Doggerland. Ben Smith

Doggerland - Ben  Smith


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he found in the old man’s room were not like any he’d seen before he came to the farm. They were heavy, washed of colour and grainy to the touch – more like concrete than anything else. This one was a thick, squared ring, with ridges sticking out from its corners, almost like a cog. Which is what it was, really – a small part that had once made up a whole, a component taken from some lost machine.

      The boy looked carefully at exactly where it had been left, then he picked it up. He wasn’t sure if he’d seen it before or not. The disorder of the room made it hard to tell. It seemed as though the contents changed every few months, but that could have just been an effect of the accumulating variety of dirt.

      All those years out with his nets and this was all the old man had to show for it – fragments of things that could never be fixed, never be put back together again.

      That was all that would be left of the farm one day too. The towers and blades would degrade; the rig would crumble into the sea. When the whole farm finally got eaten away, the only things left would be its plastic parts – the latches and hooks, clips and cable-ties – all the small disposable components that were never designed to last, but would stay, like the teeth of some enormous sea creature, shed and forgotten throughout its life, becoming, in the end, the only record of its existence.

      It’d happen even sooner if the old man kept wasting all of his time trawling up junk from the seabed.

      The boy looked down at the bone again. He scratched his thumbnail against the rough surface, blew lightly across the hole, drawing out a quavering note, like a whistle.

      A cough. Loud and sharp. Then another. The boy stopped moving and held his breath. Silence. Then the scrape of the crate again, near the bottom of the stairs. The boy wiped his hand on his leg and fumbled through the piles of netting until he found the last tin, tangled. He tried to get to the edge of the net, but gave up and wrenched a hole in the brittle mesh.

      He stacked the tins shakily, numbers facing the door, which he slid round and pulled almost shut. Once on the other side, he kneeled down and manoeuvred the tins slowly into position. At the last moment, he remembered to turn the third number to face into the room. Which he had to do blind, eyes closed, head down.

      He pulled his arm free, realized he hadn’t even looked for the pliers, closed the door and walked quickly along the corridor to his room. And winced as the stack of tins he’d built behind his own door crashed over and scattered across the floor.

      It ends with a wave. A single wave spreading across the horizon. A neat crease in the surface of things. As it spreads, it grows in height – ten feet, twenty feet, sixty feet. It hits a low island. There is barely a pause. Just, perhaps, a slight adjustment in direction and flow as the wave bends, folds, then passes on, leaving behind nothing but open sea.

      So, water completes its work – of levelling, of pressing in at edges, of constantly seeking a return to an even surface, a steady state. And now it is only the way the sea peaks and rises into sudden, steep waves that hints at the landscape underneath – a ridge that was once an island; an island that was once a coastline; a coastline that was once a range of hills at the heart of a continent; a continent that was once frozen and covered over by ice.

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