Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate 2019

Copyright © Ben Smith 2019

Cover image © Shutterstock.com

Ben Smith asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008313364

Ebook Edition © April 2019 ISBN: 9780008313388

Version: 2019-02-25

Dedication

for Lucy

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Dedication

5  Contents

6  Bootlaces

7 Nothing

8 Cracks

9 Junk

10  c.8,200 Before Present

11 A Fur Hat

12  Something

13  Tins

14  Bottles

15  c.20,000 Before Present

16  Knots

17  Circuits

18  Systems

19  c.14,000 Before Present

20  Down

21  Up

22  c.11,000 Before Present

23  Paper Cups

24  Fish

25  Westerlies

26  c.9,500 Before Present

27  Easterlies

28  Cracks

29  c.8,500 Before Present

30  Nothing

31  Dust

32  Year Zero

33  Acknowledgements

34  About the Author

35  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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Bootlaces

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Something. Fourth hook down on the drop-line there was a dark shape. The boy stopped pulling and sat back on his heels. The swell was small that day and it was more than three metres from the platform down to the sea. The boy watched as the shape stretched and buckled beneath the grey water.

‘Strange fish,’ he said to no one.

The wind was blowing in from the west – consistent, ten or eleven metres per second by the feel of it – droning through the platform’s pipes and grilles and pushing the sea into hard ridges. The North Sea shifted from horizon to horizon, like a tarpaulin being dragged over rough ground. It looked sluggish but, under the surface, currents ripped and surged. It was hard to imagine the sheer tonnages hauling past every minute, every second.

The boy wound the line around the railing until it was secure, then took hold of the hanging length, lifted it a few inches and let it fall. He moved it from side to side, but the hook was lodged. He’d have to pull it up. He moved the line again. It was heavy, whatever it was. He hoped his line wouldn’t break. It had taken him a long time to get that length of cord. How long? Months? Years? He looked out at the horizon as if it would give him an answer, but couldn’t even pick out where the grey of the sea became the grey of the sky. It was good cord. That was all that mattered. And a hundred miles offshore it wasn’t easy to get hold of good cord.

Could you even get proper fishing line any more? The wind squalled and worked itself through the seams of his overalls. Who could he ask? The old man wouldn’t know. He didn’t know. And there was no one else out there.

He stood up, set his feet shoulder-width apart and pulled his sleeves down over his hands. He moved his hands slowly and kept the rest of his body very still, as if trying to steady himself against the motion of sea and sky. His legs were planted almost a metre apart and his sleeves barely covered his wide, calloused palms. Of course, the boy was not really a boy, any more than the old man was all that old; but names are relative, and out in the grey some kind of distinction was necessary.

He took hold of the line and, using the rail as a fulcrum, began to haul it up out of the water. As soon as the load broke the surface the line tightened and rasped through his sleeves. He stopped for a moment and let the wind smooth the edges of the pain, then carried on pulling until the fourth hook was level with the platform. He looked down over the rail.

It was a load of junk as usual – a greasy mass of netting and plastic, streaming and reeking. The whole thing was tangled into a dense lump, along with an oilcan, some polystyrene, and what looked like a burnt-out panel from a door.

The boy tied off the line, straightened his back and blew lightly on his palms. ‘Good catch,’ he said.

Beside him, the thick steel support rose twenty metres to the rig. Above the rig’s squat rectangular housing, the blades of the nearest turbine turned slowly in the washed-out sky. All around, to every horizon, the blades of the wind farm turned.

The line spun slowly – ten turns one way, then a pause, then ten turns back. The boy lay down on his stomach, reached out and held the netting until it stilled.

The fields stretched out around him – row after row of turbines, like strange crops. From a distance, they all looked identical, but up close each tower was marked with dark blooms and scabs of rust. There were seepages of oil and grease creeping downward, streaks of salt corrosion reaching up, forming intricate patterns of stalactites and stalagmites. Some of the turbines had slumped down at an angle, their foundations crumbling like silt. Some had damaged blades and threw their remaining limbs around in jolting arcs. Others were missing their blades and nacelle entirely, leaving only the towers standing, like fingerposts marking the steady progression of malfunction and storm.

He tried to feel his way down to where his hook was caught. The net had floats and some kind of weights threaded through it, and it was twisted up with what could have been strips of weed but the boy knew were actually sheets of black plastic – he’d been finding them all over the farm recently. He worked his hand in and found the hook, then took a knife out of his pocket and began to cut away at the netting, strand by strand, until it slumped down into the water, leaving just the hook and the object it was stuck in.

