The Black Tide (5 page)

The heat was burning up the fog now. I could see the bright white heart of the fire and the great billowing cloud of smoke rising like a volcanic eruption. I couldn’t see the wreck, only the rocks of the Kettle’s Bottom all red with the glare. Either it was sunk or else the smoke and flames had engulfed it completely. The effect was terrifying, the thunderous roar, the whole appalling conflagration seeming to burst up from the surface of the sea as though fuelled by some underwater vent. Lightning flashed in the smoke and I sat there, thinking of Karen, trying to imagine … I think I must have been crying, for my eyes became crusted with salt and I could feel my mouth trembling. But the intensity of the heat burned up my tears, so that I stared, dry-eyed, at the pyre she had made for herself.

I should have known. After three years – God! I should have known. And we’d been here almost two – two years living in expectation, waiting for just such a catastrophe.

The heat was scorching my face and there was wind. Jimmy’s hand gripped my arm. ‘Hold it!’ he said urgently.
‘Nothing you can do.’ I realized then that I had been struggling to my feet. ‘Nothing at all.’ His face was close to mine. ‘Not now. Just sit there …’

Just sit, do nothing. The tanker blazing and Karen’s body – her lovely, soft body burned to nothing. Had it been quick? An explosion like that, such a holocaust of flame – she wouldn’t have known? Surely to God it wouldn’t have hurt? I tried to imagine myself there beside her when it happened, but it was no use – my mind couldn’t grasp what it would have been like, what the impact of it would have been on flesh and bone. The nerves … it would have been her nerves that took the full shock of it, reacting like a seismograph, shrieking information to the brain in that split second of exploding flames.

My head was turned, still facing the lurid heat-glow. But it was over the stern now. Andy had swung the inflatable away from it. The wind was growing, whipping the surface of the water to spray, and it was cold – cold air being sucked in by the rising heat of the flames.

I don’t know what happened after that, my mind seemed to blank out, so that I wasn’t conscious of anything until we were inside the Sennen breakwater and carrying the ILB up to the boathouse. The sea mist was almost gone, torn to shreds, and out where the ship had been there was nothing but billowing smoke lit by a red internal glow. The fog signal on the Longships banged again, the red light glaring fixedly. Somebody was talking to me, asking questions, and I became aware of a small crowd gathering. There was a police car there and a young helicopter pilot I knew.

‘It was your wife, was it, sir – the young woman they say went out to blow up the ship? Can you give me her name please, her full name …’ And another voice, a camera reporter from one of the TV companies that had been waiting to film the ship being hauled off the rocks, said, ‘What the hell did she do it for, going out to a wrecked oil tanker with a thing like a miniature flame-thrower? Did she want to kill herself?’

His eager, hungry little eyes stared up at me, the camera cradled on his arm. I could sense his excitement. ‘Did you
see her? Was she really out there?’ And then, as I told him to go to hell, he stepped back, the camera raised, and his mate switched a spotlight on, suddenly blinding me. ‘Just tell it to us in your own words, Mr Rodin. Why did she do it?’

I started towards him, but Andy stopped me. I thought better of it then. At least it was a chance to tell people … ‘Are you recording this?’ I asked him.

‘Yes. You tell us. Now.’ And I heard the whirr of the camera. So I told them – I told them what the quiet and beauty of Balkaer had meant to Karen, to us both – and how cheap flag-of-convenience ships, badly officered, badly equipped, were destroying the coastline, ruining everybody’s lives. ‘And that tanker spilling oil. Nothing came of the meeting tonight, only an assurance they’d get her off tomorrow. But Karen knew … she knew the pressure was falling and a storm due. She knew they’d do nothing, so she …’ I heard the hesitation in my voice – ‘so she must have made up her mind—’ I couldn’t go on, my voice caught on a sob, my words unintelligible. ‘She just – decided – she’d do it herself. Set the slick alight. Nobody was going to do anything, so she’d—’ I was conscious of the silence around me, everybody hanging on my words, the camera whirring. ‘That’s all,’ I muttered. ‘She didn’t realize – she didn’t mean to kill herself – only to save the coast and the seabirds.’ I heard him say ‘Cut’ and the camera stopped.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘You’ll wring a lot of hearts with that stuff. Pity your wife isn’t here too.’ He gave my arm a quick pat. ‘Sorry. Terrible shock for you. But thanks. Thanks a lot.’

