Doggerland. Ben Smith
from control box to generator. When he’d finally got it functioning and checked the system, it turned out that the cable connecting the turbine to the grid had snapped somewhere along the seabed. Apparently, the old man had known about it for days, but hadn’t wanted to spoil the boy’s fun.
The screens moved from field to field. The images were in colour, but the sea came through in greyscale, slapping at the bases of the towers.
The old man looked from the boy to the bootlace and back to the boy. ‘Good catch,’ he said.
The boy watched the monitors. The sea slapped and slapped. ‘Where do you reckon it came from?’ he said.
The old man blinked. ‘What?’
‘The boot. The net was …’
‘What net?’
‘It was tangled in a net.’
‘You didn’t say anything about a net.’
‘It was just a net.’
‘You didn’t say anything about it.’
The boy folded the bootlace over in his palm. ‘It was just a net. It had floats, weights tied in …’
‘Weights.’ The old man chewed the word over, leaned back and took a sip from his mug. ‘What kind of weights?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You didn’t check?’
‘No.’
‘They were probably bricks.’
‘They weren’t the right shape.’
‘But you didn’t check.’
‘No.’
The old man nodded slowly. ‘They were probably bricks.’
The monitors switched from the galley to the rec room and back to the galley again. ‘I’d never use bricks,’ the old man said.
‘Okay,’ the boy said.
‘Okay?’ The old man leaned forward and tapped his finger against his temple. ‘Think about it. Where would I find bricks out here?’
‘I didn’t say you would find bricks out here.’
‘I wouldn’t find bricks out here.’
‘I know.’
‘Exactly.’ The old man raised his finger and swivelled his chair round to face the monitors again.
The boy could smell the salt from the bootlace, sticking to his skin. Salt had a very particular smell: sharp, metallic, but sometimes almost plant-like, as if it was alive rather than bits of mineral eroded from stone and dissolved in the sea. The old man swore it didn’t smell, but to the boy it was everywhere, tangy and brackish. Either that, or he needed to wash better. He tried to remember the feeling of any other substance – sand, mud, soil – but all he could think of was the sole of the boot, scoured clean. ‘It just made me think …’
The chair creaked as the old man swivelled it back round. ‘Cogs,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Heavy ones. They make the best weights.’
The boy thought for a moment. ‘That’s what they were. Cogs.’
‘What?’
‘On the net. That’s what they looked like.’
‘What net?’
‘The net,’ the boy said. ‘The one we were just talking about.’
The old man narrowed his eyes. ‘You said they were bricks.’
‘No, you said they were bricks.’
The old man reached under the desk and brought up a rectangular container with a small tap in one corner. He filled his mug. A smell somewhere between anti-rust and generator coolant swept over the room. ‘How would I know what they were?’ he said. ‘I didn’t even see them.’
One of the monitors showed nothing but the camera lens fogged with spray. The spray ran down and pooled in the corners of the screen, drip by drip by drip.
‘It must have come from somewhere, though,’ the boy said.
The old man held his mug halfway up to his mouth and watched the boy over the rim. ‘Somewhere?’ he said eventually.
‘I mean …’
‘It could have come from anywhere,’ the old man said.
‘Anywhere?’
‘It’s just klote.’
‘I know, but …’
‘It’s just klote.’
‘But don’t you think …’
‘Think!’ The old man swung his hand in the direction of the monitors, slopping his drink over the desk. ‘What good do you think thinking does?’ He banged his mug down and began wiping the desk with his sleeve. ‘It’s just a boot. It’s got bugger all to do with him.’
The boy’s chest tightened. He stood very still, then raised his hand and rubbed the side of his jaw.
‘And you look just like him when you do that,’ the old man said.
The boy dropped his hand to his side. He could hear his heart thumping in his ears; or was that the waves, thumping deep down against the rig’s supports? He put the lace in his pocket and stepped out into the corridor.
‘Jem.’
The boy stopped, half-turned. They would go for months without using each other’s names, so that, when they did, the words seemed random and unfixed, as if they could belong to anything – a tool or piece of machinery, or something that had just drifted through the farm.
‘What are you going to do with your bootlace?’ The old man spoke quietly. His eyes reflected the pale light of the monitors.
‘Put another hook on my line.’
The old man raised his mug. ‘Then we shall feast like kings on the fruits of the sea.’ He drank, shuddered.
The boy waited in the doorway. ‘Do you reckon there’s anything down there?’
The old man leaned back and cradled his mug in both hands. ‘There’s plenty down there.’
‘I meant …’ But it was too late. Soon the old man would say ‘a whole country, a whole continent’.
‘A whole country, a whole continent.’
The boy pressed his forehead against the doorframe. ‘Yeah, I know.’
‘Right here, just below us. Thousands of years ago, all this was land.’
‘I know.’
The old man closed his eyes. ‘Riverbeds, forests, open plains. Villages, fire-pits …’
The boy walked down the corridor until the old man’s voice was swallowed by the rig’s own creaks and mutterings.
He stood below the clock on the wall of his room – it read midday, or midnight. The ticking echoed in the still and empty space. He took his watch out of his pocket. He’d just cleaned the battery connectors and the display now read ‘3.30’.
The dots between the numbers flashed with each passing second. He watched them closely, looking out for any glitch, for any slowing of the mechanism; but the beats were steady and even. He watched for a minute exactly, then took a tiny screwdriver from his pocket and inserted it into a hole in the backplate. The display changed to ‘0.00’.
He sat down on his bunk, which was, like everything else in his room, bolted to the