Time and Time Again

6

‘BAYıM BAYıM, DURUN!’

Stanton heard a little girl’s voice behind him and turned to see that the Muslim child he’d saved from the speeding car was running after him. Struggling with something. His bag.

He’d forgotten his bag.

His bag!

How could he have been so stupid?

He’d left the majority of his money and equipment in his room at his hotel but he still had with him a handgun and a small computer, water purifiers, antibiotics and a state-of-the-art field surgical kit. Items which, if lost, would take at least a hundred years to replace. And he’d walked away without them.

Sure, he was disorientated but it was still an unforgivable lapse.

Allowing emotion to cloud his judgement and losing contact with essential equipment was about as ill-disciplined and unprofessional a mistake as a soldier on active service could make. In fact, he absolutely should never have intervened to save that family at all. Quite apart from the possible repercussions on history of saving a family who had been destined to die, he could quite easily have been killed himself by that careering car, thus ending his mission before it had even begun.

But when he turned round and looked into the big jet-black eyes of the little Turkish girl who was struggling up behind him with his bag, her broad smile framed between outsized loop earrings and cascades of coal-dark silken hair, Stanton was glad he’d let instinct be his guide. Somewhere in that big dusty city there was a father who would be spared the death in life that he himself was living.

The bag was quite heavy for a little girl to carry, although not as heavy as it looked, being made of Gore-tex disguised to appear like old leather and canvas. She held it up to him, grinning a big gap-toothed grin. He took it and turned away. He couldn’t speak to her or even look at her for long. For all that she was oliveskinned and dark-eyed and her hair was shiny black, she reminded him too much of Tessa.

He made his way off the bridge. Leaving the broad modern thoroughfare behind him, he plunged at once into the matted tangle of ancient streets and alleyways on the south side of the Golden Horn.

Despite the disorientation and confusion he was feeling, Stanton could not help but be intoxicated by the magic of his situation. He was in Old Stamboul, fabled city on a hill. Ancient soul of Turkey. The gateway to the Orient where East met West and for twenty-six centuries the heartbeat of history had been heard in every wild cry and whispered intrigue. Where enchanting music played all down the ages as swords clashed and cannons roared and poets told their tales of love and death. Armies had come and armies had gone. First Christian, then Muslim, then back, and back again, but Stamboul had remained. Church had given way to mosque and mosque had given way to church then back to mosque. And through it all, the people of Stamboul had gone about their business just as they were doing now. Unaware of the fact that there had now arrived among them the strangest traveller in all the city’s long history.

Stanton gave himself over to the romance of the moment. Kicking his way through the stinking piled-up rubbish. Tripping on erratic, uneven paving stones laid down when Suleiman the Magnificent was Sultan. Avoiding the mass of dogs that snarled and whimpered as they scavenged for food at the little bread and fruit stalls lining the tiny streets. He was lost almost at once within a labyrinthine warren of alleys and passages. Dark, shadowy flights of steps disappeared into tiny cracks between sagging buildings, up towards half-hidden doorways or down into stinking, dripping cellars. And sometimes, enchantingly, into fragrant sunken gardens. How Cassie would have loved to glimpse into those gardens.

Quite suddenly Stanton found that he couldn’t recall her face.

He stopped dead in his tracks and was roundly cursed for it by a fierce bearded man in a keffiyeh who was driving two skinny, bleating goats with a stick. Stanton stood stock still, ignoring the man and his animals as he struggled to bring to mind the most precious memory he possessed.

It was the panic. He knew that. The sudden fear that she was fading, like some figure in a photograph in a time-travel movie. He struggled with his confusion, desperate to bring her face to mind but just making matters worse, like trying to remember a familiar word but chasing it further away by trying to retrieve it. He forced his brain to place her in a familiar situation. There she was! He’d found her. Picnicking on Primrose Hill when the children were tiny. Smiling up at his camera phone.

Bang!

‘Çekil yolumdan!’

The alleyway was crowded and another passer-by in a hurry had cannoned into him, a big man in a bright blue turban, a flowing white tunic and loose pyjama-y trousers. A man with two pistols and a knife stuck in his belt. Stanton mumbled an apology and moved on.

