Doggerland

‘It was in the cupboard.’

‘Give it here.’ The old man walked forward quickly and snatched it from the boy. ‘I thought I’d got rid of all these.’ He bent it in half and shoved it in his pocket.

The boy looked up at the old man. ‘What is it?’

‘Nothing.’

The water system groaned. The boy sat very still. His mouth felt suddenly dry. ‘Did he …?’

‘It’s nothing,’ the old man said again. He was about to say something else – his mouth moved, just a small twinge in the top corner, like a glitch between two wires – then he shook his head, turned and left the room.

Rain thumped against the rig. The boy didn’t move. The cold metal of the stool pressed into the backs of his legs. The old man was right; it was nothing. He should just forget it. There were more important things to focus on. They’d lost another percentage of output since the morning, and there would be more turbines down tomorrow. The rain would work itself through rivets. Rust would bloom out of chipped paint.

It’s not like there was much to forget anyway. One of the few clear memories he had was of the officials calling him in and asking him to sit down in one of their offices.

Unfortunate. That was what they’d said. It was unfortunate that his father had chosen to renege on his contract.

He couldn’t remember who had spoken, or how many people were in that brightly lit room. All he could remember was that the veneer on the desk had been peeling away at one corner. He’d thought about what glue he would have used if he’d had to stick it back down.

They’d explained things very carefully. How the boy’s position in the Company was affected. How the term of service had to be fulfilled and, as the only next of kin, this duty fell to him. It was unfortunate, they’d said, but it was policy. They went over the legal criteria and the job specifications, the duties and securities guaranteed. But they did not explain the one thing the boy most wanted to know.

‘What does “renege” mean?’ he’d once asked the old man, casually, in the middle of a job, like it was something he’d just read in one of his technical manuals.

The old man had looked at him for a long time out of the corner of his eye. His hand had moved to the ratchet in front of him, then stopped. ‘Give up,’ he’d said, finally.

Which was as much as he’d ever said on the subject. His face would darken and close over, as if a switch had clicked off. But it didn’t matter. The more time the boy spent on the farm, the more he knew what it meant. It was something to do with the endlessness. It was something to do with the fact that there was no way out. The boy would stand on the edge of the rig’s platform and look across the water. He knew, and he wanted to know, and he didn’t want to know anything; like the waves churning between the towers, rearing up and splitting and knocking back into each other.

He looked down at his meal, which had hardened into a stiff mass. He touched it with his fork, then pushed the pan slowly off the table and into the bin. It didn’t matter anyway. The food was packed with vitamins and supplements. A person could get by on less than a tin a day, and he’d already had vegetables for breakfast.

The water system groaned. The filters needed replacing and the water was already starting to taste brackish. It groaned again and the boy’s stomach chimed in. He hit it with the flat of his hand. His meal smoked slowly in the bin.

Cracks (#u8fda608c-95e1-53c6-9079-583ad24c768c)

At night, when the boy couldn’t sleep, he would take his toolbag, his welding torch and a bucket of rustproof paint and go out into the corridors; making repairs, chasing draughts, trying to shore things up.

There. He would stop and put out his hand, then move it around slowly. There was always a draught somewhere. Up in the corners of the corridor, where the two wall plates met, or around the edges of the floor, the wind would be crawling through rivets, working its way through the cracks in the metal.

Outside, the weather would circle and press in. The wind would pitch itself low and sonorous, so that it sounded like voices speaking from every bolt and screw. Rain would echo off every surface. The boy would reach up and press his finger to the crack, feeling for the colder air. That was all there was – just a few sheets of corroding metal – separating him from the dark.

He would take out a tub of filler and get to work. He liked the way the filler smelled when it was damp – the gritty, chemical tang of it. He would lean close to the wall and breathe it in. Sometimes he would dip the pads of his fingers into the tub, wait for them to dry, then peel the curved pieces off one by one.

As he worked, he would recite from the technical manuals he kept in his room. ‘There are several systems in place to prevent failures caused by adverse conditions.’ He knew all three of the manuals by heart. ‘The ride-through system prevents low-voltage disconnect by …’ Then something would start dripping somewhere up in the vents. He would tell himself that he’d checked them all recently and made sure they were sealed. It might just be condensation. If the dripping was regular then it was just condensation. He would stop and listen, measuring the sound against his heartbeat. It sounded regular. He breathed out. But what if his heart wasn’t beating regularly? He would stop breathing and listen, and his wretched heart would begin an irregular beat.

The wind would knock against the rig and throw rain like punches.

‘The ride-through system prevents …’

The dripping would continue, each drop hitting the vent in exactly the same place, chipping away at the metal, molecule by molecule, millimetre by millimetre. Soon it would wear away a dent, then a divot, then a hole; then it would begin its work again on the layer below. Given time, a single drop of water would carve out a tunnel through every level of the rig.

The boy would reach for a screwdriver to open the vent but, just at that moment, the dripping would stop.

However much he tried to vary his route, to stay down in the dock or transformer housing, or keep to the upper levels, he always found himself working over to the washroom on the second floor. He would leave his tools by the door and cross the room to stand, in the dim light, staring at the mirror, which was tarnished and blotched with rust, except for two circles kept clean from years of polishing – one the right height for the old man and the other, almost a foot higher, which had stayed unused for years but now framed the boy’s face exactly.

He would stand and stare into the mirror and think about the other things he’d found over the years. An oil-stained boot mark – too big for the old man, but almost the same size as the boy’s – under the desk in the control room. A dusty set of overalls balled up on the floor of a wardrobe in one of the dormitories. A smudge on one of the pages in the cookbook that was there before the boy had first opened it. And, at the back of one of the cupboards in the galley, a bottle of strange green sauce that the old man hated, but had been almost empty when the boy arrived on the farm.

Then there were the things he’d noticed. The way that the old man would automatically pass him sweetener for his tea, even though he’d never used it in his life. How the old man would frown at the way he laid out his tools before a job. The way the old man would stare, when they were eating, when they were out on the boat, whenever he thought the boy wasn’t watching.

The boy would lean forward towards his reflection and open his eyes wide. Had his skin always been that pale – almost grey? The same grey as the walls and the floor. He would reach up and touch his cheek, his forehead, to make sure they had not in fact turned to metal. White moons would appear where he pressed his fingertips, and take a long time to fade.

There was just one meeting he could recall. A small room, rows of orange plastic chairs bolted to the floor, lining two walls. The boy had been sitting on one of them, his feet barely touching the floor. His father had been standing. The paint on the walls was flaking and there was a hairline crack running close to the boy’s shoulder. He had traced his finger along it, over and over. He could still remember the course of the crack, the texture of the paint, the way the edges of it had bitten into his skin. He could remember his father’s bulk, the creak of the new boots he’d been given ready for starting his contract, the sound one of the chairs had made when he eventually sat on it, but his face was as blurred and tarnished as the mirror.

His father’s breath had been loud in the small room. It had smelled smoky, or maybe more like dust. He had knotted and unknotted a strap on the bag he was holding – he must have been leaving to go out to the 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.