Doggerland (Sam Applewhite Book 2)

by Heide Goody

  Erin leaned over a picked a crumb of bourbon biscuit off Polly’s chest. A big crumb, a corner piece.

  “This,” said Erin. “Unacceptable. Refined sugars. Do you know what they are doing to you?”

  “It’s just one,” lied Polly.

  “This place isn’t cheap, you know.”

  “I pay for it.”

  “You think the proceeds from the sale of the house will last forever?”

  “Long enough.”

  “Oh, that’s the plan, is it? Kill yourself with sloth and gluttony?”

  “It was just a packet of bourbons.”

  Erin was stunned. “Packet?” she whispered. She shook herself. “We’re happy to pay for you to stay here.”

  “I pay…!”

  “But you have to make an effort. You have to try to get better.”

  “I’m not ill.”

  “I’m not going to put Jack and Iris through—” The ‘what I went through’ went unsaid. “We need to present the best of ourselves to the children. Bright and happy, showing life lived to the full. And that doesn’t mean a gin and tonic every afternoon at four.” Polly opened her mouth but Erin got there first. “I’ve seen the till receipts and your room bill. Do not sully your mouth with further lies.”

  “I’m not an alcoholic.”

  “It’s undignified at your age.”

  “I’m seventy-five, Erin. That’s barely any age these days.”

  Erin picked up the birthday present. “What is it?”

  “A present.”

  “Something nice? Hard to tell from a woman who’d let a child feed raw fish to a penguin.”

  “Just some crayons and a book.”

  Erin huffed. Polly could tell she wanted to criticise it in some way. If it had been a doll or make up, Erin would have accused her of being sexist or some such. If it had been chocolate, it would have been treated as poisonous.

  “If you want to be part of this family, if you want to continue to live here, if— I don’t want to start using terms like ‘power of attorney’.”

  “Please, let’s not fight.”

  “We are not fighting,” Erin growled. “I say this all out of love.” She took out her phone. “Time for a photo.”

  “What for?”

  “The children will want photos.”

  “Not the actual me?”

  Erin scrolled and fiddled on her phone. “Smile for the camera. You can hold the present if you like.”

  Polly did not feel like smiling but picked the small gift up all the same and smiled.

  “Rein the smile in,” said Erin. “You’re a sweet old auntie, not a drunkard at a bus stop.”

  Polly let the edges of the smile drop.

  “And with your eyes,” said Erin. “Smize, Polly. A bit of warmth.”

  Polly didn’t know what to do. The phone gave the tiniest of clicks. Something winked at her.

  “You need to start treating your life and your body with respect,” said Erin. “I’ll know when you haven’t attended the classes you’re signed up for. I’ll know what you’re having at mealtimes and what you’re ordering from the café or bar. Watch your weight. Watch your blood sugars. Go get some exercise. If you don’t like aquarobics, go for a walk. There’s a perfectly lovely pitch and putt course out there.”

  “Is there?” said Polly.

  “I’m not letting you see the children while you’re in this state,” said Erin.

  “What state?”

  The disgust on Erin’s face was evident. She wrapped the bourbon crumb in a tissue and then took out a slim pack of wet wipes to clean her hands. “Our role is to be part of the happy memories in the minds of others. And then, when our time comes – a long, long way in the future one hopes – to die like Bambi’s mum.”

  Polly frowned. “Shot by a hunter?”

  “Off screen,” said Erin.

  With clear reluctance, she picked up Iris’s birthday present. Her other hand removed her e-cig vape thing from her pocket, a sure sign that she was going.

  “I’ll Instagram the photo.”

  “I’m not on Instagram.”

  Erin’s displeased expression only deepened. “I do wish you could make more effort to be part of this family,” she said and left.

  16

  The text on Sam’s phone said: Come over.

  She replied with a curt: Why?

  Come over. I have something to show you.

  In her experience of men (which she thought of as distinctly average) ‘I have something to show you’ rarely involved a ‘something’ she had much interest in seeing. However, she decided to make an exception for this ambiguous invitation from Rich.

  The man had, over the course of their relationship, tried to show her everything she could possibly want to see, and more besides. There were no surprises left to be had. Besides, she was in the vicinity of Rich’s hotel digs, having been on an afternoon errand to update the DefCon4 Attack Dogs Patrol Here! signs at a car compound. There had never been any DefCon4 attack dogs. If there had been, they were lost in the post. Furthermore, she had been itching to speak to Rich just to check he knew what she now knew – that the prehistoric Doggerland was under a dozen or so metres of seawater.

  She pulled into the Hotel Splendid car park.

  “I love your van,” Rich shouted from a balcony high above. “It’s so funny.”

  “Hilarious,” she shouted back.

  “Come on up! Peninsula, show Sam the stairs!”

  “I can find the stairs,” she muttered as she stomped in. She met the butler coming down as she climbed.

  “Ah, you found the stairs, Miss Applewhite,” said Peninsula.

  “Are they hard to spot?”

  Peninsula produced a minimalist facial shrug. “Mr Raynor always has the good sense to make friends with intelligent people,” he suggested as he led the way back up.

