The End of the World Running Club (49 page)

“So what were you doing at the gate?”

“Martha was trying to find her sister. We’ve been going down to the gate every day since it was built, searching the crowds.”

“Did you find her?”

“Nope.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. Just you find your family.”

A rough wind whipped the sea and sent a squall across the boat. James turned and squinted through the rigging at the western horizon, where a dark band of cloud was growing.

“Looks like we might have some weather,” he said.

I left James at the helm and spent some time walking up and down the deck, putting more and more pressure on my ankle, trying to work through the pain. The wind died a little around noon, although it was still blowing enough to keep us moving. James asked me to hold the wheel while he went below deck. He brought back some mackerel that he had smoked and poured something sweet and alcoholic into two tin mugs that he gave to me and Harvey. Bryce was still below deck, nowhere to be seen. Harvey and I sat at the front of the boat and ate our fish, watching the clouds creep slowly towards us as we rounded a rocky bay. When we had finished, Harvey sat forward and pushed his plate away. He picked up his cup and held it as if it was something warm and comforting.

“So what happened in the canyon?” he said. “Did you see anything?”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“I mean, did you see anything?” He took a sip. “Anything unusual?”

“Lots of mist, rocks, weird shapes…”

“No, Ed, you know what I mean. Did you
see
anything?”

I could feel him watching me across the lip of his cup as I struggled for words. Eventually he swallowed a deep swig and breathed out a great satisfied sigh, wiping his lips on his sleeve.
 

“You don’t have to say, mate,” he said. “These things are sometimes personal.” He put down the cup and toyed with it on the deck for a while. “I started seeing spiders somewhere in Victoria. Little ones everywhere, crawling all over the ground and over my feet, running up my legs. I thought they were real at first, I kept swatting at them, trying to get them off. Then I realised they disappeared when I stopped. They only followed me when I ran. And when I did run, they started making noises, little voices calling things up to me.”

He laughed and placed his cup neatly on his plate. Then he looked at me and tapped his head.

“Up here, mate, all up here.”

He sat back against the cabin window and put his hands behind his head.

“Then one day they all suddenly ran off into a forest. But this big one stayed behind. I could feel him crawling slowly up my back and onto my shoulder.”

“How do you know it wasn’t a real one?”

“When I looked at him, he smiled. He had a little face, two big human eyes and buck white teeth where his fangs should’ve been. I ignored him, turned back to the road, but I knew he was there. Every time I looked he turned his head and gave that little goofy smile back. He hopped off a few days later and I never saw him again.”

“Did he speak?”

“Nope, just smiled. But I did meet a Chinaman in the desert who told me about the cobalt he was trying to get back from the moon. He was always in front of me, running backwards. He wanted me to help him, started crying when I said I couldn’t fly. There was a girl on Route 1 who told me she was lost. Only little. I’d felt her with me for a while, you know, near me, around me. But then I saw her and heard her. She had a little pinnie and a grey cardigan, I remember it was buttoned up wrong. I thought she was real, I really did. I stopped running and tried to get my head together, find my bearings and work out where the nearest town was so I could get her to safety, you know. I asked her where her mummy was and she looked up at me and stuck out her lip. Then she kind of started drifting off into the wind as if she was made of sand, head to toe, all gone. Her and the little stuffed frog she was clutching. Pretty upsetting, that one.”

 
He stared up at the sail billowing above us, lost in his memory. Then he tapped his head again.

“Anyway, just saying, I’ve seen a few things myself. I know how weird it can get. We’re not really supposed to be on our own Ed, we’re not built for it. Spend too much time running away from reality and that’s exactly where you get.”

I heard James’s boots on the deck and a rope whizzed behind us. The boom swung slowly across and stopped, shifting the boat starboard. James fastened the sheet tight and returned to the helm.

“Can we help, mate?” shouted Harvey.

“No,” called James. “But you might have to go below deck before long.” He nodded west. The dark clouds now covered half the sky, shadowing the sea all the way to the horizon.
 

“I felt like I was coming apart,” I said. “Like I was lots of little threads unravelling. I couldn’t tell where I started and where I stopped. I knew my body didn’t want to be running, but I felt like I wasn’t my body any more. I knew my mind didn’t want to be running, but I wasn’t there either. I wasn’t my body or my mind or any of the layers in between.”

