Doggerland. Ben Smith

Either that, or he needed to wash better. He tried to remember the feeling of any other substance – sand, mud, soil – but all he could think of was the sole of the boot, scoured clean. ‘It just made me think …’

      The chair creaked as the old man swivelled it back round. ‘Cogs,’ he said.

      ‘What?’

      ‘Heavy ones. They make the best weights.’

      The boy thought for a moment. ‘That’s what they were. Cogs.’

      ‘What?’

      ‘On the net. That’s what they looked like.’

      ‘What net?’

      ‘The net,’ the boy said. ‘The one we were just talking about.’

      The old man narrowed his eyes. ‘You said they were bricks.’

      ‘No, you said they were bricks.’

      The old man reached under the desk and brought up a rectangular container with a small tap in one corner. He filled his mug. A smell somewhere between anti-rust and generator coolant swept over the room. ‘How would I know what they were?’ he said. ‘I didn’t even see them.’

      One of the monitors showed nothing but the camera lens fogged with spray. The spray ran down and pooled in the corners of the screen, drip by drip by drip.

      ‘It must have come from somewhere, though,’ the boy said.

      The old man held his mug halfway up to his mouth and watched the boy over the rim. ‘Somewhere?’ he said eventually.

      ‘I mean …’

      ‘It could have come from anywhere,’ the old man said.

      ‘Anywhere?’

‘It’s just klote.’

      ‘I know, but …’

      ‘It’s just klote.’

      ‘But don’t you think …’

      ‘Think!’ The old man swung his hand in the direction of the monitors, slopping his drink over the desk. ‘What good do you think thinking does?’ He banged his mug down and began wiping the desk with his sleeve. ‘It’s just a boot. It’s got bugger all to do with him.’

      The boy’s chest tightened. He stood very still, then raised his hand and rubbed the side of his jaw.

      ‘And you look just like him when you do that,’ the old man said.

      The boy dropped his hand to his side. He could hear his heart thumping in his ears; or was that the waves, thumping deep down against the rig’s supports? He put the lace in his pocket and stepped out into the corridor.

      ‘Jem.’

      The boy stopped, half-turned. They would go for months without using each other’s names, so that, when they did, the words seemed random and unfixed, as if they could belong to anything – a tool or piece of machinery, or something that had just drifted through the farm.

      ‘What are you going to do with your bootlace?’ The old man spoke quietly. His eyes reflected the pale light of the monitors.

      ‘Put another hook on my line.’

      The old man raised his mug. ‘Then we shall feast like kings on the fruits of the sea.’ He drank, shuddered.

The boy waited in the doorway. ‘Do you reckon there’s anything down there?’

      The old man leaned back and cradled his mug in both hands. ‘There’s plenty down there.’

      ‘I meant …’ But it was too late. Soon the old man would say ‘a whole country, a whole continent’.

      ‘A whole country, a whole continent.’

      The boy pressed his forehead against the doorframe. ‘Yeah, I know.’

      ‘Right here, just below us. Thousands of years ago, all this was land.’

      ‘I know.’

      The old man closed his eyes. ‘Riverbeds, forests, open plains. Villages, fire-pits …’

      The boy walked down the corridor until the old man’s voice was swallowed by the rig’s own creaks and mutterings.

      He stood below the clock on the wall of his room – it read midday, or midnight. The ticking echoed in the still and empty space. He took his watch out of his pocket. He’d just cleaned the battery connectors and the display now read ‘3.30’.

      The dots between the numbers flashed with each passing second. He watched them closely, looking out for any glitch, for any slowing of the mechanism; but the beats were steady and even. He watched for a minute exactly, then took a tiny screwdriver from his pocket and inserted it into a hole in the backplate. The display changed to ‘0.00’.

He sat down on his bunk, which was, like everything else in his room, bolted to the wall and made of grey painted metal. His room, although there was little to show for it. There was a ten-litre container of cleaning fluid under the sink – the sort used for 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