Doggerland

by Ben Smith

  Then one day he was looking through an old schedule and he found a service record for the maintenance boat. He looked closer and saw that the file gave details of repairs on two boats.

  The screen flickered in front of him. He sat back and closed his eyes, then opened them, leaned forward and checked the screen again. There were two different boats – each one had its own registration number.

  The screen flickered again. His hands went very cold and he almost couldn’t move them to type. He entered the registration number of the second boat into the system. A list flashed up. It took him a moment to focus clearly enough to read it. It was a list of repairs. The second boat had been allocated all of the repairs that he’d found. He sat back and looked at the screen for a long time. That was his father’s boat.

  The screen flickered again then cut out. All the screens went black and the system groaned then went silent. The boy jumped out of the chair. ‘Shit,’ he said. He hit the side of the screen. A blue light flashed up then faded. He turned the screen off then back on. Nothing. He went over to the main computer and hit that too. Then he turned off the isolator switch and rebooted everything.

  It took a long time for the system to power back up. By the time it had the boy’s hands were shaking. He leaned straight in and got to work. If he cross-referenced the old schedules with the boat’s registration, he’d be able to find all of the repairs his father had ever made. He reached for the keyboard, then stopped. What if he checked the registration against the satellite map’s archives?

  He brought up the map and entered the numbers. The processors chuntered and whirred; the screen froze for a few seconds; then a fretwork of lines began to appear across the map, building, layering over one another into a tight mesh that covered the farm.

  Here was a complete record of his father’s movements – all the turbines and transformers he’d ever visited, every journey he’d taken through the farm. By following the densest patterns of lines, the boy could make out the routes he most often used, the rows he favoured, the fact that he always plotted his maintenance route in a clockwise direction, and that almost every day he would take a detour out to the western edge of the farm and follow its limit for miles before turning back to the rig.

  The boy raced through the dates of each recorded journey – working through the months, the years – then he saw it, down in the south fields: the last record of the boat, at the moment its tracker had failed.

  He sat very still and looked at the screen. That was it. That was where it had happened. Whatever it was exactly that had happened.

  He took his watch out of his pocket and looked up at the cameras. His watch had stopped and the screens were almost dark. The old man had only just come back and the boat was only half-charged. Maybe he should wait. What good would it do rushing off into the night? He switched the screen back to the maintenance report. He should do some work. He should check his line. He should think about all of this carefully.

  He reached for the keyboard, then pushed his chair back and stood up. If he didn’t go now, he never would.

  As he turned into the stairwell, he almost collided with the old man, who was making his way up from the transformer level with a fresh container of homebrew.

  ‘You shouldn’t run in the workplace,’ the old man said.

  The boy moved down a step.

  ‘Where are you going?’ the old man said.

  ‘There’s work that needs doing.’

  ‘You should relax. Learn to enjoy things a bit.’ The old man raised the container. ‘I might even let you share this batch if you’re lucky.’

  ‘There’s work that needs doing.’

  ‘Do you remember the first time you tried this stuff?’

  The boy put his hand on the railing and looked down the stairs.

  ‘I wouldn’t let you have any, so you sneaked into my distillery and drank it raw from the vat.’ The old man laughed. ‘I found you on your back in the corridor. Had to drag you to your bed, sit with you while you kept telling me about … what was it?’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ the boy said. His thoughts were surging, he could barely hear what the old man was saying. The boat. All he could think about was the boat. The old man had never said a word about it.

  ‘You must do. It was something about fish eating all the protein.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The spiced protein.’ The old man changed the container over to his other hand. ‘I remember that you—’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ the boy said.

  The old man stopped. He nodded slowly and sighed.

  The boy took another step down.

  ‘Wait,’ the old man said.

  The boy stopped.

  The old man just watched him. Then the corner of his mouth began to twitch. ‘Have a good evening then,’ he said and carried on up the stairs.

  The boy breathed out heavily, then tried to carry on down to the dock. But his feet wouldn’t move. He lost balance and had to grip the banister. He tried again, but his feet were stuck. He looked down and saw he was standing on the step that was always covered in glue.

  The old man’s laughter echoed through the corridors of the rig.

  The boy unlaced his boots and left them where they were, then walked barefoot down to the storeroom to find a chisel.

  Dusk spread across the sea, turning it slick and dark as oil. The boy made his way to the south fields, running the boat at full throttle. At some point a bank of clouds pushed in from the south-west and it began to rain, blurring the towers and reducing visibility to a couple of rows.

  The battery gauge dropped, so he reduced his speed. He was close now. Just a few miles. He squinted out of the windscreen through the brief gaps left by the wiper blades. The rain drummed on the cabin roof.

  Soon the glow from the satnav screen grew brighter than the sky. The boy switched on the boat’s headlights and continued on his course. He was nearing the place now. One hundred metres, fifty metres. The night crowded in. The rain cut down through the headlight beams, shortening their distance. He could barely see to the nearest towers.