I shook my head, feeling dazed, the world going on around me and myself not part of it. The camera crew were packing up. The police officer was at my elbow again, asking more questions, writing it down. ‘You say she didn’t mean to blow the ship up and herself with it?’

I turned my head, seeing his eyes blue like gem-stones in the beam of a car’s headlights. ‘She was killed,’ I said dully. ‘It was accidental.’

It didn’t mean anything to me now. It was as though talking to the camera had got the shock of it out of my system for the moment.

‘She loved life,’ I told him. ‘Why should she want to kill herself? She went out there with only one thought, to burn up that oil slick.’

He took it all down, then he read the statement back to me and I signed it, resting the paper on the warm bonnet of the police car. After that I was able to get away, back to the Trevose cottage. I didn’t go in, I just stood outside by the parked van. I wanted to get away, to be with Karen – back to the cottage, to the memories … all I’d got left.

Jimmy says I didn’t utter a word all the way back, except to ask him to drive me straight down to the bottom of the lane. He wanted me to stay the night with them, of course, but I wouldn’t. ‘I’ll be all right.’ I thanked him and got my torch out of the back. Then I was going down the path to Balkaer, alone now and on my own for the first time since it had happened.

The chickens stirred in their shed at my approach and in the dark cleft of the cove the suck and gurgle of waves lapping against the rocks came to me on an updraught of wind. There were no stars, the night dark and the sky overcast. It would be blowing from the sou’west by morning. The cottage door was unlocked, the peat fire glowing now in the wide chimney, the place warm and snug, but terribly empty, as though it knew she wouldn’t be back.

I remember thinking –
it will always be empty like this now
. But there was movement on the far side, under the table. I lit the lamp and in its bright flame I saw five of the cardboard boxes they’d given us to carry the oil-soaked birds when driving them to the cleansing centre. It hit me then. It hit me so hard that I just sat down, a sort of strangled cry coming from inside me, tears falling. I was remembering that scene down in the cove with her holding the wretched bird out to me. If only her tongue could be scolding at me again. Anything rather than this deadly quiet.

And that night, lying alone in the big untidy bed, my eyes wide and staring into the dark, the loneliness of it unbearable. Without Karen what was there to life? She was all I had, all I’d ever had. She was this cottage, Balkaer, the life we’d been leading. It was her idea – the way we lived, everything. Without her it had no meaning. I was back to the
nothingness of my existence before we met. Ever since I’d stowed away on that dhow in Dubai, got myself across to Gwadar and up to Peshawar by way of Quetta, ever since then I’d been tramping the world, living out of suitcases, owning nothing, belonging nowhere – no one belonging to me. Only Karen had ever belonged …

The wind was rising. In the end I couldn’t stand it, lying there staring into the dark, listening to the wind and seeing her figure moving along the sloping deck of that tanker, the flickering flame held out in front of her, and then the flash of the explosion, the roaring holocaust that had followed. Poor darling! Poor wonderful, adorable, emotional darling! If only I’d gone down into the cove, instead of waving and climbing the path and leaving her there. She must have tried to ignite the slick with that garden flame-thrower right after I had left. And when she’d failed, she’d motored across the bay to Sennen to wait with Rose to hear the result of the meeting.

I should have known. If I hadn’t been so angry … God! If – if – if … I flung off the bedclothes and got the bottle of Armagnac I kept for emergencies at the back of the kitchen cupboard. It was the last of the bottles I had brought with me when I had finally come ashore to become self-employed instead of a salaried ship’s officer. There wasn’t much of it left, but it was over the remains of that bottle, sitting in the rocking chair with two oiled-up cormorants and three razorbills in boxes under the table beside me, listening to the roar of the wind outside, the crash of the rollers in the cove below, sensing the movement of the stone walls round me in the gusts, that I began to come to terms with what had happened. Times like this we’d have had each other – talking together, working together, going to bed together, making love; one way and another we’d always kept the gales at bay, locking ourselves into our own little world and shutting out the wind.

