The End of the World Running Club Read online

  As I crossed the road, I heard the banished dog from down the road join in the howl. Some weeks later, I would suddenly remember this noise in the middle of the night and weep, actually weep, holding my hands to my face so I didn’t wake and upset Beth and the kids.

  “Beth!” I screamed.

  I saw people at windows now, woken by the siren. Tangled dressing gowns, puffy, confused faces frowning in the light. The sun that had seemed so warm and welcoming before was now vivid and terrible.

  “Get up! We’re...”

  The words actually caught in my throat. Ridiculous. I felt dizzy, the way you do when you’re a child about to call out for your parents in the night.

  “...going to be hit!”

  My mind reeled. Think. What do you do? What did those government broadcasts tell you to do? How do I arm myself? How do I survive?

  It occurred to me that I had subconsciously been preparing for this. Even in those last few strange and unfathomable days, a check-list had been forming in my mind, an old program from my youth kicking into life. In the eighties, nuclear war was absolutely, positively, 100% how I was going to die. Not asteroids, and certainly none of this slow climate change bollocks. The real deal. You were going to evaporate in an atomic blast: finished, done, end of. Then Aids came along and, if you were a teenager like me, your worries turned to fact that death was now lurking within every pleated skirt and behind every cotton gusset. Now sex was going to kill you.

  I could deal with Aids. I knew I wasn’t getting to have sex any time soon anyway, not with my face looking like an arse smeared with jam. But the nuclear threat was a different matter. That was real terror. And so began my first mini obsession since my five-year-old self first heard that something called a Tyrannosaurus Rex used to exist. I watched all the TV series, read all the books and kept all the survival pamphlets on how to make a homemade fallout shelter. I was fascinated and terrified. That bit in When the Wind Blows when the old couple walk out and think the smell of scorched human flesh is somebody cooking a Sunday roast gave me nightmares for a week.

  Although I had long since stopped being hung up on the apocalypse, that part of my brain had started making a list as soon as the first reports of trouble came in. I think it always had done. Every major catastrophe, every natural disaster, every impending conflict gave me a little childish thrill. This is it, I would think with nothing short of glee. This could be the one. The Millennium Bug, 9/11, the London Bombings, Iraq, Afghanistan, the London Riots…

  There was no historical name for this one. This was just it. The End.

  My apocalypse-obsessed teenager passed me up a list.

  Water. Food. Medical Supplies. Light. Shelter. Protection.

  Shelter. The cellar.

  The houses on the terrace opposite ours had been built to a different design. They were wider and had five bedrooms rather than our two. The rooms were more spacious with higher ceilings and bigger windows; ours were just on the wrong side of poky and dark. There was a floored loft that you could stand up in. Some of the owners had built up into them to create a sixth room: the whole row of roofs now had dormer windows set into their tiles. Our loft was small and dark, enough for storage but nothing else. They were the posh houses. We were the cheap seats.

  But what we did have - and what they didn’t - was a cellar.

  The kitchen had a small walk-in pantry. For some strange reason - it probably appealed to her heightened nesting instinct - Beth thought that this was just about the best thing ever. It didn’t have the same effect on me, of course, but in its floor was a hatch that led down some rough, pine steps into a space that was about the same size as the kitchen above it. It wasn’t much, not very big. But it was underground.

  “Uh-oh,” said Beth when the estate agent lifted the hatch. “Man cave alert.”

  Man caves. Sheds, garages, studies, attics, cellars. Places for ‘men’ - or at least their twenty-first century equivalents - to hide. To tinker, potter, be creative, build things, hammer bits of wood, listen to the music that their families hate.

  Drink, smoke, look at pornography, masturbate.

  The subtext of the man cave, of course, is that men don’t want to spend any time with their families. For some reason this is perfectly acceptable; every man deserves his cave.

  It is my right as a tired parent.

  I’m fairly sure these two small, windowless symbols of domesticity - airy female bliss for Beth; dark male seclusion for me - were the real reason we bought the house. But in the end the pantry was where we stored all the food we didn’t eat and the cellar was where we kept the hoover and the empty wine bottles. I rarely went down there.

