The End of the World Running Club

  BELIEF

  Beliefs are strange. Things of certainty about things uncertain. Take mine for example. I believe there are graves in the field next to the house where I live. I stop at the fence every morning and I look at three lashed crosses standing crooked against the sea, and I believe I know who is buried beneath them.

  But I can’t be sure. So I believe instead. I suppose I could dig them up, but, as I see it, there are only two ways that little enterprise can end, neither of which is particularly palatable. Besides, if you have to go round digging up graves to prove your own sanity then you’ve probably already lost it.

  This house, and the cliff to which it clings, is falling down. I believe that I came here on a road that was drowning in mud, that I climbed stairs from a deserted beach to join that road, that I swam to that beach from a small boat and sat there shivering beneath a gathering storm, watching the boat sail back the way it had come. I believe that I arrived at that boat after following a series of roads through a country that was torn apart, washed away and burned down to its raw rock. I believe that I wasn’t alone.

  My memory stretches into the past like this, filament thin, a string of flickering flames, each one connected to the next. Some burn strong and bright, others barely glimmer.

  The line between any two points in your life is liable to be strange and unfathomable, a tangle of chance and tedium. But some points seem to have clearer connections, even ones that are far from each other, as if they have a direct line that bypasses the normal run of time. I remember things that no longer make any sense; events from yesterday that may as well have happened to a different person. Other things from many years ago seem still to be echoing now. I can smell Beth’s perfume in that crowded party and feel the warmth of her knee as she pressed it mischievously against mine, telling me that this was going to lead somewhere else, that her face was going to be a part of my life from then on. I can still hear the clatter of metal and the squeak of the hospital bed as Alice was passed to me, still feel the bucket inside of me emptying, the panic rising in my breath as Beth’s was filled with relief in her final contractions.

  I can still feel the sun of an English Summer, smell the warm grass that brushed against my boyhood face, hear my mother’s voice calling beneath the gentle hum of a single-engined aeroplane.

  I believe what I believe to make life less terrifying. That’s all beliefs are; stories we tell ourselves to stop being afraid. Beliefs have very little to do with the truth.

  I don’t know. Belief, memory, fear - these things hold you back, weigh you down, stop you moving. And I need to get moving. I need to stop thinking about this stuff. That’s what Harvey would say - stop thinking, keep moving. But it’s hard to stop thinking when there’s nobody else but you and a candle and an old house on the crumbling coast of a ruined country. Maybe that’s why I’m writing this down - so I can stop thinking about it and get moving.

  So I need a place to start. I may as well start at the end.

  THE END

  I heard my name called. Once, twice, then a third time louder. I jerked awake. I was sitting down; my arms were folded, stiff with inaction. The air was full of noise and movement. Screams, colours flashing by, something tugging at my trouser leg. I tried to focus. A red, urgent face was looking down on me, shouting.

  “ED!”

  I croaked something, prised my lips apart and tried to work some moisture back into the foul pit that was my mouth. Beth gradually came into focus. She sighed and looked me up and down, blew a wet ringlet of hair from her forehead. A vague mixture of disappointment and disgust flickered across her face.

  “Look after Arthur,” she said. I frowned. “Our son,” she said. “Your heir.” She pulled back her lips on this last word. I glanced down at Arthur, halfway up my shin, eyes wide as he prepared to attach his gums to my knee. “I’m taking Alice on the big slide.”

  It was Saturday afternoon, the day before it happened. I was badly hungover from after-work beers and we were at Cheeky Monkeys, probably the worst place to find yourself in such a state. Cheeky Monkeys was a vast indoor soft play arena of gigantic foam climbing frames, nets, plastic slides and - most notably - children. A hundred or more of them, fully fuelled, fully wired, clambering, crawling, clawing and yowling up ladders, across rope bridges and around the padded maze. Parents trailed behind them, lumbering on all fours through the hot fug of their own offspring like damned souls in some long-forgotten circle of hell. Others, those who had been temporarily spared this doom, stood about in groups drinking tea and energy drinks; women with dark-ringed eyes comparing notes and cackling, packs of men grinning like loons, rushing to take photographs of their little ones on their phones, their bellies bursting through T-shirts designed for teenagers.

