by Jay Bray
THE LAST MAN ON EARTH
JAY BRAY
Copyright © Jay Bray 2015
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express permission of the author except for the use of brief quotation in a book review.
All characters appearing in the work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
For questions or comments about this book, please contact the author at [email protected]
Or follow on twitter @bottomwrung
Alan: What are you doing mother?
Mother: I’m having at writing the blurb for your book.
Alan: Oh, that’s good. What have you written? I was thinking something along the lines of ‘Welcome to my totally free Christmas comedy, post-apocalyptic, bunker diary. It stars Alan, a passionate, brave and determined young man…’
Mother: Who made you the star?
Alan: I bloody wrote it!
Mother: That just makes you the hired help. ‘A seasoned comedy tale of a wise and heroic woman…’
Alan: Oh here we go…
Mother: … a wise and heroic woman and her needy, whiney son.
Alan: Oh you can cross all of that out. Have you mentioned there are loads of jokes?
Mother: I said it was a comedy.
Alan: They’re really funny jokes.
Mother: If you say so…
Alan: See, it’s the lack of support that’s held me back.
Mother: Oh don’t start. Do you think they’ll get Julie Waters to play in me in the film adaption?
Alan: Well she does specialize in playing bad old bats and is used to playing above her age. Who’ll play me? Who is like a younger Tom Hardy?
Mother: They’ll get Alan Carr in, I reckon.
Alan: Don’t write that, he might sue and then he won’t have us on Chatty Man, if it’s a best seller. And then I wont get to meet all my new showbiz pals. Adele, Jennifer Lawrence… Micky Flanagan.
Mother: What shall I put then?
Alan: Put… “Read the first page and if you aren’t laughing, then is obviously too funny for you.”
Mother: Do you think that’s long enough?
Alan: Too long if you ask me. Come on; let’s see if Chatty Man is on.
23rd DECEMBER at 12PM
Dear Diary,
That is it.
I know I’ve written this so many times before in you, but I really mean it this time.
I just can’t take it anymore. If it wasn’t bad enough that the army rejected me this morning (apparently I’m too overweight.)
I said to the Sergeant “I’m volunteering to stand in a field and be vaporized – exactly how skinny do you need to be for that?”) When I returned home, what do I find? I find mother in exactly the same place as I left her this morning.
She’d not made one of the calls I’d told her to. She was “dotting her T’s and crossing her I’s” apparently.
There she sat, waiting for her son to get come home so he could do it all for her, that’s what she was doing. Well no more. I’ve packed my bag and I’m getting a bus to the station, a train to the tube station and a tube to the start of my new life. I’ve had enough of sitting around watching her waste her money on her catalogue addiction. Stocking up on ‘necessities’ for the bunker, as she puts it. Oh she can’t bloody wait for the end, but not me – I’m young and living now.
You won’t see me back here again, that’s for sure.
See you in the big smoke!
Alan.
12:32PM
I’m back. The four-minute warning went off when I was at the bus stop.
4:00PM
Oh she bloody loved it didn’t she?
There was me, running back from the bus stop lugging my rucksack on my back, a satchel on one shoulder and a bag for life in my hand. I was bright red, perspiring everywhere. The top of my thighs were rubbing together like a thousand paper cuts. I’d stormed out forgetting to slap on my layer of coconut oil chub rub. I’d seen a tutorial on YouTube and it works a treat. But I pressed on through the agony and got back to the front door with three and a half minutes to spare.
I slid my hand into my pocket and fingered about for the key, I couldn’t find it. I rang the doorbell as I patted my remaining pockets. I pulled off my bags and dropped them as I prepared to rummage through my bags.
I screamed through the letterbox
“MOTHER!”
I looked like some crazed hyperventilating child playing head, shoulders, knees and toes (knees and toes), as the key remained lost and the door remained closed.
“Mother, mother, mother!!! Let me in!”
This was it.
I was going to die having finally managed to leave home for all of a minute.
***
Through the letterbox I could see where I’d left the keys, on the side.
Of course, I wasn’t planning on coming back so I hadn’t taken them with me. Now, if she weren’t in the bath or in front of the telly she’d be doing one of her sculptures up in the spare room.
I looked up to the window, but then I remembered Freddie.