  I leapt up the steps to the deck and burst through the back door, nearly tearing Arthur off my back in the process.

  “Beth!” I bellowed up the stairs. “Get up! Get Alice up!”

  Arthur bawled, the game no longer fun. I swung him off my shoulders and propped him up, still in his backpack against the kitchen sink.

  Thumping feet down the stairs.

  “Beth! Oh thank fuck, you’re up.”

  I’d never been more proud of her. She stood in the kitchen door, wide-eyed, pale, with Alice in her arms, dressed and still groggy from sleep.

  “What’s happening?” she said.

  I started opening and closing cupboards.

  Shelter. Water. Food. Medicine.

  “Daddy,” said Alice, rubbing her eyes. “Arthur’s crying, Daddy.”

  “I know, sweetheart,” I said. I picked up one of the recycling boxes by the door and started dragging tins and packets from the shelves into it. We were low on supplies; Sunday was our big shop day.

  A bottle of balsamic vinegar landed on a tin of tomato soup. I picked it up and stared at it. It seemed poignant somehow, this totem of middle class, now a useless dark liquor: no good to drink, no nutritional value. I left it where it was and piled more things on top.

  “What does that siren mean?” said Beth.

  “Daddeee, Arthur’s cryyyyiing.”

  Rice, pasta, beans, tinned fruit, chocolate.

  “Ed,” said Beth again. “Please, I’m scared.”

  I slid the box towards the pantry and started filling another.

  “We need to get down in the cellar,” I said. “Now. Get blankets, duvets, clothes for the kids.”

  “What? But what..?”

  I turned on her.

  “NOW, Beth!”

  Arthur stopped crying. It was all quiet apart from the wail of the siren outside. Then a door banged, a man shouted, a woman crying, a loud screech of car’s tyres as it sped away.

  “How...how long?” Beth said. She was making calculations. The same ones she used to pack up the mountain of kids’ equipment into the car when we went away for the weekend.

  I shook my head. I don’t know.

  Beth carefully placed Alice down and ran upstairs.

  I pulled out the bottom drawer and emptied the lot into the second box. Bits of string, crumpled photographs, bulldog clips, screwdrivers, dead batteries, candles, takeaway menus, spare keys, cigarettes, lighters; all the detritus of kitchen life fell into the box.

  Alice was now twirling with her hands in the air and singing.

  “Look after your brother, sweetheart,” I said.

  Alice sighed and slumped her shoulders, her ‘teenager’s sigh’ we called it, though she was only three. She trudged over to Arthur as if I’d asked her to do her homework.

  “Daddy, I want my milk,” she grumbled.

  I found a first aid kit and threw it in the box along with some plasters. I could hear Beth thumping about above me, pulling things out of drawers and cupboards. Two large boxes of nappies landed heavily at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Daddeee...”

  How much time do we have? Hours? Minutes?

  I guessed minutes.

  “Daddeeeeee...”

  Think. What next?

  Water.

  I once saw a film about a girl
who survives an apocalyptic event. It was some unnamed worldwide cataclysm; we weren’t told the details. She lives on this farm in middle America and when it all starts happening the first thing her father does is turn on all the taps in the house. She says what’s happening Daddy and he replies I don’t know honey, I don’t know and starts pelting round the rooms filling baths and sinks.

  I shouted up the stairs.

  “Fill the bath, Beth!”

  “Znot basstime Daddeee!” shouted Alice, twirling in the sunlight that was still streaming through the kitchen window.

  There were more thumps from above. Beth screamed something unintelligible.

  “Keep the taps on!”

  “Silleeee Daddeeeee woo woo wooo!”

  I had a sudden vision of our house destroyed. Brown air, heavy cloud, nothing but dust, brick and bent iron. Perched on top of the rubble is our bath. It’s a dry, scorched husk. The taps are stretched, black liquorish strings melting over the sides like a Salvador Dalí painting.

