Doggerland

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‘It was in the cupboard.’

‘Give it here.’ The old man walked forward quickly and snatched it from the boy. ‘I thought I’d got rid of all these.’ He bent it in half and shoved it in his pocket.

The boy looked up at the old man. ‘What is it?’

‘Nothing.’

The water system groaned. The boy sat very still. His mouth felt suddenly dry. ‘Did he …?’

‘It’s nothing,’ the old man said again. He was about to say something else – his mouth moved, just a small twinge in the top corner, like a glitch between two wires – then he shook his head, turned and left the room.

Rain thumped against the rig. The boy didn’t move. The cold metal of the stool pressed into the backs of his legs. The old man was right; it was nothing. He should just forget it. There were more important things to focus on. They’d lost another percentage of output since the morning, and there would be more turbines down tomorrow. The rain would work itself through rivets. Rust would bloom out of chipped paint.

It’s not like there was much to forget anyway. One of the few clear memories he had was of the officials calling him in and asking him to sit down in one of their offices.

Unfortunate. That was what they’d said. It was unfortunate that his father had chosen to renege on his contract.

He couldn’t remember who had spoken, or how many people were in that brightly lit room. All he could remember was that the veneer on the desk had been peeling away at one corner. He’d thought about what glue he would have used if he’d had to stick it back down.

They’d explained things very carefully. How the boy’s position in the Company was affected. How the term of service had to be fulfilled and, as the only next of kin, this duty fell to him. It was unfortunate, they’d said, but it was policy. They went over the legal criteria and the job specifications, the duties and securities guaranteed. But they did not explain the one thing the boy most wanted to know.

‘What does “renege” mean?’ he’d once asked the old man, casually, in the middle of a job, like it was something he’d just read in one of his technical manuals.

The old man had looked at him for a long time out of the corner of his eye. His hand had moved to the ratchet in front of him, then stopped. ‘Give up,’ he’d said, finally.

Which was as much as he’d ever said on the subject. His face would darken and close over, as if a switch had clicked off. But it didn’t matter. The more time the boy spent on the farm, the more he knew what it meant. It was something to do with the endlessness. It was something to do with the fact that there was no way out. The boy would stand on the edge of the rig’s platform and look across the water. He knew, and he wanted to know, and he didn’t want to know anything; like the waves churning between the towers, rearing up and splitting and knocking back into each other.

He looked down at his meal, which had hardened into a stiff mass. He touched it with his fork, then pushed the pan slowly off the table and into the bin. It didn’t matter anyway. The food was packed with vitamins and supplements. A person could get by on less than a tin a day, and he’d already had vegetables for breakfast.

The water system groaned. The filters needed replacing and the water was already starting to taste brackish. It groaned again and the boy’s stomach chimed in. He hit it with the flat of his hand. His meal smoked slowly in the bin.

Cracks (#u8fda608c-95e1-53c6-9079-583ad24c768c)

At night, when the boy couldn’t sleep, he would take his toolbag, his welding torch and a bucket of rustproof paint and go out into the corridors; making repairs, chasing draughts, trying to shore things up.

There. He would stop and put out his hand, then move it around slowly. There was always a draught somewhere. Up in the corners of the corridor, where the two wall plates met, or around the edges of the floor, the wind would be crawling through rivets, working its way through the cracks in the metal.

Outside, the weather would circle and press in. The wind would pitch itself low and sonorous, so that it sounded like voices speaking from every bolt and screw. Rain would echo off every surface. The boy would reach up and press his finger to the crack, feeling for the colder air. That was all there was – just a few sheets of corroding metal – separating him from the dark.

He would take out a tub of filler and get to work. He liked the way the filler smelled when it was damp – the gritty, chemical tang of it. He would lean close to the wall and breathe it in. Sometimes he would dip the pads of his fingers into the tub, wait for them to dry, then peel the curved pieces off one by one.

