In the years since puberty, my body had eventually settled for a slightly more ordered version of this strange shape. Excess had added a pot belly, some lines and wrinkles, more hair, tougher skin. The training sessions didn’t transform the soft body I had abused and ignored into a hardened slab. What I did see was a rough shaving of its outer fat, like a tree stump run once beneath a blunt lathe: not exactly sculpted, just less than what it had been. I also found it harder to sit still. My legs were uncomfortable when I lay down. I felt unused muscles ache. I discovered that I could climb stairs with ease.
I began to fidget more and more. Arthur had started teething, wailing late into the night. I took to walking the corridors with him, stretching my shoulders and thighs, pulling my neck. I felt the need to twitch my muscles as strongly as I felt the need to stop Arthur’s cries. Frustration in my head, frustration in my body; the need to explode from all corners of your being - a feeling I was already used to.
It was one of these evenings, just after midnight, and a wild storm had flared up outside that battered the windows of the barracks. I had just settled Arthur and was about to return to our room when I heard a gruff cackle and the sound of glass from somewhere above. I climbed the darkened stairwell to the canteen with Arthur asleep and burrowed into my neck. The canteen was in darkness too, but I could see a small light coming from the kitchen. I opened the door to see Harvey and Richard sat around a wooden table, a bottle and three glasses surrounding a single candle. Bryce was there too. He and Richard were in Guthrie’s group and Harvey was spared the training on account of his age. I hadn’t spoken to any of them in the weeks since our sessions had begun.
Bryce looked up as I opened the door. He was leaning on the table, still chuckling and cradling a glass in one hand. Richard was leaning back in his chair, one long leg crossed casually across the other. He looked back over his shoulder while Harvey refilled his glass.
“Hello,” whispered Harvey. His eyes twinkled in the candlelight as he looked at Arthur sleeping on my shoulder.
“Wee boy asleep?” said Bryce out loud.
I nodded. “Yes,” I whispered. “Finally.”
“What’s his name?”
“Arthur,” whispered Harvey loudly. “His name’s Arthur.”
Bryce laughed and offered his glass for Harvey to refill.
“A king no less,” he said. “An English king,” the word deliberately stressed for my benefit. His voice filled the room and I thought the noise would wake Arthur, but he didn’t flinch. The bear drained his glass and I resisted the urge to reward his joke with an unconvincing laugh. Beth had always said that Arthur’s name might be difficult for him in Scotland.
Harvey had pulled another glass from the cupboard behind him. He unfolded another chair from the corner and motioned for me to sit.
“Ignore him,” he said. “Come and have a drink.”
I sat down carefully.
“And you,” said Bryce. “What do we call you?”
“Edgar,” I said. I offered him a hand. He looked at it and raised an eyebrow.
Harvey shook his head. “Ignore him,” he said. “This is Richard.”
Bryce released a long, guttural belch.
“Or ‘Dick’,” he said.
Richard leaned forward and shook my hand. “Pleasure,” he said. I immediately thought of a remote Scottish boarding school, wooden trunks, golf clubs and cheques from mother. He had the easy-going grace and manner of some officer from a different time. If he had been smoking a pipe I wouldn’t have blinked.
“What’s that you’re drinking?” I said.
Harvey raised his eyebrows. “Whisky,” he said, filling my glass with deep, amber fluid. He looked up at me and grinned. “Single malt.”
I raised it to my nose and took a sniff. The three men watched me enjoy the rush of sharp fumes filling my sinuses. I had had nothing to drink since the night before the strike. Four weeks without alcohol. I raised my glass to them and took a long, slow gulp. I kept my eyes closed for as long as possible as heat spread down my neck and torso. When I opened them again, Harvey, Bryce and Richard were each still watching me in silence. I turned the glass in my hand.
“Where did you find this?” I said.
Bryce nudged his glass towards Harvey, who obliged and then saw to my own half-empty tumbler. Harvey hooked a thumb at Richard.
“This man here,” said Harvey, “is what you might call a forward thinker.”
