The End of the World Running Club Page 2

  I made it easy on myself, very easy. And that made it hard on Beth.

  I have to keep telling myself not to look back so much. I’ll always regret not being a better father, a better husband, but I have to look forward or else I won’t get to the place I’m going and I need beyond everything else to get there. The past is a foreign country, someone once said. They do things differently there. My past - everyone’s past - is now a different planet. It’s so different it almost makes no sense to remember it.

  But still, everyone remembers that day.

  ‘It’s just a phase,’ the midwife had said on that dark winter’s day all those months before. ‘He’ll grow out of it when he’s good and ready.’

  Just a phase. A phase that saved our lives.

  I poured myself a glass of water as I waited for the microwave to heat up Arthur’s milk, opened the back door and stepped out onto the deck. It was another sunny day and already warm. Arthur flinched at the low sun and snuggled into my neck, breathing little stuttering breaths in my ear as I closed my eyes and let the warm light flood over my face. I actually felt happy. I had another hangover of course (wine and telly on my own the night before) but I didn’t mind being up so early. Maybe it was the vitamin D, maybe I was still a little drunk from the night before, or maybe it was just holding my son in a warm sunrise when nobody else was around, I don’t know. Cool, still air, warm sun, the distant roar of a road somewhere... I just felt happy. That’s probably my last real memory of anything normal.

  As I sat on the deck enjoying the warm sunshine and my son’s quiet gurgles in my ear, a breeze suddenly whipped up around us. The plants gave a fierce rustle. The tree in the corner of the garden creaked and its branches twisted and bowed momentarily out of shape. The windows in the house rattled violently. The windows in the houses opposite rattled too. The kitchen door swung open and banged against the cupboards. It stopped. Behind the breeze came a very deep and distant rumble. A split second and then it was calm again.

  Arthur gasped and looked about wide-eyed.

  “What was that, Art?” I said, waggling his hand. “What was that?”

  He giggled.

  What the fuck was that?

  The microwave beeped inside.

  Arthur gave a little shout and pulled his hand out of mine to thwack my nose. He grinned. I grinned back.

  “Come on then, buddy,” I said, and we went inside.

  On the sofa, I plugged the milk bottle into Arthur’s mouth with one hand and found the remote with the other. I stopped. My thumb hovered over the red button. Something made me stop before I turned on the TV. Some flickering half-memory. I couldn’t place it at the time, but I would soon enough.

  Arthur sucked happily on his bottle and I pressed the ON button.

  Nothing.

  BBC2.

  Nothing.

  ITV, Channel 4, Sky. Nothing.

  This wasn’t unusual; our Sky box sometimes crashed and just needed a reboot. Still, a little warning light flashed in my mind and gave me an uncomfortable feeling in my gut.

  Arthur gurgled in dismay as the teat slipped from his mouth. I let the bottle drop to the floor and he squealed as I put him back on the sofa behind me. I scrabbled on the floor to the Sky box, took out the card and held the power button. Waited ten seconds, twenty seconds for the box to reboot. Arthur sounded a low warning note behind me, preparing for a full meltdown if I didn't return with his milk. The box finally came back to life and began its cosy introduction video. I grabbed the remote and sat back against the sofa, thumbing through the channels, trying every one in turn, moving through the international news stations: BBC World, CNN, Al Jazeera, the shopping channels, religious, music, adult...all dead.

  I told myself not to panic. All this meant was that Sky was out, maybe just in our area, maybe even just our dish. Still that half memory in the back of my mind, something I should remember...

  Arthur's warning note began to crescendo, so I lifted him down to the floor with me and reinserted his bottle. As he continued his disgruntled sucking, I took out my phone to see if I could get a connection on our Wi-Fi. Nothing. Broadband was out and I could never get a phone signal in the house anyway. I heard my son's last dry sucks as the bottle emptied.

  "Come on Artie," I said, standing up. "Let's take a stroll, mate."

