Doggerland

by Ben Smith

  The boy removed one of the interior lights from the wall of the nacelle, extended the wiring and stood in the roof hatch, pointing it out into the dark. He stood there, night after night, but he never saw the light again.

  He read through every technical manual in the nacelle. The components and systems were unfamiliar, but if he could take out the right parts, he thought there might be a way of making a whole new engine for the boat.

  He stayed up for three full days, drinking coffee and making plans, scribbling notes, calculations and diagrams over the backs of the posters. It was only when he had almost finished that he realized he hadn’t checked the scale of the original drawings – the components he’d been reading about were only a few centimetres long.

  He made the motor anyway, connected it to the main supply and watched as it burned itself out, leaving a small black mark in the middle of the table.

  He found that if he drank three coffees his hands would shake. If he drank four, his eyelids would begin to quiver. If he drank five, everything settled back down to how it was before.

  He took apart the turbine’s control panel and put it back together again. With the sealed components it took no time. So he removed one of the components, broke it open and laid the contents out over the table.

  From the other room he heard the whine of the blade controls, which sounded like a panel being opened, and the steady clicks of the cooling generator, which could have been machine parts being laid out carefully on the floor.

  It took him all day to put the component back together again, but when he reinserted it, it had stopped working.

  The floor of the nacelle was covered with broken and dismantled parts. The boy sat among them, a cup of coffee on his right side and a pile of empty tins on his left. He took one of the empty tins and laid it down in front of him. Then he got his knife and started to cut a slit down one side.

  He cut slowly and carefully, working each piece until he had a base and a stand. He fixed the base to the stand, then he took the rest of the tin and cut three long, curved shapes from it.

  He worked hard at making the edges as smooth as possible. When they were all cut he twisted the ends together into a narrow spindle.

  He pressed the spindle into a hole in the stand, then held up the model turbine and blew gently. The blades turned. Their edges were sharp and glinted in the light.

  He got up, placed the turbine carefully on the table and made himself another coffee. On his way to the machine, he began humming the beginning of a tune. He tried to remember the rest, but it slipped away.

  It turned out that the coffee machine could be made to dispense water too, which the boy only found out after his hands shook so much that he pushed the wrong button.

  Sleep finally came – a deep and total sleep, thick as engine grease, shutting out all sound and sensation.

  The boy did not dream of waves. He dreamed that he was moving down a tunnel. No, not a tunnel, down a corridor, the main corridor of the rig. There was the rec room up ahead. He walked to the door and stopped. Everything was new. There were sofas and pictures on the walls, the pool table with both cues and all its pockets intact. He turned and looked into the conference room – there was a large screen on the wall-bracket, chairs round the table. He could hear the wind thumping on the outer walls, but then he realized that it was just his own heart thumping, very slowly and distantly. So slow in fact that, between each beat, he was able to pace out every level of the rig.

  Everything was working. There were no holes in the floor panels, no leaks, no patches of rust. When he passed the control room he saw brand-new computers whirring softly.

  Down in the dock there was a boat. It was clean and freshly painted. The boy climbed on board, started the engine and left the dock.

  He travelled through the farm, passing row after row until he could see, in the distance, the open sea. He pushed on the power lever and the engine silently accelerated. It was only then that he heard it – a dripping sound coming from below.

  He cut the engine, opened the hatch and climbed down into the dark. He stepped quietly over the battery and the prop shaft. Then he felt a drip on his shoulder. He looked up – there was a crack in the hull. It dripped again. He reached up and touched the crack and it widened, turned to a trickle, then a steady stream. He reached up with two hands, tried to plug the gap, but the water kept coming.

  He was soaked through in seconds. There was water in his eyes, in his mouth. He looked down – his toolbag was near the far wall. He let go of the crack with one hand and the metal creaked. He put his hand back and tried to reach his toolbag with his foot, but it was too far. The water was spreading all around him now. He spat it out and was about to shout for help, when he saw, through the blur of water, someone standing, looking down into the hatch.

  The shape wavered – appearing and disappearing in the ripples. His face and features were obscured. All that was visible was his overall shape: he was tall, standing very upright and still. He stood there, watching.

  The boy tried to shout, tried to say something, but all that came out was a kind of bubbling, a kind of gurgling. He held on to the leak, blinking through the spray as the water spread around his feet and began pooling in the hold.

  The figure just stood there, raised his hand and rubbed the side of his jaw.

  When the boy finally woke, he had no idea how many days he’d been out. And he didn’t care; because all he could think of was his pounding headache and all he could do was stagger to the machine, pour himself a coffee and wait for the pain to subside.

  He blew on the tin turbine but the blades wedged together. He tried to untangle them but they bent sideways, folding in on themselves like fingers grasping the air.

  He sat at the table, surrounded by turbine components, empty tins, leaflets, posters and used paper cups.

  Below him the yaw system clacked and droned; above him the wind thudded against the tower.