“The man knows how to pack,” said Bryce.
Richard uncrossed his arms and reached a long arm out for his glass. He sat back and shrugged.
“My cellar was well stocked,” he said.
I nodded, fighting back a rush of guilt as I thought of the pit I had put my family in for that fortnight. “You planned ahead?” I said hopefully. Richard looked into at his glass.
“The same as everyone else I expect,” he said. “We - Gabriella, my wife, and I - we didn’t think anything was really going to happen. Nobody really did, did they? We boxed up some supplies anyway, water, pasta, medicine…”
He looked up at me, father to father. “You know what I mean?” I kept quiet, nodded, remembering the panic, the largely useless box I had packed before hurling Alice down into the cellar.
“...just in case.” He laughed to himself. “Josh called it the apocabox. He was just as sceptical as us. Anyway, we went to bed the night before thinking nothing more about it. Then I woke up to the sirens. Gaby was gone, up early, out for her morning run. She was training for a marathon, and Saturday was the day she took her hill session…” he stopped and swirled the liquid in his glass. “Which meant that she was on her way up Arthur’s Seat.”
His voice broke a little. Harvey and Bryce looked patiently into their glasses. They had obviously heard Richard’s story already.
“I tried calling her - she always took her phone with her on her runs - but she didn’t answer. We have that GPS thing on our phones that lets you see where the other one is. I checked that and, sure enough, she was almost at the top of the hill. I called her again, but that’s when I lost the signal. I tried the television, the internet, nothing. Then there was shouting outside, glass breaking, cars speeding away. I woke Josh, explained what was happening and took him out to the car. I was going to drive out to collect her. I had the engine started and was halfway down the drive when Josh pointed up into the sky. Dad, he said, Dad, what’s that? I barely had time to answer before we heard the first explosion, then fire and smoke in the distance. Arthur’s Seat raging like a volcano.”
“Christ,” I said. “I’m so…”
“Then there was no time to do anything. Two more landed a little further away. I swear I could hear the screams. It was like some terrible choir. I froze; couldn’t decide what to do.”
Richard cleared his throat and lined it with another drink from his glass.
“Eventually I realised that Josh was shaking me and shouting at me to move,” he said. “Dad! Dad! Come on Dad! Look!” The sky was filling up with streak after streak of light. I snapped to and we left the car, ran back into the house and down into our wine cellar with the apocabox and water tanks.”
“Where did you live?” I asked.
“The Grange,” he said. This explained the wine cellar; the Grange was a moneyed area - wide Georgian avenues lined with mansions protected by high trees and fences.
“There’s still a chance…” I started. “I mean, maybe she got down before it hit.”
Richard frowned, pushed out his lips and shook his head. “Our cellar was deep and we were well protected, but we could hear the fires burning above us, the sound of buildings collapsing, voices sometimes too.”
He sneered at this, turning the whisky in his glass as if he’d found something unpalatable floating in it. I remembered our own first night, the sound of the woman’s pleas against the hatch and her silence as the rubble fell.
“Unsurprisingly, we didn’t sleep that first night,” said Richard, glancing up at
us. “I don’t expect many did. Josh wanted to get out and search for his mum. I had to virtually pin him down to stop him from getting out. I knew it wasn’t safe out there. And I knew…I…well, I calculated…”
Again, that sneer as he rolled his drink around the glass. He seemed to shake away the thought.
“It didn’t matter what I thought though, Josh believed his mum was still alive. The next morning we could still hear the fires but they seemed less fierce, so I told Josh to stay put while I took a look upstairs. When I got out I was amazed to find our kitchen still standing, but it was the only part of the house that was. I could barely see with all the ash falling everywhere. I couldn’t even make out where the floor was. I wrapped a scarf around my face and walked out onto the street, but I’d barely made it past where our gate had been before I had to turn back. The air was like fire and I couldn’t breathe for the smoke. When I got back inside, Josh ran at me, screaming at me to get back out. I tried telling him, but he pushed me aside and went outside himself. I ran after him, found him halfway up the street on his knees, almost passed out. I managed to drag him back and get him cleaned up. He wouldn’t talk to me for a couple of days, but he didn’t go outside again. Neither of us did until we heard the helicopters a week later.”
