Doggerland

by Ben Smith

  The old man filled his mug and took a long drink. His eyes slid across to the boy then back to the pilot. ‘Temperament.’

  ‘What it takes to deal with life out here. The necessary qualities for the job.’

  The old man curled the corner of his mouth. ‘Bad weather’s coming in,’ he said. ‘We wouldn’t want you getting caught in it.’

  The ringing had turned to a dull throbbing behind the boy’s eyes. He opened them, tried to focus on the old man and the pilot. They were sitting very still, but their outlines seemed to judder and blur, like an engine idling.

  ‘It must be very useful,’ the pilot continued. ‘Being able to put everything to the back of your mind. What’s your output these days? Sixty per cent?’

  ‘Sixty-two,’ the old man said.

  ‘Fifty-seven,’ the boy said.

  The pilot’s eyes flicked from the old man to the boy and back again. ‘I admire it, I really do. The ability to compartmentalize. To shut things away and forget about them …’

  The old man put his mug down on the table but still held it tightly. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘… to just carry on as you always have. With such certainty, such confidence. It really is—’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re bloody talking about!’ The old man slammed his mug down on the table, chipping off a flake of enamel that skidded across the surface.

  As the boy watched, the old man’s features seemed to shift and flatten, until the only distinction between him and the pilot was overall mass. All he could see clearly was the flake of white enamel on the table.

  The pilot reached forward and lifted his mug, holding it protectively. ‘This really is very good stuff. What did you say was in it again?’

  The old man said nothing for a moment, then picked up the bottle and squinted at the faded label. ‘Generator coolant.’

  The pilot looked down at his mug, then gave a tight-lipped laugh – several short, sharp breaths through his nose. ‘You should scale up your production. I know people who’d pay well for this.’

  ‘Personal consumption only,’ said the old man. ‘For sharing with friends.’

  ‘Tsjoch,’ the pilot said, raising his mug. He reached for the bottle, filled his mug to the brim then sat back and took the smallest sip. ‘Which reminds me …’

  The boy stood up and left the room. The pilot had begun another story about a boatload of mealworms. He’d heard it before and the ending didn’t make sense. He walked to the toilet at the end of the corridor and took a long, acrid piss in the scratched metal pan. The walls, the basin, the floor, were all dull grey steel. Sometimes, even on bitter nights, he would go out onto one of the service platforms just to take a piss and not hear the same metallic patter.

  He breathed out slowly and splashed some water on his face. Then he walked back towards the galley. The pilot was still talking, so he crossed the corridor and went into the conference room. On the far side of the table there was the pile of kit the old man had given to the pilot. Enough parts to fix twenty turbines at least, and the generator in the middle. Traded away for a box of poles.

  ‘Godverdomme,’ the boy muttered.

  ‘I know.’ The old man was standing in the doorway. ‘The end of that story doesn’t even make sense.’ He looked at the boy for a moment. ‘He’s finally said he’s leaving. We could disconnect his bilge pump again.’

  The boy glanced back at the turbine parts. ‘If you want.’

  The old man shrugged, then nodded towards the components. ‘Get that lot packed up then. We don’t want to keep him waiting.’

  When the boy went back to the galley to find some empty crates, the pilot was leaning back and shaking his head. ‘Don’t make a meal out of it,’ he said, gently wiping the corners of his eyes.

  The boy stowed the last crate in the pilot’s hold, then turned and sat down on top of it. His stomach was aching and he felt sick, but at least the ringing in his ears had stopped. As he sat in the dark, his head began to clear.

  The pilot was still up in the rig. He’d got as far as the conference room, then started up with his views on the best distillation techniques – a last attempt to get the old man to slip his method.

  The boat rocked as a large swell pressed in through the grilles beneath the dock gates. What had the pilot been talking about? Mealworms … fur hats … bailing something out? He shook his head, stood up and climbed the steps out of the hold.

  As he passed the cabin, he noticed that the door was ajar. He stopped and listened – nothing but the quiet slapping of the water in the dock, the steady drone of the wind beyond the walls. He pushed the door slowly, then stood still and listened again. There were no voices, no footsteps on the stairs. He opened the door fully and went inside.

  It didn’t seem like the cabin of a boat. The floor was clean and shining, the surfaces free of dust and grease. Every dial on the control panel had been carefully polished. Against one wall, there were three locked filing cabinets, and a dark desk that looked like it might have been made out of wood. On the desk was a small pile of paper, arranged parallel to the edge, and a metal container holding six pencils, all sharp. Opposite the desk was a chest, on top of which was a large map, weighed down in all four corners by identical lead weights. The boy stepped quietly across to it.

  It took him some time to work out what he was looking at. Then he realized it was a coastline. But where there had been a solid line separating land from water, the pilot had drawn in new, snaking contours marking the highs and lows of the tides. There were flood defences, drainage fields and reinforced beaches now well below the waterline. At the widened mouth of an estuary, a whole town had been given over to water, the limits of the daily tides carefully marked where they moved back and forth through its streets. Beyond the low-water mark the pilot had pencilled in the locations of a multitude of floating settlements and trading posts, makeshift rigs and marker buoys, annotating them with numbers and symbols in his precise hand. Pressed into the paper, there were also faint marks where other settlements had been erased. The boy leaned in closer and touched his thumb lightly against one of them.