  Water.

  You want to know how long it takes for the fabric of society to break down? I’ll tell you. The same time it takes to kick a door down. There are Japanese veterans alive today who remember the darkness of the Second World War. They seem like old men with happy families at peace with the world, but they can still recall the hunger that drove them to kill and eat Chinese women. More often than not they would rape them first. Ask anyone who has been in a crowd that becomes too strong, where bodies begin to crush you. Is your first instinct to lift others up, or to trample them down? That beast inside you, the one you think is tethered tightly to the post, the one you’ve tamed with art, love, prayer, meditation: it’s barely muzzled. The knot is weak. The post is brittle. All it takes is two words and a siren to cut it loose.

  “Stay here with Mummy, darling,” I said.

  “Daddy, where are you going?”

  I ran back to Jabbar’s shop. There were people gathered there banging on the shutters and shouting for him to open up. Others were gathered around the stack of papers.

  I stopped short of the pavement and ran around the back. A few from the front saw me and started to follow.

  “Jabbar!” I shouted through the letterbox in the back door. “All I need is some batteries and water! You’ve got more than enough in there!”

  “Go! Away!” shouted Jabbar from inside.

  There was another sudden great gust of wind. The tall trees down the hill creaked painfully as their branches crumpled. Then the short, deep rumble again. Everyone stopped. Then screams and renewed hammering on the shutters of the shop. Three cars sped past and down the hill. Where the hell are they going? I thought.

  I was aware of people joining me at the door.

  “Jabbar!” I shouted one last time. Hearing nothing, I stepped back.

  Took a breath.

  Kicked the door.

  A shock of pain in my ankle made me howl. The door had not shifted. I tried again closer to the lock. This time I heard a split of wood and I heard footsteps running from inside. On the third kick, the door swung in and I followed it into Jabbar’s hall, pushing his brother into a stack of boxes in the corner.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I had pushed or punched anyone. Primary school, maybe?

  “Get the fuck out of here!” shouted Jabbar as I rounded the corner onto a corridor with a red, floral carpet and cheaply framed pictures. The place was hot, dark and stank of old curry and babies. Jabbar’s wife was hiding in a doorway behind Jabbar, who was still sweating profusely.

  “I just want batteries and water, Jabbar,” I said, storming up the corridor to the door into the shop.

  “Not all of them, just enough for me and my family.”

  “No!” said Jabbar, stepping out and squashing me against the wall with his shoulder. “Get out of my house! Get out!”

  His bulbous, wet stomach pressed into my chest as he tried to wrestle me back through the door. His breath was full of hot panic, his eyes wild. Jabbar’s brother had picked himself up behind me and was trying to hold back the growing throng at the broken door.

  Jabbar’s hand was on my face now. I could taste the salt of his rough skin in my mouth. With a surge of effort, I managed to swing back my leg and kicked it hard against his knee. He cried out and fell like lead on the stained carpet, clutching his leg.

  “Bastard!” he cried. “Bastard! Get out! Get out!”

  I ran past him and into the shop, grabbing packs of batteries from the shelves and picking up three crates of Highland Spring from a stack on the floor.

  Jabbar was still curled up on the floor in the corridor and his brother was now being pushed back by the crowd of people. Our next door neighbour Calum was the first through. He stared straight past me and elbowed me out of the way and into the shop. Behind him were an old couple I didn’t recognise. They walked past me too, the woman flashing me a nervous smile as if we were passing in the street.

  Jabbar’s brother was on the floor now. Two of the crowd were kicking him and pushing him into one of the rooms. With the batteries balanced on the crates, I marched back down the corridor.

  “Bloody bastard!” screamed Jabbar again as I stepped over his fat head. “You bloody bastard!”

  His wife was crouching next to him, holding his head and weeping.

  At the end of the corridor I avoided eye contact with any member of what was now a mob. Most ignored me too, but as I got to the door, a man I recognised from one of the houses opposite ours fixed me with a sharp stare.

  “Hey,” he said, blocking my path.

