The End of the World Survivors Club Read online

  Adrian J Walker

  * * *

  The End of the World Survivors Club

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Adrian J Walker was born in the bush suburbs of Sydney, Australia in the mid ’70s. After his father found a camper van in a ditch, he renovated it and moved his family back to the UK, where Adrian was raised.

  Ever since he can remember, Adrian has been interested in three things: words, music and technology, and when he graduated from the University of Leeds, he found a career in software. His novel The End of the World Running Club, a post-apocalyptic running fable about hope, love and endurance, was a Simon Mayo Radio 2 book club choice.

  He lives in Aberdeen with his wife and two children. To find out more visit: http://www.adrianjwalker.com/

  also by adrian j walker

  The End of the World Running Club

  The Last Dog on Earth

  For my lifelong skipper and crewmate, Dad

  Praise for The End of the World Running Club

  ‘Extraordinary’

  Simon Mayo, Radio 2 Book Club

  ‘A real find’

  Stephen King

  ‘Brilliant … superb to the end’

  Lucy Mangan

  ‘An uplifting, exciting and often humorous yarn about camaraderie, endurance and redemption’

  The Times

  ‘Ridiculously gripping straight from the start’

  Jenny Colgan

  ‘What sets this apart is Walker’s extraordinary emotional articulacy’

  The Sun

  ‘A compelling read’

  Financial Times

  ‘Compulsively readable’

  SFX

  ‘Will thrill and delight … a terrifically well-observed, haunting and occasionally harrowing read’

  Starbust

  Chapter 1

  ‘Beth, where are your children?’

  If you met me you would probably think I was rude.

  ‘Beth?’

  I don’t mean to be.

  ‘Beth, you need to get your life jacket on.’

  It’s just that I can occasionally appear to be elsewhere. There’s a distance within me. A space that opens up sometimes.

  Let’s say you’re talking to me at a party. I’ll listen. I will. I’ll nod my head and smile at your story about when you met Kate Winslet in business class. (This would be back in the days when things like parties, aeroplanes and Kate Winslets existed, of course.) But there will come a time when my eyes glaze, my smile wilts, and you’ll think that I’ve drifted away like an untethered raft.

  I look around. The heaving boat, the wide-eyed crew, the passengers sobbing in terror, they’re like objects in a dimly remembered dream.

  Like I say, it’s not intentional.

  I can’t feel my legs, my arms, my anything.

  But it happens, and when it does it is often in the wrong moments. Like during one of your stories.

  ‘Beth, what’s wrong? Where are your kids?’

  Or like now, when I’m standing beneath a growing shadow, and what is about to happen looms over me like a terrible cliff as if the past, present, future, and every choice I’ve ever made is about to crash down upon me all at once.

  ‘Beth!’

  But we’ll get to that.

  My distance has always been with me. When I was eight I was allowed to go to my grandad’s social club with him after Sunday dinner. I’d sit on his knee drinking flat cola and listening to him and the other men chat over their endless whiskies and cigarettes.

  Uncle Brian used to watch me.

  Uncle Brian who was actually nothing of the sort, and just an old alcoholic friend of my grandad. He was a hard man with small eyes and big hands.

  And he would watch me.

  When I looked, he’d lean over.

  ‘Yer awa’ wi’ the fairies, so you are,’ he’d say.

  I’d never reply, so he’d lean closer.

  ‘What’s the matter, hen? Yer awful quiet. Cat got your tongue?’

  I didn’t like Uncle Brian. There was something sinister about him I couldn’t place at the time. But I had noticed on the rare occasions when I’d been in his house that his wife was a quiet woman, forever busy with her back turned in another room, and this somehow seemed significant.

  You were wrong, Uncle Brian. I wasn’t away with the fairies. I may have seemed to be but I wasn’t. I was right there in the room listening to every word that slurred from the lips of those men, scrutinising their smiles and frowns, trying to understand what made them all tick.

  Trying to understand what made you tick.

  As it turned out, what made you tick, Uncle Brian, was a fondness for beating the living shit out of your wife when you got home from the pub. So that’s why she was so quiet – you made damn sure the cat got her tongue and kept it, you evil old bastard.

  Anyway. My distance might explain why I never had any friends. This state of affairs didn’t bother me. I was happy on my own. I chose jeans over dresses, hid behind books and sought out corners. Like the one with the tree stump in the corner of the playground, or the one in my bedroom where I learned to program a computer my grandfather won in the pub. Or the one where I met Ed – though that was much later.

  A friendless child is one thing, but when you’re an adult – well, you find it’s remarked upon. Especially with a mother like mine.

  ‘You need some pals, Lizbut.’

  Lizbut. I hated Lizbut.

  ‘You’re a mother now, you need a support network, you cannae rely on me for everything.’

  I don’t.

  ‘I cannae be down here every weekend –’

  Good.

  ‘– helping you wi’ yer bairn. I’ve got my own life to lead.’

