The End of the World Running Club (8 page)

Beth was the one to break our little pact. A single hand on mine.

“How long, Ed?”

I shook my head and folded my thumb over her long fingers. I had been trying to remember the government broadcasts and whether or not there had been any mention of rescue parties or time limits.

“I don’t think there is a set time,” I said. “It all depends on how much...how big...I think they sound an ‘all clear’ siren. That's what they'd do after a nuke anyway.”

“And what does that sound like?”

“Like the one before?” I shrugged. “How should I know?”

“What if there is no siren?” she said. “What if there’s nobody to sound it? What if there’s nothing up there at all? What if...”

“Jesus, Beth, I’m not a fucking expert,” I hissed.
 

“But we need...”

“And it’s not like I had a lot of time to prepare for it.”
 

I stopped short at the sound of my own lie. I clearly could have prepared for it. I could have had at least four more hours to pull together supplies if I hadn’t been drunk. We might have had hundreds of candles, basins and buckets full of water, more food, more batteries, more blankets. Beth, of course, was unaware of this.

“I know, I know,” she said, taking back her hand and looking over at Alice berating her doll for some heinous misdemeanour. “I just think we need a plan.”

“OK,” I said. “The plan is to ration food and water. That’s all we can do.”

The next night was the same as the first apart from Arthur waking for his normal feeds. Even they didn’t seem so difficult now that we were all in the same bed. Beth hardly woke, just rolled out whatever breast was ‘on’ for Arthur when he mumbled himself awake and let him suck on it until he fell asleep again. We began to think that we might be alright.

But the third night was different. We had barely fallen asleep when Alice sat bolt upright in bed and began to scream. This was not her normal cry, not even her normal tantrum-powered shriek; this was something we had not heard before. It was pure, unfettered, three-year-old terror, an ear-splitting whistle that she somehow managed to hold without breathing. Beth sprang up and I fumbled to turn on the Maglite. I shone it towards Alice’s face. Her pupils dilated in the sudden light; both eyes were wide open and staring madly at the hatch. At first I thought that someone might have come in; I jumped up to check, but it was still jammed shut. There was nobody there. Alice was screaming into thin air. Her arms were stretched out in front of her, each tiny fist throttling the neck of a stringy, grey stuffed rabbit.

“Alice, Alice! It’s OK, Mummy’s here, Mummy’s here.”

Beth’s soothing voice was drowned in the scream. She wrapped her arms around her chest and tried to bring her into her neck, but Alice remained rigid. Meanwhile Arthur had rolled out from the crook of Beth’s arm and was now flailing in the blankets and crying in dismay. I dropped the torch and pulled him up in one hand. As Beth tried to coax Alice from her terror I hurried over to the shelf to find a new candle. We had been alternating between the torch and darkness. Alice didn’t last too long in the darkness during the day, so there were only two left now. Two candles and the wick-less pile of wax next to them.

I wrestled with the matches with one hand wrapped around Arthur, who was now screaming and wriggling against me, pushing his hand into my eye socket. I broke one match and the second caught and went out. I managed to the light the third and held it as carefully as I could to the fresh wick while trying to restrain Arthur, wondering at the perpetual struggle with other objects that existence sometimes seems to be.

Eventually the flame lit and I turned my attention to soothing Arthur. It took about an hour for Alice to calm down, then another hour to settle Arthur before we got back to sleep. Beth and I shared a last look in the murky candlelight before we closed our eyes. It was one we had shared before.
Who were we kidding?

Life became a cycle of triggers, tasks and responsibilities. If Alice began screaming, I took Arthur whilst Beth calmed her down. If it was time for the candle to be put out, Beth tried to distract Alice from the darkness while I walked around the room with Arthur, swinging him around to try and make him laugh. If it was time to eat something, Beth would settle down with Alice and I would eat alone.
 

Every event developed a protocol that generally led to another, and another after that, each one designed to keep Alice away from her own terror. Beth and I spent the days and nights waltzing endlessly around each other. We walked a hairline between control and panic, and at any moment the quiet darkness might suddenly fill with Alice’s piercing screams.

