“Please...help me…please...let me in...”
As she spoke, her words became closer until we could hear her outside the hatch. Then we heard a scrabbling sound on the wood. Beth shot me a look of warning.
“Ed?” she said.
“It’s locked from inside,” I replied.
She must have heard us because she paused. We heard a croaking sound, as if she was thinking, then a slurp of saliva and a painful gulp. And then she began to thump, slow and feebly, on the hatch.
“Please...help me...let me in...kill me...please...I want to die...please...help me...let me in...kill me...please...I want to die...”
At no point did I even consider opening the hatch. I sat down with Beth and we waited. After about an hour, when I felt sure that she would give up, we heard a sudden groaning sound - not human this time, but of concrete and metal. The woman stopped. I pictured her looking above her. Then there was a heavy, hollow crash. The hatch rattled and the ceiling shook and the woman was silent.
“What was that?” said Beth.
“Bricks,” I guessed. “Concrete, the rest of our house.”
We said nothing to each other. Eventually Beth lifted her hands from Alice’s head. He palms were slick with sweat and Alice lay sleeping with her hair drenched and matted.
Arthur had woken up and was beginning to make noises of hunger.
“Swap,” said Beth. She carefully released Alice from her arms and lay her down against the damp pillow. We must have been sitting there for most of the morning. We both winced and stretched our numb legs painfully as we stood up to change places. I passed Arthur across and Beth released her right breast for him to suckle.
There was no question of us talking about what we had just heard. We were learning quickly to bury what we couldn’t deal with. It was a primal decision that seemed to come from somewhere far away from us: deep within us or deeply between us. Not quite fright, not quite flight; just a quiet and necessary abandonment of human thought, as if we had adopted some default state that had existed long before us.
I took out a bottle of water from the first crate. The riot at the shop was now a distant, foreign memory and I experienced another mini apocalypse as I imagined the building flattened. I opened the water and passed it silently to Beth. She began to gulp it greedily down - breastfeeding already made her thirsty at the best of times - but caught my warning look and stopped short.
“How long do you think we have to stay down here?” she whispered, replacing the cap on the bottle.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “I don’t know what’s up there.”
“Do you think…” she began. “Is it, like...nuclear? Is there fallout?”
I shook my head. “Dust and ash, probably,” I said. “Can’t imagine there’s radiation.”
I suddenly felt claustrophobic. The baking air began to catch in my throat. I scrambled to my feet.
“Ed?” said Beth. “What are you doing?”
“Opening the hatch,” I said.
“What? Don’t be insane! You don’t know what’s outside!”
“I have to see,” I said. I clambered up the ladder and undid the lock on the hatch. Then I pushed. It didn’t move. I pushed again: not an inch.
“What’s wrong?” hissed Beth.
“It’s stuck,” I said, hammering harder on the thick wood. “Something’s on top of it. Fuck. Shit. Shit.”
“That woman?” said Beth.
I stopped and looked down at her. “No,” I said. “Not unless she weighs thirty stone. It must be rubble. I need a lever.”
I jumped down from the steps and looked around the cellar. In the corner was a gleaming red toolbox. It was seriously underused, a hopeful gift from my father when we had moved in. I sorted through the shining tools and found a small crowbar in the bottom drawer which I took and rammed into the gap between the hatch and the ceiling. I pulled down as hard as I could but there was no movement. I put one foot against the wall and tried again with all my weight hanging from the crowbar. The surface began to splinter into a thin dent but the hatch gave no sign of moving. I gave one last heave and the iron came loose, sending me crashing down onto the stone floor in a shower of splinters. The crowbar clanged at my feet.
“Can’t you just take it off?” said Beth, sounding like any other woman watching her husband fail at a simple task.
“The hinges are on the outside,” I said. “I’ll need to break through.”
I took a hammer and a screwdriver from the toolbox and began to chip away at the hatch near the lock. After some time the head of the screwdriver popped through the other side. I wiggled it about. It felt like it was stuck in something on the other side. I got another screwdriver and stuck it into the hole as well, moving both of them about until the hole widened. Finally, I got the crowbar and jammed it into the hole, tearing back a quarter of the hatch in one go.