  Or men sat in the corner, like me, trying to sleep off the nine pints of strong lager that were still dribbling through an empty stomach.

  I picked up Arthur and got to my feet, immediately hit by a head-rush that sent me careering into a table of three scowling teenage mothers. One tutted. I mumbled some apology and staggered away from them, dropped Arthur into the baby’s section and fell back into my seat again, breathless. I watched him. He looked around for a bit, then crawled over to another little boy and began a wordless dispute over a plastic hammer. Another child cried as she was pushed headfirst off a bean bag by a red-faced sibling. Everywhere I looked there was some kind of conflict, infants disagreeing, trying to lay their own boundaries, little souls crashing together. All that noise and clamour; life beginning as it meant to go on - a struggle. Fighting down my own stale bile, I watched it all and wondered what any man might wonder at any given moment of his life: how the hell did I get here?

  The truth was that I was thirty-five and caught in my own headlock. I believed that I - Edgar Hill, husband, father of two young children, homeowner, Englishman, full-time employee of a large, self-serving corporation, the name of which was soon to be scorched forever from its office walls - was the product of a sick environment, a civilisation that had failed beyond hope. I wondered daily how we had ever even made it this far. It was a joke, pointless. How could we look after a planet when we couldn’t even look after our own countries, our own towns, our own communities?

  Our own families. Our own selves.

  Our own bodies. Our own heads.

  I was only halfway to the age when it’s OK to feel lethargic, cold, bitter and confused, and yet I felt those things every minute of every day. I was overweight. I ate double portions, drank double measures, avoided exercise. I was inflating like a balloon on an abandoned gas cylinder. My world perplexed me - every day was a haze of confusion. My job grated my very core. My marriage gave me vertigo. And my kids... well… I wasn’t what you’d call the most engaged father. I went through the motions alright, but let’s just say there are lots of urgent things you can find to do around the home and it’s amazing how long it can take sometimes to put out the bins. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my wife and I loved my kids, but that doesn’t mean to say I had to be happy about it. For me, then at least, being a husband and father meant being simultaneously exhausted and terrified. I was like a man on a cliff-edge, nodding off.

  Love my wife. Love my kids. You have to take care with your tenses when the world ends.

  Later, after the hell of Cheeky Monkeys, we drove home on roads shimmering with heat. The sky had that bright and colourless sheen that you only see in cities during the summer. The volume of traffic had tripled for the weather. We got stuck at a roundabout and I watched through my open window as car after car swept onto it from the right, blocking our path. There was no end to them, they just kept coming. Alice was screaming in the back about som
e vague injustice while Beth, twisted back in her seat, tried to placate her. Arthur started up too. Horns blared out behind me to get going, but there was no room for me to move. I sat there, helpless, as the traffic mounted behind. The kids’ yells got worse and I felt Beth bristling next to me. Still the cars sped by, endless, a swollen sea of souls washing past the windscreen. I lost focus on the stream of traffic and let the sound of car horns, engines and screams merge until all around me was a smear of colour and noise. I closed my eyes and saw the earth from above, the biosphere stretched across its surface like clingfilm and the human race like mayonnaise trapped within. Bacteria, sludge; an ever-expanding mass with nowhere to go.

  “ED! GO! GO NOW!”

  “Mumeeeeeee!”

  I pulled out, the car stalled, a BMW X5 screeched to a halt by our bonnet and the pinched-faced, platinum-blonde horror of a woman behind the wheel began shouting and banging her fists on the dashboard. Her husband wagged a loose, open fist at me, sneering with a mouth full of greasy dead animal matter. More car horns, more screams. I raised a hand in apology and pulled away.

