The end of the world

The plane is an hour late landing at Heathrow’s Terminal Four – hardly surprising given the circumstances. By the time we collect our bags it’s 5.30 am. The carpets muffle our footsteps and the queues at immigration are short and surprisingly quiet. I guess no-one has the energy to argue at this hour of the morning.

We hand over our passports and the man behind the desk looks at my wife and I with tired resignation.

“Reason for return? “

“Emergency repatriation,” says Carol.

“Parents?”

“Yes,” I say. “Mine. Plus a brother.”

“You only just made it”, he says. “They’re stopping flights at midnight, you know….”

We know.

“What about you, miss? Where are your nearest and dearest?”

My proud wife bites her lip. “My parents are dead. I’m an only child.”

“Sorry to hear that, miss.”

He hands back our passports and waves us through.

“Good luck, and remember…” He does a reverse nod at the small black box on the ceiling above us.

There are men with guns in every corridor. They look at us carefully but say nothing.

My own parents are of course there to meet us. It’s an hour’s drive to Heathrow from their home in South London and they’ve been up since 3 am. They call this duty. I call it heroic.

Our reunion is filled with tears and hugs that go on forever watched, no doubt, by the small camera affixed to the arrivals hall ceiling. There’s the renewing of acquaintance with the surprising wrinkles and remembered wet parts of my parents’ dear old faces: Dad with white bits gathered like flotsam in the corners of his mouth. Mum, plucky but hobbling with arthritis, wearing her trademark fuschia lipstick. I’m never sure which I want to avoid most – dad’s spittle or mum’s lipstick – but it’s irrelevant. In the furore of pent-up emotions burnished to readiness for reunions such as these, I manage to avoid neither.

“Thank god you made it, son,” says mum, placing one small, cool hand on my face. There’s a new darkness in her eyes. I place my hand over hers.

“Love you ma”, I say. “And now we’re together so everything’s gonna be allright.”

“Right!” She says, brightening. “Come on you lot!"

We walk towards my parents’ car in the spitting rain. Mum and Carol natter about the weather. Dad and I pull up our collars and exchange one of those raised eyebrow male looks that says Thank god we don’t have to do that.

Already it smells like England; fag ash and baked potatoes. I remember dark winter nights and summers of such contrasting beauty that I want to cry knowing I will never see them again.

Dad opens the passenger doors and I see the small camera on the dashboard. His sharp look says it all: Be careful; they’re watching.

“Where are Ben and Sue meeting us?” I ask.

“At the Nag’s Head in Gidleigh,” he says. “Do you remember?”

How could I not. When Ben and I were children, our family made the annual trek from London to Cornwall in an old van we named Portia Penny. The halfway stop was always Gidleigh, a small village with a pub, youth hostel and church on the outskirts of Dartmoor. From the windows of Portia Penny, us London boys could see the high rise give way to hills and cows and sheep so we knew we were far from home, but we still kept asking: Are we there yet? Are we there yet? And when, at last, the road narrowed to country lanes overgrown with hedgerows, we knew we really were, at last, nearly there.

Back at my parents’ place there is rainwater running from the South London gutters and a faint promise of morning on the horizon. No sky, no sense of distance, just cloud so close you could touch it. Sparse trees rage in the bitter wind of late autumn, sending angry red leaves to cluster on the wet pavement.

The day is a blur of cheese and pickle sandwiches and cups of tea. No-one comes over for a visit. Everyone is like us, I figure. Relishing what they have, daring to believe it won’t end. There are cameras on every ceiling.

Mum shows me her food boxes.

“There’s enough here for a bloody fortnight”, I say, not unkindly.

“Old habits die hard, son,” she says.

That night looking out from our bedroom window over the scaled rooftops, I feel the dampness and savage cold as it settles against glass. Frost, previously deterred by rain, has turned the garden pale and ghostly.

And then it is the day before the end and we are off to Cornwall, because Cornwall is everything to our family. It is where we shed our city skins, forgot about homework and instead paddled in the clear waters of Pendower Beach in search of shrimps and seaweed. It is where mum and dad held hands at breakfast and let us have two helpings of Cornish ice cream at dinner. It is where I first fell in love, with a Cornish girl called Carol who ate raw cucumbers, skin and all like they were apples. Like I said, it is everything.

We pull into The Nag’s Head car park and Ben and Sue are already there, waiting. I grab my older brother and hug him hard.

“My god it’s good to see you,” he says. He smells of Au Savage and menthol cigarettes.

“Same”, I say. “Bloody same.”

Inside the pub, we note the cameras in the saloon bar and head upstairs towards the guest rooms. A cluster of small kittens peers at us over the landing.

Our wobbly little room has a sofa that breathes out and touches the ground when we sit on it, and a fake coal fire with rotating red lights that move under the plastic coal to imitate flickers of flame. Then Carol pulls me to the bed and we do what we always do, carefully and softly lest the floorboards tell our secrets.