  He didn’t know how long he had been standing there when he heard a noise behind him. For his size, the pilot moved quietly, stepping into the cabin and blocking the doorway.

  The boy took his hand off the map. The edges of the land were scarred with inlets. He had a sudden memory of the feeling of crumbling earth, how it flaked away into water like rust off a corroding hull. He turned towards the door but the pilot stayed where he was.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ the pilot said. ‘It’s good to have a healthy curiosity. Not to let yourself get too …’ he raised his chin and glanced upwards, towards the rig ‘… insular.’

  ‘I need to go.’ The boy took a step, but still the pilot didn’t move.

  ‘I’ve got plenty of maps. The interior. The gas fields. The old cities. As I say, if there’s ever anything you need. If you ever want to trade.’

  The boy looked up at the pilot. ‘You think I’m going to start stripping good turbines?’

  The corner of the pilot’s mouth twitched. ‘I wouldn’t ask you to do that. I know you’ve got more sense. But there are other things I’d be willing to consider.’ He looked back towards the dock for a moment before carrying on. ‘What is it, exactly, that the old man’s been trawling up all these years?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I assume he must be trawling for something. Not just digging holes in the seabed.’

  ‘Why do you care?’

  ‘Call it curiosity. I like to know what my associates are involved in. Then I know if the markets are …’ he raised one hand then the other ‘… balanced.’

  ‘It’s just klote.’

  The pilot nodded. ‘Then I’m sure he wouldn’t miss one or two items.’

  The boy stepped f
orward again. ‘I need to go.’

  The pilot moved aside and folded his hands over his stomach as the boy walked past. ‘Your father had a healthy curiosity too.’

  The boy stopped. His chest tightened. He turned round slowly.

  The pilot walked over to the map and began rolling it up. ‘He was always asking questions – about the Company, the systems, the state of things onshore.’ He glanced at the boy out of the corner of his eye. ‘Never did trade with him. He didn’t want to strip good turbines either. He was a good worker. Always fixing things. But then I’m sure the old man’s told you all that before.’

  The boy stood for a moment, in the middle of the cabin, then shook his head and carried on to the door. ‘It doesn’t matter now.’

  ‘That sounds like the old man.’ The pilot tapped both ends of the map on the wooden surface to straighten it, then placed it carefully in one of the drawers. ‘And we know he isn’t always the best judge of what matters, is he? Now, your father on the other hand …’

  The boy stopped, but he didn’t turn round. He heard the pilot moving across the cabin towards him. ‘… Your father saw the way things were going. He understood the pressures.’ As the pilot came closer his voice grew even softer, until he was almost whispering. ‘He really was a very good worker. It would have taken a lot to make him go off in that boat.’

  The boy’s chest tightened. ‘What boat?’

  The pilot was very close now. He had a smell that the boy didn’t recognize, but he thought was probably soap. ‘The other maintenance boat, of course.’

  The boy looked out of the cabin window at the dock, the single charging bay. He shook his head and took another step towards the door.

  ‘You didn’t know that there were two?’ the pilot said. ‘There are always two boats. But you know what the batteries are like in those old things. It wouldn’t have even got him out of the farm before …’ The pilot breathed out slowly. ‘But surely the old man told you this.’

  The boy looked down at the floor. There was a scraping of something dark and gritty below the doorframe.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the pilot said. ‘I assumed you knew.’

  The boy’s chest was still too tight. He focused on the grit, on the way it had gathered along the line between the panels.

  ‘I feel guilty,’ said the pilot. ‘I often wonder if I could have done more.’ He sighed quietly. ‘As I said before, if you ever need someone to talk to. Someone to trade with. I can get you anything you want.’

  The boy stayed looking at the grit for a long while, then, finally, he made his legs work and stepped out of the cabin. The air was cold and he gulped it down. His stomach ached and his ears had started ringing again. A good worker. Another boat. The ringing got louder.

  As he was crossing the dock, the pilot called to him and threw something down. The boy caught it. It was the fur hat.

  ‘Anything you want,’ the pilot said. ‘Don’t catch cold.’

  Something

  It had taken him an hour just to open the yaw casing. Another three to remove, clean and refit the bearings, working in the cramped space between the top of the tower and the nacelle’s bedplate. His arms were aching and he could feel the first raw edge of a pulled muscle in his back.

  He should have been able to get three or four turbines back online by now, but instead he’d been stuck up in this one all day. He’d known it was going to be a difficult job, as soon as he’d opened the casing and seen what a state it was in – it was packed with rust and everything was damp, even the rust was damp. But because he’d started he had to finish. Why did he always have to finish?

