Turtle Diary

  Ruby loosened her grip, the blonde woman rolled David round between Ruby’s legs. ‘There,’ she said. ‘That’s all right now. Let him squeeze himself out the way he was doing.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Ruby. ‘This never happens back in Los Angeles. They just go back to that big YES and Zonk! They’re out again.’

  Murmurs and crowd noises. This wasn’t Los Angeles, said several other Americans. Small stirrings of solidarity between the expatriates and those of us who were English, feelings of pride that things in London might perhaps be not quite so simple as in Los Angeles. There was renewed interest all round. David was wiggling and shimmying, parting Ruby’s legs with his hands and uttering rending groans.

  ‘Whatever it is it feels good,’ said Ruby. ‘It feels like something big happening. You have to stay open to whatever comes up in this kind of work.’

  ‘He needs help,’ said the blonde woman. ‘I’ll push from behind. Somebody else take his head and shoulders and ease him along when he tries to get himself out.’

  ‘What are they doing now?’ said the little girl to her mother.

  ‘David’s being born,’ said her mother.

  Willing hands were laid on at both ends of David, Ruby, and the blonde lady. More and more people joined in the delivery. By this time David, still with his eyes closed, was halfway out of his trousers with all the wiggling. He was wearing black knickers. There was more pushing and pulling, much encouragement and advice, and finally with one big hoarse cry David was all the way out. Of Ruby’s legs and his trousers both.

  There was a general happy clamour and some of the girls had tears in their eyes. I looked at Harriet and saw that she did too. I squeezed her hand and she squeezed back. Ruby hugged David. ‘Give Mommy a big kiss,’ she said.

  David still had his eyes closed, and as he moved into Ruby’s embrace he fumbled one big bouncy breast out of her bikini top and applied himself to it like a veteran infant.

  ‘Jesus!’ said Ruby and pressed his head to her bosom. There was a spontaneous ovation from everybody except Ruby’s boyfriend, who said something violent in Italian, rolled his eyes up and made a gesture. David opened his eyes and smiled a happy smile, Ruby put her breast back, somebody brought her a cup of tea. People lit cigarettes and joints, settled back cosily.

  There were many earnest questions put to David by girls with glistening eyes and men in whose faces there now shone an awful lust for infancy. How had it felt, where had he been, how did he feel now? David said it had been a deep experience, it had taken him back to the darkness of the womb, his pre-natal anxieties, his ambivalence about his mother, his resentment of his father, his fears about coming out into the world. He told of his joy at the first light of emergence and Ruby’s boob. He felt good, renewed, serene. There was less tension in his neck. That was as much as he could say now, it was something he’d have to reflect on, it had been a very deep experience.

  Now there was a rush to be next for Ruby’s Original Therapy but the primordial soup wasn’t in it any more, being born was what everybody wanted to have a go at. Harriet put her name down on the list, I didn’t. Not my time for rebirth just yet. Ruby promised to take on all comers, to go right through the night if necessary, and after a short break the therapy resumed.

  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.

  26

  Neaera H.

  ‘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 the
m 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.

  Carl Denham, the film man, comes ashore with Anne Darrow (Fay Wray) and his crew to look for the legendary beast-god of Skull Island. They see the natives making ready to offer a bride to Kong. The massive wooden gates at the edge of the village suggested the size of the beast they were meant to keep out, his colossalness preceded him. There were the black men dancing in gorilla skins and chanting for Kong to come and claim his bride: ‘Something something KONG! KONG! Something something KONG! KONG!’ flinging up their furry arms at each KONG. The music by Max Steiner was just right. Then they saw Fay Wray and that night they went out to the ship in their boats and captured her and offered her instead of the local girl.

  There she was in the light of the torches, wearing a white silk frock I think, all blonde and helpless with her head drooping and her arms outstretched, hands tied to two posts. Then she looked up, higher, higher, and screamed and screamed when Kong’s luminous face rose above the trees like a giant ape-moon. It was at the same time laughable and ineffably real. Yes that’s a big fake ape, ha ha. But the fake ape is only the cipher for the real thing before which we stand with outstretched arms, hands tied, head drooping, and we scream or are silent.

  By the end of the film Kong too is a victim, tragic in his greatness and the height (the Empire State Building) from which he falls. When he’s brought a captive to New York to be exhibited on the stage it is he who stands with arms outstretched, crucified by midgets and manacles with great thick chains.

  ‘He was a king and a god in the world he knew,’ says Denham, ‘but now he comes to civilization merely a captive, a show to gratify your curiosity. Ladies and gentlemen, Kong, the Eighth Wonder of the World!’