  For a moment it sounded like footsteps and he sat upright, listening. But as the boy listened the steps slowly faded and disappeared, like the cargo ship’s light slipping away over the horizon, like when he’d sat in that small room with the rows of orange chairs and tried to say something, tried to call out, but his father had already turned and gone, his boots echoing away down the corridor.

  Or maybe it was like the shapes he’d pulled out of the old man’s nets, which dissolved into grit and ran down his hands, which were never really anything, which were never really there at all.

  The tune came into his head again, tinny and repetitive. The boy looked down at the paper cups, then he stood up, gathered together an armful and took them to the roof hatch.

  He dropped the last paper cup off the top of the tower. It sank; then, one by one, the cups rose back on an up-draught and scattered across the sky. He watched them for a moment as they wheeled away, then he closed the hatch and climbed back down into the nacelle.

  Fish

  The boy lifted the tin and turned it in the light. It was exactly the same as all of the others, except there was a small fragment of label still clinging to the bottom edge. There was something tiny written on it that he couldn’t make out, and a faded picture of a fish. He placed it on the table in front of him and sat back in the chair.

  The cellophane creaked. The sound grated and the shiny surfaces grated but he didn’t move or get up. He’d stopped going outside. He’d stopped watching the water for things that might drift past. He’d stopped searching for lights. He’d stopped going down to check on the boat. For a long time, all he’d done was stare out at the horizon – the long, uninterrupted line of it. The openness almost made him dizzy. There was nothing to draw the eye, nothing to catch hold of, just the clouds rushing past, and the currents sweeping. Everything moved away from him out there – as soon as he tried to see what the clouds were doing they shifted and changed shape, the currents turned and backed away. The horizon wa
s all there was. He’d stood and stared at it for so long that his eyes had started to ache and a thin line had appeared wherever he looked. So he’d stopped looking.

  He studied the tiny picture of the fish. The last nine tins he’d eaten had all been exactly the same – some sort of pale jelly with chunks of a foamy substance suspended in it. He had no idea what it was, or even what it really tasted like any more.

  He’d tried choosing tins from other crates, tins that sounded different, tins that varied in weight; but each time he opened them up, there was the pale jelly, the foamy chunks, waiting.

  He picked up the tin opener and cut into the top of the tin. It wasn’t jelly, but it wasn’t anything else recognizable either. The boy dug in with the end of the tin opener and took a small mouthful. He didn’t think it tasted like fish, but then he couldn’t remember what fish tasted like. Maybe all of these tins were fish. Maybe that’s what he’d been eating all along.

  He thought about the days, the years, he’d spent setting and checking his line. He’d never caught a fish. He’d never even seen a fish. But every day he’d gone down to the rig’s support to check his line. Why had he done it? He must have thought, at some point, that he would catch something. What was it called, that feeling? He couldn’t remember.

  It was the first time the supply boat was late – that’s when he’d started.

  The supplies had got lower and lower. Days had passed with no sign of the boat on the screens.

  The old man had told him not to worry. ‘Do you know how many stages there are in the supply chain?’ he said. ‘Do you know how far one tin has to travel to get to us out here?’ He was lounging on the sofa in the rec room, throwing pool balls at an empty mug on the table in front of him. He kept missing and the balls hit the table with a dull thonk, leaving shallow indents in the laminate. ‘Think about it.’ Thonk. ‘The food’s grown in the vats, then has to travel across the interior to the processors …’ thonk ‘… then on to the canneries on the coast. It goes from cannery to testing centre …’ thonk ‘… to distribution centre, then dock.’ Thonk. ‘And at every stage it has to pass through the hands of someone like the fat man, who wants to take his or her share.’

  A ball glanced the mug, which began to wobble then tilt in wider arcs until it fell onto its side and rolled off the table. ‘That counts,’ the old man said. He stretched back into the sofa. ‘So really,’ he said, ‘we should be glad that anything gets here at all.’

  ‘Yeah,’ the boy had said. Then he’d gone and found some old bent screws, tied them to a piece of rope and started fishing.

  There were still almost a hundred tins left. There had to be one somewhere that tasted of something. The boy reached into the crate, took out another, opened it, tasted it and then put it on the table next to the first one. He took out another tin and did the same thing.

  Soon there were six tins standing on the table. He hadn’t even been able to bring himself to taste the last few. He sat back and the cellophane creaked again, louder this time. He tried to stop moving. That was six days’ worth of food he’d just wasted. Six fewer days that he’d be able to last out there.

  He leaned forward and opened another tin. Might as well make it an even week. He could open up all of those tins. He could just take all of the crates and push them off the top of the nacelle. That, at least, would settle things.

  What would happen if the supply boat didn’t turn up? That’s what the boy had wanted to know. They were down to their last crate of food and still there was no sign. He checked the screens every day. He logged the delay with the system but all he got back was an automated message thanking him for his input.