Freddie was our old cat (that mum had stuffed herself when he’d departed to cat heaven). He was posed in his favorite position under the bird table – he was water logged, he should be heavy enough to throw through the window, I though. I grabbed hold of the maggot-ridden corpse and flung it at the glass. Freddie bounced off leaving nothing more than a smear. I hadn’t used enough force.
There was two minutes forty-five seconds to go.
I had to stay calm and make the next go count. I picked Freddie up by his tail and spun around three times.
I let go at just the right point to see Freddie fly straight past the house and into next doors hedge as I spun myself into the goldfish pond.
I felt my bottom lip wobbling as the front door opened and mum said, “Oh, you’re back.”
Ignoring her sarcasm I shoved myself past her, and was expecting to find the bunker door already open, but the only door open was that of the fridge. Mother strolled in after me.
“I was making a sandwich, do you want one?”
“Mother we need to get in the bunker, why haven’t you opened it?”
“Well, you’ve got the key and I wanted to use up the last of the ham…”
I dashed out into the hall and scooped the keys out of the fruit bowl and ran back into the kitchen and unlocked the door.
“I don’t know why you keep this locked”
“Cos of the rats…. there’s cheese and if you don’t want ham…”
“Mother, get down here now” I closed my eyes and descended into the dark.
“But there’s still two minutes to go”
“Oh for fuck sake mother! That’s an estimate! Get down here now!”
My mother finally joined me and closed the hatch behind her.
She climbed down and joined me in the pitch black.
“Here, hold this…” she said as she walked over to the wall and turned on the light. She handed me a sandwich on a plate.
“I made you ham and cheese,” she said as she came back over “you did very well son.”
5:10 PM
I’ve calmed down now. I felt a lot better after I sat down and ate the sandwich.
“Did you forget your ‘chubby rub in a tub’?”
“Yeah.”
“Probably better that you didn’t make it to London then, isn’t it?”
“Oh yes, Mum. So much better to have the apocalypse isn’t it?”
“Even a mushroom clou
d can have a silver living,” she mused.
I ignored her.
“So how do you like the place? Not bad is it?”
I had to admit I was very impressed. This was my first time down here due to my phobias and I’d learnt to zone out every time she had bought the subject up of what she was doing down here.
I’d had to hide her credit card after several large deliveries of all the crap that she’d ordered, so she’d had had to make do with finishing off in the pound shops and ‘Chazzers’, but it did look very smart and modern if you ignored the cocktail bar and the Grease posters plastered over the walls.
Mother was fiddling with the radio but there was only white noise.
“The bomb must’ve gone off already,” I said
“Well I didn’t hear anything,” she muttered, lighting up her roll up.
“They don’t make sounds these days… do you have to smoke that in here, you know I’ve got asthma.”
“My bunker, my rules.” she stated as she took the plate from me and placed it in a bucket of water.
“Well, are you going to show me around?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Isn’t that my room through there?” I pointed over to the only door in the room.
“Oh that, no. Sadly there’s been a change of plan son.”
“Oh God, its not another Freddie shrine is it?”
“Don’t be silly – course I haven’t. You see I had a little think-through and that’s going to have to be the crap hole.”
“Do you have to be so vulgar, mother? It’s a bathroom, or water closet...”
I stepped through the door and fell into a hole.
I stood up and mother pulled me out.
“No son that’s where I dug the hole to store all the crap in.”
“But where am I going to sleep? You know I only agreed to the bunker if I had my own room. I need my space.”
“Well, you’re quite welcome to go back upstairs if you want. If you were that bothered you would have come and taken a look before now.”
“That’s very unfair. You know, what with my condition... and anyway, I didn’t expect it to happen this soon!”
“Oh your phobias? Well they haven’t stopped you coming down here now, have they?”
I think we both knew that she had crossed a line and we were both silent for a moment.”
“Why weren’t you in here when I came back?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“When I came back you were making a sandwich, you hadn’t opened the door…”
“Maybe because you had the key.”
“But I left my keys on the side – I told you as I was leaving.”
“Oh well, to tell the truth I couldn’t be bothered.”
“You couldn’t be bothered?”
“I couldn’t see the point,” she sighed relighting her cigarette.
Oh here we go, I thought.
“I said to myself “There’s no point in going down there, not with our Alan out there. And him nothing more than a bit of crackling in a minute or two… No, there’d be no point to it at all.”
And then I was suffocated in a bear hug of petulia oil and smoke.
24th DECEMBER at 7:30AM
Dear Diary,
I am in agony.
