Doggerland

by Ben Smith

  He shoved the screwdriver back into his pocket. ‘Fine,’ he said.

  The old man opened one eye. ‘What was that?’

  The boy didn’t reply. He just started unpacking the spare holdalls from the toolbag and they began to strip the nacelle.

  Within half an hour they’d taken apart the generator and gearbox. The old man had removed anything useful from the rotor hub and packed it carefully in one of the bags. Then they unscrewed the panelling from the walls and bedplate, following lengths of copper wire, which they pulled out and wound into coils.

  The boy took the first load down the lift and out to where the maintenance boat was moored to the jacket. The rain had set in, bleaching sharply from the west. He bowed his head to stop it hitting his eyes. This was how he thought of the weather: in terms of how much you had to bow. Sometimes he had to bend double, hauling himself along by railing and rung; sometimes it drove him to his knees.

  He found some more bags in the cabin and sent them up in the lift, then waited at the foot of the tower. He could make so many repairs with the spare parts they’d just taken – they’d last for months, he could even go back and fix some of the turbines they’d had to shut down. But there was no point thinking like that. The old man kept all the parts so that he could trade for extras when the supply boat came.

  The boy had only once questioned this, saying why couldn’t they use some of the parts to make repairs?

  ‘Why do you care?’ the old man had said.

  The boy had thought about it for a long time. About all the different ways the turbines seemed to groan; how a faulty motor would emit a small dry gasp just before it gave out; how plastic creaked like his own joints when he’d been kneeling in a spinner housing too long.

  He hadn’t been able to answer.

  The boat moved slowly through the farm – a dark dot among the pale rows, rising and sinking as it cut through the swell. The boy sat in the open stern, his back braced against the cabin, watching the boat’s wake spooling out behind them until it was pulled apart by the cross-currents, leaving no trace of their passage. Spray hissed against the deck and he looked up, then cursed under his breath. They should have been travelling south, but the boat had turned north, up into zone two. He knew because the corrosion on the towers was always worse on the south-west side – the metal blistered and peeling as if it had been subjected to flame.

  He got up and opened the cabin door. The old man was standing at the wheel, squinting out of the cracked windscreen.

  ‘How’s the battery doing?’ the boy said. He looked over at the gauge – the dial was about halfway. Out in the swell and chop of the fields it was impossible to know how long the battery would last. Cutting back against a strong current, it could drain fast. There were spares, but they were old and even more unreliable. There were times when they’d miscalculated and been forced to drift the boat, only using the engine to change direction. Once, when both spares were dead, their only option had been to moor up to a turbine and try to charge them off the main supply. Which the boy managed to do; but only after fusing one battery into a solid lump and being thrown twice against the tower’s far wall.

  ‘I’m running her slow,’ the old man said.

  ‘The gauge has been playing up.’

  ‘I’m running her slow.’

  The boy went in and closed the cabin door. ‘How far’s the next job?’

  The old man didn’t answer.

  ‘There’s four more turbines on the list.’

  ‘It’s been a good day’s work.’

  ‘We haven’t fixed anything.’

  The old man squinted out of the windscreen again. ‘We’ve got what we need.’

  The boy’s face was stinging in the cabin’s dry heat. ‘We should at least try and fix one.’

  ‘What if it needs parts?’

  ‘It might not need parts.’

  ‘But it might need parts.’ The old man adjusted the wheel. ‘And if we go fixing turbines with parts we’ve salvaged, we’ll have to go around trying to find another turbine we can’t fix, so we can get the parts back, all the while hoping we don’t find one we can fix that will take another part that we’ve salvaged, which we’ll then have to try and replace from somewhere else.’

  ‘So we’re not going to do any more work?’

  ‘We can do some after,’ the old man said. ‘If there’s time.’

  The boy shook his head. There wouldn’t be time. There was never time to do anything else when the old man took them off to check on his nets.

  ‘Five,’ the boy said. ‘You owe me five tins now.’

  The old man muttered that it was only four, it was definitely only four, but the boy had already gone back outside.

  At any one time, the old man would have around a dozen nets scattered across the farm. If there was a system to their positioning, the boy could not fathom it. All he knew was that the old man spent days and nights studying tide charts and weather reports, making calculations, scrawling pages of notes and coordinates. The boy could almost have understood it, if the old man had been trying to catch fish.

  But the old man wasn’t fishing. He would string his nets between two turbines so they hung down to the seabed, then he would lower a twisted piece of turbine foundation from the stern of the boat and start to trawl: churning up the silt and clay, working loose whatever it was that he thought was down there.

  He would talk about homes and settlements – a place that had flooded thousands of years ago. He would talk about woods and hills and rivers, and he would trade away crate-loads of turbine parts for maps that showed the seabed as if it were land, surveys from before the farm was built – the paper thin and flaky as rust – that described the density and make-up of the ground beneath the water. Every resupply he would trade for a new chart, or a new trawling tool, and then he would reposition his nets, rewrite his coordinates, and start the whole bloody process again.

