Doggerland. Ben Smith

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?’

      ‘Of course. Got to be crisp.’

      ‘How could it be crisp?’

      ‘How couldn’t it be crisp?’

      ‘Because it comes in a tin.’

      ‘Pie crusts in a tin?’

      ‘Pie crusts?’

      The old man breathed out heavily. ‘What’s the point in saying something if you don’t know what it is?’

      ‘I do know what it is.’ The boy pushed harder against the pry bar. ‘I just don’t know what it’s got to do with anything.’

      ‘Then why did you say pie crusts?’

      ‘I said spicy stuff.’

      ‘Jesus.’ The old man rubbed his forehead with his palm. ‘You can’t choose that.’

      ‘Why not?’

      ‘Because that would mean that out of anything – anything – that you could choose to arrive on the next supply boat, you’d choose spiced protein.’

Tins, dried goods and vacuum-packed blocks – this was all the food the supply boat ever brought. There would be chewy cubes of some kind of curd and packets of compressed rice. The spiced protein was the only thing with any flavour, so it was always the first to go. They used it to bet with, and as payment for getting out of jobs they didn’t want to do. The old man owed him four already. In the time leading up to the resupply, there would only be tinned vegetables left – gelatinous carbohydrates moulded into the shapes of things that once grew. They were pallid and starchy, and left a powdery residue that coated the tongue and teeth. With the boat being late, that was all they’d tasted for weeks. The only thing that gave the boy any solace was that the old man hated them even more than he did.

      He pushed harder, but the pry bar slipped and he cracked his knuckles on the hatch. He dropped the pry bar in the bag, then clenched and unclenched his fists one by one.

      ‘Could have told you that would happen,’ the old man said.

      The boy laid his palms flat against the hatch, braced against the lowest rung of the ladder and pushed the hatch up into the nacelle.

      The old man went up first. No lights came on. Once, the boy had gone up into a nacelle and all the switches had been gently smouldering, molten plastic dripping down the walls like candle wax. There was a bang and muttered swearing, the flicking of buttons, then a screech of metal as the old man opened the roof hatch, letting in a shaft of daylight and a blast of sound.

The computer had said that the problem was with the generator, but when the boy climbed up he could see straight away that the generator was working fine. He blinked twice in the daylight, rubbed a hand over his eyes, then began checking each of the components.

      There were a lot of ways that a turbine could go wrong.