I’d be in less pain if I had stayed up top.
You will not believe what I had to sleep in last night. If it wasn’t bad enough that my ‘bedroom’ had been dug out for our future bowel movements and that I had to sleep in the main room with mother, I also had to sleep in the same bed as her. And when I say bed, I mean hammock. And if by hammock you’re picturing some nice soft muslin affair (and I can understand why you would picture such a hammock what with my sensitive skin) well, you’d be picturing it wrong.
Instead think of some ropey old netting that she found in the back of a skip.
I’m crisscrossed all over. I spent the whole night feeling bits of myself being squeezed through the holes. And on top of that I had to put up with her death rattle.
‘Snore’
“Stop snoring.”
‘SNORE’
“STOP SNORING!”
And for a second I’d think my prayers had been answered. Peace. And then she’d do her death rattle and start her snoring again. It must have been gone five before I dropped off.
And then she woke me up at half six when she swung out of the hammock and she’s been chain-smoking and peeling the spuds ever since.
I plonked myself at the other end of the table and started my writing in you.
And I’ve realised dear diary all that has changed since our first page together.
Back then you, like me, were just a continuation of what had gone before. You were just my new book to continue my story from just the day before.
But now, all my other diaries are ashes and your first page has become the beginning of my story.
And my story has gone from that of an everyday lad leaving home – to quite possibly being a survival report from The Last Man On Earth.
And if things have gone as badly as expected, up there well what’s peeling the spuds could be the last of the female kind.
Imagine the responsibility I now hold as I transcribe these words upon you. The whole history of the human race I must now put down.
And if Mother had listened to me when I said that I wasn’t hungry, instead of doing me a fry-up with fried bread then I wouldn’t have to stop at this point to enquire with her exactly what the toilet arrangements around here are.
***
I’ve never been so mortified in my life.
I asked Mother for the lavatory and she handed me a plastic bag and a washing up sponge. She pointed at the sponge and said “Rinse it after, that’s got to last you the week.” I stood in front of her; bag in one hand, sponge in the other. Speechless.
“You promised me there was going to be a bidet and cubicle. I marked it in your bloody catalogue!”
“Well, it was either that or the cocktail bar and I thought to myself “Well Judy, do we really need a toilet if it’s just you and Alan. And Judy said, “Yes Judy, that’s right – get ourselves the cocktail bar, you never know you may have guests…”
“Oh shut up mother!” I snapped as I could feel that breakfast pushing last night’s sandwich to the end of my large intestine.
I went and stood in the ditch behind my ‘bedroom door’ and did what I had to do into a carrier bag, which I then knotted and left in the far corner of the hole. I climbed out and mother handed me a single wet wipe with a wink.
“Special treat, seeing how it’s nearly Christmas.”
I came back to the table and was just about to continue writing, when she started hefting, heaving and grunting another sack of potatoes over towards us.
“Do you want a hand with that?”
“Oof! Aargh! Ow… No it’s all right love… I’ve nearly… just… that’s it… No you’re okay. I’ve done it now… Nearly there… Yeah, I’ve got it now.”
She sat down and I picked up my pen, but as I looked over she opened up the sack and it wasn’t potatoes. It was a great big sack of brussel sprouts.
“That’s a lot of sprouts mother?”
“You don’t know the half of it.” she replied as she crisscrossed the sprouts with her flick-knife.
“What does that mean?” I asked, unsure if I could cope with the reply.
“Oh, I shouldn’t have said anything. You’d be better off not knowing… for now.
I’d be happy not knowing for now. I’ll tell you that for nothing.”
I just stared at her.
“No, you’re right son. I best tell you now. It’s actually quite a funny story…”
I just stared at her.
“It wasn’t really my fault…”
I just stared at her.
“I had the wrong glasses on. I had my pound shop pair on, when it was going a bit cloudy outside. And when it goes a bit stormy, you know I l
ike to wear that pair I found on holiday that time, in case I get one of my heads…”
I just stared at her.
“No son, you’re right. It was sort of my fault for not having on the right specs, but those buttons on the new remote, they’re so small and you know what my nerves are like when there’s a storm or… well anyway, I ordered them all.” and she waved at eight sacks in the corner with a tartan rug draped over them and held down by the most vulgar mooning garden gnome. I went over and lifted up the blanket and saw eight industrial size sacks of brussel sprouts.