  This was the first day since the resupply that he’d been able to get out and make repairs. Every other morning the old man had left the rig at dawn, travelled through the farm, moored up and taken out the poles the pilot had given him. He would carry them to the gunwale, then begin fixing them together and lowering them down into the water, adding more and more sections to increase their length. After a while – maybe when he reached the seabed – he would fix a T-bar to the top, turn it in slow circles, then begin the process of bringing the whole thing back up into the boat. He’d been performing this same ritual every day, all across the farm.

  It was even worse than the nets. The old man would probably start trying to dive down there himself soon.

  The boy jammed the last bearing into place, sat upright and stretched his back.

  Outside it was starting to get dark – the sky yellowing at the edges, turning the colour of old smoke. The boy couldn’t see this, but he knew it was happening from the change in the wind that often accompanied the dusk.

  He stretched again and his ears popped. They’d been doing that on and off since he’d drunk all that homebrew the night of the resupply. He swore never to drink it again. At least not from that batch. If he hadn’t drunk so much of it he would never have gone into the pilot’s cabin, he would never have heard the klote the pilot said, or stayed there, listening.

  He shook his head. A second boat. The pilot always made up good stories. He’d once, a long time ago, told the boy that all rigs were equipped with an emergency set of tools hidden under the floor panels and the boy had believed him, going as far as to lever up the entire first-floor corridor until the old man had fallen into one of the holes and said was the boy slackened? Why would anyone hide emergency tools? If there was a bloody emergency no one would have the time to pull up a bloody floor, would they? And if he didn’t put the panels back right away he’d bury him under them.

  The boy’s face still burned when he thought about it.

  He packed away his tools and closed up the yaw housing. He pushed the panel shut, but it swung back open. He pushed it shut again, and it swung back open. The latch had fallen off.

  ‘Not now,’ he said.

  He pushed the panel shut, held it for a moment then released it gently. It swung back open.

  ‘Don’t do this now,’ he said.

  It was just one panel. One panel in a fully working turbine. He could just leave it and go. He breathed out slowly. One panel that would stay hanging open, swinging every time the nacelle turned and tapping in the mechanical breeze that came from the cooling system. Tapping and tapping for ever. He reached out and held it, even though it wasn’t moving.

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Have it your bloody way.’

  He took his watch out of his pocket. The time was wrong again, but he’d been using the stopwatch function to gauge his trip – he had maybe another hour of light.

  Outside, on the eastern horizon, darkness would be spreading up from the water, until only the pale tops of the towers would be visible, like candles that were guttering and about to go out.

  He put the watch away and reached into the housing to try to find the broken piece. He could glue it back together. Just enough for it to hold. Just enough so he could tell himself that he’d been able to finish the job.

  His arm rubbed against the bearings and smeared grease up his sleeve. He closed his eyes and reached in further. In the bottom corner of the housing, he felt something. He picked it up and held it to the light. It was a latch, but it wasn’t the original latch from the panel – they were black and mass-moulded. This one was hand-cut from a piece of blue plastic. It had a square hole at one end, so it could be fitted over the spindle and a hook cut into the other. The hook was cut deeper than on the standard latches, making a better connection with the receiver. It was a good repair – the sort of thing that the boy might have done.

  There was no draught in the tower, but the skin tightened on the boy’s arms and neck.

  He was good at fixing things; that’s what the pilot had said.

  The boy sat on the bedplate, holding the latch gently in his palm, running his thumb over the edges. After a while, he pushed it back onto the broken spindle, then closed the panel, raising and lowering the handle caref
ully until he felt the hook catch.

  The next day he didn’t mind when he heard the old man go out at dawn. He went to the control room and sat in front of the screens. But he didn’t look at the cameras, or even check the farm’s output. Instead, he opened up the service-schedule archives and began scrolling through, until he reached the records of the maintenance reports that were generated before he arrived on the farm.

  There was no way of telling if the work had been carried out. Like now, none of the reports were filled in or signed off. Like now, they were confused and sprawling. But they did give details of the scheduled repairs and the boy went through the reports slowly, noting down the locations of each one.

  By the time the old man returned, the boy had gone back through almost a year of reports and noted the locations of all the repairs. He waited until the old man was in his room, then he took the boat out and entered the coordinates of the nearest one.

  Most of the turbines revealed nothing, or they were too rusted out, too dangerous to venture up; but over the days and weeks there were some discoveries. He found handmade bearings so well crafted that they still ran smoothly; the most intricate rerouting of a wind sensor he’d ever seen; and, in a nacelle gaping with holes – its bedplate eaten away, its control panel caked in salt – he found a gearbox that had been serviced and perfectly sealed, all its inner workings still bright and clean.

  He had a sudden memory of a ratchet he used to use when he’d first arrived on the farm. He’d found it at the back of the storeroom, and he’d liked using it because the handle was smooth and worn-down and fitted his hand exactly. He’d lost it in the south fields – a wave had jumped up over the gunwale and dragged it under – but he still remembered how well it had worked, the smoothness that moulded to the shape of his palm.

  The boy continued to go through the old reports, plotting them on the satellite map, following their course through the farm. By day he would visit and revisit the same repairs, studying them closely. At night he would lie on his bed, working out exactly how they’d been made, what tools had been used, whether he would have done anything differently.