We allowed the loose ends of his story to dangle in silence for a while.
“He’s only fourteen,” said Richard.
A sudden blast of storm wind hammered the windows of the canteen and howled off into the night. I jumped a little and Arthur began to stir against my neck. He let out a croak, then a long wail as consciousness resurrected the pain in his mouth. I patted his back and shushed him.
“Teething?” said Richard.
“Yup,” I nodded.
“Poor little mite,” said Harvey.
Bryce jabbed his index finger into his glass and began twirling it around.
“Only one thing for that,” he said, and held it up.
I watched it for a while, that grubby stump dripping with whisky in the candlelight. Arthur’s wail turned into a scream in my ear. I turned to Harvey and Richard, who both shrugged. Then I took Arthur from my shoulder and gently lay him back over the table. The sudden change of position and light surprised him and he stared up frantically at the three new faces looking down at him, mouth wide open, hands clawing for purchase on something.
“Which side?” said Bryce.
“Upper left,” I replied. “Be careful.”
Bryce gently slid his finger into my son’s mouth and rubbed it against his gums. Arthur squealed as if to scream again, but began suckling on Bryce’s finger instead.
“That’s not a tit, son,” said Bryce, removing his finger. He doused it in more whisky and gave it back to Arthur, who chewed it hungrily, wide-eyed. Richard and Harvey laughed at the horrible sight until eventually Bryce took out his finger again and wiped it on his jeans.
“Mum always said that worked for me,” he said, picking up his glass.
Arthur smacked his lips and lay silent, looking around at the flickering walls, the shadows, the world’s strange illusions that he would soon take for granted. His eyelids began to droop and I placed him on my shoulder, expecting him to start up at any moment. He nuzzled in, lay still, fell asleep. Harvey and Richard smiled in wonder. Bryce raised his glass to his lips, but paused halfway.
“You were right not to go outside again,” he said, glancing at Richard. “I’m sorry, Dick, but there’s no way anything on Arthur’s Seat would have survived what hit it.”
“You saw it?” I said.
“Aha,” said Bryce. “I was halfway along the coast to Portobello, got a clear view. I stopped my bike when I saw the first one flying overhead, watched that hill burst apart like a watermelon.” He went to mime an exploding hill, but thought better of it when he saw Richard’s face.
“Bike?” I said. “You cycled out of town?”
Bryce puffed and snorted. “Did I fuck,” he said. “Motorbike man, Christ, do I look like I ride a fuckin push bike?”
“Well, you’re in the top group at school,” I said, referring to the training sessions.
Bryce turned to face me. “And?” he said.
“I mean, you don’t exactly look…”
Bryce laid down his glass and turned to face me.
“Oh I get it,” he said. “I’m a big man, so I must be unfit?”
“No, wait, that’s not what I…”
He prodded one of his immense fingers in my direction. “I walk everywhere, sunshine. And I do a lot of shaggin. What about you?” I followed his eyes down to my gut, visibly bulging beneath my T-shirt. “What’s your excuse?”
“Ease up there, Bryce,” said Harvey, giving me a look that got stuck somewhere between kindness and pity. “Give the man a break, he’s got kids.”
“Wait a minute…” I began. Bryce swivelled to Harvey and frowned.
“So?” he said.
“Well,” said Harvey, struggling. He looked me up and down, gesturing half-heartedly as he looked for the right words. “It’s, y’know, hard, I imagine. To keep in shape I mean.”
“What? Hold on,” I said.
Bryce had turned back to me, lip and eyebrow pulled into identical curls.
“Knew it,” he sneered. “Parents, you’re all the same. You’re all I can’t do this, I can’t do that or I can’t get my arse off the sofa, I’m tired or my kids are so fuckin demanding, I don’t have time for anything else. Fuckin pathetic, the lot of you. You chose to have the wee bastards.” He jabbed another finger at me and sat back in his seat. “You take your medicine!”
