The Black Tide

by Hammond Innes

  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 this 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 …’

  ‘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.’

  She didn’t move for a moment, standing there, staring at me as though seeing me for the first time. ‘You bastard!’ she said quietly. ‘I’ll show you.’ And she turned and walked slowly off up the path, back to the cottage.

  I stayed there for a moment, thinking back over all that had been said, wishing I could have handled it differently. But it had been building for several days now, ever since the Petros Jupiter had stranded within sight of our home. I was out of understanding, totally exhausted by her emotional behaviour and her refusal to accept that everything was being done that could be done. She was so impractical. She knew about ships. She’d been brought up with them, her father a crane driver in the docks, but she’d never understood the sea, how cruel it could be – not until she had come to live here.

  My gaze lifted from the lifeless razorbill sloshing back and forth like an oily rag in the suck and thrust of the wavelets to the edge of the slick pushing a dirty brown tongue round the rocks that hid the tanker from view. Something moved in the film of oil, a wing flapping. I turned away in disgust, climbing the path slowly, but not to the cottage. I struck away to the right, across the knoll above the elephant rock, striding out furiously as I reached the top.

  I was cursing under my breath – not at Karen, not entirely, but at the whole sodding bloody mess, the way our idyll of a simple life was breaking up under the pressure of outside events. I could remember so clearly the day we had first seen Balkaer snugged into the grass and wild flowers and rocks above the cove, so remote, so peaceful on that still, sunny day in early spring two years ago. Doubtless that was why it was being offered at such a reasonable price. For a quick sale, they had said, but it was really the lack of any amenities. Who wants a cottage perched on an exposed coast with no services and the nearest track for vehicles over 500 metres away? Only people like ourselves. Karen from the dust and polyglot overcrowding of a Welsh port, and me with my earliest memories of a tiny hospital on the edge of the desert. For us that Atlantic coast, its soft salt air, the solitude of the cottage perched above the cove, it was all irresistible. We had put our deposit down that afternoon, moved in a week later, and for almost a year we had been sublimely happy. The tourists hadn’t bothered us as much as we had feared, I had sold several magazine pieces and had started on a book, Mate of the Balkaer. And then, at the tail end of a March gale, the first oil had come ashore and we had spent hours clearing up the beach.

  That was when I discovered how unreasonable Karen could be, how taut her nerves were under that beautiful, smooth, rain-soft skin. The birds that came ashore that first time were all dead and whenever she found one she’d hold it out to me in mute accusation. Perhaps she didn’t mean it that way, but that’s how it had seemed to me. And though she said she remembered my warning, I doubt if she really remembered what I had told her that day when we had stood in the cottage doorway and decided Balkaer was what we wanted. Three years tramping round the world, then two on the Gulf-Karachi-Bombay run; I knew the sort of men who manned the smaller, older vessels. There’ll be engineers, I had told her, who’ll pump the bilges out whatever the regulations, tanker skippers who’ll turn a blind eye to tank cleansing at sea, even order it, and sooner or later Cornwall will have another oil spillage disaster like the Torrey Canyon. But she was happy, dreaming dreams. She hadn’t been listening, she hadn’t really taken it in. And then, when it happened …

  I had slowed my pace, staring ahead beyond the white sand sweep of the bay, beyond the road slanting down to Sennen and its cluster of houses, to Land’s End and the rocks off, and that tanker sitting there, stern-on to the rocks and leaking oil. The slick now stretched in a great smooth, brown, greasy layer right across the bay, the spraying vessels moving through it with scarcely a ripple like two water beetles. I was thinking back to the other spillages then. The first one hadn’t been too bad, a minor slick that had stayed off-shore. But the second, which had happened sometime in the early hours of the morning, had been very different – bigger, longer-lasting, heavy, black glutinous oil that stuck to the rocks like glue, and because it was spring and the start of the breeding season many more birds had been involved. A shift of wind had brought them ashore, some of them still very much alive so that we had spent time and money getting them to the cleansing centre.

  Now, here, staring me in the face, was the thing I had dreaded. I wondered how much of her cargo they had managed to pump out. Three small tankers festooned with fenders had been working in relays to lighten her all through the quiet weather period. Doubtless they’d tell us at the meeting tonight. But the glass had started to fall and now that the sky was visible I could see mares’ tails showing high up to the south-west. If it started to blow … I stopped and stared back along the coast to Cape Cornwall and beyond. In the stillness and the cold slanting sunlight it all looked green and fresh, everything washed clean as though waiting for the spring. But for us it wouldn’t be a spring like our first spring. If it were going to blow and she broke up, if the Petros Jupiter split open, spilling the rest of her oil, all that lovely shoreline would be polluted, the marine life killed off and birds that should be nesting coming ashore again as oil-sodden bundles. It would drive Karen out of her mind.

