The End of the World Running Club (52 page)

Then things began to move very quickly. The boat’s funnel gave another blast. There was a scuffling in the crowd next to us, raised voices, people moving apart. The guards turned in the direction of the commotion. Mine loosened his grip. I heard some words of warning, then the wet crack of a fist on cheek flesh. A fight had broken out. People were making space for two large men, one of whom was now reeling from a punch.

The guard shook me away, yelled out and ran towards the fight. His partner followed, leaving Bryce and me standing, facing the thinning crowd moving away from the boat. I shot him a look and we ran for it. I kept my eyes on Beth as I pushed through the filthy hoards, ignoring the shoves, the bony elbows digging into my ribs, the angry glares, the growls of disdain. When we reached the bottom of the gangplank I saw that it was sealed off with a white, padlocked gate. Four guards stepped warily forwards and one held out his palm. He was tall with a wide jaw and cold, grey eyes.

“Stop there!” he boomed.
 

“My family are on that boat,” I said. “Please, you have to let me on board.”

“You have medical papers?” he said.

“No, no, but I’m fine. No virus,” I said. “Let me speak to them!”

He looked me up and down.

“You cannot board without medical papers,” he said. “You must go, the ship is about to depart. Please step back.”

“No, look,” I said, pointing up on the deck. “That’s my family there! They’re right there on the deck! Beth! I’m here! Please let me speak to my family!”

“Ed!” called Beth.

The guard turned his head to the boat, keeping his eyes on my until the last minute, then flicking them up to where Beth was standing. He saw her calling down and turned back.

“I am sorry,” he said. He shook his head. “There is nothing I can do. You cannot board without medical papers. You should not even be here. Now please, get back from the boat.”

The other three guards moved cautiously towards us and raised their guns.

“You don’t…” I began. “I just…I just…”

“Ed!”

“Daddy!”

“Sir, please step back.” The guard raised his head and stood tall. I fell back into the crowd.

“I just…just…” I looked up at Beth. She was crying. I felt an elbow in my back.

“Watch out,” someone grumbled.

“Just…”
 

I had been aware of Bryce somewhere behind me. He had been quiet and the guards hadn’t paid him much attention. Now I felt him close by, heard him splutter something, felt his breath on my neck, sensed his frustration, sensed his hackles rise. His throat rumbled, then he snarled, then he grabbed me with both arms. The guards stepped back in fright. The first raised his gun. Bryce pulled me to his face and he planted a single, fierce kiss on my cheek. I felt myself rising up above the crowd, then swing down into them. Bryce hurled me with a thundering roar. And then I was flying, flying high over the astonished faces of the four guards beneath me, my legs and arms flailing as I sailed over the gate and landed on the metal gangplank with a crack from somewhere in my leg that I chose to ignore.

I scrambled to my feet and turned to the crowd. I was halfway up the gangplank. Cheers and shouts came from all around, from the boat and from the harbour. I searched for Bryce, but the crowd had begun to thicken again, turning to the boat to see what was going on. The guards were at the gate, trying to open it. One was fumbling with a set of keys. He dropped them and the others cursed. I saw my chance, turned and ran up to the deck. There was another gate at the top, too tall to climb. The crowd of passengers stepped back from it as I rattled it, trying to open it, but it was locked. Beth was further up the railing to my left.

“Help her through!” I shouted. “Help me reach her.”

The crowd shuffled about, pushing her along with Alice clinging to her dress and Arthur gripping her neck, laughing as he saw me. I hung from the gate and reached out a hand. Beth took it and I pulled her to the gate, reaching both arms through and holding her face in my palms.

Beth and I met one Christmas when we were both living in London. We were at a friend’s party. I was twenty-seven and single, she was a year younger and had just broken up with someone. She was pretty and funny and we cornered each other, avoiding everyone else and stealing their champagne when they weren’t looking, laughing at their faces as they tried to drink from empty glasses. She called me her
partner in crime
and I phoned her the next day, arranging a date for some time in the new year. I spent Christmas with my parents, she with hers in Dundee. We texted each other, each alert from my phone bringing the same jolt of excitement, each message more and more sexually charged. I would excuse myself from whatever meal or game or film I was enduring with my family and go and sit on the toilet, thumbing through the history of our conversation again and again, imagining things.