It was a boot – black, Company issue, the same as the boy’s. Except, where his were dark and supple from regular cleaning and waterproofing, this one was salt-stiffened, bleached and cracked, making it look like it was cut from some kind of rough stone.

He reached out slowly, tilted it and looked inside. The laces had come undone and it was empty, which was a relief. He’d found a boot once before, floating through the farm, still laced up tight. When was that? It had been down in the south fields. That boot had been brown, pointed at the toe. The leather and its contents had been scratched and picked apart. There must have been birds around then. And fish.

The boy put the knife away in his pocket and took out a battered digital watch. It was missing its strap and one button, and when he touched the display, bubbles of moisture spread inside the casing. It read quarter past five. He looked up at the sky and saw, perhaps, a paler patch of cloud in the west. When he closed his eyes the same patch appeared on the backs of his eyelids.

The wind dragged across the rig. Sometimes it sounded thin and hollow, sometimes it thudded as if it were a solid wall, impossible to move past. The line rocked. The turbines groaned and thrummed. The boy held the boot still. The sole was smooth and washed clean: the sea already cleaning things up, making things anonymous.

‘Where have you come from?’ he said. His voice was barely audible above the wind and the blades. Which was probably for the best, because it was a stupid question. And he was talking to a boot.

The currents that came through the farm swept in from the oceans and cycled round the whole North Sea, hauling waste and cast-offs out from every coastline. Some days there would be swathes of shining fluid that coated the surface of the water. Other days, shoals of plastic bags and bottles would rise from the depths like bulbous light-seeking creatures. The boy would find tidal barrages and bleached clothing, the brittle shells of electrical appliances. He’d seen furniture and timbers tangled together so they looked like makeshift rafts; and once, a whole house torn loose from its moorings, drifting through the farm, slumped and tilting on its flotation tanks.

Days, months and seasons passed through untethered and indistinct among the flotsam. Sometimes it felt colder and there were more storms, and sometimes a big spring tide would raise the water level up closer to the platform. But it was always cold, and there were always storms. It was spring now, according to the rig’s computer. He looked down at his watch – it still read quarter past five.

He put it away and unhooked the boot carefully from his line. Then he got up off his stomach and sat on the platform, drawing his knees up against the wind and holding the boot in front of him. It could have come from anywhere. It could even have come from the farm. It could have been lost and then got stuck in one of the gyres that looped through the fields, catching anything that was adrift inside and not letting go. It could have been cycling round the turbines, round the edge of the rig, for years.

The boot was the same size as his own. Whoever it had belonged to would have been about his height, his build. The wind pressed in and the skin on his back tightened. What if …? But he didn’t let himself finish the thought. There was no point going over all that.

He held the boot out over the water. If he let go, it could be gone in under a minute. In a day it could be out of the farm. In a few weeks it could wash up on the coast or, if it kept going, it could be pushed out north, up and over the pole.

Or maybe it wouldn’t go anywhere. Maybe it would stay circling the fields. Maybe one day he would check his line and there it would be again – a bit more cracked, a bit more bleached, but the same old boot. And he would pull it up, unhook it and think the same old thoughts, ask the same old questions. And they would still be stupid questions. And he would still be talking to a boot.

He looked out at the water and twisted the boot’s lace around his fingers. It was crusted with salt and had kinks from where it had been knotted. Slowly, he unpicked it from the stiff eyelets, coiled it and put it in his pocket. Then he reached out and dropped the boot over the edge of the platform. He watched as it dipped in the swell, pausing for a moment as if remembering its route, before drifting off east and into the grey.

‘Ahoy there, Cap’n Cod.’ The old man, Greil, spoke from where he was slumped in his chair. He had his feet up next to the bank of monitors and didn’t bother turning round. The boy had been trying to walk quietly past the control room, but now stopped in the doorway. ‘Why are you sneaking about?’ the old man said.

The boy didn’t answer.

‘I saw you.’ The old man inclined a foot towards one of the monitors. ‘I see all from my eyrie. I am omniscient.’ A hand appeared in emphasis, holding an enamel mug, in which sloshed a brutal-smelling ichor.

‘What’s that?’ the boy said, stepping into the room.

‘My finest. Not for your unrefined palate. Not since your last criticisms.’ The old man swivelled his chair round. His cheeks were flushed purplish grey, like metal discoloured by a flame. His hands, clamped round the mug, had deep creases cross-hatching the knuckles.