  Bloody stupid, incompetent bastard! I was thinking of the master, risking a ship like that so close to Land’s End just for the sake of a few miles and a tiny saving in bunker fuel. Or had it been deliberate? First the boiler out of action, then the secondary reduction gear stripped. If it wasn’t an accident, then the chief engineer would have to be in on it – one of the engineers, anyway. Would any man in his senses deliberately cause a tanker breakdown close off such a notorious headland? But then if the money was right …

  I shrugged. No doubt the Enquiry would produce the answer and we’d probably be told tonight when it would be held.

  I walked as far as Sennen, where I had a word with Andy Trevose, the lifeboat’s relief cox’n. One of the salvage boys had told him in the pub that if the weather held there was a chance they’d float the Petros Jupiter off on Monday’s tide. Apparently she’d been given enough buoyancy for’ard to lift most of her hull clear of the rocks. Only her stern remained fast on Kettle’s Bottom. He also told me there was a rumour the second engineer had jumped a foreign trawler off Porth-curnow and disappeared.

  The sun had set by the time I got back to Balkaer, night closing in and the mares’ tails gone, the sky clear again and beginning to turn that translucent green that indicates cold. The door was on the latch, but Karen wasn’t there. I thought at first she had gone up to see old Mrs Peever. She did that sometimes when she was upset about something. Or Jean Kerrison perhaps. Jean was more her own age and they got on well enough. It would have been natural considering what had happened and the mood she was in.

  It wasn’t until I went out to the stone cleit I’d built above the path to get peat to bank up the fire that I thought of looking down into the cove. I saw her then, out in the rubber dinghy. She was paddling it along the edge of the slick, not using the outboard, though she had it mounted. I called to her and she looked up, but she didn’t wave. I thought she was out there to pick up any live birds caught in the slick and I went back into
the cottage, banked up the fire and got my things. The meeting was at six in Penzance and Jimmy had said he would pick me up at the bottom of the lane at five-fifteen.

  I called to her again as I left, but she didn’t answer. The light was fading as I went off up the path to the lane, but I wasn’t worried about her. She knew how to handle the inflatable and, like me, she enjoyed being on her own sometimes. It’s not easy when people are cooped up in a lonely little Cornish tin-miner’s cottage in winter. You tend to get on each other’s nerves, however much you’re in love. Even so, if it hadn’t been for that bloody tanker … But Karen would get over it. They’d get the tanker off and then, when the spring came – everything would look different in the spring.

  So I comforted myself. I was really quite cheerful as I approached the lane, the black mood dissipated by the walk to Sennen. It would be the same for Karen, I thought. I didn’t realize how her emotions had been working on her imagination this past week, what depths of passion and desperation had been building up inside her.

  Jimmy was already waiting for me in his battered blue van and I didn’t think any more about her as we drove across the moor to Penzance. He farmed a few acres, pigs and chickens mainly, but mostly he made his living out of the tourists, renting two cottages he owned in Sennen, so that he had a vested interest in the coastal environment.

  The meeting, which was in the Town Hall, proved to be a much bigger affair than anything Wilkins, the secretary of our Preservation Society, had so far been able to organize locally. Just about every organization involved was represented, and since it was open to the public the place was packed. The local MP was in the chair and the chief speaker was the Under-Secretary for the Marine Division of the Department of Trade whose theme, of course, was that everything was being done that could be done. He pointed out that his own emergency information room, his Ops Room, which was on the top floor of the Marine Division’s HQ in Holborn, had been activated and continuously manned since January 1, the day the Petros Jupiter had been stranded. The local anti-pollution plan had been put into operation immediately, including the setting up of a pollution operation control room at Land’s End; the oil company involved had had tankers and pumps available for transferring cargo within fourteen hours; and the owners and Lloyd’s had had salvage teams, ships and equipment on the spot the following day. Of the 57,000 tons of crude oil carried in the ship’s tanks, 39,000 had already been pumped out. It was estimated that no more than 9000 tons had leaked into the sea and this was being dissipated by spraying from the ships everyone could see from Land’s End. ‘With luck the salvage operators hope to have the Petros Jupiter off the rocks tomorrow or the day after.’