The End of the World Running Club

by Adrian J. Walker

  “What about cars?” said Grimes.

  Jacob blew a puff of disbelief.

  “There are no cars,” he said. “None that works.”

  Richard looked at his watch.

  “We should get going if we want to reach Penrith before sundown,” he said.

  “Penrith’s OK,” said Jacob. “I stayed in the train station last night. There’s a ticket office that still has a roof there.”

  We picked up our packs to leave.

  “Where are you headed Jake?” said Harvey.

  “Dunno,” said Jacob. “Not back to Manchester,” he said. “They don’t like me there. Thought I’d maybe try and find a boat and see what’s what.”

  “What about your family?” said Harvey. “Friends? What happened to them?”

  Jacob smiled up and nodded, as if Harvey had told him something instead of asking a question. He turned back to his guitar.

  London’s shored, the coast is clawed, Birmingham’s a hole in the ground…

  We found our way around the front of the plane and started off again into the mist. I heaved my legs back into action. My body protested like an old man being disturbed in his sleep.

  “Keep east,” Jacob shouted behind us. “And sorry about the sausages!”

  BARTONMOUTH HALL

  I began to fade after we left Jacob. We had made it only two miles from the plane before I called the others to stop. They stood around me, sipping water and mumbling words of encouragement as I gasped for breath on my knees. I said nothing back, because I knew that all I wanted to say was that I couldn’t go on, that I had never felt this bad, that the road ahead would defeat me without even noticing I had trodden on it with my weak and trembling feet, that I had made a mistake, that I was cold and hungry, that I was fantasising about what giving up would feel like, that there would probably be other ships, that I was already dealing with the shame of accepting that my family was gone so that I could return to the relative comfort of not walking. That I did not like running or walking or any kind of exercise. That I despised it. That I would never ever get used to it.

  I said nothing. Caught my breath. Carried on.

  From then on the stops became more and more frequent until, as we reached Penrith, I was barely walking and stopped every hundred yards.

  “We’ll go on ahead,” said Richard. Then it was only Bryce who stopped with me, silently, until I found the will to move. I barely remember making it to the ticket office Jacob had suggested and I must have fallen asleep pretty soon after. When I woke, I saw Grimes looking intently down at me, cold yet caring like a nurse over a patient. She knelt beside me.

  “Ready?” she said quietly. I hadn’t moved yet, but I could feel my muscles hanging on some strange precipice, as if they themselves knew better than me what would happen when they stretched or compressed. I tried a leg. Sure enough, pain arrived somewhere in my ankle and travelled quickly up through my calves, knees, thighs and hips. I winced and felt the drone of my own detached consciousness start up again.

  You can’t do this.

  Your body wants nothing to do with this.

  Your mind wants nothing to do with this.

  “I can’t…” I began, closing my eyes. “I can’t…”

  “Come on,” she said, lifting me by the arm. “Get up.”

  “But…”

  “Don’t talk. Here.” She handed me a mug of black tea. “Move your legs slowly,” she said. “Like this.” She lifted her legs up and down, marching gently on the spot without lifting her feet from the ground.

  I kept my eyes closed as I drank sips of tea, moving my legs a little and feeling some life and warmth come back to them. I felt as if gravity had doubled overnight. The prospect of using my feet to move both myself and my pack even a single step was horrific.

  I opened my eyes and saw Harvey walk over the debris of the ticket office. He looked me in the eyes.

  “Horrible feeling after the first day isn’t it?” he said. He took a sip from an almost empty water bottle. I looked back at him with barely open eyes.

  I cannot...

  “Worse than a hangover, I’d say,” he said. “Worse than the worst hangover.”

  I cannot do…

  “You know what the worst thing is about hangovers?” he said. He tapped his head. “This. All this shit up here. Sore head, sore stomach, pah…” he waved a hand. “Nothing. It’s all this nonsense going around your noggin. All the doom and the gloom and the guilt and woe. All the stuff that doesn’t really exist. That’s what brings you down.”

