Hammond Innes: The Black Tide

like that, at such a crazy pace, I was afraid she’d go flying head first down among the rocks.

But it was no good. She took no notice. She never did. Once her emotions took charge, nothing stopped her. The cottage, the birds, everything — our whole way of life, it was all hers. She was so impossibly lovable, so damnably difficult, and now I was running after her, and it seemed to me, in exasperation, I’d always been adapting myself, excusing myself, ever since she’d faced me, holding on to the handlebars of her bike, eyes wide and spitting like a cat. That had been at the back end of Swansea docks, our first meeting, and a gang of teenagers using a puppy for a football. They’d broken its back and instead of going after them, I’d got hold of the jerking little rag of a body and put it out of its misery with a hand chop to the back of its neck. The teenagers were Arab, and she had thought I was one of them.

Now, as I joined her on the little V-shaped patch of sand, she was in the same sort of mood. ‘Look at it!’ She thrust the feebly flapping bird at me. Her hands were wet and covered with oil, her dark brown eyes gone almost black with anger.

The bird lifted its head, squirming and opening its beak. It was a razorbill, but only recognizable by the strangely bulbous shape of its beak. The beautiful black and white plumage was coated with a thick film of heavy, black oil. No sound came and its movements were so feeble that it was almost certainly near the point of death.

‘How many more?’ Her voice trembled on the edge

of hysteria. ‘Last time — remember? November it was. The night we had that bonfire on the beach. Mrs Treherne’s little boy found it flapping in the shallows, and the very next day they began coming ashore.’ Her breath smoked in the cold air, her eyes wide and very bright. ‘Dead birds, dead fish — I can’t take it.’ Her lips were trembling, tears of anger and frustration starting. ‘Spilling their filthy oil, ruining our lives, everything … I can’t take it. I won’t take it.’ And then, gripping hold of me, holding my arm so tight I could feel her fingernails through the thick sweater, ‘We’ve got to do something, fight back …’

‘I’m doing what I can, Karen.’ I said it gently, keeping a tight hold on myself, but she thought I was on the defensive.

‘Talk, talk, talk, nothing but talk. That silly little committee of yours—’

‘There’s an Under-Secretary coming with our MP this evening. I told you, be patient. It’s a big meeting. The press and the media, too. We’re trying for the same rules and sea routes that the French established after the Amoco Cadiz, and tonight…’

‘Tonight he’ll say yes; tomorrow, at Westminster, he’ll have forgotten all about it.’ She said it bitingly, her eyes contemptuous. She looked down at the razorbill. ‘Remember that first time? And last March, how many was it we took into the cleansing station — twenty-seven? All those people working for hours. Three hours to clean each bird. And they all died, every one of them.’ The bird lay passive now, no longer

struggling. ‘We’ve got to stop them — do something — make them realize.’

‘Do what?’ I asked. ‘What can we do that we’re not doing?’

‘Bomb that bloody ship, set the oil ablaze. Destroy it. That’s what. Make the government act. And if the government won’t do it, then do it our bloody selves.’

‘But I’ve told you…’ It was ridiculous, arguing there in that tiny cove with the waves lapping at our feet and Karen still clutching that limp bundle of oil-soaked feathers. I had told her before that it wouldn’t work. The experts had said it wouldn’t, that the effect would be to produce an even worse mousse, a thick mess of black, long-lasting globules of tar, big as cow pats. But she wouldn’t listen.

‘Just do something,’ she screamed at me. ‘Or are you afraid?’

‘Of what?’ My voice had risen, the lilt that was always there increasing — I could hear it. ‘Why should I be afraid?’

But she backed away from that, her eyes wide, sensing the violence of my reaction if she put it into words. Only I knew, we both knew, what had been on the tip of her tongue. Once the blood’s mixed it can always be thrown in your face. And the sensitivity, the stupid bloody helpless sensitivity… ‘You want me to do something …’ I said it slowly, keeping a tight hold on myself. ‘But what? I’m not Cornish, you know. Indeed, to the local people we’re both of us foreigners. So what is it you want? What do you expect me to do?’

She shook her head quickly. ‘No good asking me. Work it out for yourself.’ She was staring at me then as though she hated me. I could see it in her eyes. They were blazing as she said, ‘This is a man’s job.’ And then, standing there, the bird held in her two hands and spitting the words out — ‘But I’ll tell you this, Trev, if I were a man …’

‘Go on,’ I said, for she had suddenly stopped. ‘If you were a man you’d do what?’

‘Set fire to it myself.’ Her teeth were gritted. ‘I’d do something …’

‘And how do you set fire to an oil slick? Use a box of matches like you’d light a fire, or a torch of newspapers? Oil doesn’t burn that easily, not crude mixed with sea water.’

‘Of course it doesn’t. I’m not that stupid. But there are other things, that old paraffin flame-thrower thing Jimmy Kerrison was using a few years back to burn the weeds off his drive. Don’t tell me that wouldn’t set the stuff alight. Or a bomb, like that man Hals in Africa — that got results.’

‘It got him the sack.’

‘But he forced them to act, didn’t he? And that American, flying his own slick patrol. All over the world there are people fighting back. If you won’t do anything…’

‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ I didn’t take her seriously and suddenly she seemed to give up, standing there very still with a frozen look on her face. ‘Perhaps it’s my fault,’ she breathed. ‘I shouldn’t have persuaded you—’ She was gazing seaward. ‘Tourists seemed the

only pollution we had to fear. I never thought of oil. Oh yes, I know you warned me. But it was all so clean, so perfect — so very, very beautiful. Something I’d always dreamed of, brought up in Swansea, amongst all the squalor—’ She was staring down at the bird. ‘Here, you take it.’ She thrust it into my hands so violently that its muscles contracted in an effort to beat its wings and it turned its head and stabbed at my hand with its powerful beak. ‘I’m going up to the cottage. I’m going to bed. And I’m going to stay in bed until that slick’s dispersed. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to know about it. This time I’m going to pretend it isn’t there. And when it’s gone, when you’ve stirred yourself out of your lethargy and done something about it—’

‘I’ve told you, I’m doing what I can. All of us, we’re all doing everything—’

‘Balls! You’re in love with the sound of your own voices, you and Jimmy and that fellow Wilkins. A visit from a junior minister and you’re over the moon, so full of your own importance you forget—’

‘Shut up!’

‘I won’t shut up. I’m telling you the truth for once.’

We were shouting at each other and I was so angry I could have hit her. The bird was struggling and I took hold of its neck and wrung it. Anything to stop her yelling and put the wretched thing out of its misery, but my hands slipped on the oil and I botched it, so that I had to finish it off by slamming its head against a rock.

She flew at me then, shouting at me to stop, and I

had to hold her off. I held her off until the bird was dead and then I flung the mangled corpse of it back into the sea. ‘Now go to bed,’ I told her. ‘Bury your head in the sand and don’t come out until it’s all over and the slick gone.’