Doggerland. Ben Smith

pale rows, rising and sinking as it cut through the swell. The boy sat in the open stern, his back braced against the cabin, watching the boat’s wake spooling out behind them until it was pulled apart by the cross-currents, leaving no trace of their passage. Spray hissed against the deck and he looked up, then cursed under his breath. They should have been travelling south, but the boat had turned north, up into zone two. He knew because the corrosion on the towers was always worse on the south-west side – the metal blistered and peeling as if it had been subjected to flame.

      He got up and opened the cabin door. The old man was standing at the wheel, squinting out of the cracked windscreen.

‘How’s the battery doing?’ the boy said. He looked over at the gauge – the dial was about halfway. Out in the swell and chop of the fields it was impossible to know how long the battery would last. Cutting back against a strong current, it could drain fast. There were spares, but they were old and even more unreliable. There were times when they’d miscalculated and been forced to drift the boat, only using the engine to change direction. Once, when both spares were dead, their only option had been to moor up to a turbine and try to charge them off the main supply. Which the boy managed to do; but only after fusing one battery into a solid lump and being thrown twice against the tower’s far wall.

      ‘I’m running her slow,’ the old man said.

      ‘The gauge has been playing up.’

      ‘I’m running her slow.’

      The boy went in and closed the cabin door. ‘How far’s the next job?’

      The old man didn’t answer.

      ‘There’s four more turbines on the list.’

      ‘It’s been a good day’s work.’

      ‘We haven’t fixed anything.’

      The old man squinted out of the windscreen again. ‘We’ve got what we need.’

      The boy’s face was stinging in the cabin’s dry heat. ‘We should at least try and fix one.’

      ‘What if it needs parts?’

      ‘It might not need parts.’

‘But it might need parts.’ The old man adjusted the wheel. ‘And if we go fixing turbines with parts we’ve salvaged, we’ll have to go around trying to find another turbine we can’t fix, so we can get the parts back, all the while hoping we don’t find one we can fix that will take another part that we’ve salvaged, which we’ll then have to try and replace from somewhere else.’

      ‘So we’re not going to do any more work?’

      ‘We can do some after,’ the old man said. ‘If there’s time.’

      The boy shook his head. There wouldn’t be time. There was never time to do anything else when the old man took them off to check on his nets.

      ‘Five,’ the boy said. ‘You owe me five tins now.’

      The old man muttered that it was only four, it was definitely only four, but the boy had already gone back outside.

      At any one time, the old man would have around a dozen nets scattered across the farm. If there was a system to their positioning, the boy could not fathom it. All he knew was that the old man spent days and nights studying tide charts and weather reports, making calculations, scrawling pages of notes and coordinates. The boy could almost have understood it, if the old man had been trying to catch fish.

      But the old man wasn’t fishing. He would string his nets between two turbines so they hung down to the seabed, then he would lower a twisted piece of turbine foundation from the stern of the boat and start to trawl: churning up the silt and clay, working loose whatever it was that he thought was down there.

He would talk about homes and settlements – a place that had flooded thousands of years ago. He would talk about woods and hills and rivers, and he would trade away crate-loads of turbine parts for maps that showed the seabed as if it were land, surveys from before the farm was built – the paper thin and flaky as rust – that described the density and make-up of the ground beneath the water. Every resupply he would trade for a new chart, or a new trawling tool, and then he would reposition his nets, rewrite his coordinates, and start the whole bloody process again.

      The boat slowed. Up ahead there was a line of plastic bottles floating on the water. The old man piloted the boat in a wide arc towards the base of the nearest turbine, coming in slow until the scooped-out bow fitted round the curve of the jacket. The engine stopped and the old man came out on deck.

      The boy went back into the cabin and lay on the floor. The boat swayed. The battery gauge hummed. The boy brought his hand up slowly and rubbed along his jaw.

      Outside, the farm stretched away in every direction, the towers spreading out in rows, like the spokes of a wheel. Navigating through the farm, it sometimes felt like only the fields were moving. Whenever the boat turned, the towers would align along different vectors, and whenever the weather changed, the blades would shift position to face into the wind. There were whole zones that the boy had never even visited – fields well beyond the range of the boat’s decrepit battery.

When the boy was out on his own he had to rely on the boat’s satnav. He had tried to learn to use it less, but somehow he could never translate the satellite map’s clean, segmented regions into the vastness of the farm. He had tried to talk to the old man about it, about how, wherever you were in the farm, it always felt like you were in the exact centre, like you could go on for ever and never find an edge against which to take a bearing. But the old man had just looked at him. ‘Still using the satnav?’ he’d said.

      The boat rocked and shifted round the tower. Outside, the turbines started to move. The movement began on one horizon then spread like a ripple, as if a crowd of people, one by one, had noticed something and were silently turning to stare. The boy felt the old man step back down onto the boat, the scraping of the line against the side, then finally a series of heavy thuds as armfuls of net were hauled up onto the deck. As he worked, the old man hummed the strange tunes he sometimes hummed – mixed-up bits of adverts and songs for which the boy had no reference.

      The sky turned brown and dim, like old water left sitting in a bucket. Soon, the last light would dip into the haze that always hung thick in the west. The boy got up and opened the cabin door.

      Murky rain swathed everything. The old man was crouching down sorting through a pile of bottles, plastic bags, chunks of concrete and sludge-coated lumps. His hair was soaking and pools of rain gleamed in the creases of his coat. He hadn’t even bothered to put his hood up. Eventually he stood, picked everything up and dumped it all over the side of the boat.

      ‘Good catch,’ the boy said, as the old man kicked the last shreds of plastic through the scuppers and back into the sea.

The boy read the instructions one more time. There was an open cookbook and a tin of re-formed vegetables on the counter, both stamped with a fading Company logo.

      He put a frying pan on the nearest hotplate, opened the tin and emptied it into a bowl. Then he went to the crate in the corner of the room, where they kept all the empties, and found one that had contained protein mince. He wiped the inside with his finger and smeared the congealed fat on the surface of the pan, then turned on the heat. From the bowl, he selected the larger vegetables – orange discs, bulbous white and green florets – and added them to the pan. The fat was hot, but still congealed. It stuck to the vegetables in small white beads. The boy turned the heat up and pushed the vegetables around the pan with a spatula. They began to hiss and disintegrate, so he stopped moving them.

      He watched the timer on the cooker and, after a minute exactly, added the other vegetables – small orbs and cubes – and left them popping in the pan. Then he turned back to the book. It said serve with potatoes. The boy didn’t know what potatoes were. From the picture, they looked like the vacuum-packed starch blocks they sometimes got on the resupply. A gritty white powder that you boiled in water until it formed a