  I slung Arthur in his backpack and hauled him onto my shoulders, stepped into my flip-flops and left through the back garden. We lived in Bonaly, a quiet scattering of small new-builds and gigantic mansions five miles south of Edinburgh at the foot of the Pentland Hills. Our house was a new-build, one of about twenty or so lined in terraces that faced each other across a small path. It was a nice area and they were nice enough houses, but cheap, so we didn’t have a lot of space. This is close living, Beth’s dad had grumbled when he first came to visit.

  I walked down the main road trying to find a signal on my phone. It was a steep hill lined with huge houses set back behind long, gravel drives. Other roads fed off it: wide, tree-lined, well-paved cul-de-sacs with even grander properties spaced out along them. They had security gates, CCTV, triple garages, secluded gardens with ponds and trampolines. Some were styled with colonial wood, some like American bunkers. Beth was pregnant with Alice when we had first moved to Bonaly. We used to take walks around these roads, naming the most impressive one ‘Ambition Drive’. We’d go arm-in-arm along it, seeing who could say the most offensive words the loudest as we passed by the gardens.

  Fanny batter.

  Bub sucks.

  Cunt bubbles.

  Dick cheese.

  It was Ambition Drive I was walking along when I first truly started to feel that something was definitely wrong. I heard a motorised garage door open. It was still before six am, usually too early for most people to be up. Then I heard a woman cry. It was a cry of fear. A child yelping, a man shouting. Then the door banging shut, then silence again.

  I walked on slowly. I heard a glass break from an upstairs window. Loud, rattling footsteps on wooden stairs. Another bang, then silence again. A police siren whooped twice, far in the distance, possibly in Edinburgh itself.

  There was something wrong with the silence, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Even though it was early on a Sunday, it was not usually this quiet. Something was missing.

  Birdsong.

  The birds. The birds were missing.

  I looked up and scanned the tall trees for signs of life. The branches were perfectly still and empty. The bushes, usually trembling with tits and starlings at this time of year, were deathly quiet.

  I heard gravel scrabbling and a dog’s yelps behind me. I turned to see a golden retriever sprawled on a drive. It was looking over its shoulder at what I presumed was its owner, a large, bare-footed man in a crumpled shirt and no trousers who was hurrying back to the house. I had met him once at a neighbour’s Hogmanay party when we first moved in. He had been guarded, predatory, scanning the room for opportunity. Some guests, mainly men (those in the larger houses, I imagined) he met with a single heavy tanned-palm slap to their shoulder and a loud boom of acceptance. When the circulation of the party threw the two of us into proximity, he met me with something halfway between revulsion and curiosity. I was not massively successful and therefore a strange thing, an alien. No shares, no property portfolio, no deals to close. What was there to talk about?

  His wife had been stood in the corner, a small porcelain shadow of a woman sipping Bacardi in silence. They both had that strange, thick smell of wealth.

  He caught my eye as he turned. He was snarling as he slammed the great oak door behind him. The dog whimpered and sat up, looking about in bewilderment. He saw me and gave a little wag of his tail, licking his chops. Arthur gave a gleeful hoot behind me. Why would he be putting a dog out at this time in the morning?

  No room for a dog. Not any more.

  That memory still flickered. That little red warning light in my cranium, that lurch in my belly.

  At the bottom o
f the hill, I turned right onto the main road. There was no traffic, which wasn’t unusual at that time of day. Suddenly a Range Rover tore out of nowhere and roared past me at sixty, maybe seventy miles an hour. I glanced four heads inside, a family. The father’s fists were gripping the wheel and the mother had her head in her hands in the passenger seat. A discarded crisp packet was swept up in the tailwind as the car disappeared. It danced on the eddies for a few seconds before settling on the stone wall by the side of the road where it lay still, winking sunlight at me from its creases.

  I was getting no signal. I followed the main road for a while and turned right, then right again onto the street back to our house.