  Excellent. You do that. Please do that.

  ‘You need to get out there, Lizbut. Join one of them antenatal groups or something.’

  I did in the end, if for nothing else than to shut her up.

  They called themselves The Survivors Club.

  Carol, their leader (yes, they had a leader) explained with the jolliest of hockey sticks that this was because: ‘If you can survive the first six months of motherhood, ladies, you can survive anything!’

  I felt like a stalker at that first meeting, scanning them all for suitability like some postnatal Terminator looking for its mark. Which one of you … which one of you will I befriend. In the end, God help me, I went for the big boss: Carol herself. What to say, I thought as I waited for her conversation to finish. How to win her over. It should be something interesting, something personal.

  I know, I’ll tell her my fantasy.

  You needn’t get excited. My fantasy involved nothi
ng more pedestrian than time, because when you have children there is none of the stuff. Certainly none of your own. I love my kids but I was surely not the only mother to slog through another precious day with her babies stacking bricks, wiping arseholes or watching that relentless pork scratching – oh, you know who I mean – and wishing I could get just five minutes to myself. Just five minutes.

  Or an hour.

  Or a whole day.

  That was my fantasy – a day to myself – and that, for some reason I can only put down to sleep deprivation, is what I believed would endear me to the mighty Carol.

  This is what I told her.

  First, I wake up after eight hours of unbroken sleep. The bed is empty. The house is quiet. There’s no sound but the twittering of birds and the distant drone of an aeroplane, so I doze for a while in the shores of my dreams. Then I get up, stretch and open the curtains. Outside is a warm, windless day with nothing to do.

  Breakfast first. Poached eggs, bacon and a mug of tea that’s hot to the dregs. The washing-up can wait. I’ll spend an hour or two reading and then change into my gear. It’s time for a run.

  No phone, no watch, nothing to distract me with beeps. I take a long meander through forests and hills, around the glittering Pentlands reservoirs and back into town, across the dew-damp Meadows meadows and into the warrens of the Old Town. Good morning, Edinburgh. Happy day, my pretty city. Somewhere near the Royal Mile I’ll stop at a café to read a paper with a smoky espresso. Then I’ll head back. It’s just me and the hills and the rest of the day to myself.

  No husband, no children, no duty, just for a day.

  Yes please, I’ll take that. Eh, Carol?

  But Carol said nothing. She just looked at me with that painted-on smile of hers, and made a noise like a constipated chaffinch.

  Oh, what, Carol?

  Do I not get to join your yummy-mummy Facebook group? Or sign up to your Hungry Harrison vegan recipe blog? Am I not invited for breast-milk lattes with you and your pals while you compare the contents of your moon cups?

  Am I a bad mother?

  There was a time when I believed I was. In those early months when I thought I was failing at everything, holding myself up to the impossible standards of those other mothers.

  ‘Breast is best!’ they’d say. But, oh, the agonising truth of breastfeeding.

  ‘Controlled crying!’ Right, when every fibre of your being is straining to comfort them.

  ‘Sling’s the thing!’ But – Christ – don’t hold them too much or you’ll ruin them.

  In the end I left Carol and her club to it. I hid away. I battened down the hatches and I let my distance rule. I shunned all offers of help, all those well-meaning family members with their offers of tea and conflicting advice. I shut myself away until they stopped trying, and one day I realised that I had just one job as a mother: to survive and ensure that my children did the same.

  So I did. I formed my own Survivors Club, members: one. Me.

  And I survived the apocalypse with a baby and a toddler.

  So fuck you, Carol.

  I know I wasn’t really alone. I had a husband. I had Ed.

  I should have been happy when he turned up at the boat. He’d made it after all. Christ knows how and he looked like hell, but he’d actually bloody made it. He’d plumbed the depths of his spirit, broken through his barriers and by God he’d found us.

  Good man. Well done.

  But what did that change?

  This was how it had always been with Ed and me: he’d done his thing while I’d done mine, and in this case it just so happened that his thing was dragging his arse the length of the United Kingdom while mine was looking after our children in that hell of an evacuation camp. Changing nappies. Nappies I didn’t have. Scavenging for clean water and food in a field of twenty thousand other hungry families, fighting the daily battle of hygiene so we didn’t contract dysentery, and comforting my daughter through those freezing, wretched nights, trying to explain for the ten thousandth time why we were there, and why we’d had to leave her daddy behind, and why no, please don’t say that, please don’t say that about Mummy, go to sleep, I know it’s cold and that man won’t stop screaming, but please, please, just go to sleep.

  So you’ll forgive me if I wasn’t aglow with pride when he stumbled to the rail.

  It’s not that I wasn’t pleased to see him. I was, and I meant it when I said I’d go with him, I really did. I would have scooped up our kids and left that boat for whatever life he had planned for us on those battered shores that had once been our home. Because that’s what you do, isn’t it? That’s what you do when you’re a team.

