Russell Hoban - Turtle Diary

But an action, no. An action with a front and back is no good.

We drove back to London. We scarcely spoke a word. We had lunch and supper at road-side places full of motion and absence where there was ketchup in red tomato-shaped plastic bottles. The people who sat in the booths seemed to be played on a tape that erased itself. Only the motion remained, the absence. Outside on the road, inside with the ketchup. Red, heavy.

Night came but there was no rain. William only stopped for petrol once. I’d forgotten to look at the millwheel on the inn near the car-park in Polperro. I still don’t know whether or not it was turned by water that came out of a pipe.

Sometimes I can’t believe that some mechanical happenings are only chance and nothing more. K257 in the pavement, the escalator owl at Charing Cross. At the place where we had supper on the way home I went to the lavatory. No sooner had I opened the door than there was a metallic belch and three 10p pieces leapt out of the contraceptive machine and clanged on the floor. Why, for God’s sake? Why did it do it when I walked in? I was fully ten feet away when it happened. There was something insulting about it, contemptuous. Here, it seemed to be saying, here’s a refund. Bloody cheek.

The miles rushed towards us, shot under the van. I felt absurd, couldn’t find a place to put myself in relation to the three turtles now in the sea. What in the world did it all mean? Why was I in this van with this woman? Would it keep on for ever, going round and round like chewing gum on a tyre? Could it be made to stop and if it were stopped would there be anything else to do?

I had a lot of trouble with my eyes after it got dark. The road kept going abstract. Confusion, fixed and flashing. Flat shadows assumed bulk, distances lost depth, the red tail-lights of cars half a mile ahead appeared to be up in the air.

In time the Chiswick Roundabout appeared, the Hammersmith Fly-over. It was after eleven when we got to Neaera’s place. I switched off the engine and we sat there ticking over in silence for a few moments.

‘Have you kept track of the expenses?’ she said.

‘I haven’t got all the figures yet,’ I said. ‘I’ll add it up after I take back the van tomorrow.’

‘I’ll ring you up,’ she said, and sat there, not quite knowing how to leave. I knew she didn’t want to ask me up to her flat for coffee or anything.

‘There isn’t an exit line for this sort of thing,’ I said. ‘About all you can do is shake your head and walk away kicking a stone if you have a stone to kick.’

‘I’ve thrown my stone away,’ she said. She gathered up her blankets and pillows and got out of the van. She looked in through the window. ‘I shan’t say anything now,’ she said. She walked away without shaking her head.

I drove home, parked the van, unloaded it. Not a dent or a scratch on the great bulgy thing, I couldn’t believe it. It took me a long time to get to sleep that night. I lay in bed listening to cars going down our street. I don’t know why they have to go so fast, the sound of those roaring engines always fills me with rage. I kept expecting to hear one of them scrape the van. It’s quite a narrow street.

When I opened the door to my flat it was like opening a box of stale time. Old time, dead time. The windows were all closed, the place was quite airless. I opened the windows, looked out over the square. I think I’ve read that grains of wheat taken from Egyptian tombs have grown when planted. Wheat yes, time no. There’s a mummy at the British Museum, a woman if I remember rightly, I haven’t been to the Egyptian Antiquities collection for a long time. Strange, to be dead and collected. She’s lying on her side in a sleeping position and as I see her in my mind she looks more alone than if she were lying formally on her back with folded hands. Her skin is old parchment, there’s nothing personal about it, her bones are just bones. But her sleeping attitude is naked and private, the privacy of her sleep remains even though there’s no longer a person inside it.

When I turned on the lights the night outside looked so black that I switched them off again. Shutting out the night makes it blacker. I remembered being a child out of doors in the dark of summer evenings, winter evenings, late dark and early. One saw perfectly well, it never seemed really dark until I came into the house. Then the night outside the windows would be very black.

I didn’t know what to do really, didn’t know how to pick up where I left off. There no longer seemed to be continuity in my life. The road went up to the turtle-launching and ended there at a chasm where the bridge was out.

I turned on the light in Madame Beetle’s tank. There were snails in the tank, red ones, six or seven of them. They were cleaning up the algae, there were little clear meanders on the glass where they’d been working. Yesterday’s and today’s meat lay pale and wan on the bottom. The snails were working on that as well. Madame Beetle was in the corner of the tank under the filter sponge. There was a note under the china bathing beauty, I read it by the light of the tank:

Took the liberty of dropping in

a clean-up squad. Can take them

back if you don’t want them.

Best wishes,

WEBSTER DE VERE

Cheek, I thought. If I wanted to run a dirty aquarium that was my business. Come to think of it Madame Beetle was a predator, why hadn’t she had a go at the snails? Tired maybe.

I looked in my bag for cigarettes and there was the letter to Harry Rush still unposted. I lit a cigarette, went out of the flat and down to the corner. There are two telephone kiosks and a pillar box there. The telephone kiosks aren’t the same size, one of them’s larger and more heavily built than the other. I always think of them as bull and cow. They stood there, red in the dark, dark in the light of the street lamp, the bull telephone and the cow telephone and the pillar box. None of them said a word as I pushed the letter through the slot and it dived into the dark. Goodbye £1,000. It was never really there.

I woke up. There you are, I thought: life goes on. There was an old German film I saw at the National Film Theatre, Harry Bauer was in it. Massive man, head like a bald granite statue. In the film he was in prison for a long stretch, twelve years I think. He marked off the days on the wall of his cell with a bit of charcoal. When he got to the half-way mark he threw back his head and let out a hoarse cry. I thought of trying a hoarse cry, decided not to. Anyhow I was past the half-way point.

Saturday it was. Nine o’clock. I looked out of the window. The day was grey and wet. Harriet would be on her way to the shop. My mind turned away from everything all at once. I realized at that moment that the end of all things need not be difficult. No effort of any kind, just a turning away by whatever means might come to hand.

I went to the bathroom. Sandor hadn’t cleaned the bath. A ring of Sandor dirt round it, Sandor pubic hair. Rage coursed through my veins. I’d had a whole life, a house and a family! And it had come to this: Sandor’s pubic hair in a rented bath.

I cleaned the bath, had a bath, shaved even though it was Saturday. Dressed, went to make my breakfast. Sandor’d left the cooker filthy and evil-smelling as usual.

I went down the hall, knocked on his door. I was shaking all over. Sandor opened the door. He was in his dressing-gown, some lurid Persian-looking thing. He was wearing red velvet slippers that made his feet look very white, the hair on his ankles very black. His feet turned out as if there were no limit to the amount of space they could take up.