Tide by John Kinsella Page B

said to him my only regret was that the penguin had to witness such violence. But don’t get me wrong, I am not a violent man. That was a one-off, and I didn’t do much damage. Not really. Just hurt whatever little pride he had.
    Strange working for the factory. The phosphate coming in from Christmas Island, doing the plant’s circuits and coming out sacked or wagoned ready to boost the state’s wheat cheque. The aeroplane warning lights on the great central smokestack provided endless hours of joy when I worked nightshift: staring out of the office, fixating. And that acrid stench that leaves the throat and nose and mouth burning got kind of addictive. And the malarky between the blokes. The stories I could tell!
    Funny what you remember. What you take to fondly. A pod of dolphins arcing alongside the loading jetty. A chemical spill. Seagulls defying pollution, the odds; never giving up. The ships coming in, drawn by tugs, the pilot boat as steady as a life contract. Never had one of those. No real permanence. Always on short-term contracts, even as foreman. Waiting for the job to end. No way to live, said my wife. No way.
    But then suddenly I went over the barbed wire and up into the sandhills, into the Magazine. That was seven years before the fence came down. There were patrols and more people than you’d think in the NO GO area, but nonetheless I was in there seven years, and my shrieks and calls were never heard, and no signs of my presence reported in any way. Later, it wasn’t a case of ‘that explains those noises’ or ‘how on earth was that missed?’ Nothing. Just a black hole.
    I couldn’t say with real honesty that I never looked at another woman during the years I was married. Couldn’t say that. I mean, when I first met her, she was a ‘skimpy’, and she was going out with one of the other regulars who worked on the industrial strip. In the refinery. He’s the one who told me that if the burn-off pipe ever went out we were all doomed, that the whole place would go up. The pilot light goes out, he said, and BOOOOOM!
    So, occasionally, I got drunk and another skimpy took my fancy. Mostly I struck out; I mean, I’m not much to look at. But I can be generous on payday when I’m pissed. And my wife didn’t mind the company of the bikers who broke pool cues over those who gave them lip.
    To hear the sea, to be so close as to taste it through five feet of stone, down through the narrow ventilators, over the smell and saturation of cordite and powder, but not be able to catch even a glimpse of it, is the most extreme of torments. Year in, year out. Occasionally, during a storm, spray would find its way in, lifted and hurled, dampening and colluding with rainwater lashing the roof. At such times she, the keeper of the house in the dunes and my captor, would love me most. The sea, she said, sent her wild. Me too, I said, let me free to see it, swim in it. Watch fish swim the shallows, waders test the foam, skimmers take the surface, pollution’s oily film rainbowing a still, fine day. In answer, sometimes, she’d bring me shells, but they were small and often broken, and the sea barely lived in them.
    I’ve no doubt she loved me. And I can say now, with her so far away, with it all so far away, that I loved her in my own way. If I’ve ever really loved. But I shouldn’t say that. As a child I loved mystery, risk, the unknown. I loved that beach because of the forbidden, because of the fence. Over there, the sea was rich and the blue reflecting and absorbing at once. The sand tingling. The magazines with their roofs poking up over dunes, the rocket ship in the moon’s eye.
    Imprisonment? Against my interests, I’ll say that’s a complex term. I mean, her voice through the bunker’s ventilators, the door opening into the night and my inability to step out at such moments, to execute an escape; her weaving the