As he worked, he would recite from the technical manuals he kept in his room. ‘There are several systems in place to prevent failures caused by adverse conditions.’ He knew all three of the manuals by heart. ‘The ride-through system prevents low-voltage disconnect by …’ Then something would start dripping somewhere up in the vents. He would tell himself that he’d checked them all recently and made sure they were sealed. It might just be condensation. If the dripping was regular then it was just condensation. He would stop and listen, measuring the sound against his heartbeat. It sounded regular. He breathed out. But what if his heart wasn’t beating regularly? He would stop breathing and listen, and his wretched heart would begin an irregular beat.

The wind would knock against the rig and throw rain like punches.

‘The ride-through system prevents …’

The dripping would continue, each drop hitting the vent in exactly the same place, chipping away at the metal, molecule by molecule, millimetre by millimetre. Soon it would wear away a dent, then a divot, then a hole; then it would begin its work again on the layer below. Given time, a single drop of water would carve out a tunnel through every level of the rig.

The boy would reach for a screwdriver to open the vent but, just at that moment, the dripping would stop.

However much he tried to vary his route, to stay down in the dock or transformer housing, or keep to the upper levels, he always found himself working over to the washroom on the second floor. He would leave his tools by the door and cross the room to stand, in the dim light, staring at the mirror, which was tarnished and blotched with rust, except for two circles kept clean from years of polishing – one the right height for the old man and the other, almost a foot higher, which had stayed unused for years but now framed the boy’s face exactly.

He would stand and stare into the mirror and think about the other things he’d found over the years. An oil-stained boot mark – too big for the old man, but almost the same size as the boy’s – under the desk in the control room. A dusty set of overalls balled up on the floor of a wardrobe in one of the dormitories. A smudge on one of the pages in the cookbook that was there before the boy had first opened it. And, at the back of one of the cupboards in the galley, a bottle of strange green sauce that the old man hated, but had been almost empty when the boy arrived on the farm.

Then there were the things he’d noticed. The way that the old man would automatically pass him sweetener for his tea, even though he’d never used it in his life. How the old man would frown at the way he laid out his tools before a job. The way the old man would stare, when they were eating, when they were out on the boat, whenever he thought the boy wasn’t watching.

The boy would lean forward towards his reflection and open his eyes wide. Had his skin always been that pale – almost grey? The same grey as the walls and the floor. He would reach up and touch his cheek, his forehead, to make sure they had not in fact turned to metal. White moons would appear where he pressed his fingertips, and take a long time to fade.

There was just one meeting he could recall. A small room, rows of orange plastic chairs bolted to the floor, lining two walls. The boy had been sitting on one of them, his feet barely touching the floor. His father had been standing. The paint on the walls was flaking and there was a hairline crack running close to the boy’s shoulder. He had traced his finger along it, over and over. He could still remember the course of the crack, the texture of the paint, the way the edges of it had bitten into his skin. He could remember his father’s bulk, the creak of the new boots he’d been given ready for starting his contract, the sound one of the chairs had made when he eventually sat on it, but his face was as blurred and tarnished as the mirror.

His father’s breath had been loud in the small room. It had smelled smoky, or maybe more like dust. He had knotted and unknotted a strap on the bag he was holding – he must have been leaving to go out to the farm that day. ‘I’ll get out,’ he’d said. ‘I’ll come back for you, okay?’ The boy remembered that; had always remembered it. And, for a time, he’d believed it too.

His hands would clench either side of the sink. Now here he was, instead.

For a moment, the wind would seem to drop and the rig would be quiet, almost silent. The lights would be low and seem to stretch for miles in the dark corridors. The corridors seemed to narrow and twist in on themselves, knotting the boy into the middle, the silence expanding and pressing in.

Then the wind would suddenly bawl, the air con would creak and whirr, the transformer would thrum from the floor below, and, deeper still, the waves would thud against the walls of the dock.

He was here to do the job. He just needed to focus on doing the job.