There was no telling how old the old man actually was. His hair was still dark and slicked back into a hard shell, like the paint they used on the outside of the rig to stave off corrosion. Instead it was his eyes that seemed to have lost their colour. The boy was sure they had once been blue, but, like everything else on the farm, they seemed to have become bleached through years of exposure. He was small – much smaller than the boy – but moved as if carrying a much greater bulk, always banging his elbows and knees in spaces that the boy moved through comfortably. At that moment, sitting still, he almost looked frail, until he leaned forward and stretched his neck, listening for the pop of each vertebra.

‘And what bounteous harvest are you not sharing today?’ he said.

The boy took the bootlace out of his pocket and held it up. There was an oil-stain on the back of his hand that looked like a broken ladder, or a broken yaw system, or maybe a broken piece of pipework. Something broken anyway. ‘It’s Company issue,’ he said.

‘Company issue.’ The old man sighed. ‘Well of course it’s Company issue.’ He lifted his foot. ‘What kind of laces are on my boots?’ He paused for the boy to answer, but there was no point answering. ‘What kind of laces are on your boots?’ He paused again. ‘And what kind of laces are on the boots of every single person who has any business being in or around this entire sea?’ All the while he was staring at the boy. The old man could stare for minutes without blinking – it was one of his ‘people skills’.

The boy looked past the old man to the bank of monitors. There was the rig – all its corridors and crevices, like the twists on a circuit board. The screens switched from room to room. The galley with its long, steel table that could seat twenty – its cupboards stuffed with unused pans, cutlery and cooking utensils. On the work surface there were two empty tins; in the sink, two bowls, two forks and a blunted tin opener. Then the empty dormitories, the vast ‘conference space’, and the rec room with its listing pool table and the rig’s only window – narrow and abraded with salt – stretching across the far wall.

The monitors flickered down to the transformer housing, which took up an entire level of the rig; the pipes of the old man’s makeshift distillery snaking away into the dark. And down again to the dock, with its heavy gates enclosing a pool of still water. The dock was empty except for the maintenance boat, which was hoisted onto the slipway at the far end, charging off the main supply.

The screens shifted to the cameras on the rig’s service platforms – the images grainy as dry putty. There had been a camera on the roof, but, like the buckled helipad and most of the aerials, antennae and satellite dishes, it was now defunct.

And beyond the rig to the fields – over six thousand turbines grouped into huge arrays. There was no stretch of horizon that wasn’t planted, no hint of an edge or space beyond the churned air. In every image there was at least one turbine standing still and broken against the movement. At that moment, there were at least eight hundred and fifty of them scattered all over the farm. And more that were malfunctioning. It was hard to be sure, but the boy tried to keep track – it was their job to fix them.

Not that there was much they could do. With the tools and spare parts available they could only make surface repairs – replace the smaller gear wheels, weld, grease, rewire. More and more often, the only option they had was to shut the turbine down, feather the blades, apply the brake and leave it to rust.

The farm was running at fifty-nine per cent. Sometimes it was better, sometimes it was worse. Sometimes they would get spares on the quarterly supply boat, but more often they didn’t. Sometimes the boy would pick a turbine and keep returning to it, on his own, until it was fixed. He’d once spent ten days going out to a single turbine, working through each component one by one. There had been something at almost every stage 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 wall and made of grey painted metal. His room, although there was little to show for it. There was a ten-litre container of cleaning fluid under the sink – the sort used for de-greasing gears and scouring the deck of the boat. Next to it was a bucket and cloth. The only colour came from the faded spines of three warped and torn technical manuals, which were stacked in the alcove beneath the bedside unit. Other than that, the room was the same as the day he’d arrived on the farm.

He remembered following the old man through the corridors up from the dock. The smell of grease and rust. The sound of the ventilators. The hollow sound of his boots on metal. The old man had led him to his room and they had stood there in silence, the boy by the bed, the old man in the doorway, both looking down at the small pile of belongings that the boy had brought with him: his Company-issue clothes, his Company-issue kit, his Company-issue watch. The old man had cleared his throat, gestured to the sink, the cupboard, the drawers, then cleared his throat again. The boy had stared down at the folds in his high-vis jacket, his overalls. Each fold was sharp and precise. When he’d finally looked up, the old man had gone.

The boy had lain down on the mattress and stared at the ceiling. It looked like it was rocking. It pitched and rocked and he’d closed his eyes, almost thought he heard the old man coming back, his step outside the door. But no one came in. The mattress had been hard and lumpy under his shoulders. He remembered the particular way he’d had to curl up to sleep. Now it was smooth, worn-down, and fitted his body exactly.

