‘Why is he there?’ my wife says. ‘His worldview has been shattered,’ I say

Tim Dowling: the tortoise is lost and bewildered – and so am I

The weather is horrible. The sky is dark; the rain so unceasing that I keep a waterproof top in my office shed just for the purposes of making the 10-yard journey to the kitchen. On the return leg I see the tortoise sitting under a dripping sage bush, limbs retracted. On my next trip back I take him inside for the winter.

The tortoise has his own views. Instead of eating the lettuce I put out for him, he makes two furious circuits of the kitchen table and then stands by the garden door, nose pressed to the glass. I push the door open to show him the driving rain.

“Look,” I say. “Miserable.” The next time I see him, he’s back under the sage.

After two more days of rain, I bring the tortoise indoors again.

“Winter’s coming,” I say. “You need to deactivate.”

He spent the last two winters under the oven, but this year we have a new oven with no underneath. He prods its solid base with his front foot, and then looks up at me, as if to say: is this a joke?

“You might like it under the washing machine,” I say. I leave a trail of lettuce in that direction, but the tortoise only follows it halfway, before returning to the oven to try to stare a hole through it. My wife walks in with a collection of dirty mugs and narrowly avoids tripping over him.

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“Why is he there?” she says.

“His worldview has been shattered,” I say.

“We’re going on a walk with everyone tomorrow,” she says. “Along the river.”

“In this?” I say, pointing at the window.

“Tomorrow’s meant to be nice,” she says. “Anyway, I said we’d only do half. We’ll meet everyone else at the bridge.”

The next morning, the sun is shining when I wake up. I find the tortoise stomping round the kitchen table. He stops when I enter the room, and fixes me with a looks that says: hey, Lettuce Guy – what time do you call this?

“The clocks went back,” I say, pulling two lettuce leaves from the fridge and tossing them on to the floor. “I know it’s confusing.”

At midday Greenwich Mean Time, my wife and I catch a southbound train. Forty minutes later, we emerge from an unfamiliar station, and I freeze in bewilderment on the crowded pavement.

“Which way?” I say.

“Downhill,” my wife says, setting off. I follow her.

We reach the river 20 minutes ahead of schedule, and take up seats outside a pub to stare at the water.

“Where are we meeting them exactly?” I say.

“Here,” my wife says, pointing at the ground.

“Don’t we want to be the other side of the bridge?” I say.

“No,” she says. “South.”

“I don’t mean which bank,” I say. “I mean east or west.”

“I don’t really do compass points,” she says.

“That’s north,” I say, pointing. “That’s west. The sea’s that way.” My wife looks at me, and blinks twice.

“Correct,” she says. We head off down the road, in an easterly direction.

“This way we’ll intercept them after they cross over,” I say.

“I don’t know how I got so turned round,” my wife says. “I’ve lived in London all my life.”

“It’s easily done,” I say, trying to sound sufficiently patronising. We find a bench on the other side of the bridge, where I enjoy my triumph in silence, the sun warming my closed eyelids, for almost five minutes.

“Hang on,” my wife says. Even before I open my eyes I realise that she was right and I am wrong. It is a terrible, if not entirely unfamiliar sensation.

“We’re coming now,” she says into her phone, as we stomp back to our original position. “We were on the wrong side.”

“My mental map was upside down,” I say.

“It’s my fault for not remembering that you don’t know anything,” she says.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I say.

“I do,” she says. “For a bit.”

I look along the glittering river, attempting to reconstitute it as a mirror of itself, but it’s impossible, like trying to stare a hole in to an oven.