Doggerland. Ben Smith

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 better, sometimes it was worse. Sometimes they would get spares on the quarterly supply boat, but more often they didn’t. Sometimes the boy would pick a turbine and keep returning to it, on his own, until it was fixed. He’d once spent ten days going out to a single turbine, working through each component one by one. There had been something at almost every stage from control box to generator. When he’d finally got it functioning and checked the system, it turned out that the cable connecting the turbine to the grid had snapped somewhere along the seabed. Apparently, the old man had known about it for days, but hadn’t wanted to spoil the boy’s fun.

      The screens moved from field to field. The images were in colour, but the sea came through in greyscale, slapping at the bases of the towers.

      The old man looked from the boy to the bootlace and back to the boy. ‘Good catch,’ he said.

      The boy watched the monitors. The sea slapped and slapped. ‘Where do you reckon it came from?’ he said.

      The old man blinked. ‘What?’

      ‘The boot. The net was …’

      ‘What net?’

      ‘It was tangled in a net.’

      ‘You didn’t say anything about a net.’

      ‘It was just a net.’

      ‘You didn’t say anything about it.’

      The boy folded the bootlace over in his palm. ‘It was just a net. It had floats, weights tied in …’

‘Weights.’ The old man chewed the word over, leaned back and took a sip from his mug. ‘What kind of weights?’

      ‘I don’t know.’

      ‘You didn’t check?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘They were probably bricks.’

      ‘They weren’t the right shape.’

      ‘But you didn’t check.’

      ‘No.’

      The old man nodded slowly. ‘They were probably bricks.’

      The monitors switched from the galley to the rec room and back to the galley again. ‘I’d never use bricks,’ the old man said.

      ‘Okay,’ the boy said.

      ‘Okay?’ The old man leaned forward and tapped his finger against his temple. ‘Think about it. Where would I find bricks out here?’

      ‘I didn’t say you would find bricks out here.’

      ‘I wouldn’t find bricks out here.’

      ‘I know.’

      ‘Exactly.’ The old man raised his finger and swivelled his chair round to face the monitors again.

The boy could smell the salt from the bootlace, sticking to his skin. Salt had