  Harvey made me run up front with him that second day. We began again with an hour of walking, then transitioned to running. Bryce, Richard and Grimes kept their distance behind us. Perhaps it was only because I felt so bad, but they seemed to have been unaffected by the day before, moving with apparent ease as I wheezed and plodded next to Harvey. I knew now that I was their weakest link and I wondered how long it would be before they decided my fate for me, before I became the only thing holding them back from reaching Cornwall in time.

  Harvey tried to keep me talking. Whenever I let a conversation run dry, he started up another, asking me about Beth, or the kids, or my life before.

  “I need to stop,” I said.

  Harvey ignored me.

  “Keep talking,” he said, winking. “And keep running. Keeps the mind away from the dark places. I used to sing to myself on my run. This was before Walkmans and iPods and the like, you know. I used to sing anything; made-up songs, made-up words, just sounds really. Sometimes I’d listen to the noise my feet made on the road and the noise my breathing made on top of it and I’d make a word out of it, sing it all day. Becomes a bit like a mantra, very soothing, hypnotic. Listen, I’ll try and get one for you. Shhheee….shee...wah….buh...”

  “Harvey, I need to stop.”

  He put his head down and started making noises.

  “Shee..wa...buh...heh...duppa...shef...yeah that’s it, here’s one. Sheewabuh Hehduppa Shef...Sheewabuh Hehduppa Shef...Sheewabuh Hehduppa Shef…”

  He said the words in triplets, like a train on a track

  “Come on,” he said “Try it with me.”

  “Sheewabuh...Heh...Hehbuff…”

  “Sheewabuh Hehduppa Shef...Sheewabuh Hehduppa Shef” he corrected.

  “Sheewabuh...Hehduppa Shef...Sheewabuh Hehduppa Shef.”

  “That’s it!” he laughed. “Good one, that’ll keep you going all day, that will. Sheewabuh Hehduppa Shef...Sheewabuh Hehduppa Shef.”

  “Who had her head up a chef?” shouted Bryce from behind. “Filthy old bastard.”

  Sheewabuh hehduppa shef...sheewabuh hehduppa shef

  I shook my head. “Where do you find the energy?” I said.

  “Sheewabuh hehduppa shef…energy?” said Harvey. “...sheewabuh hehduppa shef…energy, well, I dunno, we’re made of energy, Ed. Everything is. You’re just kind of….energy...sheewabuh hehduppa shef...moving through other energy...sheewabuh hehduppa shef...aren’t you?”

  “But, I mean real energy, energy to run, to walk, to exercise. Calories in your blood, glucose, that kind of thing.”

  “Oh, well, that’s important you know, of course. If you don’t eat you die, that sort of thing, yeah, but...well, when you’re talking about going a long way like I did, let’s just say once you get past a certain point it doesn’t matter so much what’s in here.” He patted his belly. “More about what’s up here,” he said, touching his head. He let his hand fall down the side of his head as if he’d touched something he didn’t want to abandon so quickly. “Clear your mind and things start working out for you,” he said.

  “You can’t run five hundred miles just by clearing your mind,” I spat.

  Harvey shrugged. “You can’t do it without it either.”

  I plodded on for a short time.

  “Harvey, did you really run across Australia?”

  “Ah,” he said with a grin. “You been talking to Hagrid back there, have you?” He nodded
back to Bryce.

  “I don’t think he believes you,” I said. “And, to be honest, it’s a pretty tall story.”

  “I know,” he said. “I know. But don’t get into the habit of letting people tell you what to believe son. That’ll get you into all sorts of strife. Hey, Ed?”

  “What?”

  “Still want to stop?” he said. “Only it’s been half an hour since you told me you did. Can you believe that?”

  We stayed on our feet.

  I stayed on my feet.