Which was the only way of telling how long he’d been out there; how long he’d been fixing the turbines, setting out his fishing line, having the same conversations with the old man; how long since he’d been sent out to take over his father’s contract.

Sometimes, he tried to think back to his life before the farm – even that first boat ride over, the last moments onshore – but his memories were hazy and indistinct, the way the turbines, in squally weather, would churn up so much spray that all edges and outlines disappeared.

He looked at his watch again. It was already a minute out of sync with the clock on the wall.

He got up and left the room, making his way down to the control room, stepping automatically over the loose floor panels, ducking under the botched and rerouted ventilation pipes and avoiding the third step on the stairwell, which was covered in a clear, glue-like substance. The old man had put it there, long ago, after the boy had tried to talk to him about keeping the rig clean. The idea was that the boy would get it on the soles of his boots and then it would be him treading dirty footprints all around the rig. This had never happened, but every few days the old man replenished the glue and every few days the boy avoided it. They both found it a boring and exhausting chore, but it filled the time.

The boy stood in the control-room doorway. ‘What time is it?’ he said.

The old man had his feet up on the desk. He shrugged. ‘System’s crashed again.’

‘It did that this morning.’

‘It’s done it again.’

‘Did you spill your drink on it?’

‘I only did that once.’ The processor chuntered and whined and the old man jabbed a button on the keyboard with his heel. ‘Not my fault if it can’t hold its liquor.’

The boy waited in the doorway while it reloaded. ‘What time does it say?’

The old man sighed and twisted one of the monitors with his foot until it was facing him. ‘Quarter past five.’

‘Quarter past five?’

The old man shrugged again.

Nothing

The air in the tower was brackish and humid, the light the same strange yellow as a cloud before it dissolves into sleet.

The boy and the old man stood close, but not touching, in the turbine’s small service lift, the toolbag propped between them. The old man pushed a button and they lurched up, rising in silence, or as close to silence as it ever got out in the fields. There was always the sea, the slow pulse of the blades and generators. And the wind, twisting its coarse fibres through everything.

They climbed higher and the noise increased. It was a hundred metres from jacket to nacelle and over that distance the wind speed grew until it forced itself in through every joint and rivet – between tower and nacelle, nacelle and hub, hub and spinner. All day, the boy would feel the thump of turbulence on metal, the vibrations making their way through his feet and hands into the cavities of his chest, until it seemed as though it was his own pulse knocking on the outer walls, wanting to come in.

‘Thick slices of roast beef,’ the old man said. ‘Rare. With gravy.’

The boy looked at him. ‘Rare?’

‘Bloody.’

The boy counted the sections of the tower as they passed the joins. ‘I know.’ He always counted the sections, even though each tower was identical – made up of huge cylinders of metal, stacked like tins.

The lift doors opened and the boy picked up the toolbag and followed the old man out onto the gantry. They stopped at the bottom of a ladder and looked up at the hatch. It was rusted shut.

‘Quiche,’ the old man said. ‘Cheese and onion quiche.’ He’d been going on like this for over a week. The supply boat was late and they were running low on food.

The boy shrugged.

‘What?’ the old man said.

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know what it is, or you don’t know if you’d want to eat it?’

‘What’s the difference?’ The boy put the bag down at the foot of the ladder and looked up at the scalloped rust.

Each day, the farm’s automated system told them what jobs and repairs needed doing. There’d be a report through the computer on the rig, giving the turbine number, coordinates and details of the problem. The old technical manuals described the system as ‘smart’ – as well as controlling the direction the turbines faced, it could manage the output, slow the generators so they didn’t overheat, and feather the blades if the wind was too strong. It was designed to let the operators know only if something broke, prioritizing the most serious cases, running diagnostics and even suggesting what tools to bring.

The boy often wondered if it had ever worked like that. After years of generating countless reports, the system was wrecked. It would say the problem was in a gearbox, when it was actually the yaw motor, or that the generator was faulty, when the blade controls were rusted out. Or it would send them to the wrong turbine completely and they would have to try and find out where the actual broken one might be – going round and round following the reports, like trying to follow the ramblings of a mind that was slowly unravelling.

This was the third job they’d tried to do that day. At the first turbine, there had been nothing wrong at all. At the second, the computer had identified a simple rewiring job; but when they’d arrived, the whole front of the nacelle had been missing – spinner, blades, everything – leaving a hole like a gaping mouth.

The boy took a drill out of the toolbag and searched around until he found a thick, worn bit, the thread ground down to smooth waves in the metal. He climbed up one rung of the ladder and got to work on the bolts in the rusted hinges. The drill jammed and cut out. He banged the battery pack against the ladder and it started up again. The bolts turned to a fine orange dust.