“But you
were something
, right?”

“Yes, I was,” I said. “I was there, I was conscious, aware, I just wasn’t any of the things I’d thought I was.”

Harvey smiled and looked back at James, then at me.
 
He threw a thumb back at the helm.

“When I was a boy my father told me that life was like being on a boat,” he said. “You can’t control the wind and you sure as hell can’t control the ocean. One day it’s calm and the next it’s a storm and there’s nothing you can do about that. All you get is a tiller and a sail and the weather you find yourself in.”

He crossed his arms and puffed through his smile.

“Was he a sailor, your dad?” I asked.

“Nah, he was a shearer, he’d never been on a boat in his life,” said Harvey. “I lost count of the times he told me that, though. ‘You’re the captain, Harve’, he’d say. ‘Just keep an even keel and watch the wind, you won’t go far wrong.’ Whatever the fuck that means.”

“What do you think?”

He rubbed a coarse palm over the fingers of his other hand.

“I think we like stories,” he said. “ I think we like hearing that we’re just little boats lost at sea, all alone, fragile things at the mercy of some darkness we can’t fathom, but solid nonetheless - enclosed and separate. It makes sense to think of things being out there.” He waved a finger at the clouds rolling towards us and then touched it against his temple. “And things being in here. But just because it feels right, doesn’t make it true.” He glanced at me. “See, I drifted apart as well Ed. I felt it all fall away, just like you. I didn’t feel like I was in charge for a while, like I’d ever been in charge. Maybe we’re not the captain, not the boat, not the crew, not the cook, not the stowaway, not the rats below deck. Maybe we’re…”

“The sea,” I said.

“Yeah. Yeah I suppose…”

“No, look, the sea. It’s moving.”

A great swell was growing off the bow. The surface of the water tipped in our direction, ripples and weed spilling from it as it rose.

“Christ,” said Harvey.

James cried out from the helm and we began to tip. Our empty plates slid slowly across the deck, then suddenly flew off into the sea as the whole boat swung violently over. Harvey fell first, then I followed, both of us landing hard against the rail. I scrabbled up and pulled Harvey to his feet as a heavy spray of seawater hit our faces.

“Getting choppy!” shouted James. “You’d best get below.”

“You sure we can’t help?” spluttered Harvey.

“Best if you don’t,” said James. “I’ll call you if I need you.”

We clambered down below deck and I fell into one of the benches at the table. A single bulb hung above it, barely throwing enough light to fill the small galley. I heard Bryce groaning from one of the bunks beneath the foredeck. Harvey sat down across the table, wiping his face with a dishtowel.

“Do you think we’ll make it?” I asked.

“Probably,” said Harvey. “If he knows what he’s doing.”

I watched the old man flatten the dishtowel on the table in front of him, then fold it neatly into a square. He boxed it with his hands, then flattened it again and smoothed the surface before setting it to one side. The boat pitched again and the towel slid across the table. I caught it before it fell.

“I saw you howling,” I said, “That morning in the car park. You stood on the edge and screamed into the sky.”

Harvey ran a hand over his scalp and smiled.

“Yeah,
that
,” he said. “I was wondering when you were going to ask me.”

“And every morning before, was that you too?”

“Yeah,” he winced. “I tried to get up before everyone else. Didn’t realise you could hear me.”

He leaned his elbows on the table and opened his mouth, but before he could speak there was a thump from above and the boat pitched again. Harvey slid back in his chair and I slumped forward over the table. The timber around us seemed to strain as we bumped on the waves.

“Sheesh,” said Harvey, pulling himself back upright. “Think he’s alright up there?”

We heard footsteps and the creak of the wheel. The boat’s movement calmed and we returned to a less violent angle.

“So what is it?” I said.

“What?”

“The howl, why do you do it?”

Harvey flipped his hand dismissively and crossed his arms. “Ah nothing,” he said. “Just something I used to do when I was running.”

He caught my expression and uncrossed his arms, folding his hands on the table in front.

