The End of the World Running Club

by Adrian J. Walker

  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.

  SENNEN

  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.

  It took a month for my ankle to heal. Now I wake before the sun every day and head out along the path around the headland. I run for two or three hours, or as long as I can manage. I found a music player in a kitchen drawer and a stack of batteries that fit it. I don’t recognise half the songs and the display is broken so I can’t see what they’re called, but there’s one I like to listen to when I run. It starts like a long train coming out of a tunnel, then explodes into deep, grinding guitars and distant drums. There’s a male singer who sounds like he’s calling back from some other place, some halfway desert between reality and dream. There’s a part about him searching for something with his good eye closed, which seems appropriate to my condition. Although my own eye has healed, it’s still blind and it doesn’t look great, so I patched it up properly with some black fabric I cut from a coat. Maybe Alice will think I’m a pirate when I moor in Cape Town.

  The song ends with the singer howling a long refrain about being on his way. This is appropriate too; I am a man with a boat, after all.

  It needs fixing and I don’t know what I’m doing, but I guess the couple had been trying to do the same thing before the strike because I found a few books in the house that are helping. The mast is a concern and I have no idea if it floats. I’m trying not to think about how I’ll get it down to the water, or about how far I have to travel on seas and around coasts that may have been crushed beyond recognition. These are all just details.

  I feel as if my soul has woken up from a deep, dark sleep and that, as long as I keep moving, as long as I keep running, it won’t go back. I don’t know where we’re going. I don’t know what will become of us or where civilisation will end up. But I know where I’m going, and that’s good enough.

  When I’ve caught my fish and worked all I can on the boat, I sometimes set out on another run before sunset. Then I come home and eat and read books from the dead couple’s shelves. Before I go to sleep I whisper words into a tin can etched with five sets of initials.

  This isn’t the end. It is never the end. I still live and I still dream of my family. I miss them so much sometimes that the pain of love and the pain of running converge and become a single bright thing clenched in my fist like an atom. This morning as the sun rose I ran up the steep path from the cove and remembered a day on our doomed Cornish camping trip that I had somehow forgotten. The sun had come out and we had driven to Sennen Cove, a beautiful white beach next to Land’s End. We’d been for a walk along the cliffs and had stopped on the sand, running from the tide, dancing and laughing as the sun set. I remember feeling Beth’s growing bump beneath her dress, watching her smile in the orange light as Alice kissed her cheeks. I remember falling in love with her for the hundredth time.

  I could feel them behind me as I ran up the path this morning. I felt Beth’s breath on my neck as I pounded my feet into the sand. I swear I caught the scent of my son’s head on the breeze and heard Alice’s laughter twinkling like the light on the tide before disappearing into the morning air. They were there with me. I felt them.

  At the top I turned and faced the sun. Then I held out my arms, and into the screaming heat of that distant fireball rising above me, I screamed right back.

  From the Author

  Thanks for reading The End of the World Running Club, I really hope you enjoyed it. If you could spare the time, I’d be very grateful if you could post a review on Amazon or Goodreads. And feel free to let me know what you think in person by dropping me an email at adrian@adrianjwalker.com - I’d be happy to hear from you.

  If you want to know when my next book comes out, you can sign up for my newsletter here:

  http://www.adrianjwalker.com/rc-newsletter

  I’ll send you exclusive short stories, some of which feature characters from this book. You’ll also find out the second a new book is published.

  Speaking of which, would you like to try my first novel, From the Storm? Take a look at the blurb on the next page.

  Thanks again for reading!

  "We don’t know what his name is or where he came from, but he is living in my room."

  In the near future, a young man seeks adventure in the French Alps. Lost, feverish and caught in a freak snowstorm, he finds refuge in a lonely mountain farm where he stumbles upon a young girl’s diary from eighty years before. Claudette tells of farm life disrupted by a blizzard and the arrival of a stranger with a terrible injury. With her father sick, the eight-year-old chronicles her struggle to look after the farm, and its unwanted guest, alone.

  In present day London, Joseph Martin has screwed up. Once he was a lethal assassin, the best gun-for-hire. Now, in his autumn years, even he has to admit he is losing it. His failing skills have landed him in trouble with a dangerous client. Only the successful completion of an eerily familiar mission can save his skin; a mission which takes him into deepest Asia, where he must face a past he has long tried to forget.

  He’s not the only one on the road in Asia. London city boy Ashley Gritten is travelling. Shedding the challenges of his privileged life in Kensington, he’s off to ‘find himself’ in the drugs, girls and debauchery of the backpacker trail. But something else finds him. Something much, much worse.

  Who would have thought that a rich kid and an ageing hit man would have so much in common? And what does all of this have to do with Elmo, a pianist on his death bed in Venice?

  A dark and humorous story of how selves are lost and lives are found.

  Out now on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

  REVIEWS:

  "What sets this apart from a standard thriller is the heart beating behind it all." *****

  "…beautifully written…" *****

  "Great characters, perfectly paced with a suitably twisting plot." *****

  "…spins threads of complex, often moving and entirely gripping narrative…" *****

  "I genuinely feel like I've discovered a huge hit before it's about to take off…" *****

  "Best book I've read in years" *****

  Copyright: Adrian J Walker

  Published: 30th June 2014

  The right of Adrian J Walker to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the publisher. You must not circulate this book in any format.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank the following people, each of whom helped make this book happen - Dennis Coughlin, Catriona Vernal, John-Paul Shirreffs, Bob Ross and my father, Norrie Walker.

  Also, thanks to everyone who supported the Thunderclap, especially Mel Young. Thanks Mel!

  This book is dedicated to my wife, Debbie Walker, without whom this book simply would not exist. Thank you, my love and partner in crime.

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Oh…apart from Jacob (thanks Tobias.)

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