  The truth is I was tired of it all. I was tired of the clamour and the din of a world that made less sense by the day and a life that had me just where it wanted. The truth is that the end of the world, for me at least, came as a relief.

  Perhaps that comes across as heartless or selfish. All those people, all that horror, all that death. But was it just me? Didn’t you feel the same? Couldn’t you almost hear that collective sigh, sense the world’s shoulders loosen? Did you find no comfort in the knowledge that the show was over, that we didn’t have to keep it going any more?

  Maybe it really was just me, and I suppose it’s fair to say I was in a bad place back then. I was struggling. But I kept going, didn’t I? I kept stumbling on, putting one foot blindly in front of the other, watching it all, filling my fat face with it all, frowning at it all, wanting it all to just go away.

  Which of course it did.

  I can’t tell you exactly what happened. It took a week. One week for the country to plunge from the blissful apathy of a heatwave, through detached concern, into that strange new territory of danger, threat, panic and, finally, oblivion. It doesn’t add up when you think about it. I mean, somebody must have known well before then, must have. If we can watch stars dying on the other side of the universe and put a robot on Mars (one who’s probably now wondering why everything’s gone quiet) then surely we could see those things coming?

  Maybe those German astrophysics students were right. What did they call themselves? The Watchmen I think, something like that. I was never that much into social media (all those pleas to like this, share that, validate me, laugh at me, support me, update this or upgrade that - I just couldn’t take it) so I’m sketchy on the details, but about a year before it happened The Watchmen announced on Twitter that they’d spotted something odd, something that shouldn’t have been there. There was that famous picture they posted of Saturn with some blurry mark on its rings, then another one of a dark smudge across one of Jupiter’s moons. The internet pricked up its ears. NASA responded with just a few curt dismissals, but you could tell something wasn’t right. Some celebrities got involved and they tried to get some scientific muscle behind them to corroborate what they’d found. Still nothing from NASA, and then they went quiet. And then there were conspiracy theories. And then they were forgotten about. Probably because there was a new series of Big fucking Brother I expect.

  Then a year went by and we were in a heatwave and that was all anyone had to talk about. And then everything happened very quickly. The survivors will always remember that week. In Scotland, any kind of appearance by the sun makes the front page, so that Monday - the one before it happened - the front pages were full of grins, short skirts and bikinis. The only real story was the happy threat of a hosepipe ban. Then an undercurrent appeared in the headlines around Wednesday: something odd, distant, unrelated to the heat. The news bulletins were so disjointed and confused that the mistakes were talked about more than the actual content of what they were trying to convey: that something very bad might be about to happen.

  We laughed. Nobody really bought it. It was summer, it was still hot; this had to be a joke, some kind of reality TV prank. That’s what people said: it’s a joke. I think the supermarkets had a brief surge of cheery panic buyers, but hardly anyone really grasped what was happening. We’re idiots. Creatures of denial who have learned not to be afraid of our closets. We need to see the monster in the room before we scream.

  The monster burst in on Sunday. There was that final heart-stopping headline, there were those two blunt and terrifying words, capital letters, black on white. And that’s when we finally got it, with no time left to prepare.

  I’m not saying I thought it was a good thing and I’m not saying I thought it wasn’t tragic. I’m just saying: I thought we had it coming. We had it coming for a long time.

  I don’t know what happened. Maybe the powers that be knew, maybe they didn’t. Maybe they just didn’t have the right telescope, maybe those things were just too small to see or track. Or maybe - just maybe - they realised we were fucked. Maybe they realised there was no way out and wanted us to enjoy the last few months we had of normality. That seems like a nice idea.

  The plain fact is I don’t know. All I know is that one minute you’re watching your three-year-old daughter scrambling up a soft play fun-pipe, the next you’re hurling her head first into the cellar and slamming the hatch behind you.

  All I know is that the end - in the end - came from the skies.