  Rich came through to greet her as she entered his suite. “I had it finished this week. Hand-painted by a genuine craftsman.”

  “Right.”

  He gestured for her to follow, like a child dragging their parents to the tree on Christmas day, over-eager and pathetic. He led her through to a room that was too small to be a ballroom but too gaudily opulent to be anything else. A red cloth was draped over something huge and unevenly shaped on a central dining table.

  “I had Peninsula cover it up,” said Rich. “I just wanted you to be the first to see it.”

  “Apart from yourself,” said Sam.

  “Well, yes.”

  “And the master craftsman…”

  “Obviously.”

  “And Peninsula here when he covered it up.”

  “I can assure you that I averted my eyes, Miss Applewhite,” said Peninsula drily.

  “Apart from them,” said Rich. “Peninsula, if you would.”

  The butler gathered up the edges of the sheet, lifted it high, then flung it aside with a matador flourish.

  “Gosh,” said Sam, eventually.

  “Isn’t it?” said Rich.

  “Yeah – wow – it certainly is,” she agreed.

  She felt a strong urge to ask what it was, even though that was pretty clear. On the table was a large scale model of … something. In scale and construction it reminded Sam of a Hornby model railway, except there was no railway or trains. No, she corrected herself, there was a monorail running around the inside wall of the scene.

  “Um,” she said.

  “Um?” said Rich, worried.

  “So you do know that Doggerland is underwater,” she said.

  “Of course I do.”

  The exterior of the model was taken up by the sea. It was several inches deep and, at the edges, held back by sheets of dark, semi-translucent material. There were tiny model fish visible in the model North Sea, sunken ships, and a possibly inaccurate shark. The polymer sea did not fill the entire table, but was held back by what Sam assumed were meant to be concrete walls, An oval dam revealing the now dry seabed.

&nb
sp; “Doggerland,” she said.

  “Doggerland recovered for a new generation,” said Rich.

  The soil was a dusty yellow and dotted with sprouting greenery. An ancient landscape, brought into the sunlight once more in an age of high sea levels by brute force engineering.

  “The water would be pumped out?” she said.

  “Continuously,” said Rich. He pointed out grey pipes and tiny industrial buildings.

  “And the water wouldn’t just … crush the walls?”

  “They’re cantilevered. The water pressure pushing down holds them in place. This would be on Dogger Bank. It’s a naturally higher area of Doggerland. The walls will only need to be forty metres high.”

  “Forty…” Sam shook her head. The number was meaningless. The whole thing was meaningless.

  She was staring at a model of a something out of a stupid sci-fi film, a park on the seabed. There was a monorail. There was a hotel. There were cafés and stripey-roofed ice-cream stands. There were fenced off areas, compounds.

  “Can I ask…?”

  “Please do,” said Rich eagerly.

  “Those mammoths there. And those – I’m going to say bears? And that rhinoceros… Are they going to be models in your Doggerland theme park?”

  He was already shaking his head. “Ice age creatures brought back to life through genetic engineering.”

  “You are aware that Jurassic Park was not a documentary?”

  “The science is sound,” said Rich. “We have DNA samples of all these creatures. Not fossilised, but perfectly preserved in ice. Frozen, usable.”

  She couldn’t help but look to Peninsula for some sanity. The butler pulled back as though unwilling to be part of the conversation.

  “Mr Raynor has spent considerable time and funds talking to members of the scientific community,” said Peninsula.

  “With proper degrees from proper universities,” said Rich.

  “And this will work?” said Sam. She gently tested the edge of the retaining wall between thumb and forefinger. Was she testing it or just seeing if it was real?

  “The science is sound,” repeated Rich. “Exciting, huh?”

  “Expensive, surely,” she said.

  “Oh, and then some,” grinned Rich. “We just have to get in there before the others.”

  “Others?”

  “British companies planning on building windfarms in the region. The Dutch and the Germans are planning on building up an artificial island nearby to manage their windfarm network.”

  “So you’re not the only loony out there,” she said.

  Rich laughed. “I’m the only one with mammoths.”

  Sam walked her fingers along the top of the wall to a grand observation tower that looked like an evil supervillain’s lair.

  “And you’re going to build all of this?”

  “Well, not that,” he said, nodding at the tower. “That’s already there.”

  “What?”

  “That’s Valhalla platform. It will be the base of operations during the construction phase.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a gas drilling platform,” he said. “Decommissioned. And I own it.”

  Sam looked to Peninsula.

  “Oh, he certainly does,” said the butler, deadpan.

  “And I want you and DefCon4 very much involved in this,” said Rich.

  She shook her head. She couldn’t imagine what she or her chaotic employer could do, unless Rich wanted her to put up some Attack Mammoths Patrol Here! signs.

  17

  Strawb looked over the itemised bill. Polly watched his face, his big hands scratching and teasing at his craggy chin. “There’s a lot of biscuits on here,” he said eventually.

  “Oh, God. You’re as bad as her.”

  “I’m just pulling your plonker,” he laughed and patted her knee. “But seriously, there’s a corner shop just down the road. Family size packets of biscuits for half the price.” He shrugged. “What’s the problem?”

