Doggerland

by Ben Smith

  The chair creaked as the old man swivelled it back round. ‘Cogs,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Heavy ones. They make the best weights.’

  The boy thought for a moment. ‘That’s what they were. Cogs.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘On the net. That’s what they looked like.’

  ‘What net?’

  ‘The net,’ the boy said. ‘The one we were just talking about.’

  The old man narrowed his eyes. ‘You said they were bricks.’

  ‘No, you said they were bricks.’

  The old man reached under the desk and brought up a rectangular container with a small tap in one corner. He filled his mug. A smell somewhere between anti-rust and generator coolant swept over the room. ‘How would I know what they were?’ he said. ‘I didn’t even see them.’

  One of the monitors showed nothing but the camera lens fogged with spray. The spray ran down and pooled in the corners of the screen, drip by drip by drip.

  ‘It must have come from somewhere, though,’ the boy said.

  The old man held his mug halfway up to his mouth and watched the boy over the rim. ‘Somewhere?’ he said eventually.

  ‘I mean …’

  ‘It could have come from anywhere,’ the old man said.

  ‘Anywhere?’

  ‘It’s just klote.’

  ‘I know, but …’

  ‘It’s just klote.’

  ‘But don’t you think …’

  ‘Think!’ The old man swung his hand in the direction of the monitors, slopping his drink over the desk. ‘What good do you think thinking does?’ He banged his mug down and began wiping the desk with his sleeve. ‘It’s just a boot. It’s got bugger all to do with him.’

  The boy’s chest tightened. He stood very still, then raised his hand and rubbed the side of his jaw.

  ‘And you look just like him when you do that,’ the old man said.

  The boy dropped his hand to his side. He could hear his heart thumping in his ears; or was that the waves, thumping deep down against the rig’s supports? He put the lace in his pocket and stepped out into the corridor.

  ‘Jem.’

  The boy stopped, half-turned. They would go for months without using each other’s names, so that, when they did, the words seemed random and unfixed, as if they could belong to anything – a tool or piece of machinery, or something that had just drifted through the farm.

  ‘What are you going to do with your bootlace?’ The old man spoke quietly. His eyes reflected the pale light of the monitors.

  ‘Put another hook on my line.’

  The old man raised his mug. ‘Then we shall feast like kings on the fruits of the sea.’ He drank, shuddered.

  The boy waited in the doorway. ‘Do you reckon there’s anything down there?’

  The old man leaned back and cradled his mug in both hands. ‘There’s plenty down there.’

  ‘I meant …’ But it was too late. Soon the old man would say ‘a whole country, a whole continent’.

  ‘A whole country, a whole continent.’

  The boy pressed his forehead against the doorframe. ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘Right here, just below us. Thousands of years ago, all this was land.’

  ‘I know.’

  The old man closed his eyes. ‘Riverbeds, forests, open plains. Villages, fire-pits …’

  The boy walked down the corridor until the old man’s voice was swallowed by the rig’s own creaks and mutterings.

  He stood below the clock on the wall of his room – it read midday, or midnight. The ticking echoed in the still and empty space. He took his watch out of his pocket. He’d just cleaned the battery connectors and the display now read ‘3.30’.

  The dots between the numbers flashed with each passing second. He watched them closely, looking out for any glitch, for any slowing of the mechanism; but the beats were steady and even. He watched for a minute exactly, then took a tiny screwdriver from his pocket and inserted it into a hole in the backplate. The display changed to ‘0.00’.

  He sat down on his bunk, which was, like everything else in his room, bolted to the wall and made of grey painted metal. His room, although there was little to show for it. There was a ten-litre container of cleaning fluid under the sink – the sort used for de-greasing gears and scouring the deck of the boat. Next to it was a bucket and cloth. The only colour came from the faded spines of three warped and torn technical manuals, which were stacked in the alcove beneath the bedside unit. Other than that, the room was the same as the day he’d arrived on the farm.

  He remembered following the old man through the corridors up from the dock. The smell of grease and rust. The sound of the ventilators. The hollow sound of his boots on metal. The old man had led him to his room and they had stood there in silence, the boy by the bed, the old man in the doorway, both looking down at the small pile of belongings that the boy had brought with him: his Company-issue clothes, his Company-issue kit, his Company-issue watch. The old man had cleared his throat, gestured to the sink, the cupboard, the drawers, then cleared his throat again. The boy had stared down at the folds in his high-vis jacket, his overalls. Each fold was sharp and precise. When he’d finally looked up, the old man had gone.

  The boy had lain down on the mattress and stared at the ceiling. It looked like it was rocking. It pitched and rocked and he’d closed his eyes, almost thought he heard the old man coming back, his step outside the door. But no one came in. The mattress had been hard and lumpy under his shoulders. He remembered the particular way he’d had to curl up to sleep. Now it was smooth, worn-down, and fitted his body exactly.

  Which was the only way of telling how long he’d been out there; how long he’d been fixing the turbines, setting out his fishing line, having the same conversations with the old man; how long since he’d been sent out to take over his father’s contract.

