Doggerland

by Ben Smith

  He would stand and stare into the mirror and think about the other things he’d found over the years. An oil-stained boot mark – too big for the old man, but almost the same size as the boy’s – under the desk in the control room. A dusty set of overalls balled up on the floor of a wardrobe in one of the dormitories. A smudge on one of the pages in the cookbook that was there before the boy had first opened it. And, at the back of one of the cupboards in the galley, a bottle of strange green sauce that the old man hated, but had been almost empty when the boy arrived on the farm.

  Then there were the things he’d noticed. The way that the old man would automatically pass him sweetener for his tea, even though he’d never used it in his life. How the old man would frown at the way he laid out his tools before a job. The way the old man would stare, when they were eating, when they were out on the boat, whenever he thought the boy wasn’t watching.

  The boy would lean forward towards his reflection and open his eyes wide. Had his skin always been that pale – almost grey? The same grey as the walls and the floor. He would reach up and touch his cheek, his forehead, to make sure they had not in fact turned to metal. White moons would appear where he pressed his fingertips, and take a long time to fade.

  There was just one meeting he could recall. A small room, rows of orange plastic chairs bolted to the floor, lining two walls. The boy had been sitting on one of them, his feet barely touching the floor. His father had been standing. The paint on the walls was flaking and there was a hairline crack running close to the boy’s shoulder. He had traced his finger along it, over and over. He could still remember the course of the crack, the texture of the paint, the way the edges of it had bitten into his skin. He could remember his father’s bulk, the creak of the new boots he’d been given ready for starting his contract, the sound one of the chairs had made when he eventually sat on it, but his face was as blurred and tarnished as the mirror.

  His father’s breath had been loud in the small room. It had smelled smoky, or maybe more like dust. He had knotted and unknotted a strap on the bag he was holding – he must have been leaving to go out to the farm that day. ‘I’ll get out,’ he’d said. ‘I’ll come back for you, okay?’ The boy remembered that; had always remembered it. And, for a time, he’d believed it too.

  His hands would clench either side of the sink. Now here he was, instead.

  For a moment, the wind would seem to drop and the rig would be quiet, almost silent. The lights would be low and seem to stretch for miles in the dark corridors. The corridors seemed to narrow and twist in on themselves, knotting the boy into the middle, the silence expanding and pressing in.

  Then the wind would suddenly bawl, the air con would creak and whirr, the transformer would thrum from the floor below, and, deeper still, the waves would thud against the walls of the dock.

  He was here to do the job. He just needed to focus on doing the job.

  The boot-print didn’t match his own exactly – it was wider at the toe, and the heel was not worn-down like his was. The overalls were dirty and frayed where the boy would have repaired them. And he’d once tried the green sauce, dipping the tip of his finger in and licking it, and it had burned his tongue.

  The boy would step back, breathe on the mirror and wipe away the clean circle with his sleeve.

  Sometimes, on his way back to his room, another sound would work its way up through the vents from somewhere inside the rig. It would begin with something rasping, which would turn to an uneven rattle, then a stutter, like an engine struggling to start. The boy would follow it along the corridors, up the stairs and into the sleeping quarters. Sometimes it would stop for a moment and he would pause and wait. But it always started up again.

  He’d first heard it a few weeks after he’d arrived on the farm. He’d followed the sound into the galley, where he’d found the old man curled on the floor, coughing and spasming. The boy had almost shouted for help, then remembered where they were. So he’d done the only thing he could – gone back out into the corridor and waited until he’d heard the old man get up and begin to move around again.

  He would take his watch out of his pocket and count the numbers. Sometimes it only lasted a couple of minutes; other times it went on for longer.

  He would wait a minute. Then two.

  After that first time, he’d expected the old man to say something, to tell him what was wrong. But the old man had never mentioned it, and the boy had never mentioned it, and so that was how it stood.

  All the boy knew was that it was better when the weather was warmer, worse when the old man spent hours out in the wind and rain checking his nets. A mug of homebrew seemed to hold it off, but if the old man got drunk and fell asleep at the galley table, he would always wake up coughing.

  After a while the boy had begun to see it as just another thing that happened: like the glitches in the computer system, the leaks in the vents, the cracks that spread endlessly through the rig, which the boy fixed only to find them creeping back again, almost too delicate to see.

  Five minutes. Six.

  Sometimes the sound turned harsher, more drawn-out. Sometimes the boy would take a slow breath in and picture the old man curled up on the floor, each cough ringing out like a radar blip with nothing to return the signal.

  Seven.

  He would breathe out, put his watch in his pocket and walk quickly towards the old man’s room. But, just at that moment, the coughing would stop.

  The boy would stand still and bend his head, listening. There would be no sound. Nothing would move. Then, from far off in the corridors, the dripping would start up again.

  Junk

  Field by field, row by row, the farm disappeared. First its outlines blurred and then it began to fade until blade was indistinguishable from tower, and tower from water, and water from the mist that settled over the sea. One by one, the cameras whited out, until the rig was completely cut off, like a component removed from a machine, then wrapped and packaged for transport.