I tumbled to the floor in a shower of dust and stone as the wood came away. Staring down at me from the hole was a woman’s face, red and bulging, surrounded by charred hair. A single globule of blood fell down from the holes I had made in her cheek with my screwdrivers. Behind her was the dense pack of brick and stone that had fallen and crushed her against the hatch.
I jumped up, gibbering something to myself, and grabbed an old piece of sackcloth from the corner which I stuffed into the hole until it had covered the dead woman’s head. Then I scrabbled back against the wall next to Beth.
Beth, who had fallen asleep again, roused.
“Did you manage it?” she breathed.
“No,” I said, staring madly back at the sackcloth. “We’re stuck.”
I didn’t tell Beth about the woman. Maybe she already suspected what I had seen by the horror on my face and the way I was squashing myself against the wall. Either way, she quite calmly accepted the fact that we were trapped underground, numbed again by the instinctive need to bury the unthinkable.
“There’ll be rescue parties,” she said, staring straight ahead. “We’ll be rescued."
So we were down here for a while.
I pictured the monochrome sketched images of the fifties bunkers from the nuclear advice leaflets I had collected as a teenager. A man would be sitting in a chair with a book, smirking at the curious change in circumstances. His wife would be leaning happily over her corner sink while a pink-cheeked child in a woollen tank-top pushed a toy car around his father’s feet. This was a family at ease with the apocalypse. They were prepared, protected and safe, as happy as they ever had been before. I imagined that, at some point, the father would rise from his chair and walk across to his cheerful housewife, lay one firm hand on her buttocks and squeeze, whereupon she would follow him across the room and behind some curtain to see to his needs while the child played on obliviously. Life and all its normality reigned.
I looked around our own dark makeshift bunker in the light of the candle. We had rarely been down here before. There were some storage boxes in the corner, things we had never bothered to unpack when we moved in. A broken vacuum cleaner stood next to the steps. There were plastic bags and dusty shelves with various objects scattered along them.
Beth passed me the water bottle. I had to fight back the urge to pour mouthful after mouthful down my throat. Instead I took a small sip and replaced the cap. We had three crates of six two-litre litre bottles. Thirty-six litres. Two litres a day between the four of us? Probably not enough. Two weeks? Three before we ran out? Would there would be rescue parties before then? All of these thoughts entered my brain in the same manner: accompanied by a strange, nauseous pulse as if I had stepped too close to the edge of a cliff. My mind did not belong anywhere near these questions. They were off-limits. I had no map.
I sat down next to Alice and put my arm around her. She stirred and looked up at me. Her eyes focused on me in the dim light and she recoiled.
“I want Mummy,” she said.
This was a first. Alice had always been a daddy’s girl, in spite of - or perhaps be
cause of - my half-hearted efforts in that role. She usually called for me at night and was sometimes upset if Beth went through to her in the morning. It hurt Beth and flattered me. Now, at this sudden change in tide, I could feel Beth’s heart rising as mine sank.
“Oh, darling,” Beth cooed. “Mummy’s just feeding Arthur right now. I won’t be long.”
“I want Mummy,” Alice repeated, fiercer now and pulling away from me. I let her go and she stood up shakily and crept around to Beth’s other side, snuggling under her arm again. I buried the urge to take this personally.
I decided to take an inventory of the cellar, starting with the shelves. On the top shelf there was a packet of eight candles, one of which was half-used. Next to them was what used to be a large church candle but was now a crumpled disc of wax about an inch tall. Its wick had burned away and only a black dot poked out from the centre. There was an unopened tin of WD-40, a jar full of broken pencils, a stack of unopened bank statements addressed to the previous owners of the house, five paint colour testers, several identical Allen keys, a flat-blade screwdriver with a bent handle encrusted in white paint and a vase full of dried fucking flowers.
