The Black Tide Read Free

running, her feet flying on the grass slope to the path.
    ‘Careful!’ I shouted. She was a big girl and running 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 atight 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