The boot-print didn’t match his own exactly – it was wider at the toe, and the heel was not worn-down like his was. The overalls were dirty and frayed where the boy would have repaired them. And he’d once tried the green sauce, dipping the tip of his finger in and licking it, and it had burned his tongue.

The boy would step back, breathe on the mirror and wipe away the clean circle with his sleeve.

Sometimes, on his way back to his room, another sound would work its way up through the vents from somewhere inside the rig. It would begin with something rasping, which would turn to an uneven rattle, then a stutter, like an engine struggling to start. The boy would follow it along the corridors, up the stairs and into the sleeping quarters. Sometimes it would stop for a moment and he would pause and wait. But it always started up again.

He’d first heard it a few weeks after he’d arrived on the farm. He’d followed the sound into the galley, where he’d found the old man curled on the floor, coughing and spasming. The boy had almost shouted for help, then remembered where they were. So he’d done the only thing he could – gone back out into the corridor and waited until he’d heard the old man get up and begin to move around again.

He would take his watch out of his pocket and count the numbers. Sometimes it only lasted a couple of minutes; other times it went on for longer.

He would wait a minute. Then two.

After that first time, he’d expected the old man to say something, to tell him what was wrong. But the old man had never mentioned it, and the boy had never mentioned it, and so that was how it stood.

All the boy knew was that it was better when the weather was warmer, worse when the old man spent hours out in the wind and rain checking his nets. A mug of homebrew seemed to hold it off, but if the old man got drunk and fell asleep at the galley table, he would always wake up coughing.

After a while the boy had begun to see it as just another thing that happened: like the glitches in the computer system, the leaks in the vents, the cracks that spread endlessly through the rig, which the boy fixed only to find them creeping back again, almost too delicate to see.

Five minutes. Six.

Sometimes the sound turned harsher, more drawn-out. Sometimes the boy would take a slow breath in and picture the old man curled up on the floor, each cough ringing out like a radar blip with nothing to return the signal.

Seven.

He would breathe out, put his watch in his pocket and walk quickly towards the old man’s room. But, just at that moment, the coughing would stop.

The boy would stand still and bend his head, listening. There would be no sound. Nothing would move. Then, from far off in the corridors, the dripping would start up again.

Junk (#u8fda608c-95e1-53c6-9079-583ad24c768c)

Field by field, row by row, the farm disappeared. First its outlines blurred and then it began to fade until blade was indistinguishable from tower, and tower from water, and water from the mist that settled over the sea. One by one, the cameras whited out, until the rig was completely cut off, like a component removed from a machine, then wrapped and packaged for transport.

The boy was in the control room early, working out the day’s schedule. There was a lot of work to do. The farm had dropped another per cent in the last week, and the latest report was showing twenty turbines in zone three that had all gone down with exactly the same electrical fault. They needed to get over there and see what was going on, before the whole zone outed.

He was about to get up when he heard the clang of the dock gates. The screens shifted from white to white to white. He clicked on the camera in the dock and saw that the gates were open. Beyond them, the mist stood like a wall, then buckled and slumped inside like a sheet of insulation being unrolled.

The boy switched on the satellite map and scrolled across until he found the symbol for the maintenance boat. It was making its way out towards zone two. The boy sat back and shook his head. The old man had got the jump on him – piloting through the mist to check on his nets. There must have been some shift in the tides overnight, or a current had pushed in that the old man had somehow been aware of. He knew things like that – he could sense fluxes and storms as if he had a magnet inside him.

Once they’d been eating in the galley, when suddenly the old man had sat up and said, ‘Something’s going on out there.’

They’d gone to the rec room and looked out of the window and it had seemed, for a moment, as if all the turbines were floating in mid-air, a strip of sky underneath each one, the jackets surrounded by clouds instead of water.

The boy imagined the old man’s blood prickling up like iron filings.

He would be out in the fields all day.