“It’s the sun,” he said. “I’m yelling at the sun. I used to do it every day in Australia, just as it came up.”

“Why?”

He sighed. “You don’t understand. When you run that far for so long, it’s not just spiders and Chinamen and little girls. It’s everything. Everything looks at you. All day long that bastard up there beat down on me, all day long, every day from the moment it rose to the moment it fell behind that bloody great horizon. It gets hard to ignore it. You start thinking things are out to get you, watching you, bearing down at you, trying to stop you, resist you.”

His brow furrowed and he chewed his lip. Then he leaned forward again and stared hard into my eyes.

“We’re all born screaming, Ed. The moment we pop out our throats open and the same scream bursts out that always has done. We see all the lights and faces and the shadows and the strange sounds and we scream. Life screams and we scream back at it. After a bit of time we learn to be quiet, we learn to muffle it. But life doesn’t stop, it just keeps screaming. All. The. Time.” He tapped his finger on the table three times and sat back.
 

“I reckon it does you good to remind it that you can still scream back once in a while,” he said. “So that’s what I do. I wake up and tell the sun I’m still here. Still screaming.”

We looked at each other for a while. He jutted his jaw and worked his lips seriously like a camel chewing.

“Bet you
really
think I’m a fruit loop now, don’t you?” he said.

“Harvey, what really made you run? What happened?” I said.

He blinked at me slowly. Then something seemed to fall in his face. His mouth stopped working and he looked down at his open palms.

There was a jolt. Then a crash from above and James’ urgent voice yelling down at us. The boat pitched back and forwards, the hatch flew open and the cabin suddenly filled with wind and water. I pulled myself up and climbed the hatch. James was gripping the wheel as the boat rocked violently on its keel. Behind him, the sky was torn into bright blue across the coast and black, electric clouds bouldering in from the sea, as if the night had come early and was slowly feasting upon the day.

“I’m dropping anchor in that cove,” shouted James. “This storm’s only going to get worse. I can’t take you any further, I’m sorry.”

“How far are we from Padstow?” I screamed across the gale.

“A few miles north. Now I need your help. Get up here!”

Getting Bryce up on deck was almost impossible, but eventually we all managed to arrange ourselves on the rolling deck, Bryce hugging a mast and rubbing with his pale brow against the wood as Harvey and I tried to follow the various orders James barked at us, pulling at ropes, winding and unwinding winches, ducking as the boom swung back and forth over our heads. At last, without realising how, I found myself helping James drop anchor in a calmer patch of water that was sheltered behind a rocky outcrop. It was still daylight, although the clouds were trying their best to change that.

“I’m sorry,” said James again as we walked back through the taut rigging to the stern. “I just can’t risk it. I’m heading back. You can come too if you like. If you’ve changed your mind I mean.”

“I’d rather get going,” I said. “Maybe we can make up some distance before nightfall. But thanks all the same.”

James nodded and scanned the sky. “You’ve got a couple more hours of daylight I reckon.” He pointed at a steep, narrow path that wound up the rock on shore. “Follow that path.
 
Maybe one of the roads south is still there. You’d do well to find shelter as soon as you can, before the storm really hits.”

“Thanks,” I said. “For everything.”

“Alright,” said James. “You’d best get ashore. I’ve no dinghy, I’m afraid.”

I thanked him again, then we jumped in and swam till our boots hit the sand, then waded until we found a small beach. There we sat shivering, catching our breath and watching the boat bob harmlessly on the tide as the blue sky was consumed by darkness.

This is hard; I’m unsure of everything. Events, places, faces, words, they’re all like pages of manuscript blown across a lake. I can’t catch the sheets, I can’t place them in order. I remember the smell of ozone, the stiff air, the light around us seeming to bristle with electricity. I remember lightning stabbing at the horizon with jagged spears. I remember that the storm seemed to compress and ignite the low light. Our skins, our eyes, the stone path on which we climbed - it all gleamed.

We found the road and followed it, making sure the churning sea was to our right. We began to run. I could put pressure on my ankle, but not for long, so I was doing nothing more than a brisk limp. It didn’t seem as if Bryce and Harvey had much trouble keeping to my slow pace either; they had their own injuries to slow them down.