The End of the World Running Club (3 page)

At the bottom of 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?”

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
.

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.