The End of the World Running Club (2 page)

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 fragmented 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.  

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.