Russell Hoban - Turtle Diary

Some wept as they were reborn, others raged. Some both raged and wept. The wailing girl went dead silent when she did it, the one who’d muttered to herself shouted the whole time. Stravinsky was abandoned, no one needed music any more. Additional mats were brought in to afford as it were a longer birth canal. Some thrashed about in Ruby’s grip while being pulled and pushed the length of the room and others shimmied smoothly through her legs like fish. Ruby was red and blotched and chafed all over from being scraped along and struggled with up and down the room but she said that she was so energized by the atmosphere that she wasn’t tired at all.

Even though many of the girls did their writhing in bras and knickers the whole thing was not sexually stimulating, everyone was in such terrible need of something harder to find than sex. I particularly noticed one impressively handsome bearded young man who had sat in a lotus position with a very straight back and a very aloof face earlier in the evening. Now he actually grovelled and whimpered waiting for his turn.

I could never have imagined Harriet squirming on a mat in the grip of a lady wrestler’s legs but when her turn came there she was. She was fully clothed of course but her face was naked and I’d never seen her look like that before. I thought of films in which strange harsh voices spoke through women who were mediums. Harriet groaned and sobbed in her own voice but her body arched and twisted as if some terrible thing in her wanted to shed her like an old skin and get out. I couldn’t help noticing, what with the disarray of her clothing and her skirt sliding up, that she had much more of a figure than I’d given her credit for.

By then I wasn’t feeling cosy any more. One moment I was safe and a little detached and the next I looked at the candle flames and moving shadows and was sick with terror. It was as if the evening had reversed a giant devil-mirror with its picture of a world and I was silvered at the back of things, lost atoms speeding to infinity. Terror was all there was, nothing else. It might reflect the images of aeroplanes or cathedrals or Ruby in a bikini and the faces in the room but there was no reality but the terror, all that it reflected was illusion.

When Harriet had finished we left. The night outside was quiet and peaceful but the silver terror was all about us. We got a taxi and Harriet cuddled tiredly against me. Well, I thought, here we are, and took her in my arms and kissed her. When we got to her place I paid the driver, she opened the front door and we went up to her room without a word.

We took our clothes off with the terror in the room. The terror was the energy that moved us, our naked bodies moved together like the sound waves of a scream. Most animals don’t make love face to face, I thought as I fell asleep. Male and female face the same way, seeing what’s about them. Whales and humans show two backs to it.

‘Death of the oyster-catchers’ was the heading of an article in the Observer:

A programme to kill 11,000 sea birds has been under way for the past month on the sands of the Burry estuary on the Gower peninsula in South Wales.

Men with shotguns have been shooting oyster-catchers on the morning and afternoon tides and, so far, several hundred have been killed. The marksmen are being paid a bounty of 25p a bird.

The South Wales Sea Fisheries Committee, which is running the culling programme, believes it is necessary to kill the birds in order to save the world-famous cockle beds of Penclawdd. The birds, they say, are eating five to six million baby cockles each winter and they can eat more in a month than the cocklers can gather in a year.

Cockling in Penclawdd, the article went on to say, was one of Britain’s first forms of social security in that it offered a livelihood to women who had lost their men in mining accidents. The article ended with the words of a cockier from Crofty. ‘We’re having a struggle to even reach our daily quota of cockles nowadays,’ he said. ‘Quite simply, it is either us or the birds.’

Uncanny, I thought. Is there something keeping its eye on my mind, waiting to strike down whatever I think about? I’d never in my life seen a word about oyster-catchers in the news before. Now they’re killing them. ‘Us or the birds,’ said the cockier.

Harry Rush’s letter still lay on my desk unanswered, heavy with the burden that would be on me if I accepted. Of course I needed the £1,000, when would there ever be a time when I shouldn’t? The letter nagged at me like a paper devil, I knew I’d never finish such a book if I were fool enough to start it, I’d sicken at the very first page. I had feelings of doom and damnation, utter lostness, and now the dead and dying oyster-catchers seemed to put the seal on it. Everything seemed too much for me, I was overwhelmed.

I was getting hot flashes of desperation and running about the flat picking things up and putting them down aimlessly. I wanted a rest, wanted peace, wanted the world to let me alone for a bit. King Kong was playing at the Chelsea Odeon, so I went.

Wonderful inside the Odeon, cool and quiet and sheltered from the world. The place had been redone, the seating was spacious and comfortable. The lights had not yet dimmed, the screen was still playing music to itself the way they always do before a film starts. I like that music whatever it is, it sounds the same in all cinemas, light and gay and full of safe expectation.

The film was first released in the United States in 1933 during the Great Depression. That sounds strange: the Great Depression. One thinks of millions of people sitting with their heads in their hands and groaning all at the same time. Many did of course but there was no atom bomb then, the world was still like a child too little to know about death. Whatever was happening beyond the camera’s field of vision, innocence was still possible and one felt it in the opening of the picture: the dark and foggy harbour, the film entrepreneur with his ship bound for a secret destination, the beautiful hungry girl he recruits when he finds her stealing apples. He holds her at arm’s length looking intently at her face, she returns the look almost fainting, full of surrender that is transcendentally sexual and innocent. She knows she is beautiful, knows that her beauty has been recognized, that good things will happen if she surrenders.

On the ship he rehearses her in front of the camera, has her look up (‘Higher, higher!’) and scream. He doesn’t tell her what she’ll be screaming at later but he knows he’s going to bring her to some giant terror. It’s a reversal of the Schöne Müllerin theme of the unattainable beauty: the voyeur, the picture-maker, must put his attainable beauty within easy reach of the colossal beast. I watched her scream at the unknown horror she was heading for. That was a good touch, it was absolutely right. She screamed with complete acceptance of her place in life.

When Skull Island appeared it was mostly a painted backdrop but that didn’t matter; even if the studios and camera crew and all the behind-the-scenes equipment had been visible in the film it wouldn’t have mattered. Even showing the animator moving his little articulated models and photographing them frame by frame wouldn’t have made any difference in the effect: Kong with his teddy-bear fur is a fifty-foot tall idea even if the reality was only eighteen inches high. Kong lives. There was a giant arm for close-ups of Fay Wray screaming in Kong’s grasp and that seems right too. Possibly somewhere in Hollywood that giant arm lies in a warehouse, empty-handed now. Kong had no visible male member even when presumably excited but then he was all male member in a manner of speaking so that doesn’t matter either. On the other hand maybe that’s why he only wanted tiny women to play with instead of looking for a fifty-foot-tall she-ape with whom to have sexual kongress. The psychological ripples are ever-widening. Now that I think of it why weren’t there any other fifty-foot-high gorillas about? What had happened to Kong’s mother and father? That too must be part of the pathos of the thing: Kong is an orphan and alone of his kind. Not just an orphan but a giant orphan, a monstrous Tom o’Bedlam.