  The boy was in the control room early, working out the day’s schedule. There was a lot of work to do. The farm had dropped another per cent in the last week, and the latest report was showing twenty turbines in zone three that had all gone down with exactly the same electrical fault. They needed to get over there and see what was going on, before the whole zone outed.

  He was about to get up when he heard the clang of the dock gates. The screens shifted from white to white to white. He clicked on the camera in the dock and saw that the gates were open. Beyond them, the mist stood like a wall, then buckled and slumped inside like a sheet of insulation being unrolled.

  The boy switched on the satellite map and scrolled across until he found the symbol for the maintenance boat. It was making its way out towards zone two. The boy sat back and shook his head. The old man had got the jump on him – piloting through the mist to check on his nets. There must have been some shift in the tides overnight, or a current had pushed in that the old man had somehow been aware of. He knew things like that – he could sense fluxes and storms as if he had a magnet inside him.

  Once they’d been eating in the galley, when suddenly the old man had sat up and said, ‘Something’s going on out there.’

  They’d gone to the rec room and looked out of the window and it had seemed, for a moment, as if all the turbines were floating in mid-air, a strip of sky underneath each one, the jackets surrounded by clouds instead of water.

  The boy imagined the old man’s blood prickling up like iron filings.

  He would be out in the fields all day.

  The boy got up and went out into the corridor. Then he came back and sat down again. The screen was still on the satellite map. It showed a pattern of bright green shapes against a background of vivid blue. However many times he looked at the map, he always had to take a moment to remind himself that those shapes were the churning, windswept fields and that st
atic sheet of blue was the sea, rushing out there all around him.

  This was the only map on the system and it showed nothing beyond the borders of the farm. The only signs of activity were a series of numbers next to each of the shapes, showing how many working turbines there were in the fields and the percentage of optimal output that each zone was running at. The specifics of corrosion, malfunction or weathering were invisible. The wind could be knocking on the shell of the rig, the waves sucking and tearing at the supports; but on the map everything would be static and silent. A wind farm with no wind, a sea with no currents or tides. The only record of a three-week storm would be a slight change in the numbers – all the damage of the wind and the waves, all those long, strung-out days and nights, reduced to a few altered digits.

  The boy stared at the screen. The numbers flickered next to the shapes – two hundred and ninety-three turbines, fifty-five per cent; three hundred and seventeen turbines, forty-eight per cent; one hundred and two turbines, sixty-four per cent. The boy watched the numbers and tried not to think about how each percentage point would translate to hours working up in the nacelles, the days travelling across the farm, the spray flying across the deck, the cold splitting the skin on his knuckles as he tried to make repairs. How a whole day of work might add a percentage to the output, only for another thing to break and bring it back down again.

  The boat’s symbol was moving slowly into zone two. The boy switched the screen back to the cameras but could see nothing through the dripping mist. Once, when the old man had taken the boat out early and left him stuck on the rig all day, he’d found the camera on the nearest turbine to where the old man had moored, and brought it up on the screen. He’d waited for the old man to haul up his net, for him to crouch down and sift through whatever it was he’d got in there. But the old man had just stood on the edge of the boat and stared down into the water. The water had been dark and creased. He’d stood there and stared down and the boy had waited a long time, but the old man never moved.

  The computer system whirred and groaned. Another turbine went down in zone three.

  Later, the old man would bring the boat back with the battery drained and the boy would have to waste half the next morning charging it before he could get out to do any work.

  The boat’s symbol stopped. The old man must have moored up. He was probably standing out on deck right now, draped in mist, staring down, oblivious and unconcerned by all surface goings-on.

  The boy sat in the galley and unpicked the last tangle of plastic from his line. He’d gone out to check on it, to pass some time, and found a huge shoal of bags that had drifted in overnight – a dark mass, silent and heavy, hanging in the fields as if they were waiting for something. Some of the bags had caught on his line and twisted it round the rig’s support. He’d lost the bottom three hooks just pulling it up from the water. He held one of the frayed sidelines up to the light. Was that a bootlace? He sat and looked at it for a minute, then unpicked it from the main line. Whatever it was, it had become brittle and weak. He placed it on the desk alongside the swathes of wet plastic that covered the surface.

  Most of the bags were so bleached that their original colours could only be seen in their creases and folds. Some were so heavily degraded that, when he touched them, they turned to brittle flakes that stuck to his hands. Others were tough and flexible, stained with colours that the boy didn’t often see – red that was darker and richer than the warning signs on the rig; purple a bit like a bruise but lighter, more powdery; orange that was almost, but not quite, the same as the last of the flares he and the old man had let off, one by one, against the grey murk that hung over the farm for months without lifting. He picked up a green bag that still looked new, the logo and characters scrawled brightly down one side. He didn’t recognize any of them. It had to be older than him. In his lifetime the only places to buy anything were the Company stores. The ownership changed hands, the management came and went, but still every bag carried their logo. It was easy to forget that there were things that existed before the Company took over; that even the farm had been built long before then.

