by Ben Smith
The boy waited until he realized that the old man wasn’t going to get back up, then he left the room and closed the door. As he walked down the corridor he heard the old man searching through his nets, muttering to himself, his voice low and grating. Then there was the familiar catch, the rattling breath and the old man began to cough.
Cracks
The boy woke slumped against the corridor wall, his neck bent at a painful angle. He had stayed outside the old man’s room all night, waiting for the coughing to stop, which it must have done, because the room was now quiet. He straightened his neck slowly and pulled himself to his feet. He went to the old man’s door and listened for a moment, then carried on down the corridor.
The first thing he did was reboot the computer and get the air con working again. The vents rattled back to life and slowly began to shift the rig’s stale air. Then he made his way down to the dock and began to clear a space so he could get to work on his boat.
He scooped out the rubbish that was floating in the water and gathered together the tangled debris left over from the storm. He packed it all in the maintenance boat, then piloted out past the gates and dumped it in the sea. Then he piloted back, took his toolbag out of the hold and set to work repairing the dock.
Soon he’d patched the gangway and got both strip lights working. He took his time, enjoying the feeling of having his old tools in his hands. Then he fixed extra LED spots around the charging bay and hoisted his boat up to inspect the hull.
It was covered in scrapes and dents and there was a crack running down the bow, where he’d come in at a turbine too fast. He ran his hand over it. It had spread down until it was almost at the waterline. A few more weeks and that would have made the journey interesting.
He looked up at the threadbare tarp. Every edge was fraying. The frame creaked, looked like it would buckle at any minute. He picked up his welding torch, feeling its reassuring weight. The flame cast a small circle of light.
Once he’d fixed the crack, he scoured down the hull and gave it a new coat of rustproof paint. While that dried, he went up on deck to see what could be done about the framework for the tarp.
He removed all of the old, tattered ropes and dismantled the loose fixings. Some of the poles were bent out of shape, and those that could not be straightened were discarded. He had been thinking about a new structure for the frame, based around a central pole with a crossbeam. That would give him more manoeuvrability and allow the whole thing to be taken down in stormy weather. He rigged up a series of pulleys that fed the ropes into the cabin, so the tarp could be adjusted without leaving the wheel. He’d been able to manage the boat on his own, just, but with a crew of two it would be easy.
He was still working when the light outside grew faint and darkness began to spread in through the open gates. He’d been down at the boat all day; had not even stopped to eat. The wind pushed in and swirled round the dock. It would be steady all night and into the following day. He could feel the way the boat would respond to it, the way it would move over the surface of the sea.
The supplies in the galley would last him and the old man months on the boat. If he could find a way to rig up a battery, they might even be able to take the microwave with them. He emptied a tin of protein mince into a bowl and mashed it down with a fork. He wished he could get a cup of coffee. He reached into the cupboard and took down a jar of powdered tea, sniffed it and put it away again. He wondered if the old man had ever drunk real coffee. He should ask him.
The old man’s mug was in the same place it had been the night before and there was no sign that any other plates or bowls had been used. The boy put his food in the microwave, set the timer and went back out into the corridor.
The rec room and control room were empty. When he got down to the sleeping quarters, he found the door to the old man’s room still shut. He went up to it and knocked lightly. There was no answer. He pressed his ear to the metal, but could hear nothing. He knocked louder, waited, then opened the door.
The deckchair had tipped over and the old man was lying on the floor. The boy was there in a second. He knelt down, hesitated for a moment, then reached out and placed his hand on the old man’s shoulder. The old man didn’t stir. The boy stayed still, watching for any sign of movement. A small patch of condensation grew and receded on the floor next to the old man’s mouth.
He got up, pushed the boxes and maps off the bed, then stooped down and picked the old man up. It was a shock how easy it was. The old man’s hips and shoulder blades were sharp through his overalls. The boy laid him carefully on the bed, then ran from the room and came back with a mug of water.
He knelt down by the side of the bed, lifted the old man’s head and held the mug to his mouth. The old man’s lips were cracked. The skin on the back of his neck was hot and almost papery. The tendons at the base of his skull tensed beneath his matted hair as he tried to swallow. His throat gurgled and most of the water trickled down his beard.
The boy stayed kneeling by the bed. The old man’s breath was shallow and rasping, his jaw slack. The air con whined and pushed dust around the room. One of the maps on the floor kept catching in the breeze – its corner rising and falling. The boy watched the old man’s chest barely rise and fall. He just needed to wait. The old man would get better. He always got better. Any moment now, he’d open his eyes and ask what the hell the boy was doing in his room.
The boy knelt in silence. He should say something. That was what you did at times like this – you said something. The corner of the map rose and fell.
‘It’s a simple system,’ the boy said. ‘It uses the wind. You pull on these ropes and they open the tarp. Then the wind hits it and pushes the boat along. You adjust the tension by …’
‘Sails,’ said the old man, his voice barely audible.
The boy leaned in closer. ‘What?’