The boy got up and went out into the corridor. Then he came back and sat down again. The screen was still on the satellite map. It showed a pattern of bright green shapes against a background of vivid blue. However many times he looked at the map, he always had to take a moment to remind himself that those shapes were the churning, windswept fields and that static sheet of blue was the sea, rushing out there all around him.

This was the only map on the system and it showed nothing beyond the borders of the farm. The only signs of activity were a series of numbers next to each of the shapes, showing how many working turbines there were in the fields and the percentage of optimal output that each zone was running at. The specifics of corrosion, malfunction or weathering were invisible. The wind could be knocking on the shell of the rig, the waves sucking and tearing at the supports; but on the map everything would be static and silent. A wind farm with no wind, a sea with no currents or tides. The only record of a three-week storm would be a slight change in the numbers – all the damage of the wind and the waves, all those long, strung-out days and nights, reduced to a few altered digits.

The boy stared at the screen. The numbers flickered next to the shapes – two hundred and ninety-three turbines, fifty-five per cent; three hundred and seventeen turbines, forty-eight per cent; one hundred and two turbines, sixty-four per cent. The boy watched the numbers and tried not to think about how each percentage point would translate to hours working up in the nacelles, the days travelling across the farm, the spray flying across the deck, the cold splitting the skin on his knuckles as he tried to make repairs. How a whole day of work might add a percentage to the output, only for another thing to break and bring it back down again.

The boat’s symbol was moving slowly into zone two. The boy switched the screen back to the cameras but could see nothing through the dripping mist. Once, when the old man had taken the boat out early and left him stuck on the rig all day, he’d found the camera on the nearest turbine to where the old man had moored, and brought it up on the screen. He’d waited for the old man to haul up his net, for him to crouch down and sift through whatever it was he’d got in there. But the old man had just stood on the edge of the boat and stared down into the water. The water had been dark and creased. He’d stood there and stared down and the boy had waited a long time, but the old man never moved.

The computer system whirred and groaned. Another turbine went down in zone three.

Later, the old man would bring the boat back with the battery drained and the boy would have to waste half the next morning charging it before he could get out to do any work.

The boat’s symbol stopped. The old man must have moored up. He was probably standing out on deck right now, draped in mist, staring down, oblivious and unconcerned by all surface goings-on.

The boy sat in the galley and unpicked the last tangle of plastic from his line. He’d gone out to check on it, to pass some time, and found a huge shoal of bags that had drifted in overnight – a dark mass, silent and heavy, hanging in the fields as if they were waiting for something. Some of the bags had caught on his line and twisted it round the rig’s support. He’d lost the bottom three hooks just pulling it up from the water. He held one of the frayed sidelines up to the light. Was that a bootlace? He sat and looked at it for a minute, then unpicked it from the main line. Whatever it was, it had become brittle and weak. He placed it on the desk alongside the swathes of wet plastic that covered the surface.

Most of the bags were so bleached that their original colours could only be seen in their creases and folds. Some were so heavily degraded that, when he touched them, they turned to brittle flakes that stuck to his hands. Others were tough and flexible, stained with colours that the boy didn’t often see – red that was darker and richer than the warning signs on the rig; purple a bit like a bruise but lighter, more powdery; orange that was almost, but not quite, the same as the last of the flares he and the old man had let off, one by one, against the grey murk that hung over the farm for months without lifting. He picked up a green bag that still looked new, the logo and characters scrawled brightly down one side. He didn’t recognize any of them. It had to be older than him. In his lifetime the only places to buy anything were the Company stores. The ownership changed hands, the management came and went, but still every bag carried their logo. It was easy to forget that there were things that existed before the Company took over; that even the farm had been built long before then.

He stared at the characters for so long that they blurred together. Sometimes he tried to imagine what the bags had once carried, what people had bought. Sometimes there were twists of polystyrene caught inside, or chunks of Styrofoam that must have calved off a bigger piece. He would try and fit the pieces together and work out what they used to be, how long they would have been drifting. But the polystyrene chipped off under his nails and the Styrofoam bent and tore, until there was no way of knowing what any of it had been.

