CHAPTER 2
APOCALYPSE I
It was May when my mother came home and, collapsed upon the hall carpet, her face all concertinaed on one side, announced the coming of the apocalypse. It was coming, it was coming soon, and none of us would survive it.
“June twentieth,” she said, “1996,” and then she passed out. I rolled her onto her side and pulled down her wrinkled skirt, breathing in vodka fumes and the smell of her unwashed hair. She opened her eyes, blinking sleepily like a kitten, and lashed out, her fist connecting with my jaw. I swore and backed off to a safe distance. Then I went to the kitchen, put a bag of frozen peas on it, and waited for the murder to seep out of my heart. It’d been a while since she had caught me.
“It’s coming! You’re going to die too!”
I went over and slammed the kitchen door, sealing her off. I hadn’t spoken to her properly in months. After a couple of minutes, I heard her shuffling into the living room where she slept these days, partly because she kept falling down the stairs, partly because it was as far away from me as she could get.
The door clicked shut. The radio came on. I swapped the peas for a bag of fish sticks, reaching deep into the frost-encrusted maw of the freezer compartment and hauling them out in a shower of ice.
Ultimately, she was right though. Not about Armageddon, but about a coming end.
* * *
It became a thing, the apocalypse. Like lines from films we watched together, the in-jokes we curated, and the impressions we all did, even Peter, of Peter’s father.
“So Mum says the world is ending on June twentieth.” Nothing my mother said or did surprised them, and the hash we smoked, sat in the back of Marcus’s uncle’s van parked up at the castle or in a quiet spot in one of the lanes, meant our reactions were often muted and slow to load—although at the time the comparison would have conjured Atari computer games, rather than YouTube videos or Facebook Live. Porn was still a dirty magazine passed around class. We saved up for CDs and taped songs off the radio. I didn’t have a TV because my mother wouldn’t pay the license fee, so news came from skimming week-old copies of The Sun or The Evening Adver in Darren’s office.
Outside the van, the hedgerows were clouded with cow parsley and hogweed. Peter, Em, and I were eighteen. Marcus, my boyfriend, was nineteen. I was sitting wedged under Marcus’s arm with a toolbox sticking into my back. His other hand held the ashtray, an empty paper coffee cup, and rested lightly on my thigh. Sometimes I wished we could stay in the van forever. I couldn’t remember meeting any of them. We had gone to the same schools, right from when we were five, all the way through. We had a common language and a shared reference library of teachers, landmarks, and local legends. It was as if they had always been on the edges of my vision: Peter in a stripy scarf, aged six, hopping across the playground; Em arriving at junior school each day with a red teapot slung over her shoulder on a string; Marcus, a good-looking boy in the year above, endlessly chasing a football across a field. While we had always known him—because everyone knew everyone, because of who his uncle was—Marcus had been the last to join our tight-knit group. He had left school at sixteen but come back in to retake his English GCSE on his Uncle Darren’s orders. There had been an empty chair next to Peter and Marcus took it, and at lunchtime trailed after him, looking awkward and asking questions about King Lear, and then about what we might all be doing later on or at the weekend, and scowling at anyone else who came near us. I was tempted to tell him to get lost, but Em said, “He’s all right, Andy. I mean, he’s not doing any harm.” Until suddenly we were four. And four was enough for me. Four was plenty.
“So no exam results then?” Em was sitting beside Peter on a rolled-up bit of carpet; Em kneeling, her fringe over her eyes, Peter—all ankle, knee, and elbow—with his long skinny legs drawn up under his chin.
“No Oxford?”
“No, Peter,” I said. “After the apocalypse there will be no Oxford. No more school of any kind.”
“And Reading?” Marcus had his eye on a ticket to the festival.
“Canceled due to the sun turning black and the heavens being rolled back like a scroll.”
Peter reached in and plucked the joint from my fingertips. “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away,” he intoned. Sometimes it was almost like having the vicar in the van with us.
“But if the apocalypse is coming,” I went on, “we can do exactly what we want, and only what we want. Until June twentieth, that is.”
People had been talking to us about the future ever since we could remember, particularly in Peter’s case, of whom great things were expected. The idea of deleting it, and ending its hold over us, was worth exploring. In the van, wreathed in smoke, nostrils filled with the smell of grease and oil and the tang of hash, we talked about what we’d do. Who would die painfully. What we’d steal. The things we’d try, mostly things we’d seen people do on TV that were supposed to be fun. There was an edge of hysteria to our laughter. Em had to scramble out, bent over at ninety degrees, and pee behind one of the back wheels, getting thistled in the arse in the process.
They would have let it drop, however, had it not been for me. The apocalypse called out to something lodged under my skin, the longing for destruction perhaps, for erasure—of everything, of everyone, especially myself.
* * *
We dropped off Peter at the vicarage and Em at her family’s cottage on the Hungerford road, and then Marcus and I drove into the Savernake Forest, ancient woodland where Henry VIII had once hunted, home to deer, walkers, and courting couples, site of murders, and rumored wandering place of a headless horsewoman. We parked the van and walked out to the Big Bellied Oak, climbing up till we reached a seat among its thousand-year-old branches. A little starlight crept through the new leaves. I thought of dead stars, dead events, all their rage consumed millions of years ago, just a memory of fire reaching out across the universe, and for the first time since the punch I felt better, more normal, and not like my hands were twitching to strangle someone.
“You all right?”
I nodded. Marcus had a chivalrous streak. He was protective. Only a month ago, he’d sent Greg Martin sprawling for trying to put his arm around me. But my mum was a woman, and by Marcus’s code you never hit women, never lifted a finger against them. His uncle said men who did that were no better than dogs. Still, better not to say anything.
“Just stoned,” I said.
“Me too.” With one arm gripping a branch, Marcus leaned in to kiss me. His mouth was warm and tasted, not unpleasantly, of cigarettes.
We’d been going out a year, since I’d heard rumors of a girl out at Bishopstone who liked him. It wasn’t just the prospect of losing the lifts, or my Saturday job at his uncle’s office, or the fact that with Marcus around no one dared give Peter any trouble, not in the roughest of pubs. I liked Marcus, although it was sometimes hard, with all the other stuff in the balance, to know how much.
He drew back and let out a quick breath. “If I close my eyes, I feel like I’m falling.” He wrapped both arms around the branch and glanced downward. “Oh, that’s weird.”