“Come on, Bryce,” said Richard, folding his long, lean arms across his fatless torso. “It’s hard, isn’t it, Ed?”
All three men were now facing me, regarding me impassively like scientists at some weak and watery specimen they would soon discard.
“Bollocks,” muttered Bryce across the lip of his glass.
I said nothing, looked down at my son’s peaceful face. Arthur released a long, thoughtful fart that trailed off into something wet.
“Smartest thing I’ve heard so far this evening,” said Harvey. We laughed. It’s hard not to when a baby farts and an old man smiles.
Bryce’s story, so he told it, was that he was still awake when the early warning alarms sounded. He had owned a tattoo shop on Cockburn Street. The evening before it happened, he had closed the shop early and headed to the local, where he had knocked back several pints of Caledonian 80 before wandering down to the pubs at the Grassmarket. After four or five more rounds, he’d taken in a few private shows at one of the three lap-dancing clubs that made up the Pubic Triangle. Then he’d bought two kebabs and eaten them, one in each ring-encrusted fist, while making his way across town to a pub on Thistle Street. There was a lock-in and Bryce had helped two or three other regulars finish off a couple of grams of cocaine before picking up a straggler from a hen-party and taking her back to his flat in the New Town.
According to Bryce, the sirens had started mid-coitus. After the same process of realisation that everyone else was making around that time - the time that I was kicking down the door of our local store - the girl had run screaming from Bryce’s house, pulling on her jeans, stilettos and pink T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Three-pinter” across its chest. Bryce had scoured his flat for a few supplies and crammed them into a backpack before spinning away on his motorbike. After seeing Arthur’s Seat cleaved in two and realising he wasn’t going to make it, he had swung the bike into a school playground, crashed through the front doors and thrown himself down into the store cellar. The rescue chopper had found him two weeks later surrounded by filth, empty crisp packets and tins of pop. Those two weeks and the following eight months did little to trim Bryce down to anything approximating the size of a human being. He was still huge.
“Any family?” I asked when he had finished.
“I have a brother. Don’t see him much, he works on the rigs,” he said. “Can’t imagine there’s muc
h hope for anyone stuck out in the North Sea. Dad left us when we were little. Mum popped her clogs a few years back.” He swallowed his drink. “So no, no family.”
“What about you, Ed?” said Richard, turning in my direction. “What’s your story?”
The three of them looked at me expectantly. I flitted through the memories of that morning, trying to extract those that might put me in a better light if I told them in isolation. Very few surfaced. I was about to tell them about the riot at the newsagents, but then there was a noise behind us. We each swung around in our chairs.
“I don’t remember seeing alcohol on the inventory,” said a voice. It was Private Grimes, arms folded, leaning against the doorframe. She was hardly visible in the shadows. She pushed herself up and walked across to the table, picked up the bottle.
“Macallan,” she said approvingly. “Definitely would’ve remembered that.”
The four of us shared a look, still unsure of whether or not we were in trouble.
“Er…” said Harvey at last. “Would you like some?”
Grimes replaced the bottle and took a glass from the cupboard. She pulled a chair up next to Harvey and placed the glass on the table, nudging it over to the whisky. She folded her arms again and stared straight ahead. Harvey filled it for her and she took a sip, then drank the whole glass down. Bryce watched and grinned, waiting for a flinch or a cough that never came.
“Hard day love?” said Harvey. He meant it genuinely, but Grimes dismissed it as a jibe, curling her lip and wrinkling her eyes into a feigned smile. I guessed that this was a well-rehearsed reaction; she had learned to be suspicious and trained herself to behave a certain way in rooms full of men like this one - dry, cold and pissed off. She was a small woman who couldn’t afford to let down her guard, but she softened a little as Arthur gave a snuffle and pushed his head further into my neck.
“Is he OK?” said Grimes.
I nodded. “He’s fine,” I said.
She looked around the table, hardening once again.
The End of the World Running Club Page 10