  The boat slowed. Up ahead there was a line of plastic bottles floating on the water. The old man piloted the boat in a wide arc towards the base of the nearest turbine, coming in slow until the scooped-out bow fitted round the curve of the jacket. The engine stopped and the old man came out on deck.

  The boy went back into the cabin and lay on the floor. The boat swayed. The battery gauge hummed. The boy brought his hand up slowly and rubbed along his jaw.

  Outside, the farm stretched away in every direction, the towers spreading out in rows, like the spokes of a wheel. Navigating through the farm, it sometimes felt like only the fields were moving. Whenever the boat turned, the towers would align along different vectors, and whenever the weather changed, the blades would shift position to face into the wind. There were whole zones that the boy had never even visited – fields well beyond the range of the boat’s decrepit battery.

  When the boy was out on his own he had to rely on the boat’s satnav. He had tried to learn to use it less, but somehow he could never translate the satellite map’s clean, segmented regions into the vastness of the farm. He had tried to talk to the old man about it, about how, wherever you were in the farm, it always felt like you were in the exact centre, like you could go on for ever and never find an edge against which to take a bearing. But the old man had just looked at him. ‘Still using the satnav?’ he’d said.

  The boat rocked and shifted round the tower. Outside, the turbines started to move. The movement began on one horizon then spread like a ripple, as if a crowd of people, one by one, had noticed something and were silently turning to stare. The boy felt the old man step back down onto the boat, the scraping of the line against the side, then finally a series of heavy thuds as armfuls of net were hauled up onto the deck. As he worked, the old man hummed the strange tunes he sometimes hummed – mixed-up bits of adverts and songs for which the boy had no reference.

  The sky turned brown and dim, like old water left sitti
ng in a bucket. Soon, the last light would dip into the haze that always hung thick in the west. The boy got up and opened the cabin door.

  Murky rain swathed everything. The old man was crouching down sorting through a pile of bottles, plastic bags, chunks of concrete and sludge-coated lumps. His hair was soaking and pools of rain gleamed in the creases of his coat. He hadn’t even bothered to put his hood up. Eventually he stood, picked everything up and dumped it all over the side of the boat.

  ‘Good catch,’ the boy said, as the old man kicked the last shreds of plastic through the scuppers and back into the sea.

  The boy read the instructions one more time. There was an open cookbook and a tin of re-formed vegetables on the counter, both stamped with a fading Company logo.

  He put a frying pan on the nearest hotplate, opened the tin and emptied it into a bowl. Then he went to the crate in the corner of the room, where they kept all the empties, and found one that had contained protein mince. He wiped the inside with his finger and smeared the congealed fat on the surface of the pan, then turned on the heat. From the bowl, he selected the larger vegetables – orange discs, bulbous white and green florets – and added them to the pan. The fat was hot, but still congealed. It stuck to the vegetables in small white beads. The boy turned the heat up and pushed the vegetables around the pan with a spatula. They began to hiss and disintegrate, so he stopped moving them.

  He watched the timer on the cooker and, after a minute exactly, added the other vegetables – small orbs and cubes – and left them popping in the pan. Then he turned back to the book. It said serve with potatoes. The boy didn’t know what potatoes were. From the picture, they looked like the vacuum-packed starch blocks they sometimes got on the resupply. A gritty white powder that you boiled in water until it formed a thick paste. Little nutrition, but they made the tinned substances look more like food on the plate. He wished he’d saved one out.

  He tried to stir the vegetables, but they had melted together into a grey disc and fused to the surface of the pan. He pushed at the blackened edge, but it was stuck. He turned off the heat, looked down at the picture of the meal in the book, then closed it slowly, picked up the pan and took it over to the table. He’d once tried to make something for him and the old man out of the book, and they’d both sat there for hours trying to finish it, until, finally, the old man had poured homebrew over their bowls and they’d downed them in one wincing gulp.

  The book always said to ‘season well’. The boy reached for the salt cellar but it was empty, so he got up and checked the cupboards. He saw himself for a moment, as if through one of the cameras, searching for salt in the middle of the sea. It’d be quicker if he just scraped some off his boots.

  He opened the long, sliding door beneath the counter. The space behind was stuffed with pans that had never been used and instruction manuals for appliances that had long since broken. The boy squatted down and reached into the back – just more pans and empty packets, then a sharp edge. He pulled his hand out and saw a small cut on the tip of his finger. He rubbed the blood away then reached back in, took out the object and held it up to the light.

  It looked like a turbine. It was only a few inches tall and it had been made by hand – cut and folded out of an empty tin. There were nicks along the edges that showed where the metal had been sheared. He took it over to the table and sat down, holding it up in front of him. He blew lightly and the blades turned.

  The old man came in and crossed over to the cupboard. ‘So I was thinking, seeing as you owe me five tins …’ He stopped in the middle of the room and stared at the boy. ‘Where did you get that?’

  The boy turned the model round. It had been made very carefully. ‘I just found it.’

  ‘Give it here.’ The old man’s voice was low and quiet.

  ‘It was in the cupboard.’

  ‘Give it here.’ The old man walked forward quickly and snatched it from the boy. ‘I thought I’d got rid of all these.’ He bent it in half and shoved it in his pocket.

