The End of the World Running Club (7 page)

It had been my idea, an insane manoeuvre to get us out into the fresh air and put some distance between us and the house. Beth had been three months’ pregnant with Arthur, Alice had just turned two and Cornwall was a day’s drive. It rained most of the time and the tent had a hole that I couldn’t mend. Instead I woke at hourly intervals to pour the water from the groundsheet. Beth hardly slept, the beaches were a washout and Alice got conjunctivitis. On the sixth evening, I crouched outside in the rain prodding three cheap sausages around a pan balanced on a wonky camping stove. Beth sat inside the tent glaring out at me with Alice. She pleaded with me to get a hotel. “No,” I said. “We’re supposed to be camping, this is supposed to be fun.” I was trying to make a point I suppose, something vague about the need for living more simply, but I wasn’t even convincing myself. Then the stove caught fire and Beth grabbed a bag and took Alice to a bed and breakfast. I sat it out in the tent that night, hungry and wet and drunk on warm, flat cider I had bought from the shop in the campsite. I joined Beth and Alice in the morning and we drove home that day.

Sitting in the dried mud at the bottom of the bag were two Kendal mint cakes crushed into crumbs between flimsy plastic wrappers at perishing point. There was also a crumpled box of matches that had obviously dried from having been soaked. I took them and the cakes out and placed them grimly on the shelves with the rest of the useless stock.

In the corner of the cellar, opposite the hatch, three cans of lager and two half-empty bottles of flat tonic water stood on top of a small cheese hamper somebody had given us the previous Christmas. The cheese set contained wax-sealed miniatures of cheddar, Cheshire, Wensleydale, double Gloucester, a tiny packet of crackers and a minuscule jar of chutney all flattened into a straw bed by a vacuum-packed sheet of plastic. I moved this little pile of heaven up onto the shelves as well.

Then I started to look through the boxes I had filled with the contents of our kitchen cupboards.

I separated out the tins. There were three of baked beans, two of minestrone soup, three of plum tomatoes, one of pineapple long past its sell-by date, one of peaches, two of pilchards and three of tuna. We had an entire bag of flour and half a bag of sugar, three packets of dried, flavoured rice, one half-packet of pasta shells, a packet of digestive biscuits, a loaf of bread, cornflakes and sugar puffs. And balsamic vinegar.
 

Amongst the other detritus of the second box - thumb tacks, takeaway menus, power adaptors, dead batteries, bulldog clips, cling film and light bulbs - I found some birthday candles, a first-aid kit, a Zippo lighter and a bottle of lighter fluid.

I also had the packets of batteries to fit the Maglite. The ones inside the torch were already on their way out and its white floodlight was now a dim yellow glow.

I arranged the food and everything else that was useful on the shelves and put the rest back in one of the boxes. Then I turned the empty box upside down and sat on it as I looked through the things that Beth had pulled from upstairs. We had an entire box of nappies for Arthur. I considered Alice’s successful toilet training to be a small mercy at the time, but it would in fact turn out to be nothing of the sort. Wipes, lotions, cloths, clean clothes, medicines...she had packed for the kids as thoroughly as if we had been taking a trip down to her parents’ house. There were even books, including Alice’s favourite one about a rabbit that wants to fly.

Beth had finished feeding Arthur and was buttoning up her top.

“Hey,” I whispered. Beth looked up and I threw her the rabbit book. Alice’s brightening face flooded me with a mess of emotions. Hope, grief, pride and regret all fought for space in my heart. I turned away and gritted my teeth to stop myself from breaking down at the dreadful elasticity of my child’s spirit. When do we lose that? When does that finally break? Would it happen in the cellar? Would the darkness finally make that rabbit seem less magical?

“We can’t read it, Ed,” Beth said.

I balanced one of the candles on the shelf and lit it with one of the matches from the camping bag. It was surprisingly bright, which made me realise how little power there was in the MagLite. I turned it off and placed it on the bottom shelf as Beth started to read to Alice.

