Doggerland

by Ben Smith

  Copyright

  4th Estate

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.4thestate.co.uk

  This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate 2019

  Copyright © Ben Smith 2019

  Cover image © Shutterstock.com

  Ben Smith asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780008313364

  Ebook Edition © April 2019 ISBN: 9780008313388

  Version: 2019-02-25

  Dedication

  for Lucy

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Bootlaces

  Nothing

  Cracks

  Junk

  c.8,200 Before Present

  A Fur Hat

  Something

  Tins

  Bottles

  c.20,000 Before Present

  Knots

  Circuits

  Systems

  c.14,000 Before Present

  Down

  Up

  c.11,000 Before Present

  Paper Cups

  Fish

  Westerlies

  c.9,500 Before Present

  Easterlies

  Cracks

  c.8,500 Before Present

  Nothing

  Dust

  Year Zero

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  Bootlaces

  Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Something. Fourth hook down on the drop-line there was a dark shape. The boy stopped pulling and sat back on his heels. The swell was small that day and it was more than three metres from the platform down to the sea. The boy watched as the shape stretched and buckled beneath the grey water.

  ‘Strange fish,’ he said to no one.

  The wind was blowing in from the west – consistent, ten or eleven metres per second by the feel of it – droning through the platform’s pipes and grilles and pushing the sea into hard ridges. The North Sea shifted from horizon to horizon, like a tarpaulin being dragged over rough ground. It looked sluggish but, under the surface, currents ripped and surged. It was hard to imagine the sheer tonnages hauling past every minute, every second.

  The boy wound the line around the railing until it was secure, then took hold of the hanging length, lifted it a few inches and let it fall. He moved it from side to side, but the hook was lodged. He’d have to pull it up. He moved the line again. It was heavy, whatever it was. He hoped his line wouldn’t break. It had taken him a long time to get that length of cord. How long? Months? Years? He looked out at the horizon as if it would give him an answer, but couldn’t even pick out where the grey of the sea became the grey of the sky. It was good cord. That was all that mattered. And a hundred miles offshore it wasn’t easy to get hold of good cord.

  Could you even get proper fishing line any more? The wind squalled and worked itself through the seams of his overalls. Who could he ask? The old man wouldn’t know. He didn’t know. And there was no one else out there.

  He stood up, set his feet shoulder-width apart and pulled his sleeves down over his hands. He moved his hands slowly and kept the rest of his body very still, as if trying to steady himself against the motion of sea and sky. His legs were planted almost a metre apart and his sleeves barely covered his wide, calloused palms. Of course, the boy was not really a boy, any more than the old man was all that old; but names are relative, and out in the grey some kind of distinction was necessary.

  He took hold of the line and, using the rail as a fulcrum, began to haul it up out of the water. As soon as the load broke the surface the line tightened and rasped through his sleeves. He stopped for a moment and let the wind smooth the edges of the pain, then carried on pulling until the fourth hook was level with the platform. He looked down over the rail.

  It was a load of junk as usual – a greasy mass of netting and plastic, streaming and reeking. The whole thing was tangled into a dense lump, along with an oilcan, some polystyrene, and what looked like a burnt-out panel from a door.

  The boy tied off the line, straightened his back and blew lightly on his palms. ‘Good catch,’ he said.

  Beside him, the thick steel support rose twenty metres to the rig. Above the rig’s squat rectangular housing, the blades of the nearest turbine turned slowly in the washed-out sky. All around, to every horizon, the blades of the wind farm turned.

  The line spun slowly – ten turns one way, then a pause, then ten turns back. The boy lay down on his stomach, reached out and held the netting until it stilled.

  The fields stretched out around him – row after row of turbines, like strange crops. From a distance, they all looked identical, but up close each tower was marked with dark blooms and scabs of rust. There were seepages of oil and grease creeping downward, streaks of salt corrosion reaching up, forming intricate patterns of stalactites and stalagmites. Some of the turbines had slumped down at an angle, their foundations crumbling like silt. Some had damaged blades and threw their remaining limbs around in jolting arcs. Others were missing their blades and nacelle entirely, leaving only the towers standing, like fingerposts marking the steady progression of malfunction and storm.

  He tried to feel his way down to where his hook was caught. The net had floats and some kind of weights threaded through it, and it was twisted up with what could have been strips of weed but the boy knew were actually sheets of black plastic – he’d been finding them all over the farm recently. He worked his hand in and found the hook, then took a knife out of his pocket and began to cut away at the netting, strand by strand, until it slumped down into the water, leaving just the hook and the object it was stuck in.

  It was a boot – black, Company issue, the same as the boy’s. Except, where his were dark and supple from regular cleaning and waterproofing, this one was salt-stiffened, bleached and cracked, making it look like it was cut from some kind of rough stone.