  He was in his early sixties, perhaps. His daughter had recently given birth and we used to see the whole family quite often having barbecues in the back garden. Beth and I would wave and talk about inviting them over for a play date with Arthur. Frank. I think his name was Frank.

  He nodded at the water.

  “I need that.”

  “There’s more in the shop,” I said. I moved towards him, but he grabbed me by the shoulders and pushed me back. He made a lunge for the water but I threw my weight into him and crushed him against the door frame. He made a sound I hadn’t heard before. It started with a huhh-uhh-uhh... as the air was pushed out of his lungs, but as I squeezed past him it turned into a comical childish squeal, his face crumpled as I pushed by. Perhaps, out of context, it would have sounded amusing. But this was a man I saw almost every day. I had never shaken his hand. The first and last time I ever had human contact with him, I squeezed his lungs until he made a sound like a child who had been denied chocolate.

  Frank fell to the ground and held his chest. I crossed the road, trying to keep the stack of batteries balanced on the water and avoiding two more cars screaming down the hill going fuck knows where.

  I had almost reached the path to our house when I saw Mike standing at the corner. Mike was an old widower who lived in a one-bed flat around the corner. He was seventy-three, bald with a white beard and a cheap blue jacket. He smiled and raised a hand.

  “Hullo, Edgar,” he said.

  “Mike,” I said. “You need to get inside.”

  He leaned forward on his walking stick and peered over my shoulder at the chaos breaking out at the shop.

  “Can’t you hear the siren, Mike? It’s happening, you need to get inside.”

  Mike puffed through his nose and flickered a half-smile as if I had just told him a joke he didn’t quite get or didn’t approve of. He shook his head imperceptibly.

  “You take good care now Edgar,” he said. “Look after your family.”

  Then he took a long, quivering breath and turned his face up to the blue sky.

  That long breath, the squeal, the dog’s howl, the air raid siren. These are the sounds that stayed with me, which will always stay with me.

  The crates were slipping in my hands. I heard a shout.

  “Hey!”

  I looked behind. Frank had scrabbled to his knees and was standing in the middle of the road, staring straight at me.


  “You!” he said. “Cellars! You’ve got cellars!”

  Shit.

  A few of the other dressing gowns who were clamouring to get into Jabbar’s house had turned as well. They were all now looking at me. Frank started to stride across the road. He was almost halfway across when another 4x4 came hurtling down the hill, hitting him square in the side and tossing him up like a rag doll. His broken body somersaulted over a hedge and landed against a dustbin while the car sped on. A few seconds later I heard a crunch of metal, and a chorus of car alarms joined the howls of the siren and the dog that still filled the air.

  The others who were following Frank across the road stepped back momentarily. Then they cautiously continued across the road, glancing between me, each other and the road uphill.

  I bolted up the path and into our garden and hurled the crates of water across the deck and through the kitchen door. I slammed the bolt down on our gate and sprinted up to the kitchen, scooping up the batteries from the deck. As I closed the door I saw the others arrive at the gate. They were shaking it and screaming. More had joined them on the path and they were now trying all the gates along our terrace, streaming into the gardens and pummelling the back doors.

  I locked ours.

  Beth was standing at the open cellar door. She had thrown down the boxes and whatever else she had found and was now standing on the steps holding Arthur with her free arm stretched out to Alice. Alice was standing at the door of the pantry with her hands tucked under her chin, shaking her head.

  “Come on, darling,” Beth whispered. “Come down with Mummy.”

  “Noooo,” said Alice.

  Alice didn’t like the cellar.

  Beth was trying to smile.

  “Come on,” she said. “It’s an adventure.”

  “Nooooo mummeeeee.”

  I heard our bamboo fence start to break and turned to see two of the mob scrambling over it. One had caught his pyjamas on the top and they were torn from his legs as he fell face first into our raspberry bush. He shrieked as the thorns tore into his face, then into his bare legs and groin as he struggled to get to his feet. The woman behind landed feet first on his head and made towards our door.