  Fay Wray is on the stage as well. When the photographers’ flashbulbs go off near her Kong thinks she’s in danger, he growls and strains at his chains. Then comes one of the very best lines in the film or indeed anywhere: ‘Don’t be alarmed, ladies and gentlemen, those chains are made of chrome steel,’ says Denham. Then of course Kong breaks loose, kills some people, derails and smashes an overhead train and climbs up the Empire State Building with Fay Wray, there to be shot down by aeroplanes.

  ‘Don’t be alarmed, ladies and gentlemen, those chains are made of chrome steel.’ Wonderful line. Marvellous how one’s afraid of the thing that’s going to break its chains and then so quickly one is the thing that’s broken its chains and climbed the heavenward spire to be shot down.

  ‘Oh no, it wasn’t the aeroplanes,’ says Denham standing by the fallen Kong (there must be a giant head in the warehouse too), ‘it was Beauty killed the Beast.’

  What a sad life. On his island Kong had plenty of other monsters to fight with, he was very good against the tyrannosaurus I thought. But he had no one to be friends with. Poor thing. At the end when he’s dying from the aeroplanes’ machine-gun bullets he reaches towards Fay Wray who’s lying on a ledge where he’d put her. Weak and swaying, his grip on the spire loosening, he touches her gently, then lets go and falls. The year 1933 was full of many things. Showing with King Kong was a documentary film on Hitler’s rise to power. In 1933 there was Goebbels officiating at a book burning. ‘You do well at this midnight hour,’ he said, ‘to exorcise the past in these flames.’ Exorcise the past. Surely that thought alone was sufficient evidence of madness. But more and more I think that madness is the world’s natural condition and to expect anything else is madness compounded. In the train derailment scene in King Kong the engine-driver could not believe his eyes when he saw Kong’s face rising through the gap where he’d torn away the tracks but that was just another day in 1933. That trains mostly stay on rails, that the streets are mostly peaceful, that the square continues green and quiet below my window is more than I have any right to expect, and it happens every day.

  Madame Beetle swims in her green world expecting neither continuation nor sanity, I don’t think expectation is a part of her. While there is water she will swim. Arabella spins her weightless web on Skylab-2 and the white shark goes its way without rest. There is no buoyancy in sharks, they cannot rest, they must keep swimming till they die.

  27

  William G.

  Sermons in stones. The other day coming home from work I noticed for the first time a manhole cover near my corner. Square plate in the pavement, K257 on it. All right, I thought as I stepped on it, go ahead, play Mozart. It didn’t. When I got home I looked up K257 in the Köchel listing in my Mozart Companion. It was the Credo Mass in C. Credo. I believe. What does the manhole cover believe, or what’s being believed down in the hole? I don’t like getting too many messages from the things around me, it confuses me. Now whenever I walk on that manhole cover it’ll say ‘I believe’. When Mozart was my age he’d already been dead for eight years. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the music.

  Having slept together Harriet and I woke up together. I woke up first actually. Dora had always looked angry in her sleep. Harriet was calm and be
autiful, better-looking than when awake. Lineaments of satisfied desire. I was impressed, pleased with myself as well. Maybe not a bad chap after all. Harriet kept looking beautiful when she woke up. She has quite an elegant figure too, long and graceful. Breakfast was cosy, we didn’t talk much, mostly looked at each other.

  That evening we had dinner together, went to my place and Harriet spent the night there. Sandor stuck his head out of his door and opened his eyes wide as she passed on her way to the bathroom. ‘I believe,’ said K257 as we walked over it together the next morning.

  All right, I thought, I’ll get through this turtle business and that’ll be out of the way. I’d been giving some thought to turtle-shifting and I’d decided they could best be handled in crates. I rang up George Fairbairn and he gave me the measurements I needed. The big day would probably be in a fortnight or so, he thought. A fortnight. Right. If I’d drop off the crates first he’d have the turtles boxed and ready for pick-up. Wonderful.

  Harriet was emanating weekend availability and I was more than willing but I wanted to make the turtle crates on Saturday and I wanted to keep her and the turtles separate. I told her I had things to do at home all day and evening and couldn’t get over to her place until late Saturday night.

  On Saturday afternoon when I finished at the shop I bought the wood for the three crates and I bought six ringbolts and a hundred feet of half-inch rope. The ringbolts and the rope are for lowering the crates or dragging them up steps or whatever. Should I have got one-inch rope I wondered. I also bought a five-gallon container for extra petrol.

  Mrs Inchcliff was very pleased to see me active in the lumber-room. As soon as she heard me sawing she brought me a cup of tea. ‘What’re you making?’ she said.