James Wilding

The Little Black Book

The sun was high in a cloudless sky, its blazing heat making even the shade a little too hot for comfort. Clear blue water outlined white coral sand that was utterly dazzling in the early afternoon light, almost whiter than snow. Bird calls were soft and intermittent, the main noise coming from waves lapping gently against an inclined shoreline, six or eight feet of steepness giving way to the flatness of the beach. The tides on this tropical islet were not dramatic, twenty feet of foreshore at most, the exposed portion bearing evidence of the water’s ebb and flow in its sandy forms tipped with flecks of detritus. More pronounced was the high tide mark with its linear arrangement of larger fragments of vegetation and the odd vestige of marine life, this band a foot wide the narrow nexus of the worlds of flotsam and jetsam. Here, spine upwards and pages flared over a bleached branch, lay a small black book, its dark leather cover enclosing cream-coloured paper that bore the evidence of an ink pen, marks all but blurred after a presumably watery ordeal. This sodden notebook, now recrisping in the baking sun, conferred the poignancy of a human story onto an otherwise untroubled scene.