Doggerland. Ben Smith

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.