Russell Hoban - Turtle Diary

I dont want to go to the Zoo any more.

The other night I dreamt of an octopus. He was dark green, almost black, dark tentacles undulating in brown water. Not sure what colour an octopus is really. Found colour photos in two of the books at the shop. One octopus was brown and white, the other was grey, pinky, brown. They change colour it seems. Their eyes are dreadful to look at. I shouldnt like to be looked at by an octopus no matter how small and harmless it might be. To be stared at by those eyes would be altogether too much for me, would leave me nothing whatever to be. There was a black-and-white photo of octopuses hung up to dry on a pole at Thasos on the Aegean Sea, black against the sky, black bags hanging, black tentacles drooping and drying, behind them the brightness over the sea. Theyre related to the chambered nautilus which Id always thought of only as a shell with nothing in it. But there it was in the book full of tentacles and swimming inscrutably.

Then I wanted to see an octopus. On Friday, my half-day at the shop, I went to the Zoo. Grey day, raining a little. Went in by the North Gate past the owls. Bubo this and Bubo that, each one sitting on its bar with wet feathers and implacable eyes. Over the bridge past the Aviary towering high against the sky, a huge pointy steel-mesh thing of gables and angles full of strange cries and dark flappings. There were little shrill children eating things. There was steam coming up in the rain from three square plates in the paving at the end of the bridge. Two girls and a boy bathed their bare legs in it. The tunnel on the other side of the bridge was echoing with children. Copies of cave-paintings on the walls of the tunnel. They didnt belong there, looked heavy-handed, false. One wanted to see SPURS, ARSENAL.

Very dark in the Aquarium. Green windows, things swimming. People black against the windows murmuring, explaining to children, holding them up, putting them down, urging them on, calling them back. Echoing footsteps of children running in the dark. Very shabby in the Aquarium, very small. Too many little green windows in the dark. Crabs, lobsters, two thornback rays, a little poor civil-servant-looking leopard shark. Tropical fish, eels, toads, frogs and newts. There was no octopus.

Sea turtles. Two or three hundred pounds the big ones must have weighed. Looping and swinging, flying in golden-green silty water in a grotty little tank no bigger than my room. Soaring, dipping and curving with flippers like wings in a glass box of second-hand ocean. Their eyes said nothing, the thousands of miles of ocean couldnt be said.

I thought: when I was a child I used to like the Zoo. The rain had stopped. I went to the Reptile House. No. Didnt want to see th snakes on hot sand under bright lights behind glass. Left the Reptile House, approached the apes. The gorilla lay on his stomach in his cell, his chin resting on his folded arms. No. I couldnt think which was worse: if he could remember or if he couldnt.

I went out of the Zoo to the 74 bus stop at the North Gate. There was a young woman with a little boy and girl. Maybe the boy was eight or nine. He had a little black rubber gorilla on a bit of elastic tied to a string and he danced the little black gorilla up and down in a little puddle, spat spat spat, not splashing. It was only a bit of wet on the pavement.

Stop that, said his mother. I told you to stop that.

I fancied a china castle for the aquarium but they had none at the shop, so I contented myself with a smart plastic shipwreck. Snugg & Sharpe are expecting a new Gillian Vole story from me but I have not got another furry-animal picnic or birthday party in me. I am tired of meek and cuddly creatures, my next book will be about a predator. Ive posted my cheque for 31p to Gerrard & Haig in Surrey for a Great Water-beetle, Dysticus marginalis, and I should have it by tomorrow. Ive asked for a male.

On my way home wheeling the tank and all the other aquarium gear in the push-chair I stopped at the radio and TV shop because there was an oyster-catcher on all the TV screens in the window, a BBC nature film it must have been. It was like encountering someone from childhood now famous. I used to see oyster-catchers sometimes on the mussel beds near Breydon Bridge when the tide was out. They were nothing like the gulls and terns, their black-and-white had a special air, they went a little beyond being birds. They walked with their heads down, looking as if they had hands clasped behind their backs like little European philosophers in yachting gear. But it was a less rhythmical walk than a philosophers because the oyster-catchers were busy making a living with the mussels. In childhood at Breydon Water the day was wide and quiet, there was time enough to think of everything with no hurry whatever, to look at everything many times over.

The oyster-catcher on the TV screens was gone, there was a shot of mudflats and sea. The oyster-catcher had been very elegant in colour: creamy white, velvety black, orange bill and eye-rings, pink legs. On the black-and-white screens it had been more existential, a working bird alone in the world. Here I am, I thought, forty-three years old, waiting for a water-beetle. My married friends wear Laura Ashley dresses and in their houses are grainy photographs of them barefoot on Continental beaches with their naked children. I live alone, wear odds and ends, I have resisted vegetarianism and I dont keep cats.

I passed the place where theyre tearing up the street and the three workmen in the hole said Good morning for the first time. Before this weve nodded.

As I was going into my flat Webster de Vere, the unemployed actor next door, was coming out of his. Fascinating hobby, he said when he saw the tank. Ive been keeping fish for years. Black Mollies, you know. Nothing flash, just neat little black fish. What will you have in your aquarium?

A water-beetle, I said.

A water-beetle, he said. Fascinating pet. If you ever need any snails do let me know, Ive masses of them. Keep the tank clean, you know.

Thank you, I said. Its all new to me, I must see how it goes.

He went down the hall swinging his cane. As far as I know hes been out of work the whole five or six years hes been my neighbour. He keeps so fit that its hard to tell how old he is but by the brightness of his eye Id say hes at least fifty-five. Most of the voices I hear through the wall belong to young men of the antique-shop type but I think he lives off old ladies. Ive no reason to think it except his looks. His eyes look as if hes pawned his real ones and is wearing paste.

After Id set up the aquarium I looked in my book of Bewick engravings for an oyster-catcher but couldnt find one. Bewick has drawn the dotterel, the spotted redshank, the godwit and the little stint but theres no oyster-catcher in my book. He would have drawn it very well, its his sort of bird. The best bird drawings Ive done were for Delia Swallows Housewarming, one of my early books. The story was rubbish but the swallow was well observed, she was a distinct Laura Ashley type.

It must have been soft plastic, that gorilla the little boy had. I dont think they make those things out of rubber any more.

There are green turtles whose feeding grounds are along the coast of Brazil, and they swim 1,400 miles to breed and lay their eggs on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, half way to Africa. Ascension Island is only five miles long. Nobody knows how they find it. Two of the turtles at the Aquarium are green turtles, a large one and a small one. The sign said: The Green Turtle, Chelonia mydas,