Somewhere in the walls, the pipes let out a long, low groan. He unsnagged the last bag and pushed the sodden pile to the edge of the table. They dripped slowly onto the floor. He needed to do something. He stood up quickly. Hooks. He needed to make more hooks. He went back to the control room and unzipped his toolbag. The pliers had gone. He needed the pliers to make the hooks. He searched through the bag twice, then zipped it back up. The old man must have taken them again. The boy stayed still for a moment, then he turned and walked out of the room and down the corridor.

The door to the old man’s room creaked softly. The boy opened it an inch at a time, until he heard it touch lightly against something. He squatted down, reached round and felt for the obstacle – a stack of four empty tins. He took hold of the bottom one and dragged the stack carefully across the tacky linoleum. As he pulled it round the edge of the door, he could see that the tins had been numbered and arranged with all but the third number facing into the room. All the doors to the sleeping quarters had locks, but the keycards were long lost, so the old man had developed his own elaborate precautions. The tins were an old system, but the numbers were new. The boy moved the stack out of the way, opened the door and stepped inside.

The room was laid out exactly the same as the boy’s; the only difference was that here the furniture was barely visible. The floor was a foot deep with twisted heaps of rusted metal, lumps of clay dried and cracking in pools of their own dust, piles of nets so stiff that, if you lifted them, they held their shape. A narrow path wound from the door to the bed, which was stacked with plastic crates. On top of the crates and spilling onto the floor were piles of paper – lists and tables, pages of scrawled notes and plans of the farm, all covered with indecipherable annotations, areas ticked and dotted and shaded with different-coloured pens. Some of the maps were old, from before the farm was built, and showed the seabed as if it were land – contour lines describing valleys and hills, a range of muted colours depicting the different rocks and minerals below the surface. The same red, yellow and black sediments streaked down the sides of the sink and made curved tide-lines on the floor beneath it. The sink was piled with half-cleaned objects, just beginning to appear from their shapeless crusts of mud and silt. It was just possible to make out slabs of water-blackened wood, bright stones and broken shells. Objects like these covered every surface of the room. They were stuffed into the chest of drawers and heaped in the open wardrobe and on top of the bedside unit.

The boy stepped slowly through the room, positioning his feet carefully on the narrow trail of clear floor. The edge of his boot caught on a pile of damp netting, dragging it greasily. He untangled himself and pushed the net back where it had been.

At first, it didn’t seem like anyone even lived there. It was only after a few moments that small signs of human life became noticeable. There were two worn T-shirts and a pair of overalls slung over the end of the bed. Beneath these, the bed itself was unused – the sheets tucked in under the mattress and a single pillow, uncreased, at the head. Next to the bed there was a frayed woollen blanket strewn over a striped deckchair. All over the floor there were empty bottles of cleaning fluid and coolant that the old man used to store his homebrew, along with half-eaten tins of food discarded among the debris, forks and spoons standing stiff in them.

There was only one space in the room that was always clear and clean – a small semicircle on top of the chest of drawers, where miniature picks, chisels and pliers were laid like expensive cutlery. Today, there was something else there. The boy went over and looked at it. He knew it was a bone; but the bones he found in the old man’s room were not like any he’d seen before he came to the farm. They were heavy, washed of colour and grainy to the touch – more like concrete than anything else. This one was a thick, squared ring, with ridges sticking out from its corners, almost like a cog. Which is what it was, really – a small part that had once made up a whole, a component taken from some lost machine.

The boy looked carefully at exactly where it had been left, then he picked it up. He wasn’t sure if he’d seen it before or not. The disorder of the room made it hard to tell. It seemed as though the contents changed every few months, but that could have just been an effect of the accumulating variety of dirt.

