The End of the World Running Club (51 page)

The sun was still rising and we looked southwards, away from the coast. Thirty miles of freshly soaked marsh stretched out between us and Falmouth. It was already mid-morning. My bones felt like stone and my muscles like dried rubber. Pain threatened every movement.

“Is this the end, Ed?” said Bryce.

“It’s never the end,” I said.

Bryce sniffed. “I thought you might say that,” he said. “I found these in the house.”

Bryce held out a white box with a printed label stuck to its side.

Codeine Phosphate Hemihydrate 30mg/Paracetamol 500mg

“Happy Christmas,” he said.

You want to know how it feels to run thirty miles. You want to know how it feels to run thirty miles straight through mud and across scorched earth, dodging sinkholes and crawling beneath toppled trees, when you’ve already run the length of the country, when your ankle’s sprained, you’re blind in one eye and you’ve only had half a tin of baked beans for breakfast.

I’ll tell you. It starts like every other run. Before the first step, before the first muscle twitches, before the first neuron fires, there comes a choice: stand still or move. You choose the right option. Then you repeat that choice one hundred thousand times. You don’t run thirty miles, you run a single step many times over. That’s all running is; that’s all anything is. If there’s somewhere you need to be, somewhere you need to get to, or if you need to change or move away from where or what you are, then that’s all it takes. A hundred thousand simple decisions, each one made correctly. You don’t have to think about the distance or the destination or about how far you’ve come or how far you have to go. You just have to think about what’s in front of you and how you’re going to move it behind you.

Of course, codeine helps. We overdosed on it and drank drizzle from a ditch. Then we got our bearings and put our feet to work.

The first ten miles were of slow torment. We tried talking about the boats and about where they might be going and about Harvey. Each attempt ended in half sentences and I didn’t mention Harvey’s delirious mumblings in the middle of the night. My ankle was not as much of a problem as I thought, but my back was, probably from the way I had slept. Splintering pain ran up from the base of my spine whenever my feet hit the earth. I counted my steps, distracting myself with calculations about how many it would take before the codeine kicked in. My bones felt dry and hot. My ligaments threatened to shear like ancient rubber bands with every step. But every step came and went and led to the next one, fresh with its own unique breed of pain.

Mud became less of a problem the further inland we went. Brown marsh became scraggy dirt. There were fields and fences, coarse hedgerows, copses with some trees still growing. We stopped at a stream and drank freezing water until I felt my belly bursting against my belt. We passed through empty villages and took shortcuts through abandoned farms, and all the time a thin, blue line of sea ran along the western horizon to our left, reminding me, pulling me on.

About fifteen miles in, things began to change. A small bird - a starling, perhaps - had been flying ahead of me. I couldn’t remember for how long. It flitted between branches of a hedge, waited for me, then flitted to the next. I realised that the painkillers must have taken effect. I felt that something had separated inside. I wasn’t numb, just indifferent; the pain was still there but it didn’t seem to matter as much. Bryce was ever present, lumbering along beside me. He seemed to have withdrawn too. My attention turned to my breathing, and the sound of air moving in and out of my lungs took centre stage. I looked down at the struggle going on between my battered feet and the ground beneath them and remembered Harvey’s appraisal of my gait - that I still led with my right foot, in spite of its injury. I changed this; pushed forwards with my left.

It may have been this or the codeine or any number of other things that triggered what happened next. Maybe some long battle deep within my brain had finally been won, or maybe a hidden reserve of endorphins had suddenly burst under slow pressure. What it felt like was a surrender; something gave up, something that had kept its hold too long. I felt a slow unravelling take place around my shoulders and down my spine. A lightness drew me up and my ribcage filled with cold air. My legs seemed to stretch and flush, as if unexpectedly released from heavy chains. My muscles broke free, my blood rejoiced. Everything within me seemed suddenly to turn in the same direction, like a billion tiny compass needles twitching towards a giant magnet. Everything that had been grinding and grating and straining against each other was now flowing in one single path.
 

I was running, and my body wanted everything to do with it.
 

