Which suited him very well.
Death was the only prospect in life to which he was looking forward with any degree of enthusiasm.
It would be such a simple kill too. The road was empty, no other headlight beam illuminated the freezing darkness. There’d be no risk, no collateral damage. A clean hit. Not like on those awful desert operations he’d sweated through back in his army days, when there always seemed to be dead women and babies caught up in the tangled wreckage of exploded Toyotas.
This target was isolated and prone. Stanton had only to action the strike. One tiny turn in the direction of a tree. A little twist on the throttle for good measure, and oblivion.
Except …
What if there really was a hell?
Stanton was as close to being an atheist as prudence allowed but Cassie had been a Catholic. He therefore had to allow for the faint possibility that hell existed and, if it did, then self-murder would surely condemn him to it. Not that the idea of fire and brimstone bothered him much. An eternity of satanic torture might actually serve as a distraction from his own company, which he was beginning to find almost unbearable. The fear Hades held for Stanton was simply that if there was such a place then it was a certainty that Cassie and the children wouldn’t be there.
Angels didn’t go to hell.
The possibility of him spending eternity in a different place to his lost family was simply too terrible a thought for him to take a risk on, no matter how remote. Therefore, despite his longing for release, he kept his grip steady on the handlebar and his concentration firmly on the road as tree after tree shone briefly grey-bright through the misty dark, branches spread wide and welcoming. Like a lover’s arms, promising peace.
Stanton flicked on his indicator. The Cambridge turn-off was approaching. He knew the road. He’d ridden it many times as a student, hurtling back from London in the small hours, a takeaway meal clamped between his thighs, feeding himself through the open visor of his helmet.
Now he was returning, on his way to have breakfast with an old tutor, Professor Sally McCluskey, an eminent military historian who had been his favourite teacher as an undergraduate. More than just a favourite, in fact, McCluskey was one of the few people in Stanton’s life whom he’d ever felt close to. A large, jolly woman with bloodshot cheeks and a poorly bleached moustache who liked nothing better than to hog the fire with a drink in her hand and revel in the glorious and bloody past. To McCluskey history was alive and vibrant, a thrilling cavalcade of heroes and villains, deathly plots and brave dreams. She had held weekly debates for her students in her cosy drawing room in Great Court, which she called her ‘What ifs?’ Long lazy afternoons during which she’d serve beer and crisps and challenge terrified but delighted undergraduates to imagine and justify alternative historical scenarios. Scenarios which, but for chance and luck, might easily have made up the content of her lectures.
Stanton could see her still, standing before the fire, wearing an ancient military greatcoat, which she used as a dressing gown, vast arse placed firmly and unashamedly between the flames and the students. Cheery glass in hand. Barking out her chosen ‘What if’.
‘Come on, you dozy swine!’ she’d boom in a voice that had developed its tone on school hockey fields and been honed to rafter-rattling perfection over decades of coaching ladies’ rowing teams on the river Cam. ‘What if King George had accommodated the American colonists’ demands and allowed them a handful of MPs at Westminster?’
The debate that followed would always be loud and lively and end invariably with McCluskey ignoring her students’ efforts at a conclusion and barking out her own.
‘Well, there’d have been no bloody War of Independence for a start, and the US would have developed along Canadian and Australian lines. The hamburger would never have been invented, there’d be no chewing gum dotting the pavements, and the world would never have heard of high school massacres. Can you credit it?
America
, lost for the sake of an extra dozen members in the House of Commons.
AMERICA!
The richest prize on the bloody planet. Gone, for want of a few paltry seats on the cross benches. George the bloody Third wasn’t just mad, he was
completely tonto
! Bugger him, say I! Who cares if he did a bit of farming and was nice to children? He lost us America and he was an
arse
!’
What fun those long, semi-drunken Sunday afternoons had been. The debates always degenerated into loud, name-calling battles between the Marxists, who contended that much of history was inevitable, the result of preordained economic and material forces, and the romantics, who believed that history was made by individuals and that a single stomach ache or an undelivered love letter could have changed everything.
Professor McCluskey had been firmly in the romantics’ camp.