We met as planned and I took her to dinner in a Polish restaurant where they served vodka instead of wine. We got drunk and kissed and she let me sleep with her in her bed, although it was two weeks before we made love.
Partner in crime
became our private joke for everything, including sex. It was how I proposed to her and it even made it into our vows when we got married, when I faced her in a small church and saw only her glowing face and the bright red bouquet she was holding, bathed in a blur of noise and light, all the rest of the world draining away, so distant and inconsequential next to her.

I don’t know what happened between then and now. We never stay constant, no matter what we promise; the world has its way of pulling you about the way it wants. But some things pull you back to where you were before. Like a woman’s face through the bars of a gate.

I held her head in my hands and felt that same draining of reality. The crowd’s jeers and whistles, the sound of the guards struggling to unlock the gate behind me, the clamour of the passengers on the deck: it all seeped into a far-away hum and all that was left was Beth’s face, smiling, wet with tears, full of love. She claimed all of my senses, all of my time, all of me. I felt so ashamed and sorry; sorry for leaving her in the barracks, sorry for not looking after her more, sorry for everything I didn’t do as a husband, a father, a friend. All I had for her was ‘sorry’.
 

“I’m sorry,” she said. Her eyes creased.
 

“What?"

“I’m sorry we left you at the barracks, I thought it was our only chance, they said they were sending more helicopters. They had medicine for Arthur. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

“You’re not the one who says sorry,” I said. The gate shook at the bottom of the gangplank and Beth looked across my shoulder. I turned and saw one of the guards shout something up at me in a language I didn’t understand as two of his cohorts struggled with the lock on the gate. I turned back to Beth. She was frightened.

“It’s OK,” I said. “It’s alright, I came to get you, to take you home.”

She tipped her head sadly and put a hand through the bars to stroke my cheek.

“There is no home, Ed.”

“I know,” I laughed. “I know that now.”

There was a jangle of keys on concrete, the guards’ angry voices as they argued with each other. A small group at the front of the harbour crowd laughed.

I took a deep breath and the smell of her hair came with it. Memories of London, our first night together, the flight we had taken to Rome on our honeymoon when I’d leaned in to watch her sleep, holding her head close in the delivery room, skull to skull as Arthur squeezed into the world.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve not been what you deserve. I’ve been…I’ve been lacking.”

The passengers on the deck had formed a small semi-circle around Beth. Some of them were looking nervously back to the stern. People further back were making way for more guards moving up the boat towards us.

“No you haven’t,” she said. “Don’t say that.”

“I have and I’ll change. I will. All I want is you.” I held my hand to touch Arthur’s gleeful face and smiled, then looked down at Alice, looking up at me with that dark look of hers. “You and these things here. I’m just sorry it took the end of the world to make me see that.”

Beth smiled and something peaceful glinted in her eye. She reached around my neck and pulled me in, pressing my forehead against the bars and needling my eyes with her own.
 

“This is our world, Ed,” she said. “Me, you and these things. It doesn’t matter what happens out there.”

All of my senses. All of my time. All of me.

“Daddy, what happened to your eye?”

I looked down at Alice. She swayed, a single filthy bunny gripped in a fist. I knelt down and reached in to touch her brow.

“A bad birdy,” I said.

“Does it hurt?”

“A bit.”

“Can you see?”

“I can now.”

She frowned suspiciously. “You could have a patch,” she said. “Like a pirate.”

“I have something for you,” I said. I reached inside my coat and pulled out one end of the stringyphone, breaking the string in my teeth and holding out the battered can for her. She took it and grinned.

“Now I can talk to you,” I said. She went to speak but I saw the crowd move behind her and a guard burst through.

“Step back from the gate,” he said.

“Please,” said Beth. “This is my husband. You have to let him on board.”

