Doggerland. Ben Smith
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.
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.