The End of the World Running Club (29 page)

Suddenly Bryce released an almighty roar as he fell to the ground.

“Ow! Fuck! Ow!” he yelled, clutching his leg. Grimes and Richard caught up and stopped.
 

“What happened?” said Richard, kneeling down next to him. Grimes took off her pack and started rummaging around inside.

“My ankle,” he said. “I didn’t see a pothole. Went over on it.” He straightened up to a sitting position and stretched out his leg. Grimes pulled out a torch and shone it down on Bryce’s boot. Flakes of snow danced in its beam.

“Broken?” she said.

“Nah…” said Bryce. He loosened the lace and put an exploratory hand down inside. “Don’t think so.”

Grimes reached out a hand and helped Bryce to his feet. He winced as he put weight on foot, then wiggled it and tried again.

“It’s OK,” he said. “I’m alright, just twisted it.”

He turned to look at me.

“Are you fucking
serious
?” said Bryce.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking…I…”

“Bloody right,” said Harvey quietly, just to me. “Not thinking. Maybe you should do some more of that.”

“Ed’s right,” said Richard.

“No, I’m not,” I said. “I’m not right, like I say, I wasn’t thinking. I just panicked.”

“No, you didn’t,” said Richard. “You just did what the rest of us were thinking. This is the only way we’ll make it to Cornwall.”

“Speak for yourself!” spluttered Bryce. “Running? Are you out of your fuckin
minds
?”

Grimes worked her jaw, thinking. “We can’t walk safely on these roads at night, we’ve already seen what happens.” She motioned to Bryce’s ankle. “Even when the sun rises, the cloud cover’s too thick. It’s mid-morning by the time you can see anything properly.”

“And it’s dark before sunset as well,” said Richard.

“So we get about five or six hours of light to move by,” said Grimes.

“To do twenty miles in five hours, we need to do more than just walk.”

“So we alternate,” said Richard. “We run a few miles, then walk a few.”

Grimes nodded. “That’ll work.”

“Are you serious?” I said.

 
“Makes sense on paper,” said Grimes.
 

“Twenty miles, every day, for three weeks,” I said to myself.

“Agreed,” said Richard. “Now let’s get through this shit heap and find shelter. Get some sleep. We need to rest if we’re going to…”

“Run to Cornwall?” Bryce boomed. “Is that what we’re doing now?” He looked around at us, open handed, awaiting a response. “Just so I know. Anybody?”

Richard stared at him for a while.

“That’s right,” he said. “But right now, we walk.”

He pulled on his pack and headed south.

We hit another pile-up soon afterwards. It took us an hour to clamber through the jumble of mud, stone and metal and find the tarmac again. By that time it was fully dark, so we walked a little in the light of Grimes’ torch until we found an overturned lorry. The red canopy of its trailer was half torn away and some of its cargo had spilled out onto the road. We pulled open some of the boxes, disappointed to find them filled with stationery.

“This will have to do us,” said Grimes. “We can make a fire from the paper. How’s everyone doing for water?”

“I’m pretty much out,” I said.

“Me too,” said Bryce.

“Right,” said Grimes. “There was a sign back there for services about a mile ahead. I’m going to go and see what’s what. There might still be some supplies there, water in the pipes at least.”

“I’ll come with you,” said Richard.

Grimes paused. “OK,” she said.  “You three can stay here and get the fire going.”

“Sir, yes sir,” said Bryce, flipping a salute and sitting down on a crate of ballpoint pens.

Richard and Grimes left. Harvey and I searched the depths of the trailer for the driest paper and brought it out to the entrance. I kicked at the wooden floor until a piece broke away, then I prised it back. A rat shot out from beneath, squeaking and running over my arm. I yelled and fell back on the floor as it scuttled out of the trailer.

“You alright?” called Harvey from outside. “Oh, hello little fella.”

“Yep,” I said. “Just a rat.”

“A rat?” said Bryce. He frowned and ran a hand down his beard. I could tell what he was thinking; I was hungry too. He stood up and walked past me, disappearing into the darkness of the overturned trailer.

