The Turtle on the Stairs by Cath Barton
The Turtle on the Stairs by Cath Barton
I saw the turtle for the first time on the second night of our stay. It was nestled in a corner of the stairs.
Soon will be the time. I come here to wait for it.
I bent down and put my hand onto its back in the darkness; it was cool, and so still that I wondered whether it had crawled into the hotel and up the stairs to die on those wooden boards. Next morning it was gone.
After we’d had breakfast it was already too hot and humid to walk any distance. We had a driver who took us to see the sights each morning, but by lunchtime I was exhausted. In the afternoons I sat under the frangipani trees in the public gardens close by the hotel, reading about the sombre history of the island. The exquisite scent of those overlapping blossoms is still with me, just out of reach, even now. What Edwin did on those afternoons I neither knew nor cared. I was happy, alone. I read, dozed, read a little more and, as the week went by, wondered more and more about the turtle.
I knew that Edwin would seek me out when it was time to go back to the hotel and wait for night to fall. There is no twilight at that latitude; darkness descends in the space of half an hour like a theatre curtain, announcing the dinner interval.
Evening meals were served in a dimly-lit dining room, and we ate flying fish, which was a speciality of the island, but disappointingly dry. Edwin did not seem to mind; he chewed each mouthful slowly, up to thirty times. I counted. I wanted to shout at him to hurry up, but I knew there was a woman standing in a corner, waiting patiently to clear our plates. She was a woman of the island, used, I felt, to making herself invisible and keeping her eyes lowered in the presence of Englishmen. When she saw that Edwin had laid down his knife and fork she approached our table with a soft tread and asked, in the lilt of the islanders, if she could get us anything else. On the first night I said I would like a small dessert; she brought me a scoop of crystalline white ice, sweet and refreshing. Edwin said under his breath that it was not good for me in my condition. I said nothing.
“Can I bring you something sweet,” the woman asked as she cleared our fish plates the following evening. “Maybe an ice-cream for madame?” She smiled at me with the openness that those island women have, underneath.
Edwin replied, unnecessarily sharply, that we needed nothing more, and she left us alone there with the silence between us.
Each evening we finished our meal by 7pm and there was nothing to do but go to our bedroom, the corner room where the Atlantic roared on two sides, all through the night. It was too dark to walk out, and too dangerous, Edwin said. He did not specify the dangers and he did not invite me to ask. The light in our room was too dim for reading. My husband turned over and fell asleep immediately. I lay there, listening to the beating of the ocean waves on the shore beneath our windows and thought about London. I longed for the English rain, the rain which I despised when I was at home.
Sleep was elusive, and on that second night of our holiday I put on my robe and went out into the silent corridors of the hotel. I went down to the kitchen, my mind set on the sweet refreshment of ice-cream that I had been denied earlier. When I switched on the lights I saw the quick scuttle of cockroaches and retreated in alarm. It was on my way back up the stairs that I encountered the turtle and ran my fingers over the whorls and ridges of its shell.
This is the place. The time will be soon. There is one who will witness it.
Somehow, that contact with the creature calmed me and when I returned to our room I was able to sleep. I noticed as we went down for breakfast together that the turtle was not there, but I said nothing to Edwin, knowing he would not approve of my night time wanderings.
Small birds came to our breakfast table and we fed them crumbs and fragments of banana. Edwin smiled at their antics, and I was, briefly, hopeful that things might be restored between us. But with nightfall his shoulders drooped, and we spoke less and less at our evening meals during the time we spent at the hotel on that lonely shore. Each night he turned and entered sleep as if it were a refuge from me.
And each night I found my own refuge with the turtle, which had returned to the corner of the stairs. I stroked its shell with one hand as I curled the other round my belly. I felt nothing from either, but the knowledge that there was life in both was a comfort.
We live in different worlds, but there is a reason why we are here together. Future generations will know it.
One morning my husband asked our driver to take us to a sugar plantation. In the house built for the colonial governor, the records of past times were on display in a shuttered room. I ran my finger along the cramped script, the notation of slavery, and shame curdled in my stomach. The sugar factory was a furnace, but Edwin insisted that we visit it, climbing up precarious stairs and looking down into a vision of hell. I felt faint and had to ask to return to the car. Edwin seemed annoyed by my request.
“I thought history interested you,” he said.
“It does,” I said. “But the travelling and the heat tire me, don’t you see? And you said a simple ice was not good for me,” I added. I did not mean it as a reprimand, but he took it as such, just as I had taken the visit itself as some kind of punishment. I was at a loss to know how this had happened to us.
After that I could face no more outings and Edwin went alone. I dozed the days away, waiting for the blessing of darkness. I went down to the dining room each night. Time meant nothing to me, stretching and easing as my belly was beginning to do. Each night I spent a little longer with the turtle, pressing my belly to her shell.
We are both carriers, the woman and I. We are both creatures of the deep. Daylight does not become us.
On the penultimate night of our stay Edwin was restless. I heard him rise and go to the window. I kept my eyes closed and felt his breath over me. He half-bent, then withdrew and returned to his own bed. Finally I could hear his breathing settle; I was free to go.
The turtle was on the stairs as usual. I sat by it, listening to the tiny noises of the shaded hours, the scratching of mice, the rustle of geckos.
We are two of a kind, she and I, me and her. We are those whose destiny is to bring forth.
The sound from below was different. I found the woman in the dining room. It was the one who had served me ice-cream on the first evening. She smiled and her eyes carried the kindness I craved in vain from my husband. She fetched the sweetmeat for me now. As we sat there together she began to speak, in that lilt of hers.
“My grandfather was from your country,” she said.
I knew what her grandmother had been; she did not need to use the word.
“Life is better for us here now,” she said. “But I see that you are not free.”
I could not speak. She wiped the tears from my cheeks and lifted cold stones to my forehead. She asked me my name and told me hers. And before the first light came from the east she left me.
As I passed the turtle it stirred, and I felt the baby do the same in me.
Soon, the time is soon, for me, and not long after, for the woman too.
On the last night there was movement on the bend in the stairs. There were three eggs there, fresh laid and already hatching. I watched as the young turtles fought their way out of the shells and followed their mother, with slow awkward steps, down the stairs and out to the sea. I stood on the shore and watched as they disappeared into the waves. Within me the baby stirred and I knew the time would soon come for me too.
Our young are set on a path. They will remember one another.
My daughter is five years old now. We live, just the two of us, in a flat on the edge of Regent’s Park, overlooking London Zoo. We both love visiting the aquarium there. When Isabella saw the turtles for the first time she looked up at me and smiled her widest smile. One of the smallest of the creatures came up to the glass; it lifted a foot and she lifted a hand, as if they were greeting one another. One day I will tell her the story of the turtle on the stairs in the hotel across the ocean, and about the kindness shown to me there one night by a woman whose name she shares.
………………..
Cath Barton lives in Wales. Her prize-winning novella The Plankton Collector is published by New Welsh Rarebyte and her short stories have been published by The Lonely Crowd, Strix and a number of anthologies. Cath is active in the on-line flash fiction community and is a regular contributor to the online critical hub Wales Arts Review.
Twitter: @CathBarton1