“Harvey Rabbit lived in a small burrow at the bottom of the lane...”

I noticed that the candle occasionally flickered towards the hatch. I looked about the cellar in the brighter light. A small panel had been built into the ceiling in one corner. In the centre of the panel was a circular arrangement of long slats. I stood underneath and held my hand up to it, instantly feeling a small breath of cold air touch my fingers as a small whirring sound came from inside. I withdrew my hand instantly. This was a ventilation pipe.

I set my mind to work and tried to imagine where this led, tried to conjure up some kind of blueprint or anatomical understanding of how the hell our house fitted (or had fitted, there went another small apocalypse) together. These kind of exercises always filled me with a deep sense of panic and failure. I was not a practical man. I didn’t understand plumbing or wiring. The space between the boiler and the tap or the meter and the socket was a magical vacuum in my mind, something for small men in boiler suits to grapple with while I lurked in the background and quietly offered them tea.
 

Of course it didn’t help that whenever I attempted something like this fathoming of the innards of my own house the imaginary figure of my father was always standing behind me: arms crossed, head shaking slowly from side to side.

Doesn’t even know how his own house works...

I made a guess that the ventilation pipe fed out onto the deck in the back garden. How much was left of the pipe and the wall it fed through was another matter. Might there be some filtering mechanism inside? It could be an open pipe that was allowing the very dust we were trying to evade to flow directly into our shelter.

On the other hand, how else were we going to be able to breathe?

I glanced back at Beth and the kids.

...I’ll play on clouds and paint the sky, I’ll find my wings and learn to fly!

Then I looked back at the shaft. I pulled the Maglite from the shelf and switched it on, pointing it nervously up at the panel and peering inside. Strands of fluff waved from the slats in the light air current. I could see a gauze sheet about an inch up into the pipe that was smeared with grime. I imagined it was heavily blocked, but still there was air coming through. This was good, I thought. Wasn’t it?

I scanned the rest of the cellar. Copper pipes ran along the floor and up the wall, disappearing into what was left of the pantry.

Gas? Or water? If they were water pipes, they might still contain enough to help us survive once we’d finished the water. If they were gas and I broke one of them, then I would be sentencing us to death.

I filed this thought in a very dark place.

I traced my hand along the top pipe for some reason, following it up past Beth and into the hole in the ceiling above. It felt cold. There were no taps, no labels, nothing. I tried to remember what the pantry looked like, where the pipe came out, whether it joined onto anything else that might give me a clue as to its purpose. Nothing. I remembered nothing of the pantry.

Doesn’t even know how his own house works...

I sat back on the upturned box and switched off the torch. I watched the flame of the candle flicker in a breeze that could be either poisoning us or keeping us alive. I stared at a pipe that held either our salvation or our doom.
 

Life and death were taking bets on me.

The world had designed me to be something. I was supposed to be a survival mechanism, a series of devices and instincts built, tested and improved upon over billions of years. I was a sculpture of hydrogen, evolution’s cutting edge, a vessel of will, a self-adjusting, self-aware machine of infinite resource and potential. That was what the world had designed me to be. A survivor. A human being. A man.

I sat still in the darkness of the cellar. Arranged on the shelves before me were objects I had not created and could not create; food I had not gathered crammed into cylinders of metal I had not mined; water I had not collected in containers made of chemical formulae beyond my intelligence. I was no hunter, no engineer, no fighter. I was nothing that the world needed me to be. Nothing that my family needed me to be. I did what my body wanted me to do: eat, sleep, stay still, fuck, eat, sleep.
 

Watch television. Drink. Smoke. Buy. Consume. Breed. Sleep. Die.

Whatever was happening above our heads, whatever our civilisation had become or was going to become and whatever incredible new technologies it was going to come up with to pull itself out of this mess, I was not part of it. I never really had been. I was down here, biting my fingernails and scratching my stupid head about questions of basic plumbing.

