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.