Doggerland

by Ben Smith

  ‘You haven’t spent a lot of time offshore, have you,’ the boy told him.

  The two boats made their way slowly into the dock. ‘When will you be back with the medicine?’ the boy said.

  ‘As soon as I can.’ The pilot brought the supply boat to a stop next to the gantry. ‘Of course, I’ll have to see how much I can get for the boat, but it should do for the first few months’ supply.’ He cut the engine and turned to face the boy. ‘Then we can discuss arrangements for a repeat prescription.’

  The boy folded his arms and looked straight into the pilot’s eyes. ‘And I just have to take your word?’

  The pilot pursed his lips. ‘We’ve made a deal. Have I ever gone back on a deal? Have I ever done anything to suggest that …?’

  ‘Okay,’ the boy said. ‘Okay.’

  ‘In the meantime.’ The pilot opened a drawer in the cabinet next to the wheel and brought out a small bottle. ‘One a day,’ he said. ‘Just hope it’s not anything resistant.’

  The boy came forward and took the bottle. The glass was pale brown and delicate, with a silver cap on the top. The tablets were stacked up inside. They looked like nothing really, just tiny white spheres; small and slightly shiny, no bigger than his fingernail.

  ‘You know,’ the pilot said, leaning down and tidying the cabinet, straightening each box and roll of paper. ‘If there’s ever anything else you want.’

  The boy held the bottle carefully, then he put it in his pocket, turned and left the cabin.

  ‘I’m just saying, now that we’re on trading terms …’

  The boy crossed the deck and was about to lower the gangplank, but then stopped and went back to the cabin.

  ‘Fishing line,’ he said from the doorway.

  The pilot blinked. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I want some proper fishing line.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Fishing.’

  The pilot blinked again, nodded, reached into his cabinet drawer and took out a piece of paper and a pencil. ‘Fishing line,’ he said, writing in small, neat letters. ‘For fishing.’

  Dust

  The boy lay on his bed, listening to the sound of the old man’s breathing as it moved through the vents between their rooms. The rig was quiet. There had been strong winds overnight, blowing from the south-east. The boy could tell because they always worked their way up into the waste chute, causing it to emit a low drone. He’d stayed awake listening to it until the early hours, when the wind had dropped.

  The air con stuttered and stopped. The filters were probably clogged. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d checked them. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d checked the maintenance report either. The turbine components he’d stripped for the pilot were still packed in their boxes in the dock. He hadn’t sorted the crates from the resupply. The days just seemed to slip quietly past, like currents under the water.

  He’d watched the supply boat on the satellite map as it made its way out of the farm, towing his boat behind it. When it passed beyond the map’s borders, he’d switched to the weather report. There was a moment when he’d willed there to be a storm, but then he remembered that the pilot had to be alive in order to bring back more medicine.

  The old man’s breath had turned slow and regular since he’d taken the pills. He slept better, ate and drank a little more. He still coughed, but the fits were fewer, less violent. Sometimes, the boy would hear him get out of bed and walk slowly down the corridor to the toilet. Sometimes, he would hear the scrape of bottles and the rattle of small pieces of plastic. When the boy went to sit with the old man, he tried to explain what had happened to the boat, but he wasn’t sure if the old man heard or not, or if he understood; so the boy just cleaned, made the bed, kept the room tidy. He’d put the old man’s things back in there – the pins and bones and stones – lining them up with the bottles of plastics, one next to the other.

  The boy reached over and picked up one of the technical manuals. He opened it and began to read. He read to the end of the page then stopped, frowned, and read the page again. It was wrong. The instructions it gave for replacing a yaw bearing were in the wrong order. He rested the book on his lap. It said that the radial bearings needed to be inserted after the main bearings, but that wasn’t right. The radials were always first, then the main ones after that. He looked down at the page again. Maybe there were more mistakes; maybe everything he’d been reading was wrong, he just hadn’t noticed. He folded the cover shut slowly.

  It was so quiet he could hear the clock ticking on his wall. He looked over at it. It was ticking, but the second hand wasn’t moving at all. He looked back at the ceiling. The clock ticked but didn’t move. He got up, pulled the clock from its fixing and threw it into the corner under the sink. The ticking stopped. There was silence. The boy closed his eyes. There was actually silence. No wind, no air con, no sound at all.

  He sat up. There was no sound coming from the old man’s room. He jumped up from the bed, ran down the corridor to the old man’s door and pushed it open. His heart beat loudly in his ears. The old man wasn’t there. The boy looked up and down the corridor, then went to the washroom, the toilets, the room where he’d put all the old man’s nets and maps. He checked the control room and dock, the transformer level and the galley, his footsteps ringing on the stairs. All of them were empty. He stood in the upper corridor, breathing heavily. Then he noticed a strange light coming from the rec room.

  He walked slowly forward and looked in. The room was empty, but steeped in a dusky orange light. It was coming from the window, which was coated in something and impossible to see through. He crossed the room and cupped his eyes against the glass, but couldn’t make out anything beyond it.