I got to my feet and tugged at the wood until it broke off, then lugged it out to the fire that Harvey had started with the paper and Bryce’s lighter. There was a lot of smoke, but it was warm. Harvey and I sat close to it as Bryce hammered and stomped about inside.

“Reckon they’ll find anything?” said Harvey. “Richard and Grimes?”

I shook my head. “Doubt it,” I said. “We passed a service station two miles back with a van sticking out of its roof. I could see inside. It was empty, stripped clean.”

We heard some shouts from Bryce, things falling, then a pause, silence, some loud banging and a whoop of victory. Seconds later he appeared with a proud grin and two fat rats hanging by their tails from his fist. He dropped them by the fire and lit a cigarette.

“Dinner,” he said.

We ate the rats. They weren’t good. When we’d finished, Harvey got up and went into the trailer for more paper. When he was out of earshot, I turned to Bryce.

“Do you think we can do this?” I said. “With Harvey I mean. Do you think he’ll be able to manage it?”

“You saw him today,” said Bryce. “He was barely out of breath.” He looked me up and down in the same way he had done when we had met over whisky. “What about you?” he said. “Will you manage it?”

Harvey appeared, smiling, carrying a few packets of A4 paper. “I can hear you, you know,” he said, tapping his ear. “I’m not deaf.” He tossed a stack of paper onto the fire and his eyes began to twinkle in the growing flames.
 

“Did I ever tell you I used to be a postie?” he said.

We shook our heads. He looked between us, searching for recognition. He mimed posting a letter.

“A postman, you know? Delivering letters and parcels?”

Bryce frowned. “Aye, we’ve...we’ve heard of them, Harvey; go on.”

“This was when I was a young man, back in Australia, back in the sixties. I come from New South Wales originally, lived out in the country, north side of Sydney. It wasn’t like in the cities, you know with a van. The country was spread out, miles between houses sometimes.”

He stood up and walked to the side of the road. When he returned he was carrying a short stick. He sat down and held it to the light, smoothing it over in his hands. Then he used it to poke the fire, pushing back the blackening sheets of printer paper that were slipping from the pack.

“I had two dogs that came with me. We were up at 5am, out the door into the sunshine, spent the day racing around the Bush and back home by the afternoon. Great life, always on the move. Me and the other fellas had dirt bikes to get around and my dogs would jump on the back. A lot of the time, though, if I knew I was going up a road I was going to come back down again, I’d just leave the bike and run with the dogs at my side. I started doing it more and more, probably clocked up around twenty miles a day most days. Got really fit. Great life.”

He smiled, then his face darkened and he scratched the road at his feet with the stick.
 

“Anyway, if you live out in the Bush then you’re pretty much a member of the Bush fire brigade as well. Some years are better than others. One summer it was sweltering hot, a real bad one. Then the sheep on a farm close to us got sick and started dying. The farmers didn’t know what to do with all the corpses; couldn’t burn them, see, in case they started a fire. Then, there were fires anyway, bad ones that spread and took out some houses. We spent two or three weeks trying to put them out, ambulances all over the place taking injured people back to Sydney. I didn’t sleep much. My dogs came everywhere with me, of course; I couldn’t keep them at home.  Then everyone started to get sick, other animals too.  Agnes and Annie, well, they got sick too. Real sick. I couldn’t do anything for them.”

Bryce nodded slowly, the corners off his mouth turned down.

“Losing dogs,” he said. “Hardest fucking thing. My grandad died when I was twelve. I remember Mum telling me when I got in from school and she might as well have been telling me what was for dinner. I didn’t give a shit, fucking alcoholic old prick. Our dog died a year later and I cried for a week. It’s hard.” He punched his chest. “Harder than losing a person.”

“Well,” said Harvey. Bryce seemed to have knocked him off course. “I don’t really know about that. All I can say was that after that I didn’t cope too good. The fires stopped eventually but a lot of people had lost their homes.” He cleared his throat. “And more than that in some cases. Everyone was exhausted and nobody was particularly happy but, like I say, I’m ashamed to say I was doing worse than most, so I suppose what I did next had something to do with that.”
 

“What did you do?” I said.