‘What would you pick then?’ the old man said. He leaned back against the handrail.

The boy reached for a pry bar. ‘I don’t know.’ He could feel the old man’s eyes at his back. Any moment he’d say something about the angle he was pushing at, or how the tip wasn’t in the right place. ‘I guess I’d pick that spicy stuff,’ he said.

The old man closed his eyes and smiled. ‘Pie crusts, yeah. Golden and crisp.’

‘Crisp?’

‘Of course. Got to be crisp.’

‘How could it be crisp?’

‘How couldn’t it be crisp?’

‘Because it comes in a tin.’

‘Pie crusts in a tin?’

‘Pie crusts?’

The old man breathed out heavily. ‘What’s the point in saying something if you don’t know what it is?’

‘I do know what it is.’ The boy pushed harder against the pry bar. ‘I just don’t know what it’s got to do with anything.’

‘Then why did you say pie crusts?’

‘I said spicy stuff.’

‘Jesus.’ The old man rubbed his forehead with his palm. ‘You can’t choose that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because that would mean that out of anything – anything – that you could choose to arrive on the next supply boat, you’d choose spiced protein.’

Tins, dried goods and vacuum-packed blocks – this was all the food the supply boat ever brought. There would be chewy cubes of some kind of curd and packets of compressed rice. The spiced protein was the only thing with any flavour, so it was always the first to go. They used it to bet with, and as payment for getting out of jobs they didn’t want to do. The old man owed him four already. In the time leading up to the resupply, there would only be tinned vegetables left – gelatinous carbohydrates moulded into the shapes of things that once grew. They were pallid and starchy, and left a powdery residue that coated the tongue and teeth. With the boat being late, that was all they’d tasted for weeks. The only thing that gave the boy any solace was that the old man hated them even more than he did.

He pushed harder, but the pry bar slipped and he cracked his knuckles on the hatch. He dropped the pry bar in the bag, then clenched and unclenched his fists one by one.

‘Could have told you that would happen,’ the old man said.

The boy laid his palms flat against the hatch, braced against the lowest rung of the ladder and pushed the hatch up into the nacelle.

The old man went up first. No lights came on. Once, the boy had gone up into a nacelle and all the switches had been gently smouldering, molten plastic dripping down the walls like candle wax. There was a bang and muttered swearing, the flicking of buttons, then a screech of metal as the old man opened the roof hatch, letting in a shaft of daylight and a blast of sound.

The computer had said that the problem was with the generator, but when the boy climbed up he could see straight away that the generator was working fine. He blinked twice in the daylight, rubbed a hand over his eyes, then began checking each of the components.

There were a lot of ways that a turbine could go wrong. Mostly it was the weather getting in: crumbling seals on the hatches, loose rivets, scratches in the paintwork admitting the narrow end of a wedge of damp and corrosion. There were several different models on the farm and each had their own weaknesses – small differences that sprawled over time into repeated malfunctions or whole areas of the nacelle half-digested by rust. Some of the newer models were meant to be more resilient – better seals round the circuitry, fewer moving parts – but nothing stayed new or resilient for long.

The boy went over to the control panel, where a row of lights had gone out. He signalled to the old man, who sighed, opened the zip pocket at the front of his overalls and took out a decrepit tablet – two sides thick with tape and a crack in the corner of the screen, dark lines spreading across it like veins. The old man came over, plugged it into the control panel, tapped at the screen and then said something.

‘What?’ the boy shouted.

The old man cupped a hand over his ear. ‘What?’ he shouted back.

‘I said “what”,’ the boy shouted, louder.

The old man stared at him for a moment, then put down the tablet and went to the front of the nacelle, removed the panel leading in to the rotor hub and crawled inside. After a few seconds, the blades slowed then stilled. The boy took out three LED lamps and positioned them round the nacelle, then reached up and closed the roof hatch. For a moment, it was almost like silence. The old man backed out of the hub and returned to the tablet. He tapped at it again and nodded, which meant he didn’t know what was wrong.

‘What is it?’ the boy said eventually.

The old man tapped at the tablet. ‘Huài diào.’

‘Huài diào?’

The old man shrugged.

‘Which bit?’

The old man gestured towards the control panel. ‘All of it.’

The boy took a step forward. ‘Let me see.’

The old man unplugged the tablet and put it back in his pocket. ‘No point. Don’t know where the problem is. We’d need the control panel to tell us.’

The boy took a screwdriver out of his pocket and began to remove the casing of the control panel. ‘I can work it out.’