  He reached out slowly, tilted it and looked inside. The laces had come undone and it was empty, which was a relief. He’d found a boot once before, floating through the farm, still laced up tight. When was that? It had been down in the south fields. That boot had been brown, pointed at the toe. The leather and its contents had been scratched and picked apart. There must have been birds around then. And fish.

  The boy put the knife away in his pocket and took out a battered digital watch. It was missing its strap and one button, and when he touched the display, bubbles of moisture spread inside the casing. It read quarter past five. He looked up at the sky and saw, perhaps, a paler patch of cloud in the west. When he closed his eyes the same patch appeared on the backs of his eyelids.

  The wind dragged across the rig. Sometimes it sounded thin and hollow, sometimes it thudded as if it were a solid wall, impossible to move past. The line rocked. The turbines groaned and thrummed. The boy held the boot still. The sole was smooth and washed clean: the sea already cleaning
things up, making things anonymous.

  ‘Where have you come from?’ he said. His voice was barely audible above the wind and the blades. Which was probably for the best, because it was a stupid question. And he was talking to a boot.

  The currents that came through the farm swept in from the oceans and cycled round the whole North Sea, hauling waste and cast-offs out from every coastline. Some days there would be swathes of shining fluid that coated the surface of the water. Other days, shoals of plastic bags and bottles would rise from the depths like bulbous light-seeking creatures. The boy would find tidal barrages and bleached clothing, the brittle shells of electrical appliances. He’d seen furniture and timbers tangled together so they looked like makeshift rafts; and once, a whole house torn loose from its moorings, drifting through the farm, slumped and tilting on its flotation tanks.

  Days, months and seasons passed through untethered and indistinct among the flotsam. Sometimes it felt colder and there were more storms, and sometimes a big spring tide would raise the water level up closer to the platform. But it was always cold, and there were always storms. It was spring now, according to the rig’s computer. He looked down at his watch – it still read quarter past five.

  He put it away and unhooked the boot carefully from his line. Then he got up off his stomach and sat on the platform, drawing his knees up against the wind and holding the boot in front of him. It could have come from anywhere. It could even have come from the farm. It could have been lost and then got stuck in one of the gyres that looped through the fields, catching anything that was adrift inside and not letting go. It could have been cycling round the turbines, round the edge of the rig, for years.

  The boot was the same size as his own. Whoever it had belonged to would have been about his height, his build. The wind pressed in and the skin on his back tightened. What if …? But he didn’t let himself finish the thought. There was no point going over all that.

  He held the boot out over the water. If he let go, it could be gone in under a minute. In a day it could be out of the farm. In a few weeks it could wash up on the coast or, if it kept going, it could be pushed out north, up and over the pole.

  Or maybe it wouldn’t go anywhere. Maybe it would stay circling the fields. Maybe one day he would check his line and there it would be again – a bit more cracked, a bit more bleached, but the same old boot. And he would pull it up, unhook it and think the same old thoughts, ask the same old questions. And they would still be stupid questions. And he would still be talking to a boot.

  He looked out at the water and twisted the boot’s lace around his fingers. It was crusted with salt and had kinks from where it had been knotted. Slowly, he unpicked it from the stiff eyelets, coiled it and put it in his pocket. Then he reached out and dropped the boot over the edge of the platform. He watched as it dipped in the swell, pausing for a moment as if remembering its route, before drifting off east and into the grey.

  ‘Ahoy there, Cap’n Cod.’ The old man, Greil, spoke from where he was slumped in his chair. He had his feet up next to the bank of monitors and didn’t bother turning round. The boy had been trying to walk quietly past the control room, but now stopped in the doorway. ‘Why are you sneaking about?’ the old man said.

  The boy didn’t answer.

  ‘I saw you.’ The old man inclined a foot towards one of the monitors. ‘I see all from my eyrie. I am omniscient.’ A hand appeared in emphasis, holding an enamel mug, in which sloshed a brutal-smelling ichor.

  ‘What’s that?’ the boy said, stepping into the room.

  ‘My finest. Not for your unrefined palate. Not since your last criticisms.’ The old man swivelled his chair round. His cheeks were flushed purplish grey, like metal discoloured by a flame. His hands, clamped round the mug, had deep creases cross-hatching the knuckles.

  There was no telling how old the old man actually was. His hair was still dark and slicked back into a hard shell, like the paint they used on the outside of the rig to stave off corrosion. Instead it was his eyes that seemed to have lost their colour. The boy was sure they had once been blue, but, like everything else on the farm, they seemed to have become bleached through years of exposure. He was small – much smaller than the boy – but moved as if carrying a much greater bulk, always banging his elbows and knees in spaces that the boy moved through comfortably. At that moment, sitting still, he almost looked frail, until he leaned forward and stretched his neck, listening for the pop of each vertebra.

  ‘And what bounteous harvest are you not sharing today?’ he said.