  There was no sound of the wind or the sea. There was nothing. He remembered, for a terrifying moment, what it had been like to be completely alone on the outer turbine. The walls seemed to press in. There wasn’t enough air. What had the pilot said? The old man had waited a year before he finally admitted that the boy’s father had gone.

  There were footsteps coming from above his head. He left the rec room and went to the hatch that led out to the roof. He stopped and listened, heard nothing. He turned the handle, pushed and almost fell through the opening – there was no resistance from the wind.

  He stumbled out and squinted against the strange red glow that seemed to emanate from every surface. Everything was totally still – the blades, the sea, the sky. The boy blinked and waited for his eyes to adjust, because everything still seemed red. He blinked again, pressed his knuckles into his eyes, but the red was still there, covering the rig, the towers, the blades, even the edges of the clouds and the surface of the sea. It was as if another place had laid itself down when he wasn’t looking, silently, pressing into every edge and corner.

  There were footprints leading from the hatch out to the cracked helipad. The boy crouched down and ran his finger along the metal. It was dust. He stood up and turned around. The whole farm, as far as he could see, was coated in a layer of dust.

  He followed the line of footprints, making his own, slowly and deliberately next to them, watching how the dust compressed to form a perfect outline of his boot-tread. As he walked, he ran his palm along the rail and gathered up almost a handful, which he held and poured from one hand to the other, watching how it clung to his skin, gathering in the cracks and creases, highlighting the wave-like patterns of his fingerprints. It was gritty and light, almost soft. He rubbed his hands together and the dust rose up into the air.

  The old man was standing in the centre of the helipad. He had shaved, leaving a few lines of grey stubble in the creases of his neck. His hair too was flecked with grey, but his eyes were less dull and his jaw had lost its tension. The boy went over and stood next to him.

  ‘Comes from the desert,’ the old man said eventually.

  ‘The desert?’

 
‘You know what that is?’

  The boy looked down at the dust. ‘Somewhere dusty.’

  The old man glanced over at the boy. ‘Dusty and hot.’

  The boy nodded, crouched down and laid his palm on the roof of the rig. It seemed warm, but that could have been because they were standing over the heating system.

  ‘Nights get cold, though,’ the old man continued. ‘So cold you could freeze in your bed.’

  ‘Like here then?’

  ‘But not wet.’ The old man closed his eyes. ‘In the desert there’s no water at all.’

  The boy looked out at the sea. The dust had coated the surface so that it didn’t look like water any more. It looked almost solid, as if they could just step down there and walk towards the horizon. The more the boy looked, the more it seemed like he could do it; he could almost imagine the feeling of it under his feet, how firm it would be, how unmoving. Then a small wave surged in and broke the layer of dust, crumbling the edges. A moment later, it settled back to stillness.

  ‘It used to be like that here,’ the old man said.

  ‘Desert?’

  ‘Land.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘All of this, as far as we can see, would have been land.’

  ‘I know.’

  The old man bent down and picked up a pinch of dust. ‘Everything changes, if you wait long enough.’

  The boy stood up and brushed the dust off his hands. ‘I don’t want to wait.’

  The old man carried on looking out to sea.

  ‘We can make another boat,’ the boy said. ‘Better than the last one. There are things here we can use. And things always drift through. All we need are tarps, poles, some rope.’ He’d spent a long time thinking about exactly what they would need, working out whether anything they already had on the rig could be used. The sheets off the bed would be too flimsy and would tear in the first gale. The old man’s poles would buckle. Everything he thought of he had to dismiss, until there was only the option of waiting, watching the water, seeing what might come in.

  The old man ground the pinch of dust slowly between his fingers. ‘That’s all going to drift through, is it?’

  ‘Well, where did he get it from before?’

  The old man frowned. ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘What about the batteries?’

  ‘They were the spares.’

  ‘And you just let him take them?’

  The old man kept his eyes fixed on the horizon. ‘He said he needed them.’ The dust had settled in a fine line over his eyelashes.

  The boy bent down and ran his fingers in the dust again. The grains banked up under his nails.

  ‘Do you remember him?’ the old man said.

  The boy stared down at his hand – there were so many grains under his nails, millions probably, if he could count them all. ‘Not much,’ he said.

  The old man nodded. ‘But you thought about him.’

  The boy reached up and rubbed the side of his jaw, then dropped his hand back down.

  ‘I mean … did you …’ The old man stopped and cleared his throat. He squinted out at the strange brightness. ‘It’ll be calm now,’ he said. ‘For a few days.’

  The boy turned and looked at the old man. ‘It won’t happen to us.’

  The old man carried on looking at the sky. ‘Have you drawn up the schedule for tomorrow yet? We’ve got behind.’

  ‘What happened to him,’ the boy said. ‘It won’t happen to us. I managed the boat all the way through the farm. With both of us …’

  ‘There won’t be both of us.’

  ‘What?’

