Russell Hoban - Turtle Diary

There was a kestrel a long time ago, perhaps that’s why I was so annoyed by the poem. We were lying in a field, we looked up and opened our mouths and said nothing.

The range of human types and actions is not terribly wide. I have seen the same face on a titled lady and a barmaid. And there seem to be only a few things to do with life, in various combinations. I could not have accepted the idea of myself as a stereotype when I was young but I can now. I’m a more or less arty-intellectual-looking lady of forty-three who is unmarried, dresses more for style than for fashion, looks the sort of spinster who doesn’t keep cats and is not a vegetarian. Looks, I think, like a man’s woman and hasn’t got a man. When I was a child grown-ups often told me to smile, which I found presumptuous of them. People still tell me that sometimes, mostly idiots at parties.

Sometimes I wonder if I ought to give up the push-chair that I use instead of a shopping basket on wheels. It has red and white stripes like the little tents one sees over holes in the street. It may well be that the same company makes both, I’d like it if they did. It was lent me by a friend whose children have outgrown it on the occasion of her giving me an orange tree and I’ve never returned it. One sees a certain kind of poor old person wheeling battered prams loaded with rubbish or shabby push-chairs full of scavengings. My push-chair is still smart however and I am not yet poor and old.

Somehow I keep up with my work, always in arrears, often uncertain whether I’m sleeping or waking. My files decline gently from order to chaos, all kinds of things are accumulating dust in the spare room. I can’t always find what I’m looking for. Easy is the slope of Hell. I sit at the typewriter, I sit at the drawing-table, proof copies appear from time to time, then bound copies, so I seem to go on doing what I do. Royalty cheques twice a year.’ Gillian Vole’s Jumble Sale was absolutely the hit of the sales conference,’ writes my editor, ‘and we expect it to do even better than Gillian Vole’s Christmas. Whatever Gillian is up to now, we and all of her other fans look forward to her next appearance.’

Well, Gillian Vole may jolly well have packed it in. I couldn’t think of another Gillian Vole story right now to save my life. I’ve become quite fond of Madame Beetle but simply as a flatmate. Suddenly I don’t know, haven’t the faintest idea how people make up stories about anything. Anything is whatever it happens to be, why on earth make up stories.

At three o’clock in the morning I sat in the dark looking out of the window down at the square where the fountain is not and I thought about the turtles. The essence of it is that they can find something and they are not being allowed to do it. What more can you do to a creature, short of killing it, than prevent it from finding what it can find? How must they feel? Is there a sense in them of green ocean, white surf and hot sand? Probably not. But there is a drive in them to find it as they swoop in their golden-green light with their flippers clicking against the glass as they turn. Is there anything to be done about it? My mind is not an organizational one.

What is there to find? Thomas Bewick diligently followed the patterns of light from feather to feather, John Clare looked carefully at hedgerows, Emily Dickinson cauterized her lopped-off words with dashes. Ella Wheeler Wilcox implacably persisted. Shackleton came back against all odds, Scott didn’t. There was a round-the-world singlehanded sailing race in which one of the yachtsmen stopped in one part of the ocean and broadcast false positions.

There is no place for me to find. No beach, no breeding grounds. Do I owe the turtles more or less because of that? Is everyone obliged to help those who have it in them to find something? I bought a second-hand mathematical book, I don’t know why, on self-replicating automata. Not robots but mathematical models. The book said that random search could not account for evolution. Something evidently wants there to be finding. Time’s arrow points one way only. Even the moment just past cannot be returned to.

I went into the kitchen, had some tea and toast, came back and sat in my reading chair with my eyes closed. When I opened them it was time for lunch. I had some cheese and apples, went out. I had no intention of going to the Zoo but I went there. The penguins were yawping and honking in a way that had unmistakably to do with procreation. An Australian crane was performing a remarkable dance for his mate. It was as if place and time were internalized in them and not in their surroundings, like Englishmen who dress for dinner on plantations in Borneo. The lions and tigers have no such faculty, must pace madly or lie still and doze.

I stood in the darkness by the turtle tank for some time, not so much looking at the turtles as just being near them and waiting. A man in shirt-sleeves came out of a door marked PRIVATE and stood in front of one of the fish tanks as if checking something. He was obviously one of the keepers and he had an air of decency about him, as if he paid attention to the things that really need attention paid to them.

I rehearsed the question several times in my mind, then spoke to him. ‘Were any of the turtles full-grown when they were brought here?’ I said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘They were only little when they came here, no more than a pound or two. The big ones have been here twenty or thirty years.’

‘Full-grown turtles,’ I said, ‘how are they transported?’

A lady came into the shop one afternoon, arty-intellectual type about my age or a little younger. She was wearing a long orange Indian-print skirt, an old purple velvet jacket, a denim shirt and expensive boots. Not at all bad-looking. Rather troubled face, circles under her eyes. All at once I felt a strong urge to talk to her for hours and hours about everything. And at the same time I felt an urge not to talk to her at all.

She drifted about the Natural History shelves for a time in a sleepwalking sort of way, picking up books and turning the pages without always looking at them. Then she picked up a book on sea turtles by Robert Bustard and read about a quarter of it where she stood. Eerie, the way she read, as if she’d simply forgotten to put the book down. And eerie that she was reading about sea turtles. Obviously I can’t be the only one thinking about them but I had the shocking feeling that here was another one of me locked up alone in a brain with the same thoughts. Me, what’s that after all? An arbitrary limitation of being bounded by the people before and after and on either side. Where they leave off I begin, and vice versa. I once saw a cartoon sequence of a painter painting a very long landscape. When he’d finished he cut it up into four landscapes of the usual proportions. Mostly one doesn’t meet others from the same picture. When it happens it can be unsettling.

Had we anything new on sea turtles other than the Bustard, she asked. Her voice was as I expected, low and husky. She spoke as if she’d come a long way from wherever she’d been in her mind and couldn’t stop long.

No, I said. Nothing else new. Had she read Carr?

Yes, she had. She looked directly at me when I mentioned Carr as if registering the fact that I knew of him. Then it seemed her mind went elsewhere, she thanked me and left the shop.

Pity, in a way. If she’d been young and pretty would I have tried to extend the conversation? Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t really want to talk to a woman who’s accumulated the sort of things in her head that I have in mine. And I haven’t had much interest in women at all for a while, not in a realistic way. Fantasies, yes. But not actualities, not practicalities. For a time after the break-up I went to bed with as many girls as I could but nothing lasted and I didn’t want it to. They wanted attention paid to them, attention paid to a present they were part of and a future that belonged to them, and my mind was elsewhere.