Doggerland. Ben Smith

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СКАЧАТЬ farm that day. ‘I’ll get out,’ he’d said. ‘I’ll come back for you, okay?’ The boy remembered that; had always remembered it. And, for a time, he’d believed it too.

      His hands would clench either side of the sink. Now here he was, instead.

For a moment, the wind would seem to drop and the rig would be quiet, almost silent. The lights would be low and seem to stretch for miles in the dark corridors. The corridors seemed to narrow and twist in on themselves, knotting the boy into the middle, the silence expanding and pressing in.

      Then the wind would suddenly bawl, the air con would creak and whirr, the transformer would thrum from the floor below, and, deeper still, the waves would thud against the walls of the dock.

      He was here to do the job. He just needed to focus on doing the job.

      The boot-print didn’t match his own exactly – it was wider at the toe, and the heel was not worn-down like his was. The overalls were dirty and frayed where the boy would have repaired them. And he’d once tried the green sauce, dipping the tip of his finger in and licking it, and it had burned his tongue.

      The boy would step back, breathe on the mirror and wipe away the clean circle with his sleeve.

      Sometimes, on his way back to his room, another sound would work its way up through the vents from somewhere inside the rig. It would begin with something rasping, which would turn to an uneven rattle, then a stutter, like an engine struggling to start. The boy would follow it along the corridors, up the stairs and into the sleeping quarters. Sometimes it would stop for a moment and he would pause and wait. But it always started up again.

He’d first heard it a few weeks after he’d arrived on the farm. He’d followed the sound into the galley, where he’d found the old man curled on the floor, coughing and spasming. The boy had almost shouted for help, then remembered where they were. So he’d done the only thing he could – gone back out into the corridor and waited until he’d heard the old man get up and begin to move around again.

      He would take his watch out of his pocket and count the numbers. Sometimes it only lasted a couple of minutes; other times it went on for longer.

      He would wait a minute. Then two.

      After that first time, he’d expected the old man to say something, to tell him what was wrong. But the old man had never mentioned it, and the boy had never mentioned it, and so that was how it stood.

      All the boy knew was that it was better when the weather was warmer, worse when the old man spent hours out in the wind and rain checking his nets. A mug of homebrew seemed to hold it off, but if the old man got drunk and fell asleep at the galley table, he would always wake up coughing.

      After a while the boy had begun to see it as just another thing that happened: like the glitches in the computer system, the leaks in the vents, the cracks that spread endlessly through the rig, which the boy fixed only to find them creeping back again, almost too delicate to see.

      Five minutes. Six.

      Sometimes the sound turned harsher, more drawn-out. Sometimes the boy would take a slow breath in and picture the old man curled up on the floor, each cough ringing out like a radar blip with nothing to return the signal.

      Seven.

He would breathe out, put his watch in his pocket and walk quickly towards the old man’s room. But, just at that moment, the coughing would stop.

      The boy would stand still and bend his head, listening. There would be no sound. Nothing would move. Then, from far off in the corridors, the dripping would start up again.

Junk

      Field by field, row by row, the farm disappeared. First its outlines blurred and then it began to fade until blade was indistinguishable from tower, and tower from water, and water from the mist that settled over the sea. One by one, the cameras whited out, until the rig was completely cut off, like a component removed from a machine, then wrapped and packaged for transport.

      The boy was in the control room early, working out the day’s schedule. There was a lot of work to do. The farm had dropped another per cent in the last week, and the latest report was showing twenty turbines in zone three that had all gone down with exactly the same electrical fault. They needed to get over there and see what was going on, before the whole zone outed.

He was about to get up when he heard the clang of the dock gates. The screens shifted from white to white to white. He clicked on the camera in the dock and saw that the gates were open. Beyond them, the mist stood like a wall, then buckled and slumped inside like a sheet of insulation being unrolled.

      The boy switched on the satellite map and scrolled across until he found the symbol for the maintenance boat. It was making its way out towards zone two. The boy sat back and shook his head. The old man had got the jump on him – piloting through the mist to check on his nets. There must have been some shift in the tides overnight, or a current had pushed in that the old man had somehow been aware of. He knew things like that – he could sense fluxes and storms as if he had a magnet inside him.

      Once they’d been eating in the galley, when suddenly the old man had sat up and said, ‘Something’s going on out there.’

      They’d gone to the rec room and looked out of the window and it had seemed, for a moment, as if all the turbines were floating in mid-air, a strip of sky underneath each one, the jackets surrounded by clouds instead of water.

      The boy imagined the old man’s blood prickling up like iron filings.

      He would be out in the fields all day.

      The boy got up and went out into the corridor. Then he came back and sat down again. The screen was still on the satellite map. It showed a pattern of bright green shapes against a background of vivid blue. However many times he looked at the map, he always had to take a moment to remind himself that those shapes were the churning, windswept fields and that static sheet of blue was the sea, rushing out there all around him.

This was the only map on the system and it showed nothing beyond the borders of the farm. The only signs of activity were a series of numbers next to each of the shapes, showing how many working turbines there were in the fields and the percentage of optimal output that each zone was running at. The specifics of corrosion, malfunction or weathering were invisible. The wind could be knocking on the shell of the rig, the waves sucking and tearing at the supports; but on the map everything would be static and silent. A wind farm with no wind, a sea with no currents or tides. The only record of a three-week storm would be a slight change in the numbers – all the damage of the wind and the waves, all those long, strung-out days and nights, reduced to a few altered digits.

      The boy stared at the screen. The numbers flickered next to the shapes – two hundred and ninety-three turbines, fifty-five per cent; three hundred and seventeen turbines, forty-eight per cent; one hundred and two turbines, sixty-four per cent. The boy watched the numbers and tried not to think about how each percentage point would translate to hours working up in the nacelles, the days travelling across the farm, the spray flying across the deck, the cold splitting the skin on his knuckles as he tried to make repairs. How a whole day of work might add a percentage to the output, only for another thing to break and bring it back down again.

The boat’s symbol was moving slowly into zone two. The boy switched the screen back to the cameras but could see nothing through the dripping mist. Once, when the old man had taken the СКАЧАТЬ