“They’re probably watching,” I whisper.

“Let them,” she says.

Later, we all return to the saloon, dodging kittens on the way. I order the steak and kidney pudding which comes with chips all creamy with vinegar and lots of salt on the outside.

Ben and I start at the right-hand end of the bar and work our way through the different beers, half a pint of each, savouring the difference. I feel a sense of dread that even alcohol can’t touch.

That night, Carol and I lay in bed and listen to the the high-pitched twang of kittens, the laughter of the dart players.

The next day we reach Pendower Beach just before dusk. The cottage is just as I remember it but, inevitably, way smaller. Here, too, small cameras peer from every ceiling.

“Can it really be 30 years?” I say.

“Don’t think you’re getting the big room”, says Ben. “That’s still bloody mine.”

A hint of peppermint rises up from the path as my brother and our wives walk down to the best beach in the world. Bordered by mudstone and slate cliffs on one side and ocean on the other, the wide expanse of impossibly pale sand stretches to the northern lee of the bay and a cluster of small, brightly coloured boatsheds.

Ben and I skim stones across the water and I weep quietly at the very sameness of it all. In the stillness, we sit on the damp sand and watch the setting sun leach colour into the sea. Off to one side, the gulls pull mealworms from the sand and caw ungraciously at their neighbours. The milky flotsam comes and goes, comes and goes, seaweed and cuttlefish bones glimmering in the last light.

Afterwards, we walk along the water’s edge towards the boatsheds, our feet turning the fine, damp sand to jelly. Further up, the sand grows coarse and we can make out the individual flecks of white shell shining in the half light.

“Like babies’ nails”, says Carol and I see that she, too, is weeping.

And then Sue crumbles to the sand and my brother is beside her and around her, pulling her up and holding her, just holding her. Carol and I add our own bodies to theirs.

“Bloody fucking meteor,” whispers Sue.

“Ssh babe”, says Ben. “We don’t know who’s listening, remember?”

Diesel fumes and creosote tang of old wood drifting up from the boatsheds. The faint stench of old prawn nets and the sweet vaginal tang of the seaweed; a million shining bubbles dark as licorice strewn along the beach, vast wigs of unkempt hair swaying in the shallows, breaking the glazed surface of the rock pools. The silhouettes of the day’s last gulls returning home. Highway lights in the distance and a faint red hum of light on the horizon. We turn for home.

Back at the cottage, Mum places a big dish down on the table before us and it’s fragrant with bubbling melted cheese, brown bits blossoming along each edge.

“I know we should have something fancier, she says. Beef Wellington or a whole salmon or something, but vego lasagne was always our favourite family meal.”

“Good call, mum”, I say. “It looks bloody wonderful.”

Dad opens a bottle of Grange 1995 which has got to be worth two grand. Ben and I look at each other, impressed.

“There’s more where that came from,” says dad. “Here’s to us!”

After dinner, we sit around the TV watching the news. A man has changed his name to the registration number of his antique Mercedes and wants his friends to call him 825XMG. The TV weather map shows the percentage chance of rain for the coming week at places all over Britain. There is no mention of the meteor.

“Who are they kidding”, says dad.

“Ian!” Says mum, glancing up at the ceiling. “Remember!”

We are all fairly sloshed by the time Ben turns up the music and grabs Sue. I watch as they circle the lounge room gracefully, holding each other close as Love Love Me Do fills the room.

“Come on, Iris,” says dad, and twirls mum around while she shrieks and giggles like a teenager, her heart-shaped locket glinting in the lamplight.

I remember the hours we spent sitting at the kitchen table at home, listening to her stories and trying on rings, each one feeling cool and loose on my small boy fingers. Mum’s old jewellery box held many treasures, but I loved her heart-shaped locket best. When you pressed the clip set into its burnished, golden frame it opened to reveal an old black and white photograph of mum and dad.

“Your dad was such a handsome young man,” mum told us once, lifting up the locket and showing us how it opened. “He bought this for me not long after we married.”

Ticket to Ride starts playing and I look at my wife.

“Come on then, Nureyev”, she says, taking my hand.

Carol’s salty breath is warm on my neck, the gritty reality of her, the way she melts into me, the gentle sway of her body against mine. Gently I hold her at the waist, feeling the molten heat of her belly, her silken hair tickling my cheek.

“For what it’s worth”, she whispers, “I love you.”

And then the music changes pace and we are moving swiftly as we shimmy and twirl. Carol’s hip bites into mine, the rich aroma of her sweat mixing with the music, a gritty crescendo that sees us breathing deep, eyes locked as the music, finally, comes to an end. As we pull apart, I breathe deeply, invite the muddy tiredness and exhilaration into my body. Carol’s eye search my face and she whispers something I can’t quite hear.

“Sorry?”

She says it a little louder this time.

“Will it hurt?”

“No”, I say, but what the fuck do I know?

Somewhere, a clock strikes twelve.