  He stared at the characters for so long that they blurred together. Sometimes he tried to imagine what the bags had once carried, what people had bought. Sometimes there were twists of polystyrene caught inside, or chunks of Styrofoam that must have calved off a bigger piece. He would try and fit the pieces together and work out what they used to be, how long they would have been drifting. But the polystyrene chipped off under his nails and the Styrofoam bent and tore, until there was no way of knowing what any of it had been.

  Somewhere in the walls, the pipes let out a long, low groan. He unsnagged the last bag and pushed the sodden pile to the edge of the table. They dripped slowly onto the floor. He needed to do something. He stood up quickly. Hooks. He needed to make more hooks. He went back to the control room and unzipped his toolbag. The pliers had gone. He needed the pliers to make the hooks. He searched through the bag twice, then zipped it back up. The old man must have taken them again. The boy stayed still for a moment, then he turned and walked out of the room and down the corridor.

  The door to the old man’s room creaked softly. The boy opened it an inch at a time, until he heard it touch lightly against something. He squatted down, reached round and felt for the obstacle – a stack of four empty tins. He took hold of the bottom one and dragged the stack carefully across the tacky linoleum. As he pulled it round the edge of the door, he could see that the tins had been numbered and arranged with all but the third number facing into the room. All the doors to the sleeping quarters had locks, but the keycards were long lost, so the old man had developed his own elaborate precautions. The tins were an old system, but the numbers were new. The boy moved the stack out of the way, opened the door and stepped inside.

  The room was laid out exactly the same as the boy’s; the only difference was that here the furniture was barely visible. The floor was a foot deep with twisted heaps of rusted metal, lumps of clay dried and cracking in pools of their own dust, piles of nets so stiff that, if you lifted them, they held their shape. A narrow path wound from the door to the bed, which was stacked with plastic crates. On top of the crates and spilling onto the floor were piles of paper – lists and tables, pages of scrawled notes and plans of the farm, all covered with indecipherable annotations, areas ticked and dotted and shaded with different-coloured pens. Some of the maps were old, from before the farm was built, and showed the seabed as if it were land – contour lines describing valleys and hills, a range of muted colours depicting the different rocks and minerals below the surface. The same red, yellow and black sediments streaked down the sides of the sink and made curved tide-lines on the floor beneath it. The sink was piled with half-cleaned objects, just beginning to appear from their shapeless crusts of mud and silt. It was just possible to make out slabs of water-blackened wood, bright stones and broken shells. Objects like these covered every surface of the room. They were stuffed into the chest of drawers and heaped in the open wardrobe and on top of the bedside unit.

  The boy stepped slowly through the room, positioning his feet carefully on the narrow trail of clear floor. The edge of his boot caught on a pile of damp netting, dragging it greasily. He untangled himself and pushed the net back where it had been.

  At first, it didn’t seem like anyone even lived there. It was only after a few moments that small signs of human life became noticeable. There were two worn T-shirts and a pair of overalls slung over the end of the bed. Beneath these, the bed itself was unused – the sheets tucked in under the mattress and a single pillow, uncreased, at the head. Next to the bed there was a frayed woollen blanket strewn over a striped deckchair. All over the floor there were empty bottles of cleaning fluid and coolant that the old man used to store his homebrew, along with half-eaten tins of food discarded among the debris, forks and spoons standing stiff in them.

  There was only one space in the room t
hat was always clear and clean – a small semicircle on top of the chest of drawers, where miniature picks, chisels and pliers were laid like expensive cutlery. Today, there was something else there. The boy went over and looked at it. He knew it was a bone; but the bones he found in the old man’s room were not like any he’d seen before he came to the farm. They were heavy, washed of colour and grainy to the touch – more like concrete than anything else. This one was a thick, squared ring, with ridges sticking out from its corners, almost like a cog. Which is what it was, really – a small part that had once made up a whole, a component taken from some lost machine.

  The boy looked carefully at exactly where it had been left, then he picked it up. He wasn’t sure if he’d seen it before or not. The disorder of the room made it hard to tell. It seemed as though the contents changed every few months, but that could have just been an effect of the accumulating variety of dirt.

  He wondered if the old man knew where the bone had come from. Or if he even cared. Most of the things in his room seemed to serve no purpose at all. His drawers were full of pins, discs and flakes of stone – so thin they were almost translucent – scratched with patterns of lines and dots. There were sharpened stone points, rocks worked into odd shapes, pebbles sanded down to accentuate their lumps and crevices. It had taken the boy a while to work out what they were meant to be – headless torsos with jutting breasts and smooth fat thighs that stirred strange thoughts he didn’t know he possessed. He didn’t look at them any more. If there ever had been a use for that stuff, there wasn’t now.