The old man folded his arms. ‘Waste of time.’

The boy removed the casing. Underneath there was a tangle of frayed and rusting circuitry.

‘See,’ the old man said.

The boy eased two wires apart with his screwdriver. Flakes of rust crumbled onto his hand.

‘Got plenty to be getting on with,’ the old man said. ‘But if you want to spend all day playing electrician.’ He leaned against the gearbox and closed his eyes.

The boy stood in front of the control panel. It was probably just a circuit board, or a few transistors. He could see what he needed to do with the wires. But if it wasn’t, he’d end up there for hours and then they wouldn’t have the right spares anyway. And it’d be another day wasted. A handful of electrical components. Everything else in the turbine was fine, but without the control panel the nacelle wouldn’t be able to change direction, or the blades adjust their speed. A strong wind from the wrong direction and the whole hub could get torn off.

He shoved the screwdriver back into his pocket. ‘Fine,’ he said.

The old man opened one eye. ‘What was that?’

The boy didn’t reply. He just started unpacking the spare holdalls from the toolbag and they began to strip the nacelle.

Within half an hour they’d taken apart the generator and gearbox. The old man had removed anything useful from the rotor hub and packed it carefully in one of the bags. Then they unscrewed the panelling from the walls and bedplate, following lengths of copper wire, which they pulled out and wound into coils.

The boy took the first load down the lift and out to where the maintenance boat was moored to the jacket. The rain had set in, bleaching sharply from the west. He bowed his head to stop it hitting his eyes. This was how he thought of the weather: in terms of how much you had to bow. Sometimes he had to bend double, hauling himself along by railing and rung; sometimes it drove him to his knees.

He found some more bags in the cabin and sent them up in the lift, then waited at the foot of the tower. He could make so many repairs with the spare parts they’d just taken – they’d last for months, he could even go back and fix some of the turbines they’d had to shut down. But there was no point thinking like that. The old man kept all the parts so that he could trade for extras when the supply boat came.

The boy had only once questioned this, saying why couldn’t they use some of the parts to make repairs?

‘Why do you care?’ the old man had said.

The boy had thought about it for a long time. About all the different ways the turbines seemed to groan; how a faulty motor would emit a small dry gasp just before it gave out; how plastic creaked like his own joints when he’d been kneeling in a spinner housing too long.

He hadn’t been able to answer.

The boat moved slowly through the farm – a dark dot among the pale rows, rising and sinking as it cut through the swell. The boy sat in the open stern, his back braced against the cabin, watching the boat’s wake spooling out behind them until it was pulled apart by the cross-currents, leaving no trace of their passage. Spray hissed against the deck and he looked up, then cursed under his breath. They should have been travelling south, but the boat had turned north, up into zone two. He knew because the corrosion on the towers was always worse on the south-west side – the metal blistered and peeling as if it had been subjected to flame.

He got up and opened the cabin door. The old man was standing at the wheel, squinting out of the cracked windscreen.

‘How’s the battery doing?’ the boy said. He looked over at the gauge – the dial was about halfway. Out in the swell and chop of the fields it was impossible to know how long the battery would last. Cutting back against a strong current, it could drain fast. There were spares, but they were old and even more unreliable. There were times when they’d miscalculated and been forced to drift the boat, only using the engine to change direction. Once, when both spares were dead, their only option had been to moor up to a turbine and try to charge them off the main supply. Which the boy managed to do; but only after fusing one battery into a solid lump and being thrown twice against the tower’s far wall.

‘I’m running her slow,’ the old man said.

‘The gauge has been playing up.’

‘I’m running her slow.’

The boy went in and closed the cabin door. ‘How far’s the next job?’

The old man didn’t answer.

‘There’s four more turbines on the list.’

‘It’s been a good day’s work.’

‘We haven’t fixed anything.’

The old man squinted out of the windscreen again. ‘We’ve got what we need.’

The boy’s face was stinging in the cabin’s dry heat. ‘We should at least try and fix one.’

‘What if it needs parts?’

‘It might not need parts.’

‘But it might need parts.’ The old man adjusted the wheel. ‘And if we go fixing turbines with parts we’ve salvaged, we’ll have to go around trying to find another turbine we can’t fix, so we can get the parts back, all the while hoping we don’t find one we can fix that will take another part that we’ve salvaged, which we’ll then have to try and replace from somewhere else.’

‘So we’re not going to do any more work?’

‘We can do some after,’ the old man said. ‘If there’s time.’

The boy shook his head. There wouldn’t be time. There was never time to do anything else when the old man took them off to check on his nets.

