Doggerland. Ben Smith

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