Read Whirligig for Free Online Page B

conversation.’
    â€˜Oh.’ Claypole was finding it almost impossible to make sense of her words. But he decided, like an exhausted trout must do, to simply let the river take him where it may. Coky continued.
    â€˜I have this thing, you see.’ Her speech was deliberate and thoughtful. ‘It’s like a mental groove. I can’t help thinking… about the cost to the environment of whatever it is I’m looking at… or thinking of…’ She frowned.
    Claypole gaped.
    â€˜It’s something of an affliction,’ she said and sipped again. ‘Not like Tourette’s or motor neurone disease, but it gets in the way of life. You know?’
    Coky explained that she could not catch a bus, look at a view, eat a meal or dream, without thinking of pollution or the carbon cycle. She had done her best to avoid it, she said. She had tried to be stupid. She had tried not to care so much, but was always dogged by insistent voices asking her constantly to weigh one action against another in terms of its impact on the environment. She explained that she was no eco-warrior and certainly did not always make the Earth-friendly choice, but that just made the voices shout louder. It was, she suggested, a curse as debilitating as Midas’s touch.
    The coffee arrived. Coky added nothing to her strong black. Claypole felt sick just looking at his mocha choccolatto, but added his habitual three sugars nonetheless.
    â€˜Sometimes I feel like an eco-accountant,’ Coky continued. ‘Just weighing up debit and credit… Andwhen I was farting about in my rubbish job, I just thought: well, I’m not doing anything for the credit side, am I? Not exactly causing harm, but not exactly helping either… That’s why I got involved with Peregrine’s wind farm. Not that he gives a… I just thought I should take it upon myself to –’
    Coky had stopped in mid-sentence, and Claypole looked up, realising that he had his head in his hands and was moaning gently.
    â€˜Sorry,’ he offered weakly. ‘Not you.’
    â€˜You must feel like cack.’ She licked her cigarette closed expertly but did not light it. ‘You kept the bottle of whisky I brought with me pretty close to you.’
    Claypole tried to transmit shame, but just looked blank.
    â€˜I barely got a taste of it,’ said Coky, but without resentment. ‘Actually, you were quite… funny… when you did speak – which wasn’t much.’
    â€˜Oh,’ said Claypole.
    â€˜Yes. You kept going on about a “misfortune”, but I couldn’t work out what you were talking about.’
    â€˜Oh God,’ said Claypole.
    â€˜I tried to cheer you up, and said it sounded like you needed a bit of time out. That…’ Coky’s eyes crinkled in amused recollection. ‘That was when it got properly funny.’
    â€˜Oh God.’
    â€˜You just kept repeating “time out”, “time out”, “time…” ’ Coky paused dramatically, in imitation, ‘ “…out”. Like that. Then you really didn’t speak much after that.’
    â€˜Oh God.’
    Breakfast arrived and Claypole drilled into his meal like a starved hummingbird while Coky extolled thebenefits of wind power between mouthfuls of Eggs Florentine.
    â€˜I mean it’s clean, it’s renewable. And the wind is free, so… what’s not to like? And some people say they actively like the look of them. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and all that. And anyway, we really don’t have much choice if we’re going to reduce carbon emissions, right?’
    Coky’s cranberry juice silently shrank as she sucked at it through a straw. Claypole looked up from his plate briefly, his fat face full of protein. He wanted to show he was listening, even if he wasn’t. She took off her shades.
    â€˜Mm-hm,’ he said.
    It struck Claypole