The End of the World Running Club Read Free Page B

road trying to find a signal on my phone. It was a steep hill lined with huge houses set back behind long, gravel drives. Other roads fed off it: wide, tree-lined, well-paved cul-de-sacs with even grander properties spaced out along them. They had security gates, CCTV, triple garages, secluded gardens with ponds and trampolines. Some were styled with colonial wood, some like American bunkers. Beth was pregnant with Alice when we had first moved to Bonaly. We used to take walks around these roads, naming the most impressive one ‘Ambition Drive’. We’d go arm-in-arm along it, seeing who could say the most offensive words the loudest as we passed by the gardens.
    Fanny batter.
    Bub sucks.
    Cunt bubbles.
    Dick cheese.
    It was Ambition Drive I was walking along when I first truly started to feel that something was definitely wrong. I heard a motorised garage door open. It was still before six am, usually too early for most people to be up. Then I heard a woman cry. It was a cry of fear. A child yelping, a man shouting. Then the door banging shut, then silence again.
    I walked on slowly. I heard a glass break from an upstairs window. Loud, rattling footsteps on wooden stairs. Another bang, then silence again. A police siren whooped twice, far in the distance, possibly in Edinburgh itself.
    There was something wrong with the silence, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Even though it was early on a Sunday, it was not usually this quiet. Something was missing.
    Birdsong.
    The birds. The birds were missing.
    I looked up and scanned the tall trees for signs of life. The branches were perfectly still and empty. The bushes, usually trembling with tits and starlings at this time of year, were deathly quiet.
    I heard gravel scrabbling and a dog’s yelps behind me. I turned to see a golden retriever sprawled on a drive. It was looking over its shoulder at what I presumed was its owner, a large, bare-footed man in a crumpled shirt and no trousers who was hurrying back to the house. I had met him once at a neighbour’s Hogmanay party when we first moved in. He had been guarded, predatory, scanning the room for opportunity. Some guests, mainly men (those in the larger houses, I imagined) he met with a single heavy tanned-palm slap to their shoulder and a loud boom of acceptance. When the circulation of the party threw the two of us into proximity, he met me with something halfway between revulsion and curiosity. I was not massively successful and therefore a strange thing, an alien. No shares, no property portfolio, no deals to close. What was there to talk about?
    His wife had been stood in the corner, a small porcelain shadow of a woman sipping Bacardi in silence. They both had that strange, thick smell of wealth.
    He caught my eye as he turned. He was snarling as he slammed the great oak door behind him. The dog whimpered and sat up, looking about in bewilderment. He saw me and gave a little wag of his tail, licking his chops. Arthur gave a gleeful hoot behind me. Why would he be putting a dog out at this time in the morning?
    No room for a dog. Not any more.
    That memory still flickered. That little red warning light in my cranium, that lurch in my belly.
    At the bottom of the hill, I turned right onto the main road. There was no traffic, which wasn’t unusual at that time of day. Suddenly a Range Rover tore out of nowhere and roared past me at sixty, maybe seventy miles an hour. I glanced four heads inside, a family. The father’s fists were gripping the wheel and the mother had her head in her hands in the passenger seat. A discarded crisp packet was swept up in the tailwind as the car disappeared. It danced on the eddies for a few seconds before settling on the stone wall by the side of the road where it lay still, winking sunlight at me from its creases.
    I was getting no signal. I followed the main road for a while and turned right, then right again onto the street back to our house.
    It was after six o’clock by the time I