Turtle Diary Read Online Free PDF Page B

of it because she’s still alive. I remove the old bits from the tank with a skewer. When I first took the cover off to do that I thought Madame Beetle might fly away but she simply retired inside the shipwreck until I’d finished.
    I’ve bought a little china figure, a bathing beauty in a 1900s mauve bathing-suit and cap, red bathing-slippers. She’s sitting on a rock leaning back on her elbows, her right knee raised and her right ankle resting on her left knee. Her pretty rosy-cheeked face is turned to the side and as she sits before the aquarium on my desk she looks as if she’s been watching Madame Beetle and has just turned away towards me. Possibly there’s a story in her as well. Possibly there’s no story either in her or Madame Beetle. It may happen to me at any time that everything will be just what it is, with no stories in anything.

9

William G.
    Briefcases. Businessmen, barristers carry briefs. When I was in advertising we always talked about what our brief was.
Brief
means letter in German. Brief is short. Life is a brief case. Brief candle, out, out. In the tube there was a very small, very poor-looking man in a threadbare suit and a not very clean shirt, spectacles. He made a roll-up, lit it, then took from his briefcase a great glossy brochure with glorious colour photographs of motorcycles. Many unshaven men carry briefcases. I’ve seen briefcases carried by men who looked as if they slept rough. Women tramps usually have carrier bags, plastic ones often. I carry one of those expanding files with a flap. Paper in it for taking notes, a book sometimes, sandwich and an apple for lunch. The apple bulges, can’t be helped.
    I took the tube to Surrey Docks, the 70 bus from there. There were some children on the bus singing ‘Oranges and Lemons’ and they seemed to spin it out very slowly. I found myself waiting, waiting for ‘Here comes a chopper to chop off your head, chop, chop, chop!’ which arrived in due course and very loudly.
    At Greenwich I went straight to the Port Liberty model after the guards at the door had looked into my envelope and found no bombs. They have to take precautions, that’s understandable. A place like Greenwich is a temptation. The greenness and the stillness, the augustness of the buildings and the observatory dome almost make one want to set off a bomb just out of respect.
    There seem to be more children than there used to be. Always lots of them about even on school days. Children seem to be the permanent population while adults drift in and out and fall away. Each year the schoolgirls in their white knee-socks seem more erotic, more secretly knowing, one thinks probably nothing would surprise them. There are always children at the Port Liberty windows. I looked over the shoulder of a girl who must have been about twelve, the scent of her hair was in my nostrils. I don’t know where my daughters are now. I don’t know if Dora’s remarried. Someone pressed the button and the three-minute sequence began. The model sky grew slowly dark. Such a perfect world, so small and yet so full of distance. A long time ago I copied the signs that tell about Port Liberty:
    APPROACHING PORT LIBERTY BY NIGHT
    When night falls the navigator has to rely on the navigation lights shown by other vessels to avoid colliding with them and the lights shown by buoys, beacons and lighthouses to keep him in safe waters.
    A confusion of fixed and flashing lights confronts him when he approaches a port but trained to interpret the various light colours and sequences in conjunction with his chart he can safely identify and follow the correct channel into port.
    What you can see

The lighthouse on Patrol Point, whose white light is visible 20 miles out at sea, occults once every 30 seconds, while dead ahead can be seen the white light of the Landfall buoy, flashing every second.
    A steady red light over a steady white light near the Landfall buoy identifies the pilot launch waiting for our arrival