One corner, then another. A darkened passage then a burst of light and a tinkling fountain in a walled square. Horse dung on his nostrils then delicate perfume. Tobacco, hashish, oranges, fried meat, rose water and dog piss. There were so many dogs.

He heard shouts and clattering and the squeal of metal on stone.

Just in time Stanton jumped to avoid a sweating carthorse as it skidded down the street in front of him. Stamboul was a city on a hill and the gradients of some of the alleyways were almost precipices. The foam-mouthed beast was struggling to restrain the heavily laden cart which theoretically it was pulling but in practice now threatened to push it down the steep hill. The drover cursed Stanton and pulled on the horse’s reins. The man knew a feringi when he saw one, an obvious foreigner in his Norfolk jacket and moleskin britches. A man out of place and out of time.

Stanton felt exposed. Eyes peered out at him from deep within dark and barred recesses. Others flicked a glance through niqabs. A young soldier strode past, chest out, eyes front, but he too stole a glance at the foreign stranger. It felt to Stanton as if those eyes could see through him and knew his secret.

He needed to pull himself together. He’d already been nearly killed twice that morning, first by a car and just then by a horse. He might even have been killed by the man with the pistols in his belt. Life was clearly cheap in the old city and offence, once taken, was mortal.

He had to concentrate. Whatever his personal sorrows might be, he had a mission to accomplish and one he truly believed in. Cassie and the children were gone, evaporated like the morning mist on the Bosphorus, along with the century in which they’d lived. He couldn’t save them but it was in his power to save millions of others. Young men who would very shortly be choking on mustard gas, hanging limp on barbed wire and vaporized by shells. Unless he changed their fate.

But to do that he needed to keep his head.

He decided he would drink some strong Turkish coffee, and found a cafe on a tiny square in the shadow of a mosque. Everything in Stamboul was in the shadow of a mosque. Or else jammed up against some decayed and rotting palace which in its days of glory had housed a prince or potentate with his eunuchs and his harem. Nowhere else on earth, Stanton thought, could current decay have lived so entirely within the shell of past glory.

It reminded him of London in 2024.

The little cafe had just two small tables and a counter but it was scrupulously clean and well ordered. There was a splendid hookah pipe on display in the window and neat little rows of pink and green sweetmeats lined up in a glass cabinet on the counter. Each table had a well-brushed, tasselled velvet cloth on it, a clean ashtray and a small bowl of salted almonds. Such calm and order amid the seemingly random chaos outside allowed Stanton his first moment of reflection since the Crossley 20/25 had thundered on to the Galata Bridge.

He was shown to a seat and brought coffee and bottled water. Whatever suspicion of feringi he had felt out in the street was not evident in the cafe. Business was always business, whatever age or town you were in.

Speaking in Turkish, the cafe owner pointed at the cakes and pastries. Stanton made an expansive gesture as if to say that he was happy to be served as the proprietor wished.

He was brought some marzipan and a kind of semolina doughnut in a sticky syrup, the first food he had eaten since dinner the evening before, a hundred and eleven years ago. It was a strange sort of breakfast but he was grateful for it. He laid a ten-lira note on the table and indicated that he didn’t need change. The man smiled and returned to his coffee, newspaper and cigarette.

Prayers were being called in the mosque outside. Stanton could see the devout beginning to assemble in the little square outside the window, beyond the hookah pipe. Reaching into his pocket he pulled out his wallet. Slimmer now than he was used to, no plethora of plastic cards, no photo ID. Just some post-Edwardian Turkish currency.

And two printouts.

Letters which better than anything else could remind him of his duty and focus his resolve.

Cassie’s last two emails.

The one asking for a divorce.

And then the final one. The one that had offered a glimmer of hope. The one she had written in reply to his pleas and his promises. The one he’d been rushing home to answer face to face.

If you can just change a little.

No, not even change. Just be yourself again. The man I married.

The father of our kids.

That man was every bit as passionate as you are. But not as angry.

Every bit as tough. But not as hard.

Every bit as cool. But not as cold.

Stanton swallowed his coffee and held out his cup for a refill.

He’d wanted so much to prove to her that he could be that man again. But four drugged-up hooligans had denied him the chance. Cassie had died thinking him unredeemed. Tess and Bill had died thinking that Mummy was leaving Daddy.

Because Daddy was a stupid selfish bastard who didn’t deserve their love.