My mind wanted everything to do with it.

That other beast inside you, the one you rarely see? You have it tethered tight. It watches and waits while you mess up your life, fill your body with poison and muddy your mind with worry. For some it takes just one call to free it. For others it takes five hundred miles of agony.
 

But mine was free now, for the first time since I was a boy, running with a grin like a wolf through moonlit bracken. Pain ran alongside me, kindred and beautiful and grinning my grin.
I’ll always be here
, it said.
Always, but now we’re friends.

I held nothing back. I took every pleasure I could from the experience and took all the warmth I could from the sun, now high in the clear sky above us. I thought about my wife and my children and ignored the cold shreds of instinct that told me they were already far away, that I was already too late. Instead I thought simple, bright thoughts about a cliff-side house with a small field, of a woman in a garden teaching her daughter how to plant vegetables, of a young boy standing in the sun, gazing up at his father as he sands the sides of an old boat in long, satisfying strokes, of an empty beach and sand beneath small toes and laughter on the water’s edge as the sun falls.

 
Bryce fell behind, then caught up. I felt as if he was riding on my tailwind, with me carrying him effortlessly on whatever boundless reserve of energy I had somehow tapped into. I felt like a child. I was a child; I am a child. Because we don’t grow up; we grow over, like weeds over new grass.

I ran with Bryce across dales and meadows and we followed streams and stone walls through ancient forests until finally we broke through a hedge and hit a road. We stopped and caught our breath, swaying, dizzy with adrenalin. We looked up and down the tarmac. It was long and straight and flat with no potholes, an untouched relic - the first unbroken road I had seen since before the strike. A white signpost said
Falmouth - 3 miles
.
 

We ran the first two easily. The last was hell.

“Ships!” shouted Bryce. “Ships!”

By the time we reached the outskirts of Falmouth, I was running on the last fumes of whatever fuel I had found that morning. I was back to struggling and limping and wincing. The pain had shape-shifted back into its old unfriendly and unfathomable form. Then we reached the top of a hill and my heart exploded with relief. Falmouth harbour opened up gloriously beneath us. I could hear and see people; I swear I could even smell them, though they were still a mile from where we stood. There was movement - a ship; we were not too late. We had made it. It might take some time, but I would find Beth. I would find her and tell her I loved her and that I had run across the country to find her. We would find a quiet place and I would tell her about my vision of our simple life, and she would understand and say that she wanted that too and we would take our children away from the heaving crowds and find a place to live our lives.

“Ships,” said Bryce again. This time he hesitated. His voice was flatter and his head was turned out to sea. Relief, joy, hope, the strange new energy I had been moving with: everything began to seep slowly away. A line of ten or more ships drew out of the harbour with their bows puffed towards the horizon and their funnels pointing back to the shore from which they were sailing. A roar of voices rose up on the wind like a mourning choir. People filled the dockside, a dark mass of human life pushing, pulling, pulsing, swarming, moving as a single entity in a clamour to reach the gangplank of the one ship still moored; the one ship, the last of the fleet to leave.

I felt my knees tremble and give way. Weight returned like an iron jacket. Gravity grew stronger, doubled, trebled, quadrupled and finally yanked me down to the earth. My face hit the tarmac and I sprawled forwards. I heard Bryce’s voice. One of the cans fell out from my jacket and rolled forwards. I grasped for it, missed it and watched it roll slowly away. Road, sky and sea all blurred into one smear of grey as the can picked up speed down the hill.
 

I felt myself being lifted, then dragged, looked down to see my feet moving beneath me, clawing at the ground as it moved backwards like a conveyor belt. A long string of drool floated out from my lips and wavered on the breeze. Bryce’s voice again, distant and urgent.

We’re here, Ed
.
We made it. You made it.

The noise of the crowd suddenly closed in around me. The smell of warmth of human life hit my nose. Something hit my shoulder, then my other one. A woman laughed, a cackling laugh like a witch, then I looked up and saw only sky. The light was the same electric yellow that we had seen on the beach the day before: charged, static, on the brink of change. Then something hit me. Bryce hit me, open palmed, twice on each cheek.