  “She can see what I’m buying.”

  “Your niece?”

  “Erin.”

  “Why?”

  Polly tapped the page. “She gets in touch or logs on, I don’t know. She does the thing and it tells her what I’m spending my money on.”

  Strawb frowned. When he frowned and the set of his jaw was just so, he made a passable impression of an English bulldog, all lined and jowly. “Two questions,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “One. If you’re the one who’s paying for your rooms here—”

  “I am.”

  “—then why does she get to see what’s on it? That’s a data protection thingy, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And, b, why do you care?”

  “Sorry?”

  Strawb put the bill on the lounge table between them. “Why do you give a fack what this horrible niece of yours thinks?”

  Polly squirmed inside. The simple answer was that she shouldn’t, that she was her own independent person. But more than that, there was the business with her great niece and nephew. She didn’t know them as well as she should but they were her youngest relatives, the closest thing to a legacy. No, it wasn’t even that.

  “I used to have a home,” she found herself saying.

  “And you don’t now?”

  She shook her head. “It was large, detached. Wickenby Way. There was a kitchen, apple white walls, and a hob with five rings. The hallway had an Axminster patterned carpet. The living room was long with seating for at least six people, and on the display cabinet were the pictures of our mum and dad’s wedding and of Lucy and me.”

  “Lucy?”

  “My sister. And there were Laura Ashley bedspreads in the bedrooms and cushions and silly little teddy bears and a power shower that – oh, I loved that power shower – and…” She trailed off, not sure what she was saying.

  “And now you live in a little box in a building of little boxes with a bunch of other bewildered people wondering where the last fifty years went?” suggested Strawb.

  She laughed. “Yes. Yes and no. Yes, it’s my physical place in the world. Yes, it’s stuff. But also… Families. They’re complicated things, aren’t they?”

  “Too bleeding right,” he said. “My other half’s family were a nightmare.”

  “Your other half…”

  “Gone … eight years now.” He caught her look and she could almost see him filing his emotions away. He tapped the bill with an aggressive fingertip. “We’ll sort this out.”

  “Or I could buy my biscuits somewhere else,” she suggested.

  “Yeah, but not your G and Ts. Nowhere serves a G and T like the Otterside,” he grinned.

  18

  Sam was down at the DefCon4 office early to meet Delia. Sam had promised to accompany her dad to the doctors later, and Delia had a shop to open at nine sharp. Sam wasn’t sure who the key customers for Delia’s specialised brand of repurposed junk were, or whether they demanded entry to Back to Life at the very start of the day, but she didn’t want to be the reason for any loss of takings.

  Sam climbed the stairs, turned on the crappy heater and put it on the desk next to Doug Junior.

  “Ooh, it’s colder in here than it is outside!” said Delia, following her up.

  “Yep. Some days I just keep my coat on all day. I have a hot water bottle for when things get very bad.”

  “Don’t you have heating in here?”

  “There’s that tiny low wattage thing over there.”

  “Doug looks like he’s positively shivering,” said Delia.

  “Nothing bigger is allowed, according to facilities management. This one would probably warm the place up if it could come on at four in the morning or something, but company policy forbids the use of heating when the office is unoccupied.”

  Delia rolled her eyes. “Your facilities management sounds rubbish. Who is it?”

  “It’s me, but I can’t make any actual decisions. It
’s all down to a website I put details into.”

  “Details like...?”

  “Like the size of the office, and the occupancy.”

  “What about your absent colleagues?” Delia asked, waving a hand around at the empty desks.

  “I can only add people if I have their national insurance number. Believe me I’ve had a go. I’m not permitted to request personal identifiable information unless I’m a hiring manager.”

  “Huh.” Delia was stumped. Sam could see her mind whirring, and knew she’d keep coming up with ideas. She didn’t want to stop her, just in case she found an angle that could work, but Sam had applied herself to this problem with the motivation of the permanently shivering, and was pretty sure she’d tried everything. “Well I probably can’t fix your heating, but maybe I can take your mind off it.”

  “I’m all for distractions,” said Sam.

  Delia delved into her large tote bag and fetched out a large cafetière. “For you.”

  “For me?”

  “A thank you for your help with Drumstick.”

  Sam felt a little deflated. “I’ve done nothing. Apart from asking a few questions in the area.” And putting the bird in the freezer ready for Christmas, she added silently.

  “You were there when I needed you,” said Delia. “It’s appreciated. Now, I will make us some proper ground coffee. You realise this will increase your productivity as well?”

  Sam caught on. “Oh! Because now I won’t have to go to Cat’s Café for a coffee and listen to her talk about her play or anything. I don’t even know what I’ll do with all the extra time!”

  Delia gave her a triumphant fist bump. “I’ll go and put the kettle on.”

  As Delia prepared coffee, Sam checked through her tasks for the day. It was a surprisingly sane list: checking the smoke alarms at a packaging factory, secure cash collections in the town, and the slightly cryptic Hygiene management at a local hostel – which basically meant checking the cleaning was getting done. The final task of the day was Staff familiarisation with fitness support trackers and related training material. There was a parcel on the desk linked to that one.