The Black Tide Read Free Page A

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 atight 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’twant 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