‘Five,’ 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 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

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.

Junk

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.

The boy imagined the old man’s blood prickling up like iron filings.

He would be out in the fields all day.

The boy got up and went out into the corridor. Then he came back and sat down again. The screen was still on the satellite map. It showed a pattern of bright green shapes against a background of vivid blue. However many times he looked at the map, he always had to take a moment to remind himself that those shapes were the churning, windswept fields and that static sheet of blue was the sea, rushing out there all around him.

This was the only map on the system and it showed nothing beyond the borders of the farm. The only signs of activity were a series of numbers next to each of the shapes, showing how many working turbines there were in the fields and the percentage of optimal output that each zone was running at. The specifics of corrosion, malfunction or weathering were invisible. The wind could be knocking on the shell of the rig, the waves sucking and tearing at the supports; but on the map everything would be static and silent. A wind farm with no wind, a sea with no currents or tides. The only record of a three-week storm would be a slight change in the numbers – all the damage of the wind and the waves, all those long, strung-out days and nights, reduced to a few altered digits.

The boy stared at the screen. The numbers flickered next to the shapes – two hundred and ninety-three turbines, fifty-five per cent; three hundred and seventeen turbines, forty-eight per cent; one hundred and two turbines, sixty-four per cent. The boy watched the numbers and tried not to think about how each percentage point would translate to hours working up in the nacelles, the days travelling across the farm, the spray flying across the deck, the cold splitting the skin on his knuckles as he tried to make repairs. How a whole day of work might add a percentage to the output, only for another thing to break and bring it back down again.

The boat’s symbol was moving slowly into zone two. The boy switched the screen back to the cameras but could see nothing through the dripping mist. Once, when the old man had taken the boat out early and left him stuck on the rig all day, he’d found the camera on the nearest turbine to where the old man had moored, and brought it up on the screen. He’d waited for the old man to haul up his net, for him to crouch down and sift through whatever it was he’d got in there. But the old man had just stood on the edge of the boat and stared down into the water. The water had been dark and creased. He’d stood there and stared down and the boy had waited a long time, but the old man never moved.

The computer system whirred and groaned. Another turbine went down in zone three.

Later, the old man would bring the boat back with the battery drained and the boy would have to waste half the next morning charging it before he could get out to do any work.

The boat’s symbol stopped. The old man must have moored up. He was probably standing out on deck right now, draped in mist, staring down, oblivious and unconcerned by all surface goings-on.

The boy sat in the galley and unpicked the last tangle of plastic from his line. He’d gone out to check on it, to pass some time, and found a huge shoal of bags that had drifted in overnight – a dark mass, silent and heavy, hanging in the fields as if they were waiting for something. Some of the bags had caught on his line and twisted it round the rig’s support. He’d lost the bottom three hooks just pulling it up from the water. He held one of the frayed sidelines up to the light. Was that a bootlace? He sat and looked at it for a minute, then unpicked it from the main line. Whatever it was, it had become brittle and weak. He placed it on the desk alongside the swathes of wet plastic that covered the surface.

Most of the bags were so bleached that their original colours could only be seen in their creases and folds. Some were so heavily degraded that, when he touched them, they turned to brittle flakes that stuck to his hands. Others were tough and flexible, stained with colours that the boy didn’t often see – red that was darker and richer than the warning signs on the rig; purple a bit like a bruise but lighter, more powdery; orange that was almost, but not quite, the same as the last of the flares he and the old man had let off, one by one, against the grey murk that hung over the farm for months without lifting. He picked up a green bag that still looked new, the logo and characters scrawled brightly down one side. He didn’t recognize any of them. It had to be older than him. In his lifetime the only places to buy anything were the Company stores. The ownership changed hands, the management came and went, but still every bag carried their logo. It was easy to forget that there were things that existed before the Company took over; that even the farm had been built long before then.

He stared at the characters for so long that they blurred together. Sometimes he tried to imagine what the bags had once carried, what people had bought. Sometimes there were twists of polystyrene caught inside, or chunks of Styrofoam that must have calved off a bigger piece. He would try and fit the pieces together and work out what they used to be, how long they would have been drifting. But the polystyrene chipped off under his nails and the Styrofoam bent and tore, until there was no way of knowing what any of it had been.

Somewhere in the walls, the pipes let out a long, low groan. He unsnagged the last bag and pushed the sodden pile to the edge of the table. They dripped slowly onto the floor. He needed to do something. He stood up quickly. Hooks. He needed to make more hooks. He went back to the control room and unzipped his toolbag. The pliers had gone. He needed the pliers to make the hooks. He searched through the bag twice, then zipped it back up. The old man must have taken them again. The boy stayed still for a moment, then he turned and walked out of the room and down the corridor.