I never minded being married to a soldier. Because I knew you believed in what you were risking your life for. What you were taking lives for.

I never minded being married to an idiot whose idea of inspiring kids was to see how close he could get to death without actually dying.

Even when we had kids of our own and you still kept on doing what you did. Even though you weren’t just risking leaving me without a husband but our children without a father, I still didn’t mind.

Because that was the man I signed up for.

Just like you knew you married a girl who’d rather lie in bed and watch daytime TV than go hiking up a mountain in a storm.

A girl who didn’t want to get her scuba ticket. Or go paragliding (or watch you doing it either).

We both knew who we were getting and we were fine with it.

But who’s this new guy, Hugh?

I don’t know him? Do you?

Really, Hugh? Seriously?

A security guard? A hired gun? A glorified minder?

You leave me and Tess and Bill at home to go off and be some billionaire’s bitch? Would you really take a bullet for those people, Hugh?

Is that how little we mean to you?

She was right. It was crazy. Why had he done it?

Bitterness? Boredom? Pride?

All three. But pride was the big one of course. Stupid male pride. After they kicked him out of the army and the webcast thing went sour, he just hadn’t known what to do with himself. Hanging around the house, fighting with Cassie, shouting at the kids. He’d felt … unmanned.

And there was the money. He’d never cared about it before and nor had Cassie. They’d always had enough, always got by. But then Guts Versus Guts made them briefly wealthy, or so it had seemed. Wealthy enough to make the down payment on a proper family house in a really nice area. There was a second baby on the way, they’d needed more room and he’d just done it. Without even telling her. She was angry at first, of course, but he knew she’d love it. That house had been the first real home they’d ever had. Before that it had been just short rentals and army housing.

He couldn’t just let it go.

He couldn’t tell Cassie and the kids that they had to pack their bags because he could no longer meet the payments on the mortgage. He was too … proud.

So we can’t pay the mortgage! We’ll move. We’ll get something cheaper, or rent, or live in a tent! You’re good at that. If you’re bored, read a book. If you need a job, go and stack shelves at a supermarket! Wash cars if you love them so much. Sell hamburgers. Do you think we’d care? That Dad isn’t a hero any more? Do you think you’re a hero now? Maybe you imagined yourself rescuing terrified princesses from sex traders or saving stolen school kids from crazed warlords. You always were an overgrown boy scout and we loved you for it. But the truth is you’re just a bodyguard to the most selfish people on earth.

She’d been right of course. When Stanton had been approached by an old SAS comrade to join an international ‘security’ company, there’d been a lot of righteous talk about protecting the vulnerable from predators. Doing the tough jobs that the authorities couldn’t or wouldn’t do. Fighting pirates, guarding crusading education ministers from fundamentalist assault.

But when Cassie’s emails had reached him he’d been leaning on the rail of a superyacht in the Aegean. Suit, dark glasses, earpiece. For all his big pay cheque, he was just another goon, riding shotgun for the Boss man. Working for the new master race in their floating world. The twenty-first-century boat people, that evergrowing flotilla of billionaires and trillionaires who had taken to living at sea where they could be isolated and protected from the rapid social breakdown their own activities had played a large part in causing. Climate-change refugees in the truest sense of the word.

I was proud of you when you risked your life on peacekeeping missions, saving children who were just like your own.

I was proud of you when you risked your life making your videos to help inspire kids who weren’t as fortunate as ours.

But risking your life for media moguls? Oil tycoons? Real-estate parasites? So they can fiddle about on their yachts while the rest of the world burns?

Forget it!

Bill and Tess deserve a dad who cares more about them than about dealing with his own stupid demons.

If ever you bump into the guy you used to be, get him to give us a call.

That last line had been the glimmer of hope. He hadn’t called. He’d run. Resigned his job that minute. Gone ashore and headed for the nearest airport. He was going straight to London. To get down on his knees and promise to be the man Cassie wanted him to be. The father Tess and Bill needed.

But he never got the chance to make those promises, let alone keep them. They never even knew he was coming home …

Stanton drained his second coffee and poured himself a glass of water.

Then he heard a voice. An English voice.

‘Garçon! Coffee and cognac, and be quick about it!’

His whole being froze.

He knew that voice.