  The boy took the bootlace out of his pocket and held it up. There was an oil-stain on the back of his hand that looked like a broken ladder, or a broken yaw system, or maybe a broken piece of pipework. Something broken anyway. ‘It’s Company issue,’ he said.

  ‘Company issue.’ The old man sighed. ‘Well of course it’s Company issue.’ He lifted his foot. ‘What kind of laces are on my boots?’ He paused for the boy to answer, but there was no point answering. ‘What kind of laces are on your boots?’ He paused again. ‘And what kind of laces are on the boots of every single person who has any business being in or around this entire sea?’ All the while he was staring at the boy. The old man could stare for minutes without blinking – it was one of his ‘people skills’.

  The boy looked past the old man to the bank of monitors. There was the rig – all its corridors and crevices, like the twists on a circuit board. The screens switched from room to room. The galley with its long, steel table that could seat twenty – its cupboards stuffed with unused pans, cutlery and cooking utensils. On the work surface there were two empty tins; in the sink, two bowls, two forks and a blunted tin opener. Then the empty dormitories, the vast ‘conference space’, and the rec room with its listing pool table and the rig’s only window – narrow and abraded with salt – stretching across the far wall.

  The monitors flickered down to the transformer housing, which took up an entire level of the rig; the pipes of the old man’s makeshift distillery snaking away into the dark. And down again to the dock, with its heavy gates enclosing a pool of still water. The dock was empty except for the maintenance boat, which was hoisted onto the slipway at the far end, charging off the main supply.

  The screens shifted to the cameras on the rig’s service platforms – the images grainy as dry putty. There had been a camera on the roof, but, like the buckled helipad and most of the aerials, antennae and satellite dishes, it was now defunct.

  And beyond the rig to the fields – over six thousand turbines grouped into huge arrays. There was no stretch of horizon that wasn’t planted, no hint of an edge or space beyond the churned air. In every image there was at least one turbine standing still and broken against the movement. At that moment, there were at least eight hundred and fifty of them scattered all over the farm. And more that were malfunctioning. It was hard to be sure, but the boy tried to keep track – it was their job to fix them.

  Not that there was much they could do. With the tools and spare parts available they could only make surface repairs – replace the smaller gear wheels, weld, grease, rewire. More and more often, the only option they had was to shut the turbine down, feather the blades, apply the brake and leave it to rust.

  The farm was running at fifty-nine per cent. Sometimes it was better, sometimes it was worse. Sometimes they would get spares on the quarterly supply boat, but more often they didn’t. Sometimes the boy would pick a turbine and keep returning to it, on his own, until it was fixed. He’d once spent ten days going out to a single turbine, working through each component one by one. There had been something at almost every stage from control box to generator. When he’d finally got it functioning and checked the system, it turned out that the cable connecting the turbine to the grid had snapped somewhere along the seabed. Apparently, the old man had known about it for days, but hadn’t wanted to spoil the boy’s fun.

  The screens mov
ed from field to field. The images were in colour, but the sea came through in greyscale, slapping at the bases of the towers.

  The old man looked from the boy to the bootlace and back to the boy. ‘Good catch,’ he said.

  The boy watched the monitors. The sea slapped and slapped. ‘Where do you reckon it came from?’ he said.

  The old man blinked. ‘What?’

  ‘The boot. The net was …’

  ‘What net?’

  ‘It was tangled in a net.’

  ‘You didn’t say anything about a net.’

  ‘It was just a net.’

  ‘You didn’t say anything about it.’

  The boy folded the bootlace over in his palm. ‘It was just a net. It had floats, weights tied in …’

  ‘Weights.’ The old man chewed the word over, leaned back and took a sip from his mug. ‘What kind of weights?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You didn’t check?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They were probably bricks.’

  ‘They weren’t the right shape.’

  ‘But you didn’t check.’

  ‘No.’

  The old man nodded slowly. ‘They were probably bricks.’

  The monitors switched from the galley to the rec room and back to the galley again. ‘I’d never use bricks,’ the old man said.

  ‘Okay,’ the boy said.

  ‘Okay?’ The old man leaned forward and tapped his finger against his temple. ‘Think about it. Where would I find bricks out here?’

  ‘I didn’t say you would find bricks out here.’

  ‘I wouldn’t find bricks out here.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Exactly.’ The old man raised his finger and swivelled his chair round to face the monitors again.

  The boy could smell the salt from the bootlace, sticking to his skin. Salt had a very particular smell: sharp, metallic, but sometimes almost plant-like, as if it was alive rather than bits of mineral eroded from stone and dissolved in the sea. The old man swore it didn’t smell, but to the boy it was everywhere, tangy and brackish. Either that, or he needed to wash better. He tried to remember the feeling of any other substance – sand, mud, soil – but all he could think of was the sole of the boot, scoured clean. ‘It just made me think …’