The most dangerous times were during Arthur’s feeds, when I would try my best to occupy Alice. She still didn’t trust me. In fact it was as if she had removed me from her view of reality altogether. I had been her world before. Now the world had become cold, frightening and claustrophobic. Everything was down to me.

I knew Beth was secretly and guiltily enjoying her renewed companionship with Alice. This was touching, of course, but, like most things that happen to you when you’re stuck underground, also unbearably crushing.

I kept track of the time and the days by turning my phone on every now and then. This had the added advantage of providing more light but I was careful to only keep it on for a few minutes at a time, switching it off when I had abandoned my hopeless fantasy of somehow finding a signal. After a week - two nights of relative peace, five of madness - Alice stopped screaming. Very soon afterwards she stopped speaking as well. She spent most of her time tight-lipped with her dolly clasped to her chest in her corner or staring at the opposite wall with her thumb firmly planted between her lips and a bunny’s ear pressed against her nostrils. She was emotionless. Unresponsive unless she needed food, water or the toilet, in which case she would simply move towards whichever one was required and stand waiting until it was organised for her. We panicked, immediately craving her screams. Beth tried to coax her back with the usual bait of cuddles, stories and songs. But a wall had come down. A door had slammed shut. Her brain had moved to its next level of defence: complete lockdown. Nothing goes in, nothing goes out; sit tight and wait for this all to disappear. I thought she had lost her mind.

When Beth gave up, I tried my usual repertoire of raspberries, hoots and silly faces, all of which became sinister grunts and gurns in the near dark. Alice ignored me. Her trust no longer belonged to anyone but herself.

We ate the last of the cans of beans for dinner. I had become obsessed with making sure we ate every last particle of whatever we had, so when we had finished the beans I broke up a crust of bread into small pieces and smeared each around the inside of the can. I passed these to Beth, who either ate them or passed them to Alice. She tried one with Arthur, who explored the bean juice with his tongue before ejecting it in disgust and letting it dribble down his chin. He was still only interested in his mother’s milk, which meant that Beth always ate more than me.
 

After only a few days I became quietly insane with hunger. Before, my plates had been piled high with squashy carbohydrates, fatty protein and refined sugar that masqueraded as a balanced, nutritional, middle-class diet. Large, expensive cuts of meat and home-cooked chips hid behind slivers of baby broccoli like fat thieves behind a twig. Lean fish drowned in cream and packed with double helpings of pasta. Bowls of rich ice-cream, ‘hand-made’ crisps, rustic dips...with the wine, I was probably topping over 4,000 calories a day. On the rare days when I watched what disappeared down my gullet, my brain stepped in and rounded down, compressing the total to the magic 2,500 figure you’re led to believe is what an average male should be living on, what and average male
needs
to live on. The problem with this, of course, is that the
average male
is not a good target to shoot for. The average is very low.

I had swollen slowly with the blubber of these wasted calories. And exercise...who had time? I would sit in the park at lunchtime with some meaty, cream-smothered sandwich, baulking at the runners strutting past in lycra, spitting my crisps at the fast music sizzling from their earbuds, knocking back disgusted gulps of fizzy chemicals at the leers of determination on their taut faces. Why did they bother? Why did they struggle?

I hated them. To me running was just showing off, a hideous way of telling other people how much more focused, disciplined and healthy they were than you. How much more
average
they were than you, the sub-average gibbon who watched from a park bench with its pre-packed lunch. Gyms were just as bad, except in gyms you had it coming at you from all angles: weight lifters out-lifting each other, cross-trainers quietly tapping up their speeds to match their neighbour’s, treadmillers pounding their feet to some unheard, nauseating soundtrack and gritting their teeth through the pants and the puffs, each acting out their own eighties training montage from a film all about themselves. Entire, windowless rooms crammed full of sweaty, unashamed, lycra-clad peacockery.

Once more: I hated runners. I hated running.