  The old man took a rattly breath and coughed, but the coughing stopped almost as soon as it had started. ‘I’ll help you get the boat ready, if the right stuff comes through, but you’ll have to sail it yourself.’

  ‘But you’re getting better. The pilot …’

  ‘It’s not about that.’ The old man breathed out slowly.

  For a moment the dust seemed too thick, too dry. The boy could feel it on his eyelids, between his teeth. ‘So you’re giving up?’

  The old man sighed again, took one more look across the farm then turned and made his way back towards the hatch.

  The boy followed him. ‘You’re just going to stay here? Doing what? Trawling up junk? A room full of tiny bits of plastic? Sitting on your own, thinking about a place that doesn’t even exist any more?’

  The old man stopped. ‘I have to.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’m on a contract,’ he said quietly. ‘Same contract your father was on. He left and you ended up out here. If I leave …’ He looked out at the water, past the water. His jaw was tight again.

  The boy stood very still. He looked over at the two sets of footprints leading back towards the hatch. As they got further away, it was hard to tell whose were whose.

  The old man wiped the dust off his hands, watching as the flecks dropped to the ground. ‘Let me know the schedule for tomorrow,’ he said. He carried on to the hatch, then turned back. ‘He was just like you,’ he said. ‘Always bloody fixing things. Did I ever tell you that?’

  The boy watched the old man go. Then he called out, ‘Greil?’

  The old man was about to duck through the hatch but he stopped and waited.

  ‘I did think of him,’ the boy said. ‘I still do.’

  The old man nodded. His hand gripped the railing. His skin was coated with dust, except in the lines where he was holding hard to the metal.

  Then, slowly, his hand relaxed. After a moment he turned round and straightened up. Then he popped his knuckles softly, savouring each crack. A small cloud of dust floated across the rig in the wind.

  ‘System crashed again this morning,’ the old man said.

  ‘What did you do?’ the boy said.

  The old man shrugged. ‘I didn’t do anything. It just crashed. Then when it rebooted all the screens were green.’

  ‘Green?’

  ‘All of them.’

  The boy brushed the dust off his overalls. ‘Why green?’ he said.

  ‘How am I meant to know?’

  ‘That doesn’t sound good.’

  ‘Well, what would you prefer, blue?’ the old man said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The screens. When they crash.’

  ‘I’d prefer it if they didn’t crash,’ the boy said.

  ‘What if you had to pick a colour?’

  ‘Why would I have to pick a colour?’

  ‘Jesus, just pick a colour.’

  ‘Black.’

  ‘You’re picking black?’

  ‘You said to pick a colour.’

  ‘And you picked black.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Jesus,’ the old man said again. He shook his head, then went back into the rig, muttering something about the boy having no imagination.

  The boy looked back out across the farm. Gradually, the wind picked up, the clouds began to push back in and the dust was slowly scoured away, leaving just the thinnest threads caught in the rivet-lines and crevices of the metal.

  At least he knew what it was that had shut down the air con. He could look forward to a long night scrubbing out all the dust from the filters.

  Slowly, starting from the west, the blades began to turn. Almost all of the turbines near to the rig were still. The boy thought of the components down in the dock. He could put them back where he’d found them, but maybe it would be better to save them out and see where they were most needed. He’d forget about the maintenance report – the next day he and the old man would start early, pick an area and go and check all the turbines themselves. There would be gearboxes to grease, blade controls to reset and rewire. He’d been wanting to have a go at overhauling a generator for a long time. In the ri
ght conditions, they could get through fifteen, maybe twenty a day. The farm had over six thousand turbines, which meant they could get round them all in three to four hundred days. Of course, that didn’t take into account the lack of spare parts, the weeks when the weather kept them stuck on the rig, or the fact that they would have to save out the best components to trade with the pilot. It didn’t take into account the cracks and draughts and drips on the rig that would need to be reinforced, sealed, shored-up, just to keep it all from crumbling into the sea. Or the fact that, whenever the boy said a bearing needed replacing, the old man would argue and say it probably didn’t, and then he would bet the boy a tin of protein on it, and they would have to check, and when the boy was inevitably right, the old man would say they had to check again. Or the fact that, when they were on their way to the next job, they could just as easily end up sorting through one of the old man’s nets.

  But they had a lot of time on their hands.

  The boy looked up at the sky. There was perhaps a slightly paler patch of cloud out towards the west. There was a lot of the day still left. He didn’t go straight back to the service hatch, but climbed down the ladder to the platform at the bottom of the south-west support. Out in the fields, the blades were turning faster, working up into a steady rhythm. The wind droned through the grilles. Thirteen metres per second. The farm would generate well today.

  He squatted down and took hold of his line. The water was murky, clouded with the last of the dust, but he could see some way. Who knew what he might find? After all, this was once a whole country, a whole continent.

  Fourth hook down he noticed something.

  ‘Strange fish,’ he said, his voice merging with the wind.

  Year Zero

  And now it is just water. Or, not quite just water.