The shelf below it held an opened set of paintbrushes, a half-empty pot of white emulsion, a small sewing kit, a blunt bread knife, some superglue and two tea-towels with maps of Dorset stitched into them. Standing at the end was a bottle of cheap supermarket table wine, which I was almost certain had been there when we moved in.
Underneath the shelves was a black bin bag. I stared blankly at it for a while before remembering what it was. It had been sitting there since the previous Spring. I dropped to my knees and tore the double knot I had made in the plastic opening. The smell of woodsmoke and wet cloth burst out as I rummaged through it. Two scratched plastic plates, a rancid towel, an anorak and two white metal camping mugs stained with dried tea: the remains of our camping trip to Cornwall.
It had been my idea, an insane manoeuvre to get us out into the fresh air and put some distance between us and the house. Beth had been three months’ pregnant with Arthur, Alice had just turned two and Cornwall was a day’s drive. It rained most of the time and the tent had a hole that I couldn’t mend. Instead I woke at hourly intervals to pour the water from the groundsheet. Beth hardly slept, the beaches were a washout and Alice got conjunctivitis. On the sixth evening, I crouched outside in the rain prodding three cheap sausages around a pan balanced on a wonky camping stove. Beth sat inside the tent glaring out at me with Alice. She pleaded with me to get a hotel. “No,” I said. “We’re supposed to be camping, this is supposed to be fun.” I was trying to make a point I suppose, something vague about the need for living more simply, but I wasn’t even convincing myself. Then the stove caught fire and Beth grabbed a bag and took Alice to a bed and breakfast. I sat it out in the tent that night, hungry and wet and drunk on warm, flat cider I had bought from the shop in the campsite. I joined Beth and Alice in the morning and we drove home that day.
Sitting in the dried mud at the bottom of the bag were two Kendal mint cakes crushed into crumbs between flimsy plastic wrappers at perishing point. There was also a crumpled box of matches that had obviously dried from having been soaked. I took them and the cakes out and placed them grimly on the shelves with the rest of the useless stock.
In the corner of the cellar, opposite the hatch, three cans of lager and two half-empty bottles of flat tonic water stood on top of a small cheese hamper somebody had given us the previous Christmas. The cheese set contained wax-sealed miniatures of cheddar, Cheshire, Wensleydale, double Gloucester, a tiny packet of crackers and a minuscule jar of chutney all flattened into a straw bed by a vacuum-packed sheet of plastic. I moved this little pile of heaven up onto the shelves as well.
Then I started to look through the boxes I had filled with the contents of our kitchen cupboards.
I separated out the tins. There were three of baked beans, two of minestrone soup, three of plum tomatoes, one of pineapple long past its sell-by date, one of peaches, two of pilchards and three of tuna. We had an entire bag of flour and half a bag of sugar, three packets of dried, flavoured rice, one half-packet of pasta shells, a packet of digestive biscuits, a loaf of bread, cornflakes and sugar puffs. And balsamic vinegar.
Amongst the other detritus of the second box - thumb tacks, takeaway menus, power adaptors, dead batteries, bulldog clips, cling film and light bulbs - I found some birthday candles, a first-aid kit, a Zippo lighter and a bottle of lighter fluid.
I also had the packets of batteries to fit the Maglite. The ones inside the torch were already on their way out and its white floodlight was now a dim yellow glow.
I arranged the food and everything else that was useful on the shelves and put the rest back in one of the boxes. Then I turned the empty box upside down and sat on it as I looked through the things that Beth had pulled from upstairs. We had an entire box of nappies for Arthur. I considered Alice’s successful toilet training to be a small mercy at the time, but it would in fact turn out to be nothing of the sort. Wipes, lotions, cloths, clean clothes, medicines...she had packed for the kids as thoroughly as if we had been taking a trip down to her parents’ house. There were even books, including Alice’s favourite one about a rabbit that wants to fly.
Beth had finished feeding Arthur and was buttoning up her top.
“Hey,” I whispered. Beth looked up and I threw her the rabbit book. Alice’s brightening face flooded me with a mess of emotions. Hope, grief, pride and regret all fought for space in my heart. I turned away and gritted my teeth to stop myself from breaking down at the dreadful elasticity of my child’s spirit. When do we lose that? When does that finally break? Would it happen in the cellar? Would the darkness finally make that rabbit seem less magical?