  Sometimes, he tried to think back to his life before the farm – even that first boat ride over, the last moments onshore – but his memories were hazy and indistinct, the way the turbines, in squally weather, would churn up so much spray that all edges and outlines disappeared.

  He looked at his watch again. It was already a minute out of sync with the clock on the wall.

  He got up and left the room, making his way down to the control room, stepping automatically over the loose floor panels, ducking under the botched and rerouted ventilation pipes and avoiding the third step on the stairwell, which was covered in a clear, glue-like substance. The old man had put it there, long ago, after the boy had tried to talk to him about keeping the rig clean. The idea was that the boy would get it on the soles of his boots and then it would be him treading dirty footprints all around the rig. This had never happened, but every few days the old man replenished the glue and every few days the boy avoided it. They both found it a boring and exhausting chore, but it filled the time.

  The boy stood in the control-room doorway. ‘What time is it?’ he said.

  The old man had his feet up on the desk. He shrugged. ‘System’s crashed again.’

  ‘It did that this morning.’

  ‘It’s done it again.’

  ‘Did you spill your drink on it?’

  ‘I only did that once.’ The processor chuntered and whined and the old man jabbed a button on the keyboard with his heel. ‘Not my fault if it can’t hold its liquor.’

  The boy waited in the doorway while it reloaded. ‘What time does it say?’

  The old man sighed and twisted one of the monitors with his foot until it was facing him. ‘Quarter past five.’

  ‘Quarter past five?’

  The old man shrugged again.

  Nothing

  The air in the tower was brackish and humid, the light the same strange yellow as a cloud before it dissolves into sleet.<
br />
  The boy and the old man stood close, but not touching, in the turbine’s small service lift, the toolbag propped between them. The old man pushed a button and they lurched up, rising in silence, or as close to silence as it ever got out in the fields. There was always the sea, the slow pulse of the blades and generators. And the wind, twisting its coarse fibres through everything.

  They climbed higher and the noise increased. It was a hundred metres from jacket to nacelle and over that distance the wind speed grew until it forced itself in through every joint and rivet – between tower and nacelle, nacelle and hub, hub and spinner. All day, the boy would feel the thump of turbulence on metal, the vibrations making their way through his feet and hands into the cavities of his chest, until it seemed as though it was his own pulse knocking on the outer walls, wanting to come in.

  ‘Thick slices of roast beef,’ the old man said. ‘Rare. With gravy.’

  The boy looked at him. ‘Rare?’

  ‘Bloody.’

  The boy counted the sections of the tower as they passed the joins. ‘I know.’ He always counted the sections, even though each tower was identical – made up of huge cylinders of metal, stacked like tins.

  The lift doors opened and the boy picked up the toolbag and followed the old man out onto the gantry. They stopped at the bottom of a ladder and looked up at the hatch. It was rusted shut.

  ‘Quiche,’ the old man said. ‘Cheese and onion quiche.’ He’d been going on like this for over a week. The supply boat was late and they were running low on food.

  The boy shrugged.

  ‘What?’ the old man said.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know what it is, or you don’t know if you’d want to eat it?’

  ‘What’s the difference?’ The boy put the bag down at the foot of the ladder and looked up at the scalloped rust.

  Each day, the farm’s automated system told them what jobs and repairs needed doing. There’d be a report through the computer on the rig, giving the turbine number, coordinates and details of the problem. The old technical manuals described the system as ‘smart’ – as well as controlling the direction the turbines faced, it could manage the output, slow the generators so they didn’t overheat, and feather the blades if the wind was too strong. It was designed to let the operators know only if something broke, prioritizing the most serious cases, running diagnostics and even suggesting what tools to bring.

  The boy often wondered if it had ever worked like that. After years of generating countless reports, the system was wrecked. It would say the problem was in a gearbox, when it was actually the yaw motor, or that the generator was faulty, when the blade controls were rusted out. Or it would send them to the wrong turbine completely and they would have to try and find out where the actual broken one might be – going round and round following the reports, like trying to follow the ramblings of a mind that was slowly unravelling.

  This was the third job they’d tried to do that day. At the first turbine, there had been nothing wrong at all. At the second, the computer had identified a simple rewiring job; but when they’d arrived, the whole front of the nacelle had been missing – spinner, blades, everything – leaving a hole like a gaping mouth.

  The boy took a drill out of the toolbag and searched around until he found a thick, worn bit, the thread ground down to smooth waves in the metal. He climbed up one rung of the ladder and got to work on the bolts in the rusted hinges. The drill jammed and cut out. He banged the battery pack against the ladder and it started up again. The bolts turned to a fine orange dust.

  ‘What would you pick then?’ the old man said. He leaned back against the handrail.

  The boy reached for a pry bar. ‘I don’t know.’ He could feel the old man’s eyes at his back. Any moment he’d say something about the angle he was pushing at, or how the tip wasn’t in the right place. ‘I guess I’d pick that spicy stuff,’ he said.

  The old man closed his eyes and smiled. ‘Pie crusts, yeah. Golden and crisp.’