‘Men and women make history! Not balance sheets!’ she’d shout at some cowering Dialectical Materialist. ‘The great and the flawed. The evil and the honourable. Josephine married Bonaparte because her previous lover was threatening to throw her on the street! She
despised
the little Corsican corporal. Is it therefore any wonder that two days into their honeymoon he buggered off to conquer Italy, thus sealing Europe’s fate for a generation? If that old town bike had put as much effort into servicing Boney’s boner as she put into pleasuring her numerous other lovers he might have hung around screwing her instead of prancing off to screw an entire continent!’
In Stanton’s view, Professor Sally McCluskey had really known how to teach history.
He’d kept in touch with her after graduating, maintaining a sporadic email correspondence from the various parts of the world in which he’d found himself, and when her note had arrived asking that he spend Christmas with her at his old college, he’d accepted. Since Cassie and the children’s deaths he had cut himself off entirely from what few old friends he had, but he couldn’t help being intrigued by the urgency of the professor’s tone.
I beg you to come
, she’d written.
We have matters to discuss of the utmost importance.
He was skirting through the edges of the town now. Early workers were shivering at the bus stops, hunch-backed figures bent in supplication over their phones, each face an ash-grey ghost illuminated by the screen.
It had been fifteen years since Stanton had graduated and Cambridge, like all towns, had become a wind-blown shadow of its former self. Faded signs promised books, toys, pharmacists’ and fresh market produce but the only things for sale behind those broken boarded windows were drugs and semiconscious girls. Shops were history, just like horse troughs and suits of armour. Nobody bought their stuff in the physical world any more.
Dawn was breaking as he approached the College. A pale monochrome light gently stirred the frost-crisp sleeping-bag cocoons pupating in the alcoves of the old familiar walls. Venerable stone edifices that had stood since the Tudors. Graffiti-covered now but still deeply stirring to a man like Stanton, who loved the past. Those stones held within them the sonic echo of every footfall and every cry that had ever disturbed the racing molecules at their core. If Stanton had had an instrument sensitive enough he could have listened to the hammer blows on the very cold chisel that had shaped them.
There was a porter at the Great Gate just as there had been when Stanton first arrived in 2006 as an eighteen-year-old undergraduate. There, however, the similarity ended. Gone was the avuncular, strawberry-nosed Mr Pickwick figure in a bowler hat emerging from his cosy lodge. The porter who welcomed visitors to College in 2024 sat behind a thick screen of glass and wore a fluorescent yellow high-vis jacket, despite there being scant possibility of anybody bumping into him.
‘Look at the camera,’ the porter instructed, scarcely glancing up from the game he was playing. ‘No fucking way, bro! That is fucked. That is fucking mental.’
Stanton didn’t take offence at the tirade; the porter was just communicating with some third party on the phone on which he was playing his game. Undivided attention was a thing of the past; if you got annoyed about people talking to their phones while also dealing with you, your head would explode before lunch. Besides, if you were slightly famous, as Stanton was, it was a sort of blessing. If a person didn’t look at you then they wouldn’t ask to have a photo with you either.
The iris machine beeped, flashing up Stanton’s identity, a barrier opened and he tried to hurry through.
He wasn’t quick enough. His fierce blue eyes, lean, weathered, handsome features and close-cropped, sun-bleached hair were unmistakable, particularly to the sort of young man who stared all day at his phone.
‘Oh my God, it’s you, innit?’ the porter said. ‘It’s Guts.’
‘No,’ Stanton replied. ‘Not any more. Just Hugh.’
‘Fuckin’ hell! It is. It’s Guts,’ the porter insisted. ‘Eh, man,’ he went on, now speaking once more to the third party on his phone. ‘You won’t believe who’s standing here. It’s only Guts! Guts Stanton. Yeah!
I know!
Fucking mental!’ The porter addressed himself once more to Stanton. ‘I love your stuff, man. I can’t believe it’s you. This is amazing. Can I get a photo?’
