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