  But that’s just it. Ed and I – we were nothing like a team.

  Perhaps we had been once, in the early days. I still remember those moments of bliss – like finding each other’s hand after our first night together, or kissing him in a flurry of snow and Salvation Army carols at Dundee station, or sitting in the bath of our Marchmont flat with our fingers interlocked, grinning over those two blue lines.

  Hands. We were always holding hands. But somewhere along the way we lost our grip.

  And that man who had once leaped, beaming from the train had instead trudged in from work and sunk into our milk-stained sofa without a word.

  Oh, my poor hero, I would think. Did you have to spend another day pushing buttons and drinking coffee and being with other adults? Did you get to make an uninterrupted trip to the bathroom, eat an entire lunch and hear human words – actual ones, not squawks – that make sense? There, there, my brave lion. What, my day? Oh, just another storm of excrement and vomit. I’m starving, sick of the smell of my own clothes, and I feel like someone’s been ironing my tits for the last nine hours. So, you know, nothing unusual.

  I wanted to scream at him: Look at what you have. You get to go out every day with a chance to do something, create something, be something. But all you do is mope. Was it really that bad, whatever it was you were doing out there?

  No. Never a team.

  Nevertheless, my tears at Falmouth Harbour were real, and when he kissed me and said that he would come for me instead, my heart broke in two.

  Of course it did.

  But heartbreak wasn’t all I felt. I felt relief as well. Relief that I wouldn’t have to return to that life with him, full of its frustrations and disappointments.

  Relief that I only had to carry two children, not three.

  The foghorn blared, the crowd released their cheers and wails like gulls into the frigid air, and, as Ed fell from my grasp, all that distance he had somehow covered opened up again at twice the speed.

  And my distance opened up too.

  This distance of mine. I think I saw it in my daughter that day as we watched Britain’s coastline fall away. It was cold on the deck. Arthur’s face was buried into my armpit, and Alice’s last tears for her daddy had already shattered into particles on the salt wind. She breathed a trembling sigh and leaned back, fingers loosening upon the battered can Ed had given her – the ‘stringy-phone’, he had called it. I watched her gazing back at the shore, taking in the squat nose and squint mouth, the soft drifting curls, and those heavy-lashed eyes that would one day, whether she liked it or not, see the world as a woman. Her face twitched with thoughts and I wondered whether they were the same as mine.

  There’s no way he’ll find us again, there’s just no way.

  But it doesn’t matter. I can do this alone.

  Just like I always have.

  Chapter 2

  It was crowded below deck.

  We were led down staircases and long, metallic corridors until we reached a large, windowless room like an auditorium, with tiers of seats and a spotlit stage at the front. The place was full of noise and bodies, and the smell of our recent encampment in Cornwall had stowed away with us.

  ‘Ooh,’ said a female voice, ‘it’s a bit like that cruise ship we went on, isn’t it, Gerald?’

  ‘Hmm,’ said a bovine-like voi
ce belonging to, I assumed, Gerald. ‘Without the ruddy buffet, I hope. Couldn’t stomach that cheese, bloody awful. Ouch, bloody hell, watch where you’re going.’

  Gerald scowled down at his foot, upon which Alice had accidentally trodden.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, pushing through the crowd.

  ‘You should take better care of your children,’ he bellowed after us.

  ‘Wanker,’ I muttered under my breath.

  I found a space near the back and sat down on the floor. A microphone whistled. The room hushed.

  ‘Mummy,’ whispered Alice, ‘that man wasn’t very nice.’

  ‘No, darling, he wasn’t.’

  ‘Is that what wanker means?’

  ‘Shh.’

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, girls and boys, my name is Captain Anders Ulrich. Welcome aboard the SS Unity.’

  Captain Anders Ulrich – a tall man with white eyebrows and a thin moustache – proceeded to tell us about how the next few weeks of our lives were going to pan out. I got the gist of it. Cabins, water rations, food, toilets, that sort of thing, but his Norwegian mumbles were like a lullaby and I strained to keep myself from nodding off. I saw others succumb to the same fatigue.

  Alice tugged my sleeve.

  ‘Is it like that place, Mummy? Where we got our own room?’

  She was talking about the barracks, of course. They seemed like a long time ago, though it had only been a few weeks.

  ‘Yes, darling. Until we get to Cape Town.’

  ‘And that’s where Daddy’s meeting us? Kip Town?’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. The truth could wait.

  The afternoon and evening passed in a daze of anxiety and euphoria, as if we’d all got sunstroke and decided to drop pills. Apparently it was Christmas Day, and we were served paper plates dotted with carefully measured portions of unidentifiable meat, potatoes and gravy, with a cracker each. I sat in a dark corner next to two other families, with whom I shared some words I can’t remember as I fed Arthur with a plastic spoon. Then there were presents for the children, handed out by crew members disguised badly as elves. We all tried our best to laugh.