  It was after six o’clock by the time I reached the shop opposite our terrace. It was the only shop within a mile of the house. It should have been open at this time but the metal shutters were still down. I peered through the window to see if I could spot Jabbar, the owner, sorting through the morning papers, pushing the new milk to the back of the fridges so he could sell off the old stuff first. Jabbar was an overweight Pakistani who ran the shop with his brother. It was independent, not part of a chain, so it was filled with dusty cans and bottles already well past their sell-by dates and twice their RRP. Jabbar and his brother lived with their wives and kids in the house that joined onto the back. Close living.

  There were no lights on, no sound. The door through to the house was shut.

  “Jabbar,” I shouted through the shutter. “Hey, Jabbar!”

  I thought I saw some eyes dart at me through the glass panel of the door into the house, but when I looked again they were gone.

  “Morning,” I heard somebody say behind me. I turned around and saw Mark standing in shorts and sandals, carrying his daughter Mary in a backpack like Arthur’s. She was about Arthur’s age. Mark and I had met through the antenatal group that Beth had made me go to when she was pregnant with Alice. She’d made friends with three or four of the girls, her ‘support network’ as she liked to call them, who quickly huddled into regular Friday coffee mornings and unabashed texts about breast milk, cracked nipples and vaginal tearing. The husbands dutifully met on the fringes, nodding silently at each other at birthday parties, going for the occasional pint where we’d sit and discuss things like sport, work, news - trivial safe-houses, anything but the reason we were thrown together. Yes, there was the odd update on how the respective wives were doing, how the sons and daughters were growing every day, little bundles of joy that they were... but we were each aware that we didn’t want, didn’t need, that level of discussion in our lives. We were really just a bunch of strangers sharing a pub table.

  I had been the only English one there. “We won’t hold that against you!” boomed Mark one night in the pub, slapping me on the back and repeating the joke I’d heard a thousand times since moving north. Mark and I got on OK, despite the fact that he was a road-cyclist and therefore a bastard, being much fitter and healthier than me. He had always threatened to take me out cycling. I always made excuses. I sucked in my stomach when I saw him.

  “Mark,” I said. “Hey. Hi, Mary.”

  I turned back to the shop and peered through the window. Mark joined me.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  “You tell me,” I said. “Jabba the Hutt’s hiding in there.”

  Mark banged a fist on the shutters.

  “Jabba! Come out of there you fat Pakki!”

  Nothing from inside. We stepped back.

  “Weird,” said Mark.

  “Aha,” I said.

  Mark nodded up at the hills at the top of the road.

  “I just passed a load of squaddies from the barracks running up to the Pentlands.”

  “Training?”

  “Didn’t look like it. They were all over the place, no leader. Some had two guns.”

  “Have you noticed the birds?” I said.

  “Aye. Weird. Any signal?”

  “No, you?”

  “Nada.”

  “Our telly’s out as well.”

  “Ours too, must be a problem with the cable I guess.”

  “We’re on Sky.”

  We looked at each other. It was still quiet, still warm. There are times when I wished I’d savoured that feeling more.

  “Any newspapers?” said Mark.

  “No, the van always drops them here before six though. Jabba’s usually sorting through them by now.”

  We looked around the pavement. There was nothing there so we walked round to the back door of the house. There on the ground was a fat stack of Sunday Times newspapers bound up with string.

  Mark tore the invoice sheet - someone had incredibly still thought to include it, even with what lay within - and pulled out the first in the pile. It was thin. Only two sheets thick, not the usual hundred leaf wad you get on a Sunday. There was nothing on the front apart from the Times logo and a single headline taking up the entire page.

  Two blunt and terrifying words.

  STRIKE IMMINENT

  Then I remembered. I remembered everything.