  That Sunday I awoke from a long and difficult dream about cows. A small herd of them were stuck inside a pen, struggling to escape, their hooves sliding from each other’s hides. Four or five bald men in white coats were standing around them with clipboards, watching them, prodding them, taking notes. The cows were getting more and more panicky, before one let out an almighty guttural MEEEEEEEERRRR and I almost fell out of bed. The sound still rang in my ears as I blinked in the low light and listened to my heart struggling for calm.

  I looked at the clock. It was 5am and Arthur’s cries were piercing the wall behind our bed. Beth groaned and elbowed my ribs. Arthur was still feeding through the night and waking early, so this was my shift, this was what I brought to the table. When his older sister, Alice, was born, I had made it very clear to Beth, very early in the proceedings, that I was the one who had to get up for work in the morning, that I was the one who needed my sleep, so no, I would most certainly not be helping with night feeds. I don’t think I’m the first man to have ever pulled this one. It’s a common enough shirk, one that conveniently ignores what work actually means for most men - i.e., comfy seats, tea and coffee, biscuits, nice food, adult conversation, the occasional pretty girl to ogle at, the internet, sealed toilet cubicles where you can catch a few winks without anyone noticing. Work. Not like being at home breastfeeding a newborn and entertaining a two-year-old all day.

  What work actually meant...those days. Careful with those tenses.

  Anyway, yes, I hold my hand up, guilty again. I insisted on my right to sleep. Beth curtailed like she always did, but only on the proviso that I took the early shift on Saturdays and Sundays. I couldn’t really argue with her. There’s only so much you can push it with a woman who’s just given birth.

  I grumbled something and pulled back the duvet, knocking the empty glass of water from my bedside table. Another groan from Beth. “Sorry,” I muttered.

  These early starts had been going on since Christmas, six months before. We had tried all the advice in the books, from friends and family. Let him cry it out, change the bedtime routine, put some water in his cot, change his day-time naps, fill him up with Weetabix before bedtime. Or, from those who weren’t parents: can’t you just ignore him? Sure, ignore him. Ignore the thunderous screams of rage and the cot hammering against the wall as your wife’s body stiffens with fury in the bed next to you, exhausted after another night of fr
agmented sleep.

  We had called a midwife out in January. ‘The main thing is not to worry,’ she had said, one palm laid carefully on Beth’s knee so as to avoid the various stains of sick, stewed apple and sour breast milk. ‘It’s just a phase, he’ll grow out of it when he’s good and ready.’

  Beth had nodded back dutifully, sobbing quietly as Arthur drained her bruised, broken left nipple for the third time that morning. I’d been watching from the kitchen as I tried to cram cold porridge into Alice’s bawling mouth. A metre of snow outside, still dark at 8:30am, wondering again why we were living in fucking Scotland.

  What if this all just went away, I had thought. What if this all just blew away.

  I cringe when I remember how hard I thought life was back then. With no sleep, no sex, no time, no respite. Honestly, I thought having kids was hell. But Beth was the one who did it all. She was the one who took it all on, growing them, giving birth to them, changing more than her fair share of filthy nappies, never complaining when I snuck off to the pub or stayed up late watching telly, never complaining when I fell into bed beside her in the middle of the night, my breath heavy with wine. Beth didn’t drink because of the breastfeeding, but I pretty much drank every night. I reasoned that it was my right as a tired parent, that I worked all week to provide for my family and that it helped me relax. I told myself that a glass or two on weeknights and a bit more at the weekend was fine and perfectly healthy. In reality I was pushing at least a bottle a night and two on a Saturday, not to mention the pints after work on a Friday. And exercise - who had time for that with a nine-to-five and two children? The same tired old excuses. The truth was that, aside from a minor decrease in sleep, my body had found a way of getting what it wanted: a sedentary life with plenty of carbohydrates and relaxants. And I gave in. I learned to avoid mirrors, learned to ignore the dull shock of seeing paunch, jowls and breasts growing day by day.