He wondered if the old man knew where the bone had come from. Or if he even cared. Most of the things in his room seemed to serve no purpose at all. His drawers were full of pins, discs and flakes of stone – so thin they were almost translucent – scratched with patterns of lines and dots. There were sharpened stone points, rocks worked into odd shapes, pebbles sanded down to accentuate their lumps and crevices. It had taken the boy a while to work out what they were meant to be – headless torsos with jutting breasts and smooth fat thighs that stirred strange thoughts he didn’t know he possessed. He didn’t look at them any more. If there ever had been a use for that stuff, there wasn’t now.

All those years out with his nets and this was all the old man had to show for it – fragments of things that could never be fixed, never be put back together again.

That was all that would be left of the farm one day too. The towers and blades would degrade; the rig would crumble into the sea. When the whole farm finally got eaten away, the only things left would be its plastic parts – the latches and hooks, clips and cable-ties – all the small disposable components that were never designed to last, but would stay, like the teeth of some enormous sea creature, shed and forgotten throughout its life, becoming, in the end, the only record of its existence.

It’d happen even sooner if the old man kept wasting all of his time trawling up junk from the seabed.

The boy looked down at the bone again. He scratched his thumbnail against the rough surface, blew lightly across the hole, drawing out a quavering note, like a whistle.

Whistling. He heard it again. Working its way through the rig. Up from the loading bay. He looked around, but there were no clocks in the old man’s room. He put the bone back carefully where it had been, turned and moved quickly to the door, catching the stack of tins with his heel and scattering them across the floor. He dropped down onto his knees and felt around. There was the faint scrape of a crate being unloaded from the boat. He found three of the tins, but the last one had rolled in between the piles of netting. He searched as fast as he could, trying not to disturb anything. A tangled mass of rusted metal shifted and began to topple. He grabbed it and moved it back so it was balancing again. He found a tin, but this one was half-full of coagulated protein mince, which slipped in a thick disc onto his hand.

A cough. Loud and sharp. Then another. The boy stopped moving and held his breath. Silence. Then the scrape of the crate again, near the bottom of the stairs. The boy wiped his hand on his leg and fumbled through the piles of netting until he found the last tin, tangled. He tried to get to the edge of the net, but gave up and wrenched a hole in the brittle mesh.

He stacked the tins shakily, numbers facing the door, which he slid round and pulled almost shut. Once on the other side, he kneeled down and manoeuvred the tins slowly into position. At the last moment, he remembered to turn the third number to face into the room. Which he had to do blind, eyes closed, head down.

He pulled his arm free, realized he hadn’t even looked for the pliers, closed the door and walked quickly along the corridor to his room. And winced as the stack of tins he’d built behind his own door crashed over and scattered across the floor.

c.8,200 Before Present (#u8fda608c-95e1-53c6-9079-583ad24c768c)

It ends with a wave. A single wave spreading across the horizon. A neat crease in the surface of things. As it spreads, it grows in height – ten feet, twenty feet, sixty feet. It hits a low island. There is barely a pause. Just, perhaps, a slight adjustment in direction and flow as the wave bends, folds, then passes on, leaving behind nothing but open sea.

So, water completes its work – of levelling, of pressing in at edges, of constantly seeking a return to an even surface, a steady state. And now it is only the way the sea peaks and rises into sudden, steep waves that hints at the landscape underneath – a ridge that was once an island; an island that was once a coastline; a coastline that was once a range of hills at the heart of a continent; a continent that was once frozen and covered over by ice.

For a hundred thousand years the water waited, locked up as crystal, sheet and shelf. All was immobile, but for the slow formation of arc and icicle, which was the water remembering the waves it used to be and the waves it would become again. The only sound was the crackle of frozen mud and ice rind, which was the water, down to its very molecules, repeating its mantra: solidity is nothing but an interruption to continuous flow, an obstacle to be overcome, an imbalance to be rectified.