Читать книгу Doggerland - Ben Smith - Страница 7

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.