Doggerland. Ben Smith

de-greasing gears and scouring the deck of the boat. Next to it was a bucket and cloth. The only colour came from the faded spines of three warped and torn technical manuals, which were stacked in the alcove beneath the bedside unit. Other than that, the room was the same as the day he’d arrived on the farm.

      He remembered following the old man through the corridors up from the dock. The smell of grease and rust. The sound of the ventilators. The hollow sound of his boots on metal. The old man had led him to his room and they had stood there in silence, the boy by the bed, the old man in the doorway, both looking down at the small pile of belongings that the boy had brought with him: his Company-issue clothes, his Company-issue kit, his Company-issue watch. The old man had cleared his throat, gestured to the sink, the cupboard, the drawers, then cleared his throat again. The boy had stared down at the folds in his high-vis jacket, his overalls. Each fold was sharp and precise. When he’d finally looked up, the old man had gone.

The boy had lain down on the mattress and stared at the ceiling. It looked like it was rocking. It pitched and rocked and he’d closed his eyes, almost thought he heard the old man coming back, his step outside the door. But no one came in. The mattress had been hard and lumpy under his shoulders. He remembered the particular way he’d had to curl up to sleep. Now it was smooth, worn-down, and fitted his body exactly.

      Which was the only way of telling how long he’d been out there; how long he’d been fixing the turbines, setting out his fishing line, having the same conversations with the old man; how long since he’d been sent out to take over his father’s contract.

      Sometimes, he tried to think back to his life before the farm – even that first boat ride over, the last moments onshore – but his memories were hazy and indistinct, the way the turbines, in squally weather, would churn up so much spray that all edges and outlines disappeared.

      He looked at his watch again. It was already a minute out of sync with the clock on the wall.

      He got up and left the room, making his way down to the control room, stepping automatically over the loose floor panels, ducking under the botched and rerouted ventilation pipes and avoiding the third step on the stairwell, which was covered in a clear, glue-like substance. The old man had put it there, long ago, after the boy had tried to talk to him about keeping the rig clean. The idea was that the boy would get it on the soles of his boots and then it would be him treading dirty footprints all around the rig. This had never happened, but every few days the old man replenished the glue and every few days the boy avoided it. They both found it a boring and exhausting chore, but it filled the time.

      The boy stood in the control-room doorway. ‘What time is it?’ he said.

The old man had his feet up on the desk. He shrugged. ‘System’s crashed again.’

      ‘It did that this morning.’

      ‘It’s done it again.’

      ‘Did you spill your drink on it?’

      ‘I only did that once.’ The processor chuntered and whined and the old man jabbed a button on the keyboard with his heel. ‘Not my fault if it can’t hold its liquor.’

      The boy waited in the doorway while it reloaded. ‘What time does it say?’

      The old man sighed and twisted one of the monitors with his foot until it was facing him. ‘Quarter past five.’

      ‘Quarter past five?’

      The old man shrugged again.

Nothing

      The air in the tower was brackish and humid, the light the same strange yellow as a cloud before it dissolves into sleet.

      The boy and the old man stood close, but not touching, in the turbine’s small service lift, the toolbag propped between them. The old man pushed a button and they lurched up, rising in silence, or as close to silence as it ever got out in the fields. There was always the sea, the slow pulse of the blades and generators. And the wind, twisting its coarse fibres through everything.

      They climbed higher and the noise increased. It was a hundred metres from jacket to nacelle and over that distance the wind speed grew until it forced itself in through every joint and rivet – between tower and nacelle, nacelle and hub, hub and spinner. All day, the boy would feel the thump of turbulence on metal, the vibrations making their way through his feet and hands into the cavities of his chest, until it seemed as though it was his own pulse knocking on the outer walls, wanting to come in.

‘Thick slices of roast beef,’ the old man said. ‘Rare. With gravy.’

      The boy looked at him. ‘Rare?’

      ‘Bloody.’

      The boy counted the sections of the tower as they passed the joins. ‘I know.’ He always counted the sections, even though each tower was identical – made up of huge cylinders of metal, stacked like tins.

      The lift doors opened and the boy picked up the toolbag and followed the old man out onto the gantry. They stopped at the bottom of a ladder and looked up at the hatch. It was rusted shut.

      ‘Quiche,’ the old man said. ‘Cheese and onion quiche.’ He’d been going on like this for over a week. The supply boat was late and they were running low on food.

      The boy shrugged.

      ‘What?’ the old man said.

      ‘I don’t know.’

      ‘You don’t know what it is, or you don’t know if you’d want to eat it?’

      ‘What’s the difference?’ The boy put the bag down at the foot of the ladder and looked up at the scalloped rust.

Each day, the farm’s automated system told them what jobs and repairs needed doing. There’d be a report through the computer on the rig, giving the turbine number, coordinates and details of the problem. The old technical manuals described the system as ‘smart’ – as well as controlling the direction the turbines faced, it could manage the output, slow the generators so they didn’t overheat, and feather the blades if the wind was too strong. It was designed to let the operators know only if something broke, prioritizing the most serious cases, running diagnostics and even suggesting what tools to bring.

      The boy often wondered if it had ever worked like that. After years of generating countless reports, the system was wrecked. It would say the problem was in a gearbox, when it was actually the yaw motor, or that the generator was faulty, when the blade controls were rusted out. Or it would send them to the wrong turbine completely and they would have to try and find out where the actual broken one might be – going round and round following the reports, like trying to follow the ramblings of a mind that was slowly unravelling.

      This was the third job they’d tried to do that day. At the first turbine, there had been nothing wrong at all. At the second, the computer had identified a simple rewiring job; but when they’d arrived, the whole front of the nacelle had been missing – spinner, blades, everything – leaving a hole like a gaping mouth.

      The boy took a drill out of the toolbag and searched around until he found a thick, worn bit, the thread ground down to smooth waves in the metal. He climbed up one rung of the ladder and got to work on the bolts in the rusted hinges. The drill jammed and cut out. He banged the battery pack against the ladder and it started up again. The bolts turned to a fine orange dust.

      ‘What would you pick then?’ the old man said. He leaned back against the handrail.

The boy reached for a pry bar. ‘I don’t know.’ He could feel the old man’s eyes at his back. Any moment he’d say something about the angle he was pushing at, or how the tip wasn’t in the right place. ‘I guess I’d pick that spicy stuff,’ he said.

      The old man closed his eyes and smiled. ‘Pie crusts, yeah. Golden and crisp.’

      ‘Crisp?’