The door to the old man’s room creaked softly. The boy opened it an inch at a time, until he heard it touch lightly against something. He squatted down, reached round and felt for the obstacle – a stack of four empty tins. He took hold of the bottom one and dragged the stack carefully across the tacky linoleum. As he pulled it round the edge of the door, he could see that the tins had been numbered and arranged with all but the third number facing into the room. All the doors to the sleeping quarters had locks, but the keycards were long lost, so the old man had developed his own elaborate precautions. The tins were an old system, but the numbers were new. The boy moved the stack out of the way, opened the door and stepped inside.

The room was laid out exactly the same as the boy’s; the only difference was that here the furniture was barely visible. The floor was a foot deep with twisted heaps of rusted metal, lumps of clay dried and cracking in pools of their own dust, piles of nets so stiff that, if you lifted them, they held their shape. A narrow path wound from the door to the bed, which was stacked with plastic crates. On top of the crates and spilling onto the floor were piles of paper – lists and tables, pages of scrawled notes and plans of the farm, all covered with indecipherable annotations, areas ticked and dotted and shaded with different-coloured pens. Some of the maps were old, from before the farm was built, and showed the seabed as if it were land – contour lines describing valleys and hills, a range of muted colours depicting the different rocks and minerals below the surface. The same red, yellow and black sediments streaked down the sides of the sink and made curved tide-lines on the floor beneath it. The sink was piled with half-cleaned objects, just beginning to appear from their shapeless crusts of mud and silt. It was just possible to make out slabs of water-blackened wood, bright stones and broken shells. Objects like these covered every surface of the room. They were stuffed into the chest of drawers and heaped in the open wardrobe and on top of the bedside unit.

The boy stepped slowly through the room, positioning his feet carefully on the narrow trail of clear floor. The edge of his boot caught on a pile of damp netting, dragging it greasily. He untangled himself and pushed the net back where it had been.

At first, it didn’t seem like anyone even lived there. It was only after a few moments that small signs of human life became noticeable. There were two worn T-shirts and a pair of overalls slung over the end of the bed. Beneath these, the bed itself was unused – the sheets tucked in under the mattress and a single pillow, uncreased, at the head. Next to the bed there was a frayed woollen blanket strewn over a striped deckchair. All over the floor there were empty bottles of cleaning fluid and coolant that the old man used to store his homebrew, along with half-eaten tins of food discarded among the debris, forks and spoons standing stiff in them.

There was only one space in the room that was always clear and clean – a small semicircle on top of the chest of drawers, where miniature picks, chisels and pliers were laid like expensive cutlery. Today, there was something else there. The boy went over and looked at it. He knew it was a bone; but the bones 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.

He wondered if the old man knew where the bone had come from. Or if he even cared. Most of the things in his room seemed to serve no purpose at all. His drawers were full of pins, discs and flakes of stone – so thin they were almost translucent – scratched with patterns of lines and dots. There were sharpened stone points, rocks worked into odd shapes, pebbles sanded down to accentuate their lumps and crevices. It had taken the boy a while to work out what they were meant to be – headless torsos with jutting breasts and smooth fat thighs that stirred strange thoughts he didn’t know he possessed. He didn’t look at them any more. If there ever had been a use for that stuff, there wasn’t now.

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.

Whistling. He heard it again. Working its way through the rig. Up from the loading bay. He looked around, but there were no clocks in the old man’s room. He put the bone back carefully where it had been, turned and moved quickly to the door, catching the stack of tins with his heel and scattering them across the floor. He dropped down onto his knees and felt around. There was the faint scrape of a crate being unloaded from the boat. He found three of the tins, but the last one had rolled in between the piles of netting. He searched as fast as he could, trying not to disturb anything. A tangled mass of rusted metal shifted and began to topple. He grabbed it and moved it back so it was balancing again. He found a tin, but this one was half-full of coagulated protein mince, which slipped in a thick disc onto his hand.

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.

c.8,200 Before Present

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.

For a hundred thousand years the water waited, locked up as crystal, sheet and shelf. All was immobile, but for the slow formation of arc and icicle, which was the water remembering the waves it used to be and the waves it would become again. The only sound was the crackle of frozen mud and ice rind, which was the water, down to its very molecules, repeating its mantra: solidity is nothing but an interruption to continuous flow, an obstacle to be overcome, an imbalance to be rectified.

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