The End of the World Running Club Read Online Free PDF Page A

gave me a little childish thrill. This is it , I would think with nothing short of glee. This could be the one . The Millennium Bug, 9/11, the London Bombings, Iraq, Afghanistan, the London Riots…
    There was no historical name for this one. This was just it. The End.
    My apocalypse-obsessed teenager passed me up a list.
    Water. Food. Medical Supplies. Light. Shelter. Protection.
    Shelter. The cellar.
    The houses on the terrace opposite ours had been built to a different design. They were wider and had five bedrooms rather than our two. The rooms were more spacious with higher ceilings and bigger windows; ours were just on the wrong side of poky and dark. There was a floored loft that you could stand up in. Some of the owners had built up into them to create a sixth room: the whole row of roofs now had dormer windows set into their tiles. Our loft was small and dark, enough for storage but nothing else. They were the posh houses. We were the cheap seats.  
    But what we did have - and what they didn’t - was a cellar.  
    The kitchen had a small walk-in pantry. For some strange reason - it probably appealed to her heightened nesting instinct - Beth thought that this was just about the best thing ever. It didn’t have the same effect on me, of course, but in its floor was a hatch that led down some rough, pine steps into a space that was about the same size as the kitchen above it. It wasn’t much, not very big. But it was underground.
    “Uh-oh,” said Beth when the estate agent lifted the hatch. “Man cave alert.”
    Man caves. Sheds, garages, studies, attics, cellars. Places for ‘men’ - or at least their twenty-first century equivalents - to hide. To tinker, potter, be creative, build things, hammer bits of wood, listen to the music that their families hate.
    Drink, smoke, look at pornography, masturbate.
    The subtext of the man cave, of course, is that men don’t want to spend any time with their families. For some reason this is perfectly acceptable; every man deserves his cave.
    It is my right as a tired parent.
    I’m fairly sure these two small, windowless symbols of domesticity - airy female bliss for Beth; dark male seclusion for me - were the real reason we bought the house. But in the end the pantry was where we stored all the food we didn’t eat and the cellar was where we kept the hoover and the empty wine bottles. I rarely went down there.
    I leapt up the steps to the deck and burst through the back door, nearly tearing Arthur off my back in the process.
    “Beth!” I bellowed up the stairs. “Get up! Get Alice up!”  
    Arthur bawled, the game no longer fun. I swung him off my shoulders and propped him up, still in his backpack against the kitchen sink.
    Thumping feet down the stairs.
    “Beth! Oh thank fuck, you’re up.”
    I’d never been more proud of her. She stood in the kitchen door, wide-eyed, pale, with Alice in her arms, dressed and still groggy from sleep.
    “What’s happening?” she said.
    I started opening and closing cupboards.
    Shelter. Water. Food. Medicine.
    “Daddy,” said Alice, rubbing her eyes. “Arthur’s crying, Daddy.”
    “I know, sweetheart,” I said. I picked up one of the recycling boxes by the door and started dragging tins and packets from the shelves into it. We were low on supplies; Sunday was our big shop day.
    A bottle of balsamic vinegar landed on a tin of tomato soup. I picked it up and stared at it. It seemed poignant somehow, this totem of middle class, now a useless dark liquor: no good to drink, no nutritional value. I left it where it was and piled more things on top.
    “What does that siren mean?” said Beth.
    “Daddeee, Arthur’s cryyyyiing.”
    Rice, pasta, beans, tinned fruit, chocolate.
    “Ed,” said Beth again. “Please, I’m scared.”
    I slid the box towards the pantry and started filling another.
    “We need to get down in the cellar,” I said. “Now. Get blankets, duvets, clothes for the kids.”
    “What? But what..?”
    I