  He reached the place and cut the throttle. Outside, the lights showed nothing but the rain. He switched them off, pulled up his hood and went out on deck.

  Water streamed from every surface, sweeping in sheets across the deck each time the boat rolled in the swell. The boy stood at the gunwale, raised his hands to shield his eyes from the rain and squinted out into the night.

  Slowly, his eyes grew more accustomed and he began to make out the pale shapes of the towers looming all around him. He made his way round the deck. There was nothing. The sea slapped quietly against the boat. Of course there was nothing. What had he expected? The rain gusted across his shoulders. If there was nothing there then maybe the boat had gone further, maybe it had … But he stopped the thought before he had finished it. The batteries would have failed. The engine would have given out.

  He needed to get back. He turned and crossed the deck. Then he stopped. Out to starboard he could make out the squat shape of a transformer housing. He blinked, wiped the rain from his face. There was something wrong with its silhouette.

  He went back into the cabin, switched on the lights and brought the boat round. The headlights swung in an arc through the rain until they hit the transformer, picking out its square angles, its gantry and railings, all highlighted by the streaming water. Then the supports lit up and, as the beams moved through them, there appeared the outlines of a gunwale, the roof of a cabin, the dark mass of a hull.

  Tins

  The deck rang out as he jumped aboard – a single bass note swallowed up by the rain. He turned on his torch and swung the beam through the sodden air. Dark shapes covered the deck, altering the sounds of the rain as it fell – the patter of bundled tarpaulins and plastic buckets, the rumble of a hollow metal drum.

  H
e hesitated for a moment, moving the torch round slowly. Each dark object the beam picked up made his heart skip over. Finally he forced himself to cross the deck and go into the cabin.

  At first it looked the same as the other boat – there was the control panel, the steering column. But, on one side of the cabin, where the built-in lockers should have been, there was a foam roll-matt and a bundle of mouldering sheets.

  Moving closer to the control panel, he saw suddenly that it was hollow. A gap on one side of the casing showed that almost all of the wiring and electrics had been pulled out, leaving just the metal shell. The boy crouched down and looked in the hole where the satnav screen should have been. All that was left of the controls were the steering column, battery gauge and the ignition switch. He reached over and pressed it, but nothing happened.

  The engine hatch was open and through it he could just make out the engine, or rather the broken and charred remains of the engine. What was left of its workings were scattered around the hull, along with a few tools. The satellite transmitter was on top of the engine housing, scorched and half-melted. The boy shone the torch further in and saw the outline of the battery, then another, and another. There was a whole row of batteries running the length of the keel.

  He closed the hatch and stayed squatting in the cabin for a long time. Rain hammered on the roof and the deck. Water ran down from his hair and along his jaw.

  He was about to get up when he noticed a sheet of paper tucked into the empty shell of the control panel. He took it out and unfolded it. It was a map of a coastline. The boy looked at it closely, seemed to recognize, for a moment, the shapes of the estuaries and breakwaters, the contours of the seawalls and fences surrounding the warehouses and docks. It was the eastern mainland. He lowered his torch and stood up.

  On deck he found a guttering system that had been rigged up to the roof of the cabin and ran down into a large plastic container for collecting rainwater. Towards the stern was a mass of tarpaulin, poles and ropes – the remains of what looked like a shelter for covering the deck. He opened the hold and found it stacked with crates. He climbed down and checked inside them. They were full of tins and supplies – enough to last for months at sea.

  It was long into the night before he finally left the boat. If the weather had worsened or the currents had picked up, he could have been in trouble; but the boy was not thinking of that as he piloted back through the dark.

  He was thinking about the map and the tins and the row of batteries in the hull. The engine had been modified. There were parts there that weren’t in a standard boat. From the quick check the boy had been able to make, it looked like a power converter had been retro-fitted to increase the efficiency. If it had worked it would have more than doubled the output of the batteries. All of the extraneous systems had been stripped out – no lights, no heating, no bilge pump. All of the power had been diverted straight to the engine. With that bank of batteries fully charged, and in the right conditions, it would have had maybe seven or eight times the range of a standard maintenance boat. It could have gone out beyond the borders of the farm. Out of the whole North Sea.

  The boy had thought for a long time about the map of the mainland. Why would his father risk going back there? If he had a way out, why not just leave? Then the boy had looked again at the supplies in the hold. There was a spare roll-matt and sheet, two sets of spare clothes, two towels, two mugs and plates and forks – two of everything.

  ‘I’ll come back for you,’ he’d said. ‘Okay?’

  But the engine had overheated. The boy had searched the boat, trying to work out what had happened next. Then he’d climbed up to the transformer housing and found the hatch hanging open. Just inside the doorway, a panel had been removed and it looked like an attempt had been made to extract some of the components. Maybe there had been a frayed wire, maybe the water had got in, or maybe it had just been a mistake – a slip of the hand – because all that was left was a gaping hole where the electrics had blown, components thrown about the housing, and the door opposite swinging open into the wind and the sea.