‘The tarp. It’s called a sail.’ He swallowed gratingly. ‘The ropes are rigging.’
The boy nodded. ‘Sails … rigging.’
‘Jem.’
The boy looked down at the old man.
‘You’re back.’
The boy sat in the rec room with all of their medical supplies spread out across the low table in front of him. There were two rolls of yellowing bandages, two bottles of painkillers, a few blisters of sickness pills and a single, buckled tube of anaesthetic cream, which had crystallized and turned a strange pink colour. The wind made a high-pitched buzzing as it forced its way in through the crack in the window. Outside, beyond the scratched glass, a turbine shuddered to a halt. The boy stared out at the turbine, and then down at the supplies.
He’d stayed with the old man all night. There were times when it seemed that the old man was asleep, then the boy would see his eyes open, staring at the ceiling. At some point the coughing started and there was nothing the boy could do to stop it. He just had to sit and watch, and place his hand on the old man’s shoulder and feel his frame shudder with each breath.
As he’d waited and watched the old man, he’d started to see old scars and injuries that he hadn’t really noticed before. He didn’t know when or how the old man had got most of them, but some he remembered: the burn on his forearm, which he’d got when he’d been welding with a mug of homebrew too close to his elbow. A bruise on his neck that had never fully healed, from a falling panel. A split thumbnail, the swollen bone in his ankle that clicked and locked and meant that sometimes he had to walk downstairs backwards. There was that weird dent in his forehead and a scar that he’d got when the boy had dropped that grinding disc, layered over it, like the maps of the seabed, or the maps of the coastline which showed how the land had changed and eroded.
In the morning, the boy had managed to get him to eat a little, drink a few sips of water, but every time the old man swallowed, it was accompanied by a grimace. His eyes roved across the ceiling. His skin, instead of burning, was now cold as the m
etal doorways. The boy had tried to give him one of the painkillers, but the damp must have got into the bottle, because when he poured out the tablets they turned into a grainy paste on his palm.
The boy leaned back and closed his eyes. He slept for maybe thirty seconds, then jerked awake, his heart hammering. The technical manuals said that when a piece of machinery was failing the mechanic needed to pay attention, to stay focused. They said that the mechanic should consider every viable solution before declaring the apparatus beyond repair. There was an image of a broken engine, its components laid out cold and still on the page.
He reached over and picked up the tube of cream. The thin metal had split where it had been bent and twisted, and the foiled lettering came off in dark specks that stuck to his fingers. He dropped it back down on the table.
The old man barely moved, apart from his hands, which clutched at the sheets, and his jaw, which twitched, tensed and went slack, as though an electrical current was passing through it.
The boy stood in the middle of the old man’s room. He watched the old man’s hands and jaw, he breathed slowly, he clenched and unclenched his own hands, looked around at the bottles and nets and fragments of plastic covering the floor. He bent down, picked up one of the nets and folded it carefully over his arm.
He picked up all of the nets, took them into the corridor, shook them out, folded them and stacked them in one of the empty rooms. Then he cleaned the floor, working square by square, mopping and drying each one in turn, scrubbing away at the decades of mud and salt and who knew what else.
He took the bottles of plastic grains and lined them up on top of the wardrobe and chest of drawers. He tried to arrange them by colour for the old man, but many of them were so similar that it was hard to tell them apart. He held one up and turned it in the light. Were the bits of plastic blue or green? Sometimes they looked blue, sometimes green. Or maybe they were a mixture, a slow graduation from one colour to the other. He stared at the bottles harder.
‘What are you doing?’ the old man said, his voice faint and rasping.
The boy blinked, then looked round at the old man. ‘We need to get you medicine,’ he said.
The old man turned his head slightly to face the wall. ‘I’m fine.’
‘We can’t leave until you’re better.’
‘Just need to get up.’ The old man pushed himself onto his elbows and tried to lever himself up. His arms shook, he screwed his eyes shut and bit down, then finally let himself slump back onto the bed. He lay, breathing heavily. ‘Why are you still here?’ he said, almost too quietly to hear.
‘What?’
The old man stared up at the ceiling. Then closed his eyes.
The boy reached over to one of the bottles on the chest of drawers and shifted it a few millimetres so it was in line with the others. ‘You need medicine.’
The old man kept his eyes shut.
‘There’s only one way to get it.’ The boy looked down at his hands. All he could hear was the way the old man was breathing. ‘Last time I saw him, he told me what he wanted.’
The old man’s eyes opened. They were bloodshot round the edges, and the skin underneath looked raw.
The boy stayed looking at his hands. ‘The stuff you had in this room. I need it. We need it.’
The old man didn’t move. He coughed, once, but managed to stop it before it turned into anything more. The room was too warm, too quiet. ‘It’s gone,’ he said.
The boy looked up. He could suddenly smell the bleach he’d been using. It went up his nose, into his eyes and throat. He took a step closer to the bed. ‘We need it. It’s the only thing he wants.’
The old man said nothing. He closed his eyes and turned over to face the wall.
