The Black Tide

Incredibly, because of the unseasonable quietness of the weather during the days following the gale, she was still intact and, except that she was down by the stern and her after deck almost awash, she might have been anchored there. All this side of the wreck the sea was a flat oily brown. I left my spade and went up to the knoll above the elephant head rock. When I had been out to the wreck on the Friday the spillage had all been to seaward and I was hoping it would prove to be some trick of the iridescent light. But it wasn’t. It was oil all right. Two anti-pollution vessels were spraying close inshore along Whitesand Bay and the slick ran in a long dirty line from the tanker right

across the bay until it disappeared from sight below the cliffs on which I was standing.

Karen must have been looking at it, too. From the door of the cottage you could see straight down the rocky pathway to the little patch of sand wedged into the rocks of the gully where we kept our inflatable. The anguish of her cry cut the stillness. She was out of the door, searching wildly and calling to me: ‘Trevor! Trevor!’ She looked up to where I stood. ‘D’you see it?’

‘See what?’ I called down to her, though I knew damn well what she’d seen.

She turned. ‘There! On the sand.’ Her voice was high like the screech of a gull. We had been expecting ifais for almost a week now. ‘By that rock.’ She was standing in the cold, watery sunlight, her left hand shading her eyes, her right stretched out, pointing down into the cove.

From where I stood I couldn’t see it, the little cove blocked from my view by the top of the elephant rock.

‘I can see it moving.’ She had turned, looking up at me again, the smooth rounded beauty of her face shattered by the violence of her emotions — a fishergirl’s face, I had described it in a magazine piece, with the high-necked fisherman’s jersey she wore in winter and the blue scarf tied in a bandeau round her head. And then she was 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 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…’