“Papers?” said the guard. I shook my head and leaned it against the bars. “Then you must get off. Please, move back.”

“You have to,” said Beth. She swung round to face him, furious. “You have to. We have children.”

“Not without papers. I’m sorry. Now please step back.”

I heard keys in the gate behind me, more shouts from the crowd. The gate rattled.

“Then we’re getting off,” said Beth. She reached through and grabbed my good hand. “We’re coming with you. Open the gate.”

The guard on the boat looked unsure, nervous. I thought of the house on the cliff, the vegetable garden, the boat. A possible life. A fantasy life. On the deck, behind Beth, I saw a nurse treating a child. There were stacks of fresh bottled water, clean laundry, warm blankets, food, relief on every face. I didn’t have to look behind me to see the difference in the faces at the harbour.

Everything here was dark and dead.
Everything out there was bright and living.

“No,” I said. “You stay here. I’ll come to you.”

Beth blinked and a tear ran down her face, but she didn’t argue. She understood.

“Step back now,” snapped the guard on deck. I heard the gate open behind me and a disappointed jeer rose from the crowd, boots clattering on the gangplank.

You want to find the big line, the words that tie everything together, the phrase that speaks the world and all that’s in your heart, but you’re holding tightly to a railing and your hands are tired and time is running out and all you have are words and a set of feelings you don’t fully understand. All you ever have is cards, a mixed deck, shaking hands and no clue how to deal them. So you reach for anything that might work. You try to resonate. You reach for something to say, a story, a memory, anything.
 

“Alice kissed me,” I said.

“What?”

I felt the metal floor shudder behind.

“We’d been arguing about milk. We were tired. You were downstairs, angry, slamming doors. I was upstairs, lying on the bedroom floor and Alice came over. She kissed me. Right here.” I touched the space above my wounded eye. Beth shook her head, confused.

“It was wonderful,” I said. “It’s wonderful.”

Three hands grabbed my shoulders.

“You’re wonderful.”

They pulled my body back and my hands left the gate. My heels dragged and the boat fell down out of my vision. My head hit the metal twice and they tossed me onto the harbour floor. The boat’s funnel blared and I heard water moving. I lay still and stared up into the electric sky. Strange worried faces framed the dying daylight. I kept my eyes open, refusing to blink.

S
ENNEN

You want to know the truth. You want to know if what happened happened. I’ll tell you what I believe.

I believe that there are three bodies buried in the field behind the house in which I live. I believe that two of them were the strangers who lived here before me and that the third was an old man named Harvey Payne who once ran across Australia. I believe that somewhere north of Birmingham lies the body of a soldier named Laura Grimes, that a man named Richard Shore is safe with his son on a boat to South Africa. I believe that I lost a six-foot-eight Scotsman with waist-length hair named Bryce Gower in a crowd of emaciated refugees on the Falmouth dockside.

Now, having written this down, I can see how you might believe otherwise. And you might find your own version of the truth in that. But we choose our own truths, we choose what to believe. Beliefs are just little stories we tell ourselves make life easier. So you enjoy yours and I’ll enjoy mine.

I stayed at Falmouth for a day or two, trying to find Bryce in the camps people had set up. Nobody had seen him. There was a small riot as the last support vessel left, but nobody really had the energy to see it through. I watched it disappear over the horizon, then everyone drifted away. I found my way back here, to the house we had stayed in the night before our run to Falmouth. I sheltered in the garage for a day or two, then decided to risk moving inside. I used blankets to shift the bodies of the young man and woman at the table. From their clothes, I guessed they had been in their twenties and I noticed that she had been pregnant when they died. I didn’t spend too much time thinking about that. Then I buried them in the field next to Harvey.

I’ve been here for two months now and I’m showing no signs of illness, so my guess is that I’m safe. I’m getting quite good at fishing. I found a line in the garage that I take down to the rocks when the tide is high. I don’t know what the things I catch are called but I can eat most of them. I found a pool up the road that’s filled with rain, so that’s where I get my water. And the weather’s getting warmer. I’m surviving.