I watched Beth reading to the kids, Arthur hitting the page with glee and Alice pointing and echoing her mother’s words. I thought about a boy riding through the streets of an empty village on a summer’s day.

M
ORE
T
HAN
E
NOUGH
ON
M
Y
P
LATE

I worked in an office before all this. I won’t go into details -
in computers
covers it, although even that isn’t strictly accurate. I listened to people who wanted something done on a computer, then told the people who knew how to use the computer what to do. That’s about it. My job - the thing I spent a third of my life doing so that I could live the other two-thirds regretting it in relative comfort - existed purely because other jobs that didn’t need to exist existed.
 
If there was ever a sign that there were too many people in the world, it was my job. Happily this isn’t such a problem any more.

The office I worked in was large and open plan. Rank upon rank of long desks stretched out from wall to wall. When Beth became pregnant with Alice, around the time when it’s OK to say so, I announced our news at work. I watched the big, gloating red faces of my co-workers pull into sneers.

“That’s it for you then, pal!” they wheezed, slapping their clammy, blubbery palms on my back. “Game over! Nae more nights oot! Nae more nooky! Nae more fuckin nuttin! Game over! The end! Bye bye!”

On the first night we took her home after she was born, Alice slept soundly the whole night through. No stirring, no crying; a full night’s sleep. We both rejoiced. The warnings and gleeful mockery had made us terrified about what lay ahead, but after that first night we thought we’d got lucky, that we had somehow sidestepped the fate that everyone thought lay ahead of us as parents. We would be free, well rested, with a happy, undemanding child. Those fat fucks at work were wrong.

Four nights in and that dream had flown, leaving in its place night feeds, floor-walking and perpetual exhaustion. Beth laughed at me as I stumbled out of the door the morning after that first bad night. She pulled me back in and began rubbing a smear of Alice’s shit off my cuff-sleeve with a kitchen cloth. “Who were we kidding,” she said quietly, before sending me off to spend the day staring at the mess of pixels and wondering what I was supposed to be doing. It wasn’t long after that I imposed my
he-who-works-sleeps
rule.

It was the same story in the cellar. The first night all four of us slept as soundly as any night I could remember. We had eaten a can of cold baked beans and bread and shared out the rest of the first bottle of water. I arranged a bed of blankets, coats and pillows in one corner and we huddled together in the glow of a candle telling stories and whispering songs until Alice and Arthur drifted off. Beth soon followed and I lay awake for a while longer listening to them all breathe, staring at the hatch and trying to pick up any more noises from beyond it. I knew there were corpses out there, but it was the possibility of life that scared me now.

We spent the following day dealing with practicalities. We divided the cellar into two areas. The half opposite the hatch was where we slept and ate and where Alice played; the other was the toilet. I put one of the recycling boxes in the corner and wrapped layers of cling film over the top when it wasn’t being used. For extra protection, we added the empty camping holdall. The smell was still terrible but at least it was a container. Amazingly, Alice took to it without question. Beth crouched down and held her hands as she balanced on the rim, stroking her hair and looking into her face. Her legs shook as she concentrated. Then she looked up and smiled as the first squirt hit the plastic, both of them sharing a giggle just as they had done the first time Alice used a proper toilet.

We arranged the few toys and books Beth had grabbed in the corner under the ventilation shaft. This was the only part of the cellar which received any natural light: a thin glimmer from the open pipe above it. Alice again gravitated there quietly without question and busied herself with her dolly. I envied her innocence in those first twenty-four hours.

We drank water carefully and ate only small quantities of food, mostly because we didn’t want to overuse the toilet. We sang songs and Beth and I whispered between ourselves when Alice was in her corner. We talked about what might have happened, piecing together what little we had absorbed from the news in the days before; what had hit us, where else had been hit, whether people we knew were safe, what state the country was in, what state the
world
was in. We talked as long as possible about what was outside the hatch. Speculating made it seem safer, separate, as if the hatch was protecting us rather than trapping us. It allowed us to avoid the nagging question of when we might expect to get out.