The boy sat in the cabin of his boat, where it was moored in the still waters of the dock. He sat cross-legged on the floor and traced the scratches embedded in there: countless pacings of boots – his own, his father’s – countless nicks from where he’d skidded across in rough weather, and his chair had fallen over, and he’d ended up sleeping crouched down on his front, his head tucked into his arms, his nails digging in to try to stop the constant pitching.
He pulled on one of the ropes and the tarp unfurled. The fabric didn’t even stir in the dock’s still air. The wind thumped against the outer walls. He folded the tarp up again carefully.
The old man was getting worse. He’d tried telling himself that this wasn’t true – that every time the old man drank some water, or ate a little food, he was getting better – but he couldn’t tell himself that any more.
He’d counted the tins in the galley and tried to work out how long it had been since the pilot’s last visit, and when he might be expected to return. But it was impossible to say. The old man had hardly been eating and neither had the boy. The days blurred into one another in the old man’s hot, cramped room.
When the old man was asleep, the boy would take the maintenance boat out and scour the turbines for any sign of the old man’s stuff. But he didn’t dare stay away for longer than a few hours and soon he had searched every turbine within that radius.
He stared at the maps in the old man’s room for hours, searching for any clue, but found nothing. So he resorted to talking – trying to convince the old man to say where he had hidden it, trying to keep the frustration and panic out of his voice and only sometimes succeeding. But as the old man grew weaker, his speech became strained, his thoughts more and more disjointed. Sometimes he wouldn’t seem to notice that the boy was there; other times he would grip the boy’s hand and stare straight at him.
‘Where is it?’ the boy would ask. ‘Where is it?’
But all the old man would say was, ‘It’s gone.’
c.8,500 Before Present
There is nothing but sand now, and the wind. And each day the wind scours more grains into the sea.
The island sits low in the water, barely troubling the horizon. With each storm, its outline shifts.
Sometimes the drifting sand reveals a trace of something – a midden of shells, a sharpened stone, a pile of crushed thatch – but as soon as it’s unearthed, it’s covered over again.
The sand is a maze of seabirds’ burrows. The tunnels are long and dark and hollow. On still nights there is no sound except for the waves, and the murmuring of the birds deep in the dunes. Before dawn they leave, rushing silently out to sea.
Across the sea, on distant coastlines, people stand on beaches, looking out towards the island. Some days they can see it above the waves, most days they can’t. On clear nights they see the birds rise up, like grains of sand, or a spirit leaving a body.
Sometimes, on their own tide-line, ghosts appear – masses of blackened roots, clods of peat, petrified stumps preserved in bell jars of salt. They leave offerings. They float out the bodies of the dead.
They tell stories of ancestors who walked in forests on the seabed, of the island that was once a coastline, a coastline that was once a range of hills at the heart of a continent, a continent that was once frozen and covered over by ice.
Nothing
The supply boat turned a slow arc and backed in. The fenders thumped against the dock, where the boy stood, alone, next to four crates of turbine parts, cleaned and neatly packed. There was no movement for a long time. Then, finally, the cabin door opened and the pilot appeared at the stern. He paused, looked the boy up and down, then scanned across to the charging bay, where the maintenance boat was hoisted up.
When the boy had seen the supply boat appear on the map, he had towed his boat out and hidden it in the fields. Then he’d packed away his tools in the storeroom, cleaned the charging bay of any traces of paint or solder. The dock was as it had always looked.
The pilot blinked, nodded, threw the boy the ropes and watched carefully as the knots were tied. The boy passed up the charging cable. The pilot blinked again, turned and plugged the cable into
the socket. ‘If you’d care to examine the goods,’ he said, lowering the gangplank down to where the boy was standing.
The pilot leaned against a crate and folded his hands over his stomach. The light coming down into the hold fell in strips across his body, highlighting only his belt, his shoulders, the top half of his face. ‘Medicine?’ He furrowed his brow and his eyes disappeared. ‘Medicine’s very expensive.’
‘I’ve got any parts you need.’ The boy gestured to the crates he’d carried on board. ‘Generators, gearboxes.’ He forced himself to sit down, even though he wanted to pace, to shove the crates at the pilot and make him look inside. He leaned back and put his hands in his pockets.
The pilot sighed. ‘It’s not that I don’t want to help. It’s just that the situation is … difficult.’
‘So difficult people don’t need working generators?’
The pilot’s face shifted into what might have been a smile. ‘Oh no. I’m sure they need them. But you see, therein lies my predicament.’
The boy glanced across at the crates. It had taken him weeks to find enough working parts. Days to clean and test them. He’d shut down every decent turbine in a ten-mile radius of the rig. At night he could hardly hear any blades thrumming; he’d jolted awake once and not known where he was.
‘What predicament?’ he said eventually.
‘I’m glad you asked,’ the pilot said. ‘It’s good to know that there are some people who still have consideration for the feelings of others.’ He adjusted his position on the crate. ‘You know, it’s a long trip out here. Thirsty work. I don’t suppose …’
‘We’re all out.’