Doggerland

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. Mostly it was the weather getting in: crumbling seals on the hatches, loose rivets, scratches in the paintwork admitting the narrow end of a wedge of damp and corrosion. There were several different models on the farm and each had their own 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?’