Doggerland. Ben Smith
the boy said. ‘You owe me five tins now.’
The old man muttered that it was only four, it was definitely only four, but the boy had already gone back outside.
At any one time, the old man would have around a dozen nets scattered across the farm. If there was a system to their positioning, the boy could not fathom it. All he knew was that the old man spent days and nights studying tide charts and weather reports, making calculations, scrawling pages of notes and coordinates. The boy could almost have understood it, if the old man had been trying to catch fish.
But the old man wasn’t fishing. He would string his nets between two turbines so they hung down to the seabed, then he would lower a twisted piece of turbine foundation from the stern of the boat and start to trawl: churning up the silt and clay, working loose whatever it was that he thought was down there.
He would talk about homes and settlements – a place that had flooded thousands of years ago. He would talk about woods and hills and rivers, and he would trade away crate-loads of turbine parts for maps that showed the seabed as if it were land, surveys from before the farm was built – the paper thin and flaky as rust – that described the density and make-up of the ground beneath the water. Every resupply he would trade for a new chart, or a new trawling tool, and then he would reposition his nets, rewrite his coordinates, and start the whole bloody process again.
The boat slowed. Up ahead there was a line of plastic bottles floating on the water. The old man piloted the boat in a wide arc towards the base of the nearest turbine, coming in slow until the scooped-out bow fitted round the curve of the jacket. The engine stopped and the old man came out on deck.
The boy went back into the cabin and lay on the floor. The boat swayed. The battery gauge hummed. The boy brought his hand up slowly and rubbed along his jaw.
Outside, the farm stretched away in every direction, the towers spreading out in rows, like the spokes of a wheel. Navigating through the farm, it sometimes felt like only the fields were moving. Whenever the boat turned, the towers would align along different vectors, and whenever the weather changed, the blades would shift position to face into the wind. There were whole zones that the boy had never even visited – fields well beyond the range of the boat’s decrepit battery.
When the boy was out on his own he had to rely on the boat’s satnav. He had tried to learn to use it less, but somehow he could never translate the satellite map’s clean, segmented regions into the vastness of the farm. He had tried to talk to the old man about it, about how, wherever you were in the farm, it always felt like you were in the exact centre, like you could go on for ever and never find an edge against which to take a bearing. But the old man had just looked at him. ‘Still using the satnav?’ he’d said.
The boat rocked and shifted round the tower. Outside, the turbines started to move. The movement began on one horizon then spread like a ripple, as if a crowd of people, one by one, had noticed something and were silently turning to stare. The boy felt the old man step back down onto the boat, the scraping of the line against the side, then finally a series of heavy thuds as armfuls of net were hauled up onto the deck. As he worked, the old man hummed the strange tunes he sometimes hummed – mixed-up bits of adverts and songs for which the boy had no reference.
The sky turned brown and dim, like old water left sitting in a bucket. Soon, the last light would dip into the haze that always hung thick in the west. The boy got up and opened the cabin door.
Murky rain swathed everything. The old man was crouching down sorting through a pile of bottles, plastic bags, chunks of concrete and sludge-coated lumps. His hair was soaking and pools of rain gleamed in the creases of his coat. He hadn’t even bothered to put his hood up. Eventually he stood, picked everything up and dumped it all over the side of the boat.
‘Good catch,’ the boy said, as the old man kicked the last shreds of plastic through the scuppers and back into the sea.
The boy read the instructions one more time. There was an open cookbook and a tin of re-formed vegetables on the counter, both stamped with a fading Company logo.
He put a frying pan on the nearest hotplate, opened the tin and emptied it into a bowl. Then he went to the crate in the corner of the room, where they kept all the empties, and found one that had contained protein mince. He wiped the inside with his finger and smeared the congealed fat on the surface of the pan, then turned on the heat. From the bowl, he selected the larger vegetables – orange discs, bulbous white and green florets – and added them to the pan. The fat was hot, but still congealed. It stuck to the vegetables in small white beads. The boy turned the heat up and pushed the vegetables around the pan with a spatula. They began to hiss and disintegrate, so he stopped moving them.
He watched the timer on the cooker and, after a minute exactly, added the other vegetables – small orbs and cubes – and left them popping in the pan. Then he turned back to the book. It said serve with potatoes. The boy didn’t know what potatoes were. From the picture, they looked like the vacuum-packed starch blocks they sometimes got on the resupply. A gritty white powder that you boiled in water until it formed a thick paste. Little nutrition, but they made the tinned substances look more like food on the plate. He wished he’d saved one out.
He tried to stir the vegetables, but they had melted together into a grey disc and fused to the surface of the pan. He pushed at the blackened edge, but it was stuck. He turned off the heat, looked down at the picture of the meal in the book, then closed it slowly, picked up the pan and took it over to the table. He’d once tried to make something for him and the old man out of the book, and they’d both sat there for hours trying to finish it, until, finally, the old man had poured homebrew over their bowls and they’d downed them in one wincing gulp.
The book always said to ‘season well’. The boy reached for the salt cellar but it was empty, so he got up and checked the cupboards. He saw himself for a moment, as if through one of the cameras, searching for salt in the middle of the sea. It’d be quicker if he just scraped some off his boots.
He opened the long, sliding door beneath the counter. The space behind was stuffed with pans that had never been used and instruction manuals for appliances that had long since broken. The boy squatted down and reached into the back – just more pans and empty packets, then a sharp edge. He pulled his hand out and saw a small cut on the tip of his finger. He rubbed the blood away then reached back in, took out the object and held it up to the light.
It looked like a turbine. It was only a few inches tall and it had been made by hand – cut and folded out of an empty tin. There were nicks along the edges that showed where the metal had been sheared. He took it over to the table and sat down, holding it up in front of him. He blew lightly and the blades turned.
The old man came in and crossed over to the cupboard. ‘So I was thinking, seeing as you owe me five tins …’ He stopped in the middle of the room and stared at the boy. ‘Where did you get that?’
The boy turned the model round. It had been made very carefully. ‘I just found it.’
‘Give it here.’ The old man’s voice was low and quiet.
‘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