  The boy looked up at the old man. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  The water system groaned. The boy sat very still. His mouth felt suddenly dry. ‘Did he …?’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ the old man said again. He was about to say something else – his mouth moved, just a small twinge in the top corner, like a glitch between two wires – then he shook his head, turned and left the room.

  Rain thumped against the rig. The boy didn’t move. The cold metal of the stool pressed into the backs of his legs. The old man was right; it was nothing. He should just forget it. There were more important things to focus on. They’d lost another percentage of output since the morning, and there would be more turbines down tomorrow. The rain would work itself through rivets. Rust would bloom out of chipped paint.

  It’s not like there was much to forget anyway. One of the few clear memories he had was of the officials calling him in and asking him to sit down in one of their offices.

  Unfortunate. That was what they’d said. It was unfortunate that his father had chosen to renege on his contract.

  He couldn’t remember who had spoken, or how many people were in that brightly lit room. All he could remember was that the veneer on the desk had been peeling away at one corner. He’d thought about what glue he would have used if he’d had to stick it back down.

  They’d explained things very carefully. How the boy’s position in the Company was affected. How the term of service had to be fulfilled and, as the only next of kin, this duty fell to him. It was unfortunate, they’d said, but it was policy. They went over the legal criteria and the job specifications, the duties and securities guaranteed. But they did not explain the one thing the boy most wanted to know.

  ‘What does “renege” mean?’ he’d once asked the old man, casually, in the middle of a job, like it was something he’d just read in one of his technical manuals.

  The old man had looked at him for a long time out of the corner of his eye. His hand had moved to the ratchet in front of him, then stopped. ‘Give up,’ he’d said, finally.

  Which was as much as he’d ever said on the subject. His face would darken and close over, as if a switch had clicked off. But it didn’t matter. The more time the boy spent on the farm, the more he knew what it meant. It was something to do with the endlessness. It was something to do with the fact that there was no way out. The boy would stand on the edge of the rig’s platform and look across the water. He knew, and he wanted to know, and he didn’t want to know anything; like the waves churning between the towers, rearing up and splitting and knocking back into each other.

  He looked down at his meal, which had hardened into a stiff mass. He touched it with his fork, then pushed the pan slowly off the table and into the bin. It didn’t matter anyway. The food was packed with vitamins and supplements. A person could get by on less than a tin a day, and he’d already had vegetables for breakfast.

  The water system groaned. The filters needed replacing and the water was already starting to taste brackish. It groaned again and the boy’s stomach chimed in. He hit it with the flat of his hand. His meal smoked slowly in the bin.

  Cracks

  At night, when the boy couldn’t sleep, he would take his toolbag, his welding torch and a bucket of rustproof paint and go out into the corridors; making repairs, chasing draughts, trying to shore things up.

  There. He would stop and put out his hand, then move it around slowly. There was always a draught somewhere. Up in the corners of the corridor, where the two wall plates met, or around the edges of the floor, the wind would be crawling through rivets, working its way through the cracks in the metal.

  Outside, the weather would circle and press in. The wind would pitch itself low and sonorous, so that it sounded like voices speaking from every bolt and screw. Rain would echo off every surface. The boy would reach up and press his finger to the crac
k, feeling for the colder air. That was all there was – just a few sheets of corroding metal – separating him from the dark.

  He would take out a tub of filler and get to work. He liked the way the filler smelled when it was damp – the gritty, chemical tang of it. He would lean close to the wall and breathe it in. Sometimes he would dip the pads of his fingers into the tub, wait for them to dry, then peel the curved pieces off one by one.

  As he worked, he would recite from the technical manuals he kept in his room. ‘There are several systems in place to prevent failures caused by adverse conditions.’ He knew all three of the manuals by heart. ‘The ride-through system prevents low-voltage disconnect by …’ Then something would start dripping somewhere up in the vents. He would tell himself that he’d checked them all recently and made sure they were sealed. It might just be condensation. If the dripping was regular then it was just condensation. He would stop and listen, measuring the sound against his heartbeat. It sounded regular. He breathed out. But what if his heart wasn’t beating regularly? He would stop breathing and listen, and his wretched heart would begin an irregular beat.

  The wind would knock against the rig and throw rain like punches.

  ‘The ride-through system prevents …’

  The dripping would continue, each drop hitting the vent in exactly the same place, chipping away at the metal, molecule by molecule, millimetre by millimetre. Soon it would wear away a dent, then a divot, then a hole; then it would begin its work again on the layer below. Given time, a single drop of water would carve out a tunnel through every level of the rig.

  The boy would reach for a screwdriver to open the vent but, just at that moment, the dripping would stop.

  However much he tried to vary his route, to stay down in the dock or transformer housing, or keep to the upper levels, he always found himself working over to the washroom on the second floor. He would leave his tools by the door and cross the room to stand, in the dim light, staring at the mirror, which was tarnished and blotched with rust, except for two circles kept clean from years of polishing – one the right height for the old man and the other, almost a foot higher, which had stayed unused for years but now framed the boy’s face exactly.