  Maybe that was how it had happened, or maybe it had happened differently. The boy had never wanted to imagine his father’s last moments. He had always, almost, managed to stop himself before they rose up. And he didn’t want to imagine them again now. His whole body felt numb and shaky as he piloted back through the rain – he didn’t think he’d ever felt this cold before in his life.

  But, either way, however it had happened, his father hadn’t given up. He hadn’t reneged on anything.

  There was a half-empty bottle of homebrew on the table in the galley. The boy sat down and poured himself a drink, drained his mug and poured himself another. Then he got up and closed the galley door, sat back down and shut his eyes.

  His thoughts pitched and surged. He tried to order them, to box them in. He couldn’t stop picturing the sheets strewn about the cabin, the twisted tarpaulin and tangles of rope, the engine components scattered around the hull.

  He took a deep breath and began to imagine how he’d piece them back together.

  Some of them were junk, but others might be serviceable. The row of batteries had looked in good condition. If he could get some charge in them, he could test the electrics and then … He opened his eyes. Then what?

  He lifted his mug, caught a nose-full of the foul smell and put it back down on the table. The air con groaned in the walls. The water-filter light flickered and then turned red. The dripping had started up again somewhere. Another crack was working its way across the ceiling.

  Then he’d get out. Out of all this. Like his father had planned to do.

  His father was good at fixing things – that’s what the pilot had said. Well the boy was good at fixing things too. He knew engines, and if could find the right parts then maybe he could get the boat going.

  There were footsteps in the corridor and the old man came into the galley. He sat down opposite the boy, placed three lumps of rusted metal on the table, looked down at them and then up at the boy.

  The boy ignored the lumps of metal and stared at the old man. His chest tightened. The old man must have known. They were living together on the rig. He must have known what the boy’s father had been trying to do.

  The old man lifted a finger, then picked up one of the objects, held it next to his ear, shook it very gently and placed it back down on the table to his right. He repeated the process for the other two, placing another on his right and one on his left. Then he leaned back and folded his arms. ‘My catch,’ he said. ‘I have audible and inaudible tins.’

  The boy blinked, then looked down at the objects. They were tins – buckled and ballooning with rust, caked in a claggy black substance, but still, it seemed, intact.

  Why had the old man stayed? If they’d gone together, if the old man had helped, maybe they’d have been able to fix the engine; maybe they all would have been able to get out.

  The old man’s hand hovered over the tin on his left, then switched sides and picked up one from his right. He took a penknife from his pocket and scraped round the rim, clearing away the rust and dirt. He blew off the powdery residue, then got up, went to the sink and came back with the tin opener. He sat back down and fitted it to the top of the tin, jolting it around until the wheel bit into the lid.

  The boy watched the old man closely. He was turning the handle too fast, so that the wheel kept slipping off the tin; and then he would mutter something, fit it back on and start again. There were streaks of powdery rust on the table and on his hands.

  The old man turned the handle again but it didn’t move. He tried to take the tin opener off but it was stuck. ‘Bloody thing’s broken.’

  The boy kept watching. All the old man needed to do was turn the wheel backwards but instead he was digging it in even deeper.

  The old man pressed harder and the wheel started to bend.

  ‘Y
ou’re going to break it,’ the boy said.

  The old man kept turning. Rust flaked off the tin and onto the table.

  The boy watched the wheel bend in on itself, like a hot piece of solder. It bent and started to buckle. ‘You’re going to break it,’ the boy said again.

  The old man didn’t look up. ‘It just needs a …’

  The boy shook his head. The old man would just carry on. He’d break the tin opener and then they wouldn’t be able to open any other food.

  The old man gripped the handles tighter. His hands started to shudder.

  ‘You don’t care, do you?’ the boy said, suddenly.

  The old man looked up and frowned.

  ‘Trawling around,’ the boy said. ‘Digging with poles. Finding junk. You don’t care about anything else.’

  The old man sat very still. A sharp smell of rust rose up into the room.

  ‘You just carry on,’ the boy said. The chill from the rain had started to wear off now. ‘You don’t care what happens as long as you’ve got your maps and your nets.’

  The old man’s hand still gripped the opener, but he didn’t make a turn. ‘And what,’ he said, ‘don’t I care about?’

  The boy shrugged again. ‘I don’t know. Anything. You’d be happy if we just stayed like this for ever. Eating out of tins, watching the farm fall apart. You wouldn’t care if we never got out.’

  Still, the old man didn’t move. Rust flaked off the tin and onto the table. ‘Out,’ he said.

  ‘Out of all this. The farm, the Company.’

  The old man jerked the opener out of the tin and put it down slowly. ‘Who’s been talking to you about that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Who’s been talking to you about that?’

  ‘No one’s been talking to me.’ The boy looked steadily at the old man. ‘No one’s been talking to me about anything.’