Stanton wanted to say that he was in a bit of a hurry but he knew it would be more trouble than it was worth. The young man was already struggling out of his tiny cubicle and Stanton had plenty of experience of ‘fans’ whose adoration turned instantly to outrage and vociferous offence when they considered themselves dissed.
‘Yeah. Fine. No worries. Happy to.’
The porter tried to throw an arm round Stanton’s shoulder but Stanton was well over six feet tall and the porter’s high-vis jacket made it hard for him to raise his arm. He had to settle for grasping Stanton round the waist, which was slightly uncomfortable for both of them. Then he reached out with his other hand and took the selfie.
‘Nice one. Fucking mental,’ the porter said, already thumbing at his phone to post the picture online. ‘What’re you going to have for breakfast then, Guts? Gonna dig up some worms on the quad? That’d do you for the day, wouldn’t it? Plenty of protein to keep your core temperature up.’
‘Yeah, probably,’ Stanton replied.
He hated being famous. He hadn’t asked to be a celebrity, although he knew very well that it had been his own fault nonetheless. And it had been fun for a while – and important in its own small way. Those little survival videos he’d begun posting on the net in an effort to kindle the spirit of adventure in disaffected young people were something he’d enjoyed doing and been proud of. Why should only posh kids get to experience the exhilaration of testing yourself in the wild? He’d wanted to lure a few gangstas out of the ghettos and on to the hills. But then he’d done some cross-promotion with some city charities and youth groups and it had got out of hand. He’d become an internet celebrity and been chucked out of the Regiment for blowing his anonymity. Like they weren’t all scrabbling for publishing deals themselves.
Stanton walked through the arches of the magnificent old gate and into Great Court. That certainly hadn’t changed. It was still ‘great’ by any standards: the chapel on his right and the fountain to his left. The same gravelled paths that had been trod by centuries of undergraduates. A non-stop stream of bright, optimistic young spirits that stretched back for five hundred years. Spirits for whom even sadness and sorrow were living, vibrant things, the stuff of poetry and song. Burning passion, impatient ambition, unrequited love. Not like the sorrows that come later.
Failure. Disillusionment. Regret.
He passed the entrance to the chapel and thought about the names on the memorial to the Great War inside. Sometimes, as a young student, he had sat alone in the darkening evening and read them. All those young men, cut down at their beginning. He’d felt so sad for them then. Now he envied them; they died at the high tide of life. When the sun was rising.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
Lucky bastards.
‘
I WAS SO
very sorry to hear about your terrible loss, Hugh,’ Professor McCluskey said, pouring tea from the same china pot she had used during Stanton’s student days, ‘and I thought since neither of us has anyone to spend Christmas Eve with, we might as well spend it together.’
Stanton accepted the proffered steaming cup but declined to return the warm smile that accompanied it.
‘I’m not really interested in Christmas, professor,’ he replied. ‘Christmas doesn’t mean anything to me any more.’
‘Christmas means the birth of our Saviour,’ McCluskey remarked. ‘That means something, surely.’
‘The bastard never saved me.’
‘Perhaps he hasn’t finished with you yet.’
Stanton looked at his old professor long and hard. There were few people he respected more but there were limits.
‘I really hope you didn’t get me here to suggest I take comfort in religion,’ he growled.
‘Not in the slightest,’ McCluskey replied. ‘I don’t think religion should
be
comfortable. That’s where it all went wrong for the Anglicans, trying to be comfortable. Deep down people want fire and brimstone. They want a violent vengeful God who tells them what to do and smites them if they don’t do it. That’s why the Prophet Mohammed’s doing so well these days. I’ve occasionally thought about switching myself. At least Allah’s got a bit of fire in his belly. But you see I could never give up the turps. Speaking of which, drop of brandy? You’ve had a chilly ride.’
It was scarcely eight thirty in the morning and Stanton was about to refuse but McCluskey didn’t wait for a reply before reaching down for the bottle of cognac that was standing on the floor between her swollen ankles. She snorted at the large picture of a diseased liver that government statute required the bottle to display, then slopped a substantial shot into each teacup. ‘Quite frankly, when it comes to comfort I’ll take booze over faith every time.’