  Every day, we woke and left and walked. Then we ran for a while, and then we walked, and then we ran again. Running became the most familiar and unfamiliar of movements for me. Physical pain and mental torment swirled around me as I dragged leg after leg, willed every step into being. Everything I did met with resistance. This wasn’t just gravity and the tightness of my muscles, but something that seemed very real; an aggressive entity that had lain hidden and dormant for decades of physical inactivity, but which had now shaken itself up, like a ray shakes itself from the seabed, and risen above and around me, repulsed, indignant and furious at this sudden decision of its host to move.

  The body wants nothing to do with this.

  The mind wants nothing to do with this.

  The resistance wants nothing to do with this.

  And yet…you’re running. Who are you?

  Every twitch of my torn and quivering muscles seemed to meet an opposite force much stronger than its own.

  And yet, still, I stayed on my feet.

  This didn’t occur to me at the time. I didn’t feel like I was winning and couldn’t imagine a time when I might overcome these physical and mental obstacles standing in my way. Every second was a breath away from screaming out stop and falling to the ground. At times it felt like I was so close to doing so that I actually felt my legs slowing down, my head bowing and my hands falling to my knees, actually felt the sickening combination of shame and relief as I gave up. But then I would realise that I had not slowed down, that my head was still facing up, that my arms were still swinging weakly by my sides, and I would be back to feeling torment, mixed, for the briefest of moments, with a kind of proud surprise.

  At these times, I felt as if I had just split away from a version of my life that had taken another direction, another universe where I’d actually given up and would have to face a different future. In this one, the walk, the moving landscape, the noise of my breathing and of Harvey’s footsteps, the pain and the hunger and the tiredness carried on, relentlessly.

  I had no control over anything any more.

  Harvey told me that the resistance I faced wasn’t something I could ever beat. The best I could hope for was to learn how to fight it daily, to parry and lunge and keep it at bay by learning about how it worked. Some days it would win, others it would lose. He told me he learned this for himself while running through the Nullabor Plain. He had spent countless days beneath the sun, watching his shadow move around him as the sun arced across the sky, losing his mind with the heat and the unchanging landscape and fighting his own resistance. He realised that this resistance was like a shadow, and that the darker the shadow was, the brighter the light that shone. It was a part of me and it would always be with me. When it was at its strongest, when things seemed to be at their worst, that’s when the brightest hope could be found.

  I should learn not just how to fight it, he told me, but, like every enemy, how to love it.

  I ran beside Harvey every day and barely registered the others or how they were coping. He kept me talking, although most of the noises I made were just grunts or a ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Harvey had a tick that I hadn’t noticed before. Whenever he asked me a question, he would cut off my answer after one or two words with a sharp “hey?” or “huh?” or “what’s that?” Occasionally, in the weirder moments when I felt myself falling into a trance, I heard these loud, questioning barks of his over and over again without, it seemed, any question to precede them. They replayed in my mind, sometimes backwards, sometimes delayed and repeated very quickly like a dance music sample. Then they would silence and I would be running normally with Harvey quiet by my side. At other times, I wiled away minutes of brain activity imagining the same conversation with him: me telling him exactly how wrong it was for him to ask someone to repeat themselves when they had barely started talking, that you could work out missing words in sentences by the context provided by the others. He was unfair to demand perfect diction from somebody who was under such physical pressure. Unfair and unkind. This was something he should be aware of and change in himself to make others around him more comfortable.

  I lost myself in the prosaic detail of this fantasy argument.

  I couldn’t remember if he had always done this or whether I was just talking more quietly than before. It didn’t even occur to me that he himself might be finding it hard to run as much as we were, that this annoying affliction might simply be a symptom of the fact that he was a tired old man moving a long distance over a destroyed country. Such was my pre-occupation with my own condition.

  We made our way along the shredded remains of the M6 motorway for five days. We slept in toppled coaches, beneath smashed flyovers, concrete overhangs and underneath cars. Every morning I woke from the same dream. Every morning I woke thinking that I had heard a howl. Every morning we drank hot black tea and ate noodles, packed up and left. We found cars that still had water and filled our hydration bladders with it. Some even had fuel in their tanks and working batteries, but we knew enough not to waste our time taking them. We stayed on our feet.