“We can’t read it, Ed,” Beth said.
I balanced one of the candles on the shelf and lit it with one of the matches from the camping bag. It was surprisingly bright, which made me realise how little power there was in the MagLite. I turned it off and placed it on the bottom shelf as Beth started to read to Alice.
“Harvey Rabbit lived in a small burrow at the bottom of the lane...”
I noticed that the candle occasionally flickered towards the hatch. I looked about the cellar in the brighter light. A small panel had been built into the ceiling in one corner. In the centre of the panel was a circular arrangement of long slats. I stood underneath and held my hand up to it, instantly feeling a small breath of cold air touch my fingers as a small whirring sound came from inside. I withdrew my hand instantly. This was a ventilation pipe.
I set my mind to work and tried to imagine where this led, tried to conjure up some kind of blueprint or anatomical understanding of how the hell our house fitted (or had fitted, there went another small apocalypse) together. These kind of exercises always filled me with a deep sense of panic and failure. I was not a practical man. I didn’t understand plumbing or wiring. The space between the boiler and the tap or the meter and the socket was a magical vacuum in my mind, something for small men in boiler suits to grapple with while I lurked in the background and quietly offered them tea.
Of course it didn’t help that whenever I attempted something like this fathoming of the innards of my own house the imaginary figure of my father was always standing behind me: arms crossed, head shaking slowly from side to side.
Doesn’t even know how his own house works...
I made a guess that the ventilation pipe fed out onto the deck in the back garden. How much was left of the pipe and the wall it fed through was another matter. Might there be some filtering mechanism inside? It could be an open pipe that was allowing the very dust we were trying to evade to flow directly into our shelter.
On the other hand, how else were we going to be able to breathe?
I glanced back at Beth and the kids.
...I’ll play on clouds and paint the sky, I’ll find my wings and learn to fly!
Then I looked back at the shaft. I pulled the M
aglite from the shelf and switched it on, pointing it nervously up at the panel and peering inside. Strands of fluff waved from the slats in the light air current. I could see a gauze sheet about an inch up into the pipe that was smeared with grime. I imagined it was heavily blocked, but still there was air coming through. This was good, I thought. Wasn’t it?
I scanned the rest of the cellar. Copper pipes ran along the floor and up the wall, disappearing into what was left of the pantry.
Gas? Or water? If they were water pipes, they might still contain enough to help us survive once we’d finished the water. If they were gas and I broke one of them, then I would be sentencing us to death.
I filed this thought in a very dark place.
I traced my hand along the top pipe for some reason, following it up past Beth and into the hole in the ceiling above. It felt cold. There were no taps, no labels, nothing. I tried to remember what the pantry looked like, where the pipe came out, whether it joined onto anything else that might give me a clue as to its purpose. Nothing. I remembered nothing of the pantry.
Doesn’t even know how his own house works...
I sat back on the upturned box and switched off the torch. I watched the flame of the candle flicker in a breeze that could be either poisoning us or keeping us alive. I stared at a pipe that held either our salvation or our doom.
Life and death were taking bets on me.
The world had designed me to be something. I was supposed to be a survival mechanism, a series of devices and instincts built, tested and improved upon over billions of years. I was a sculpture of hydrogen, evolution’s cutting edge, a vessel of will, a self-adjusting, self-aware machine of infinite resource and potential. That was what the world had designed me to be. A survivor. A human being. A man.
I sat still in the darkness of the cellar. Arranged on the shelves before me were objects I had not created and could not create; food I had not gathered crammed into cylinders of metal I had not mined; water I had not collected in containers made of chemical formulae beyond my intelligence. I was no hunter, no engineer, no fighter. I was nothing that the world needed me to be. Nothing that my family needed me to be. I did what my body wanted me to do: eat, sleep, stay still, fuck, eat, sleep.
The End of the World Running Club Page 5
