Doggerland. Ben Smith

weaknesses – small differences that sprawled over time into repeated malfunctions or whole areas of the nacelle half-digested by rust. Some of the newer models were meant to be more resilient – better seals round the circuitry, fewer moving parts – but nothing stayed new or resilient for long.

      The boy went over to the control panel, where a row of lights had gone out. He signalled to the old man, who sighed, opened the zip pocket at the front of his overalls and took out a decrepit tablet – two sides thick with tape and a crack in the corner of the screen, dark lines spreading across it like veins. The old man came over, plugged it into the control panel, tapped at the screen and then said something.

      ‘What?’ the boy shouted.

      The old man cupped a hand over his ear. ‘What?’ he shouted back.

      ‘I said “what”,’ the boy shouted, louder.

The old man stared at him for a moment, then put down the tablet and went to the front of the nacelle, removed the panel leading in to the rotor hub and crawled inside. After a few seconds, the blades slowed then stilled. The boy took out three LED lamps and positioned them round the nacelle, then reached up and closed the roof hatch. For a moment, it was almost like silence. The old man backed out of the hub and returned to the tablet. He tapped at it again and nodded, which meant he didn’t know what was wrong.

      ‘What is it?’ the boy said eventually.

      The old man tapped at the tablet. ‘Huài diào.’

      ‘Huài diào?’

      The old man shrugged.

      ‘Which bit?’

      The old man gestured towards the control panel. ‘All of it.’

      The boy took a step forward. ‘Let me see.’

      The old man unplugged the tablet and put it back in his pocket. ‘No point. Don’t know where the problem is. We’d need the control panel to tell us.’

      The boy took a screwdriver out of his pocket and began to remove the casing of the control panel. ‘I can work it out.’

      The old man folded his arms. ‘Waste of time.’

      The boy removed the casing. Underneath there was a tangle of frayed and rusting circuitry.

      ‘See,’ the old man said.

      The boy eased two wires apart with his screwdriver. Flakes of rust crumbled onto his hand.

      ‘Got plenty to be getting on with,’ the old man said. ‘But if you want to spend all day playing electrician.’ He leaned against the gearbox and closed his eyes.

The boy stood in front of the control panel. It was probably just a circuit board, or a few transistors. He could see what he needed to do with the wires. But if it wasn’t, he’d end up there for hours and then they wouldn’t have the right spares anyway. And it’d be another day wasted. A handful of electrical components. Everything else in the turbine was fine, but without the control panel the nacelle wouldn’t be able to change direction, or the blades adjust their speed. A strong wind from the wrong direction and the whole hub could get torn off.

      He shoved the screwdriver back into his pocket. ‘Fine,’ he said.

      The old man opened one eye. ‘What was that?’

      The boy didn’t reply. He just started unpacking the spare holdalls from the toolbag and they began to strip the nacelle.

      Within half an hour they’d taken apart the generator and gearbox. The old man had removed anything useful from the rotor hub and packed it carefully in one of the bags. Then they unscrewed the panelling from the walls and bedplate, following lengths of copper wire, which they pulled out and wound into coils.

      The boy took the first load down the lift and out to where the maintenance boat was moored to the jacket. The rain had set in, bleaching sharply from the west. He bowed his head to stop it hitting his eyes. This was how he thought of the weather: in terms of how much you had to bow. Sometimes he had to bend double, hauling himself along by railing and rung; sometimes it drove him to his knees.

He found some more bags in the cabin and sent them up in the lift, then waited at the foot of the tower. He could make so many repairs with the spare parts they’d just taken – they’d last for months, he could even go back and fix some of the turbines they’d had to shut down. But there was no point thinking like that. The old man kept all the parts so that he could trade for extras when the supply boat came.

      The boy had only once questioned this, saying why couldn’t they use some of the parts to make repairs?

      ‘Why do you care?’ the old man had said.

      The boy had thought about it for a long time. About all the different ways the turbines seemed to groan; how a faulty motor would emit a small dry gasp just before it gave out; how plastic creaked like his own joints when he’d been kneeling in a spinner housing too long.

      He hadn’t been able to answer.

      The boat moved slowly through the farm – a dark dot among the 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