Besides, I didn’t have the time. I was a dad, I had responsibilities. I had more than enough on my plate.

It’s my right as a tired parent.

My body didn’t enjoy having these excesses taken away from it. After just one pathetic week of living on the only fuel it actually needed, it began to strain against the change like a toddler in a supermarket. I knew that Beth had to eat more than me to keep her milk up. But still, every chunk of stale bread smothered in baked bean sauce that I passed to her almost ended up in my mouth.

When there was nothing else in the tin, I placed it on top of the other two in the waste pile we had made next to the toilet. Alice had swallowed down the last of her bread pieces and was accepting a sip of water from a bottle Beth was holding carefully to her mouth.
 

“Here you go, sweetheart, that’s a good girl.”

She kept her eyes pointed away from Beth as she drank.

Then I had an idea. I took two of the empty bean tins from the pile and then the bent screwdriver and string from the shelf. It was starting to get dark, so I prepared the last candle and took a match from the box so it was as easy to light as possible later on. Then I took the cans, string and screwdriver back to my place by the wall.

“What are you doing?” said Beth.

“Not sure yet,” I said.

I upended the first can and held it between my feet. Then I started working the head of the screwdriver into the centre of its base. The metal scraped loudly on the floor and I glanced up to see if Alice had become interested. Her eyes were lost in the light that was creeping up the wall from the ventilation shaft, the last faint rays of sunlight leaving the cellar for the day. Eventually the screwdriver burst through the can with a loud pop. I yanked it out and began work on the second, watching Alice gaze silently at the wall. When I had finished I cut a long piece of string and threaded it through the two holes, knotting it inside both cans. Beth, realising what I was trying to do, took one of the cans from me and walked it over to Alice.
 

“Here, Alice,” said Beth. “Hold this up to your ear.”

Alice ignored her.

“Here you go, darling. Take it.”

Alice breathed a long, tired sigh, still lost on the dying light that was seeping from the wall.

Beth pulled the string tight and crouched down next to Alice. She held the tin up to her ear.

“Boo,”
I whispered into my can.

Alice’s eyes flickered and she flinched from the can as if it were a fly buzzing at her head. She glanced at it, then at me, then her eyes fell back to the light on the wall.

“Hello Alice,”
I tried.

This time there was no reaction at all. Instead she pulled one of the blankets over her and closed her eyes, resting her head against the wall.

Beth placed the can next to her. Then she came over and placed a long, soft kiss on my head before taking a blanket herself and lying down next to Arthur. I sat turning my can in my hands. That was the first night that sleep became something different for me; something less than what it used to be; a thin, diluted, watery version of itself. I don’t know whether it was a feeling of giving up, or a feeling that some part of me was no longer of any use, or whether the sight of my three-year-old daughter resigning herself to something like an old woman to a disease was too much to bear, but I was never fully unconscious for a long time after that evening.

Things began to deteriorate quickly. Arthur got sick and Beth followed quickly after. Both had a fever and spent the days and nights huddled in the corner, Beth shivering and Arthur crying. We used up all the painkillers within the first 24 hours. I spent the time trying to keep them cool with wet flannels. Our water supplies were now very low. Food too. The candles had all gone and the torch’s batteries were also running out. Alice wouldn’t eat. She began crying quietly in her sleep, still the only noise she made. The toilet box was starting to reach its limit. I tried double sealing it but in my haste I spilled some of the vile liquid onto the floor. I covered it with an anorak, but it did no good. The close air in the room was now thick with the smell of shit.

I spent long periods staring at the hatch, yearning to be outside in whatever hell now lay above. I imagined fluttering ash and molten rock, a heat haze on the rubble, a poisonous breeze. And yet how cool and fresh the air would feel against my face compared with the fetid atmosphere of the cellar.

Then I would stare at the pipe. The more I stared, the more I convinced myself that it was full of water. I could break it, drain it, prolong our survival, perhaps enough for...for what? A rescue party?

Or it could be a gas pipe. I could break it in the middle of the night and kill us all. Beth, Alice and Arthur would not know what had happened.