  I stayed on my feet.

  Every day we woke and left and ran.

  Somehow we managed to make close to one hundred miles in five days. We met nobody and the landscape changed little - hills and moors swathed in thick mist and potholed with craters that had long lost their spectacle. We saw two more plane crashes: one far away into the crags of a cliff, another just next to the road. We found water in the second. The food was ruined, but Bryce filled every space he could with miniature bottles of spirits he found and spent the rest of the day grinning like a maniac.

  Each day was harder than the last. On the fifth night we slept beneath a bridge and woke up before light in a river of rain. Our kit was soaked and we stumbled and hopped around each other in the dark as we packed. We left without eating and ran out into a storm that continued all day, washing the snow into sludge and drenching our boots. Some time in the afternoon I called for a stop, fell down and found I couldn’t get up again. I went into cramp and spent an hour trying to pull myself up while the others waited. Harvey and Grimes took turns pushing and pulling on my legs, trying to stretch them out of their spasm. I stared up at them, their faces hidden in black hoods haloed with rain, dimly aware that their attempts were being foiled not just by my knotted muscles but by my own pleasure in lying down. Eventually I managed to sit up and Richard helped me to my feet.

  “Let’s call it a day,” he said, above the din of the rain. “Ed, do you think you can walk far enough for us to find shelter?”

  “I think so,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t worry,” he replied. “We’ve only a couple of hours of daylight left anyway.” He shook his face. “Now let’s get out of this fucking rain.”

  Bryce was by the side of the road, looking down into a valley.

  “Think I’ve found just the place,” he said, pointing down to a large clearing surrounded by trees. “There, how does that look?”

  In the middle of the clearing was a large stately home. It didn’t appear to be badly damaged; the red brick walls were upright, the roof was still intact and I could even make out the busts of lions still sitting on the pillars at the top of the stone steps that, I imagined, had once led down into the gardens.

  “That’ll do nicely,” said Richard. “Let’s go.”

  The slope down from the road was steep and boggy. After a few steps, Bryce slipped and fell on his back. Richard reached to help him
up and slipped too. Before we knew it, we were all on our backs, beginning a long descent through slick mud. I struggled for a few seconds and then stopped, looked up into the rain and let gravity take me where it wanted.

  Where gravity wanted to take me was a bare and stubby bush that lined a deep ditch. I sat up and began removing the thorns from my trousers, heard a scrambling, grunting noise behind me and turned in time to see Bryce crashing into my back. The impact sent us both bouldering through the bush and we landed in a heap on the other side, my face in the mud under the full weight of Bryce’s torso.

  “Gmmt mmmmfff!” I said. I felt Bryce floundering above me, then the weight lifted and he pulled me to my feet. I cleared the clods from my eyes and wiped my face, feeling fresh cuts where the thorns had torn at my cheeks. Bryce stood before me like a mountain of dirt, laughing. His teeth flashed beneath the mud.

  The other three arrived in a similar way. I helped Grimes through the bush and Bryce and Richard pulled Harvey from the ditch. Then we cleaned ourselves up and looked around. We had arrived in the gardens of the house. We were standing on a long slope of brown scrub dotted with patches of moss and grey grass. There was a gravel clearing in the centre where a cracked and stained fountain stood overflowing. Four stone lion heads surrounded it, spewing brown rain onto the ground. Beyond this was more earth leading up to a wide flight of steps that ran up to the house itself, which was long and bleak. The main door was closed. Tall windows lined the two storeys surrounding it, most of them smashed. The flat roof was decorated with blackened turrets.

  I imagined what we might have seen before: rich, cropped turf and colourful beds surrounded by clipped green hedgerows; a grand fountain trickling clear water, white steps and shining red walls.

  “Do you think it’s empty?” said Harvey.

  “Only one way to find out,” said Bryce. He took a step forwards. There was a crack in the distance and a clod of mud exploded by his feet.

  “Christ!” shouted Bryce, dancing away from the spray of dirt. “What the fuck was that?”