with dew. A police constable’s footsteps approached, then the glimmer of his shirt, then the constable, one of the ones I know. They’re used to seeing me about at all hours.

‘Very close, isn’t it,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s very close.’ The constable passed on, the shirt became a glimmer again, the footsteps receded.

I could scarcely sit still. I had one of those thoughts that sometimes come in dreams and put themselves into words that stay in the mind: the backs of things are always connected to the fronts of them. This is the back of the turtle thing, I thought. What? What is it? I had a feeling of dread. The back of the turtle thing was despair. Mine? His? Not mine. My despair has long since been ground up fine and is no more than the daily salt and pepper of my life. Not mine.

The square was moving towards morning. Railings that had gleamed under the street lamps were black against the first light of day. But it was a dark dawn. Weekend weather. I went back to the flat. It was much closer inside. I felt as if I were being smothered in wet sheets. I opened all the windows. The window frames were sooty and my hands got dirty. The air outside joined the air inside, all of it was like wet sheets.

I looked down at where I had been sitting in the square. The bench was empty, the square was green and vacant in the early light like one long uniflected vowel. It seemed to have lost all particularity. The trees, the bushes, the benches had no reference to anything, were altogether incomprehensible. The fountain that wasn’t there was doubly not there, was incapable of being associated with the square.

It was half-past five. I was drowsy but I didn’t want to go to sleep, I didn’t want to dream. I lay down and of course I did fall asleep. I dreamt that nothing had a front any more. The whole world was nothing but the back of the world, and blank. No shape to it, no colour, just utter blankness. How could even the buses have lost their shape and colour, I thought. Even from the back they’re red and bus-shaped. Some part of all this blankness must be a bus. But there was no bus, no anything. Just blank terror.

Then another of those dream thoughts came to me: every action has a mother and a father and is itself the mother or the father of the action that comes out of it. An endless genealogy branching back into the past, forward into the future. There is no unattached action. I woke up and it was half-past seven.

I looked at the telephone again. Don’t be ridiculous, the shape of it said. The daylight in the windows threatened rain. I had breakfast and a cigarette and then another cigarette. I walked about the flat picking things up and putting them down, shuffling through unanswered letters and unpaid bills and dire things in brown envelopes On Her Majesty’s Service. In the spare room are cartons of books demoted from the active shelves. 16 Giant ARIEL, said one. OUTSPAN Lemons, said another, and in my lettering: SITTING ROOM BOTTOM. That cardboard box is twenty years old, I labelled it when we emptied the shelves at home and packed the books to move to London. The longevity of impermanent things! I sat down in the chair again, dozed off, woke up at a quarter to nine, left the flat quickly and went down to the bus stop.

The bus came sooner than I expected, they always do when I’m early. I sat next to a man with a newspaper in which I read about a ‘Vice girl’ who’d entertained various businessmen for a pop singer. She’d been instructed to sleep with Mr X for a fee of £5, said the girl. She’d been requested to dress and act like an eleven-year-old schoolgirl and to refer frequently in her conversation to certain breakfast cereals and other products by their brand names. Mr X was in advertising it seemed. He proved incapable, said the girl. Incapable of sleeping, I thought, smiling at the ambiguities of polite speech. I shouldn’t be surprised if Mr X did have difficulty in sleeping what with all those brand names dancing in his head.

It occurred to me then to imagine lives packaged and labelled and ranged on shelves waiting to be bought. I couldn’t think of any likely brand names right off except Brief Candle. And what if the ingredients were listed on the box? Many lives would go unsold, they’d have to discontinue some of the range. Sorry, we don’t stock that life any more, there was no demand for it really. Hard Slog for example or Dreary Muddle, how many would they sell a year? On the other hand Wealth and Fame would move briskly even with a Government Health Warning on the packet.