  ‘Crisp?’

  ‘Of course. Got to be crisp.’

  ‘How could it be crisp?’

  ‘How couldn’t it be crisp?’

  ‘Because it comes in a tin.’

  ‘Pie crusts in a tin?’

  ‘Pie crusts?’

  The old man breathed out heavily. ‘What’s the point in saying something if you don’t know what it is?’

  ‘I do know what it is.’ The boy pushed harder against the pry bar. ‘I just don’t know what it’s got to do with anything.’

  ‘Then why did you say pie crusts?’

  ‘I said spicy stuff.’

  ‘Jesus.’ The old man rubbed his forehead with his palm. ‘You can’t choose that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because that would mean that out of anything – anything – that you could choose to arrive on the next supply boat, you’d choose spiced protein.’

  Tins, dried goods and vacuum-packed blocks – this was all the food the supply boat ever brought. There would be chewy cubes of some kind of curd and packets of compressed rice. The spiced protein was the only thing with any flavour, so it was always the first to go. They used it to bet with, and as payment for getting out of jobs they didn’t want to do. The old man owed him four already. In the time leading up to the resupply, there would only be tinned vegetables left – gelatinous carbohydrates moulded into the shapes of things that once grew. They were pallid and starchy, and left a powdery residue that coated the tongue and teeth. With the boat being late, that was all they’d tasted for weeks. The only thing that gave the boy any solace was that the old man hated them even more than he did.

  He pushed harder, but the pry bar slipped and he cracked his knuckles on the hatch. He dropped the pry bar in the bag, then clenched and unclenched his fists one by one.

  ‘Could have told you that would happen,’ the old man said.

  The boy laid his palms flat against the hatch, braced against the lowest rung of the ladder and pushed the hatch up into the nacelle.

  The old man went up first. No lights came on. Once, the boy had gone up into a nacelle and all the switches had been gently smouldering, molten plastic dripping down the walls like candle wax. There was a bang and muttered swearing, the flicking of buttons, then a screech of metal as the old man opened the roof hatch, letting in a shaft of daylight and a blast of sound.

  The computer had said that the problem was with the generator, but when the boy climbed up he could see straight away that the generator was working fine. He blinked twice in the daylight, rubbed a hand over his eyes, then began checking each of the components.

  There were a lot of ways that a turbine could go wrong. Mostly it was the weather getting in: crumbling seals on the hatches, loose rivets, scratches in the paintwork admitting the narrow end of a wedge of damp and corrosion. There were several different models on the farm and each had their own weaknesses – small differences that sprawled over time into repeated malfunctions or whole areas of the nacelle half-digested by rust. Some of the newer models were meant to be more resilient – better seals round the circuitry, fewer moving parts – but nothing stayed new or resilient for long.

  The boy went over to the control panel, where a row of lights had gone out. He signalled to the old man, who sighed, opened the zip pocket at the front of his overalls and took out a decrepit tablet – two sides thick with tape and a crack in the corner of the screen, dark lines spreading across it like veins. The old man came over, plugged it into the control panel, tapped at the screen and then said something.

  ‘What?’ the boy shouted.

  The old man cupped a hand over his ear. ‘What?’ he shouted back.

  ‘I said “what”,’ the boy shouted, louder.

  The old man stared at him for a moment, then put down the tablet and went to the front of the nacelle,
removed the panel leading in to the rotor hub and crawled inside. After a few seconds, the blades slowed then stilled. The boy took out three LED lamps and positioned them round the nacelle, then reached up and closed the roof hatch. For a moment, it was almost like silence. The old man backed out of the hub and returned to the tablet. He tapped at it again and nodded, which meant he didn’t know what was wrong.

  ‘What is it?’ the boy said eventually.

  The old man tapped at the tablet. ‘Huài diào.’

  ‘Huài diào?’

  The old man shrugged.

  ‘Which bit?’

  The old man gestured towards the control panel. ‘All of it.’

  The boy took a step forward. ‘Let me see.’

  The old man unplugged the tablet and put it back in his pocket. ‘No point. Don’t know where the problem is. We’d need the control panel to tell us.’

  The boy took a screwdriver out of his pocket and began to remove the casing of the control panel. ‘I can work it out.’

  The old man folded his arms. ‘Waste of time.’

  The boy removed the casing. Underneath there was a tangle of frayed and rusting circuitry.

  ‘See,’ the old man said.

  The boy eased two wires apart with his screwdriver. Flakes of rust crumbled onto his hand.

  ‘Got plenty to be getting on with,’ the old man said. ‘But if you want to spend all day playing electrician.’ He leaned against the gearbox and closed his eyes.

  The boy stood in front of the control panel. It was probably just a circuit board, or a few transistors. He could see what he needed to do with the wires. But if it wasn’t, he’d end up there for hours and then they wouldn’t have the right spares anyway. And it’d be another day wasted. A handful of electrical components. Everything else in the turbine was fine, but without the control panel the nacelle wouldn’t be able to change direction, or the blades adjust their speed. A strong wind from the wrong direction and the whole hub could get torn off.