  I remembered the night before, pushing myself up from the sofa and knocking the dregs from the second empty bottle of Shiraz onto the carpet. I remembered scrubbing the stain with a cloth. I remembered the light in the room suddenly changing as a giant BBC logo filled the television screen. I remembered the silence in the studio, the flustered looks on the newsreaders’ faces. I remembered that the female presenter had no make-up on, that the male had his sleeves rolled up as he leafed through the stacks of A4 sheets on his desk. I remembered that he stammered, sweated, blurted out words like data, miscalculation, trajectory, then indoors and vigilant. I remembered him putting his head in his hands, his co-host covering her mouth, then a loud thumping sound and the camera seeming to wobble, footsteps running away on the studio floor. Then the picture flickered and a high pitched tone sounded like a test card. I remembered words appearing on the screen, white letters on primary red:

  STRIKE IMMINENT

  STAY INDOORS

  I remembered blundering up the stairs, blinking, trying to stop my head from swimming, wine and bile rising in my throat. I remembered calling Beth’s name. I remembered falling through Arthur’s door, falling against his cot, Beth’s face full of recrimination as she looked up from the chair where she was sitting feeding him. I remember struggling for words, slurring, trying to explain something even I didn’t understand. I remembered her disappointed eyes and her face flat as she told me to get out of the room. I remembered protesting, trying to explain. I remembered her shaking her head, telling me that I was drunk and she didn’t want me near him. I remembered staggering through to our room, waiting for Beth to come through, trying to make sense of things, knowing that I should be doing something.

  I remembered closing my eyes. I remembered waking up to Arthur’s cries.

  Strike imminent. A multiple asteroid strike on the United Kingdom is imminent.

  Mark and I stared at the words for a few seconds before they made sense and I had processed my own dull memory of the night before.

  “‘Strike’?” said Mark. “Does that mean what I think it does?”

  I didn’t answer. Simultaneously we ran back round to the front of the shop. We started banging on the shutters.

  “Jabbar! Jabbar! Open up! Fucking open up!”

  We kept hammering and shouting until we saw those eyes again behind the door. Jabbar hiding. We hammered louder.

  Jabbar started waving us away with his hand. His eyes were set, determined, no longer the genial face of the local tradesman. We kept banging on the shutters and Arthur and Mary joined in the game with squeals and shouts behind us. Eventually the door behind the counter opened and Jabbar stormed up to the shutters.

  “Go away!” he said, flicking his hand at us. He looked terrified. “Go on! Clear off! I’m not open!”

  “Look,” I said. I held up the paper and pointed at the headline.

  “What’s this? Are there any more papers?”
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  Jabbar stared at the words and then back at us. His fat cheeks were damp with sweat. Behind him I could see a woman looking at us, cowering in the doorway to the house. She was holding a crying baby. Behind her were Jabbar’s two brothers. Close living.

  One of the brothers was holding a portable radio close to his ear, his fist pressed against his lips.

  Jabbar shook his head violently,

  “No,” he said. “Nothing.”

  I looked back at his brother.

  “Mark,” I said. “Look.”

  He was looking down at his feet, the radio still pressed to his ear and his hand across his eyes.

  “Jabbar,” growled Mark. “What do you know?”

  I stabbed the paper.

  “What does ‘imminent’ mean Jabbar?”

  Jabbar faltered, shaking, his eyes flicking between us both.

  “It’s already happened,” he hissed. “They’re already here.”

  I remembered the sudden gust of wind on the deck, the bending branches, the rumble. What was that?

  An aftershock. How far away? Glasgow? London?

  “Now go away! Get....”

  But Mark and I had turned from the shutters and were looking around us. Jabbar started to look upwards through the slats of the shutters as well. Far away, we heard a low, nasal drone. It was an ancient sound, like a rusted handle turned on something that had not been used in a long time. A sound that was not supposed to be heard any more, a sound that belonged in a different century. It began to rise slowly in pitch till it reached and held its hideous, gut-wrenching howl.

  An air-raid siren. A fucking air-raid siren.

  Jabbar sprang back from the shutters and fled back through the shop. Mark and I shared one last look and then bolted in opposite directions.

  “Beth!” I cried as I ran, Arthur laughing in blissful ignorance as he shoogled in his backpack.

  “Get up! Get Alice up!”

  I sped through the archway and onto the path. The siren was beginning its first awful dive back down. Where the hell did Bonaly have an air-raid siren? The barracks I guessed. It echoed off the hills and howled through the empty streets; a demented, sickening sound that had only ever meant one thing and one thing only: take cover, hell is coming, things are about to get VERY bad.