Russell Hoban - Turtle Diary

I passed the booth, they both looked up at me. It wasn’t William G. and the girl from the bookshop. It was two people I’d never seen before.

I rang up a van-hire place. £2.75 per day, 2½p per mile, £10 deposit. God, how I hate the thought of driving the thing. In films people like Paul Newman and Burt Lancaster leap into vehicles they’ve never seen before, cars, lorries, buses, locomotives, anything at all, and away they go at speed. Sometimes they have to fight with someone first, knock him out before they can drive away. Well of course that’s how it is in films. How can reality be so different?

I still haven’t said anything about the turtles to Harriet and I still don’t want to. She’s begun saying ‘We’. So-and-so wondered if we could come to a party. There was a series of early music recitals and ought we to subscribe. We went to the party, we subscribed to the series.

I keep waiting for the phone to ring from that other world where the turtles are. It’s not another world really, it’s this one. Everything happens in the same world, that’s why life is so difficult. I’ll pick up the van right after work, deliver the crates, come back later, meet Neaera at the Zoo and drive to Polperro. Maybe I ought to pick her up earlier, maybe we ought to have dinner first.

Yesterday evening I looked out of my window and saw the greyhound lady go past alone. No husband. The Greyhound Widow, like a figure on a tarot card. A train went past on the far side of the common. One vertical row of three lights: Tower Hill. I knew the husband was dead, it was in the way she walked with the greyhound. I asked Mrs Inchcliff about it, she knows everything that goes on in the neighbourhood. Yes, she said, the husband had died a week ago. If he’d lived two weeks longer his widow would have got two years’ salary but as it was she wouldn’t.

There’s an owl in the Charing Cross tube station. Bubo tubo. Not really an owl. The sound comes from an escalator but it’s as real as the owl I hear on the common and never see. There’s only one world, and animal voices must cry out from machines sometimes.

There it was: the telephone call from George Fairbairn. Thursday would be the day. This was Monday. If I could drop the crates off about half past six he’d have the turtles ready for me in half an hour or so. He was talking to me in a matter-of-fact way as if I really existed and was a real grown-up person who could drive vans, be at a certain place at a certain time and do what I’d undertaken to do. Incredible. I said I mightn’t be able to get there till after seven. Right, he said, he’d see me then.

Maybe there wouldn’t be a van available, maybe all the arrangements would break down. I rang up the van-hire place. Yes, I could have a van on Thursday.

Maybe I’d not be able to get away from the shop. Late summer, still lots of tourists. I asked Mr Meager if I could have Friday off. Personal matter. He said yes of course.

I thought of ringing up the Zoo and warning them that a turtle snatch was planned for Thursday. I didn’t do it. All right, I thought. Let it happen.

I hadn’t posted the letter to Harry Rush, it was still in my bag. I wasn’t going to do the book but nothing else was happening. Madame Beetle’s good for companionship and philosophy lessons but nothing in the way of commercial profit, and Gillian Vole and that lot seem to be a thing of the past. So I wasn’t completely ready to let go of the £1,000. Wasn’t ready to let go of the idea of the £1,000. I could no more write the book than swim the Channel. Actually, with training I might in time swim the Channel but no amount of training will get that book out of me.

William G. rang up. Thursday would be the day. He spoke as if it was all really real and we were real people who were simply going to go ahead and do what we’d said we’d do. Had I in fact said it? That first day at lunch I’d talked in code, talked about hauling bananas. Had I ever said turtles? Yes, my very first words to him in the shop before we went to lunch. And then that awful Saturday morning when I went to his flat we talked about the turtles before I left. Perhaps I could still back out of it. But there was his voice coming out of the telephone and I said yes, Thursday would be all right. He asked if he could pick me up on his way to the Zoo with the crates and we’d have dinner before setting out. I said that would be lovely, yes of course and I’d be ready at half past six.

I looked at the telephone after I’d put it down. Sly thing, getting words out of me I’d no intention of saying. This was Monday. Tuesday Wednesday Thursday. Oh God, more than two hundred miles each way. I’ll pack sandwiches and a flask of coffee but how much time will eating sandwiches and drinking coffee get us through. The whole thing is quite likely to end in disaster with the van and the turtles and us overturned in a ditch somewhere in the middle of the night, all blood and splintered glass, groans and whimpers. Maybe we’ll be killed outright, and all for some stupid notion long since gone out of my head. Oh shit.

Blankets. We’ll want a bit of a rest before the drive back. Pillows. Surely he won’t book hotel rooms, it isn’t that kind of thing. No, no, just let it be done and out of the way as quickly as possible. Towel and soap, toothbrush, toothpaste. Have a wash in the public lavatory before starting back. Wear jeans and a shirt, take a cardigan. Cigarettes, mustn’t run out. Has he got maps? He looks the sort to have maps, torches, compasses. He’s the anxious type and I know we’ll get lost.

The tide. Will it be in or out. What’s the use of bothering to find out. However it is is the way it’ll be. I wonder if they’re still killing oyster-catchers at Penclawdd. They must be.

I asked Webster de Vere to feed Madame Beetle, left him a key and the remains of the lamb chop she’s been living on for the last week. I still haven’t posted the letter to Harry Rush.

And here’s Thursday.

Thursday. Grey and rainy. That was a help, sunny blue-sky days always look like bad luck to me. Harriet wanted to know where I was going but all I said was that I had things to do.

‘There’s no need to make a mystery of it,’ she said.

‘And there’s no need to ask me either,’ I said.

‘Look,’ said Harriet, ‘you’re perfectly free to do whatever you like …’

‘Thanks very much,’ I said.

‘Oh, you know what I mean,’ said Harriet. ‘You don’t have to treat me like a stranger just because you’re going to be with someone else.’

‘Everything isn’t sex,’ I said. ‘There are other things that are private.’ I hadn’t minded telling Mrs Inchcliff and Miss Neap but I just wasn’t willing for Harriet to know everything about me. She walked away looking reproachful, had very little to say to me for the rest of the day.

After work I went to pick up the van. It was a Ford Transit 90, 18 Cwt, huge, smooth, bulgy and white, not a dent or scratch on it. I couldn’t believe I’d get it there and back intact. They gave it to me with no hesitation whatever. VANS 4-U Van Hire in big black letters on both sides.

The man at VANS 4-U said the petrol tank held thirteen gallons and the van would do from fifteen to twenty miles to the gallon. I thought fifteen more likely than twenty although the engine certainly sounded economical, I wondered if it would go up hills with two people and three turtles. I filled the tank, later I’d fill my five-gallon container as well. On the map our route looked like about two hundred and fifty miles, and at night I couldn’t count on petrol stations being open. If the van did fifteen miles to the gallon that was one hundred and ninety-five miles on a full tank and seventy-five miles more on the extra five gallons in the container, so we ought to be all right even if there were no stations open.