But now there was only myself. And with Karen gone I was intensely conscious of every battering blast of wind, so that the cottage seemed no longer a protection, the wind entering it and the waves beating at its foundations. And my love out there by the Kettle’s Bottom. Tomorrow or the next
day, a week, a fortnight maybe, somewhere along the coast they’d find the charred remains of her floating in the sea, or smashed up on the rocks – and I’d be expected to identify her. Or would that rounded, full-breasted form have been reduced to ashes? If it had been cremated beyond recognition … I could see her still, sitting in the wing chair on the opposite side of the chimney piece. We had bought that chair in a gale, junk from a nearby homestead that had gone for nothing, no dealers there, and she had laboriously re-covered it with material from an old Welsh
cardden
that had belonged to her mother.

I could see her now, sitting there like a ghost with one hand propping her chin, the other holding a book, or sitting staring intently at the fire as I read aloud to her what I had written during the day. She was doing the typing for me, of course – she was a trained typist – but I think it was my reading to her that developed her interest in books. She had never been much of a reader before, but then she started borrowing from the travelling library, always wildlife books or stories about animals. Sometimes she would borrow a book about Wales, but mostly it was wildlife, and because much of what I was writing was about the birds and seals that visited our coast, she became in a sense my sounding box, our relationship deeper, more intimate, so that now, for the moment, I could still see her, sitting there in that empty chair.

That was really the start of it, that was when I saw the pattern of my life, how it all added up – so that what had been without purpose before suddenly became purposeful.

It’s hard to explain, for in the hours I sat there, sleepless, with the noise of the front coming in out of the Atlantic steadily increasing, I went through several stages. I had already passed through shock and had reached the point of feeling sorry for myself when I came down seeking the comfort of the Armagnac. But then, as the fire of it gave me courage to face my loss and the loneliness that would follow, I came to feel that Karen wasn’t dead, that she still existed, not in her own body but in mine – that she had become part of me.

It was a strange feeling, for my thinking immediately
became different. It was as though death had opened the door for me so that life had a new meaning, a new dimension – all life, not just human life. I was beginning to think like her. I suddenly felt at one with the Green Peace movement and all those people who had tried to stop the harp seal killers of Canada or to prevent the slaughter of the dolphins by the fishermen off Iki.

The world as I drank seemed to be shrieking aloud the cruelty of humans – not just to themselves, but to all living things. Greed, and a rage against nature. Karen was right. A rogue species. She’d read that somewhere. And about vested interests, too. There’d always be vested interests, always be reasons for not interfering, for allowing another species to be wiped out, for letting them cut down another rain forest, pollute another stretch of coast, another sea, an ocean even, with oil or nuclear waste. She’d seen it. Now I was seeing it. And I hadn’t reasoned it out – it was just suddenly there in my mind, as though she had put it there.

A gust shook the walls, the wind tugging at the door and a sheet of spray lashing at the windows. The peat fire glowed and I saw her face in it, the long black hair let down and burning like a torch. Slumped in the old rocker, I re-lived the moment, the holocaust, confusing the peat-glow and seeing her body shrivel in the heat of it, and with that hallucinatory sight the anger that was there, deep inside me, boiled over, vengeance then my only thought. An eye for an eye, a life for a life. Somebody had put that bloody ship on the rocks, somebody had been responsible – for the pollution, for Karen’s death.

Speridion? Another gust, the cottage trembling, and I spoke the name aloud. Aristides Speridion. And he’d got away in a boat. That’s what the marine consultant, an oil pollution specialist from Cardiff, had said at the meeting, that the second engineer of the
Petros Jupiter
was missing and they’d traced him through a Penzance fisherman to a stolen dinghy and a Breton fishing boat. I’d hunt him down. I’d kill the bastard. The wind howled and I emptied my glass, hugging that thought to me.

A bloody little Greek – they were always Greek. I’d find
him and I’d get the truth out of him, and if he was responsible, if he’d deliberately caused that damned tanker to go on the rocks …

Dawn was breaking as I finished the last of the bottle and began to dress. The razorbills were dead by then, only the cormorants still alive, and the room was very dark, a lot of noise. There always was a lot of noise with a gale blowing out of the west and a big sea running. Lloyd’s! That was what was in my mind now as I shaved and dressed. With an insurance claim in, Lloyd’s would know where the man had gone to earth if anybody did. Lloyd’s of London – I’d phone them as soon as I had banked up the fire and got myself some breakfast.