“Well, one day, after everything had died down, I got up at 5am as usual and went outside to start work. I rode my dirt bike a few miles down the track, turned left at the creek and stopped at the top of the hill. The sun was coming up and I could see the light spreading west over the plains. The hill had cast a shadow on the plain beneath me. There was still smoke coming off the burned scrub and I could see the places where houses used to be, little black squares full of rubble, nobody there any more. It was all in this dark shadow. It felt like the end of the world.”

He looked up suddenly and laughed.

“Yeah…” he gestured at the darkness. “Not much compared with this I guess, but that’s what it felt like at the time. Anyway, between all the burnt-out houses and black scrubland, there was this long, straight road running south-east out of the shadow. No bends or hills, just this sharp line running through all the shit and leading out towards the horizon. As the sun rose, I could see the line extending further and further towards the horizon, as if it was drawing it for me on a map. Such a simple picture.”
 

He stamped one foot on the ground.
 

“Everything
here
was dark and dead.”

Then he pointed his stick out across the fire.

“Everything out
there
was bright and living.”

He looked at us nervously, as though seeking acknowledgement for something he’d only just tried the very first time.

“There was no path down to the road,” he continued. “I dropped the bike and picked my way down the slope to it, fell a few times, skidded down most of it on my arse and fell in a heap of dust at the bottom. Then I stood up and looked down the road. And then...” He shifted a little on his seat and shrugged. “Then I just started running.”

He looked into the fire for a long time, then up at us as if he had just remembered we were there.
 

“I know,” he said. “Stupid really.” He tapped his stick on the ground and laughed through his nose, then stared into the flames once again and was quiet.

Bryce raised his hands and looked between us.

“That it?” he said. “That’s the story? You went for a run?”

“Ah, yeah,” said Harvey. “Yeah, that’s about it, I guess. Went for a run. Pretty big one mind.”

“How far did you run, Harvey?” I said.

“Oh well,” said Harvey, scratching his chin. “Hard to say, really; I didn’t have a map and I wasn’t following a route. I met a few people on the way, you know, other folk on the road. I remember one pair of blokes in a truck who spent their time driving around the country, following the coast, just looping and looping around. I met them five or six times I think, coming in the opposite direction. I slept wherever I could, ate and drank whatever I could find. Eventually I reached a bay and saw an ocean I hadn’t seen before. I stopped and sat on a rock and looked out at the sea crashing against these huge rocks. I could smell the salt, feel it getting on my skin and in my air, tasted it on my lips. It felt good, I felt like I’d reached where the road was taking me, felt like I’d found my coast.”

“Where were you?” said Bryce.

“WA mate,” said Harvey. “Western Australia, place called Kalbarri.”

Bryce thrust his head forward and gawped.

“Western Australia?” he said. “That’s on the other side of the country.”

“That’s right,” said Harvey. “Beautiful place, too. I slept rough on the beach for a few weeks before one of the locals took pity on me and let me stay for a while. I found a job cooking fish.”

Bryce’s mouth was still agape, a cavern of flickering shadow in the firelight.

“And you ran all that way?” said Bryce.

Harvey scratched his head, rocking it this way and that.

“Hard to say exactly how I got there,” he said. “A while later, some university people got wind of what I’d done and wanted to talk to me about it. They wrote about me in some journal or other. I told them what I knew, the places I’d seen, and they tried to piece together my route.”

He began to trace lines in the dirt with his stick.

“Near as they could place it, I ran south, meandered around Victoria for a while, found my way up into South Australia where I got lost in the lakes, circled back a few times, eventually hit the south coast and then joined Route 1, straight across the Nullabor plain before gravitating north and getting lost again before Kalbarri. They told me I should have died a few times. Truth is, I don’t really remember many of the details, and some of the people I met might not really have been there; hallucinations, you know? Dangerous thing to do, stupid like I say.”

He paused and drew a single line through the others he had made at his feet.

“I didn’t choose it, though,” he said, meeting my eyes and narrowing his. “That road. I didn’t decide to run that far on it. It chose me.”

Bryce stared across the fire at Harvey. Eventually he snapped his mouth shut and shook his head.

“Fuck me,” he said, getting to his feet. “Just fuck me sideways. Ow.”

“Take it easy there, big fella,” said Harvey, getting up to help him. Bryce waved him away.