“Ed!” He shook me, hit me again, clicked his fingers. “Ed! Snap out of it! Come on! We’re here!”

I was awake again, standing upright, breathing, seeing and hearing. But time was slow. Everything moved through sludge. We were at the harbour. The boat was above us. We were separated from the gangplank by a crowd fifty people deep that lined the dock as far as we could see in each direction. People were moving about aimlessly. Some were laughing, some were weeping, some were drunk, others dizzy with hunger, staggering up and down with wide eyes and taut mouths. Everywhere I looked I saw lost, wandering souls and huddled families. The stench was terrible: fear and panic and shit and squalor - the breath and sweat of a million survivors still clawing for some chance of escape from a crumbling country. No medicine, no water, no food, no rest. We were not the only ones to have made it to Falmouth that day.

I jumped as a loud female voice filled the air, airy and pleasant. Speakers rigged to poles rang out a metallic tannoy.

Please move back from the dock. The
Endeavour
is ready for departure. Please move back from the dock.

“Move back, please,” said another voice, close to my ear. It sounded Dutch or Nordic. Next to us were two men in military uniform. They held assault rifles.

“My family,” I murmured. “My family are here.”

“You have papers?” said the first.

“Papers?” I said. “No. My family. They were brought here…I came to find them.”

“You don’t have papers, you don’t belong here. Move back, please, sir.”

“Come on…” began Bryce, holding his hands up. The second guard moved closer to him, pushing him back with the tip of his gun.

“You don’t understand, they were taken…” I began, but I jumped again as the noise of the ship’s horn blared across the harbour.
 

The second guard raising his gun slightly at Bryce.
 

“Move
back,
sir.”

“No, you don’t…you don’t….”

The ship’s horn sounded again, longer this time. I heard something else in the long reverberating tail that made me freeze.

“You don’t understand, I…”

I looked up at the ship. The crowd was dispersing, moving past us, opening up the gap between us and the gangplank.

I knew then I would find her. I didn’t believe it or hope it, I knew it.

“SIR, MOVE BACK NOW.”

That sound again. A voice.

“SIR!”

“Daddy!”

I swung my eyes to the boat and a shot of adrenalin pulsed through me. How much that chemistry set inside dictates our perception of the world; my mind and muscles came to life and time returned to its normal speed. There on the deck, with both feet on the bottom rung of the railing, was Alice. She leaned out and stretched a hand towards me.

“Daddeeeee!”

The other passengers didn’t see her, too busy finding a place to stand or searching the crowd. She put one foot on the next rung up.

“Alice!”

Then she followed with her next leg. Her waist was now at the top of the railing.

“SIR, MOVE BACK.” The second guard was bullying Bryce back with his gun.
 

“Alice! No! Wait!”

Her face fixed into a determined frown. She pushed her hands down on the railing and raised another trembling leg. It slipped and she tried again, this time finding the next rung. I called out and ran, but the guard caught me, pushing me back.

“That’s my daughter!” I cried. “Alice! Get down!”

A hopeful smile crept onto her face. She kept her eyes on me, her only goal to get from where she was to where I was. It was a simple journey; nothing stood in her way but the railing. Then it was just empty space and then me. The freezing sea and concrete thirty feet below was not part of the equation. I watched in horror as she hauled herself up.

“Somebody help her!” I shouted up to the boat.

Then another sound, another voice I recognised. An arm shot out of the crowd and around Alice’s chest, yanking her back. Beth’s arm. In her other was Arthur. She plonked Alice down on the deck and began to scold her. I saw Alice remonstrating, her fists waving, pointing out into the crowd, jabbering back at her mother’s sharp words. Then she stopped and took a deep breath.

“It’s DADDDEEEEEEEEE!” she screamed. Beth seemed to falter, then stopped. She held her finger in mid-wag, crooked like a question mark. Then she turned to the crowd on the harbour. Alice placed her hands on her mother’s cheeks and directed them towards me. Beth’s mouth fell open.