  What if the boat had sunk? What if their supplies had been delivered somewhere else by mistake? What if there was a fault in the system and they’d been forgotten? What would happen …?

  ‘What do you think will happen?’ was all the old man said.

  So the boy tried to talk about rationing. If they only ate half a tin a day, it would give them a few extra weeks. If they went down to a third, they’d last over a month.

  Eventually, the old man got so annoyed that he went into the galley, took all the tins out of the crate and divided them into two piles. ‘There,’ he said. ‘You can do what you bloody want with yours.’

  A few days later the boy found him using a tin of vegetables to patch up a crack in one of the air vents. ‘Couldn’t find the putty,’ was all the old man said.

  A dull ache started to spread up and press at the front of the boy’s skull. He closed his eyes and rubbed at his temples. He needed a coffee. If there had been a clock up in the nacelle, he could have set it by the regularity of these headaches.

  He got up and went over to the machine. He put a cup in and pressed the button. The machine gurgled, hissed and dispensed a slightly tinted liquid, the colour of water from a rusty pipe. The boy picked up the cup, sniffed it, then put it down on the floor and got another one. The machine did the same thing again. He hit the side panel and jabbed at the button. A small red light came on. He stood looking at the machine for a long time, then he left the room.

  He went up to the roof hatch and climbed out. There was a strange mugginess in the air, as if it had grown thicker. The clouds had turned lumpy and dull, like old mattresses. It wasn’t warm – he couldn’t remember what warm air was like – but the thickness of the air, the sluggishness, almost made it seem warm. Even the wind seemed heavier, as if it were slumping over the turbines, muffling the sound of the blades.

  Behind him one of the turbine’s blades ground out an enormous arc, raised itself to vertical and then slowly began to fall. The boy climbed up onto the roof of the nacelle, held on to the top of the hatch to steady himself and slid his feet towards the edge. He stood there, swaying in the wind. The blades behind him rose and then fell. He sat down, pulled his knees up to his chest and laid his head on his arms.

  He’d been checking the satellite map every day, staring at the screen for hours, willing the supply boat to appear. He sat in the control room, blinking himself awake. He knew he should just get up and do something, but whenever he thought about it the screen would flicker and he would lean in closer, certain he had seen something move across the map. Then his head would droop and he’d blink himself awake. He’d taken to eating barely a quarter of a tin a day.

  Still the old man seemed to think it was fine. He kept on wasting food – leaving half-eaten tins standing around on the side in the galley, the tops going dark and crusty until there was nothing the boy could do except throw them away. He even thought it would be funny to tie a tin to the end of the boy’s fishing line. The boy had quickly hauled it in when he felt the weight, then realized what it was and wordlessly returned it to the old man’s store.

  The old man started to gamble with their remaining food. He would bet a tin that he could pot every ball on the table with the snapped cue; or that he could unravel, and then re-coil, the fire hose quicker than the boy. It was always something stupid and if the boy took the bet he almost always won.

  When the connection to the central system went down the old man had bet three tins that the boy couldn’t fix it before the supply boat came back. The signal was still coming in to the rig, so it had to be a problem with the wiring. The boy wasn’t going to do it, but without access to the system he couldn’t check the satellite map – he’d have no way of knowing when the boat would arrive.

  In the end it took seven days. A week of taking up floor panels, testing connections and following cables through the bowels of the rig. It turned out that one of the wires had snapped. It was a clean break and easy enough to fix with a connecting box. But it was a strange way for the connection to go down. The boy had never known it to happen before or since. Still, he took the tins from the old man, who didn’t seem to care.

  It was almost strange, feeling the skin of his face against the skin of his arms. He couldn’t picture himself, coul
dn’t disassociate himself from the heaviness of the air. The tiredness was so deep that the boy could hear his brain creaking like the cellophane on the chair. His hands and arms felt very far away, even though he could smell the tins on his fingers, and feel the dent in his palm from where he must have been clenching the handle of the tin opener.

  He tried to open his eyes, but they were too heavy to open properly, so he left them half-closed. The blades rose and fell behind him. They sounded very far away.

  When the supply boat finally turned up, the boy had won so many bets off the old man that he still had a cupboard-full of tins and had been back to eating one a day.

  He’d forgotten that. He’d always remembered his relief when the boat had arrived, the way he’d tracked it as it blinked across the map, but he’d forgotten about how easily he’d won those bets. He’d forgotten about the wire too – how clean the break had been, as if it had been cut carefully with a knife.

  And there was something else he’d forgotten: how he’d gone into the galley after the pilot had left and seen the old man cramming down a tin of protein as if he hadn’t eaten in days, leaning over the counter, his eyes closed, waiting for the stomach cramps to subside.

  The boy sat up. He’d been thinking about the wire, the cleanness of the cut. It was perfectly straight, like the lines of the towers, like the line in the water. He rubbed over his eyes. There was a line in the water. A few rows to the north. As he watched, it juddered, buckled, seemed to shift closer. He closed his eyes and opened them again.