Killing myself

I’m here to kill myself.

This is Brighton, Monday 24 June 2013, at 9.03 in the morning. I’m about to leave my hotel after a weekend of excessive drinking, clubbing and drinking, and I think I managed to fit in some sex at some point as well. I have just settled my boozled stomach with a full English breakfast and a big mug of coffee.

I’m 25 years old, about to turn 26. A few days previously my long-term girlfriend left me and my reaction was to seek out excess. I booked a hotel in Brighton from Friday night and set out to party like only a 25 year old can party.

I have with me a small, black suitcase containing the few clothes I needed for my adventure. I pay the remainder of my bill, share a risky joke with the landlady, who seems a game sort and I am ready to leave. I pull a big floppy sun hat over my face, which together with the sunglasses should give my hangover modest protection from the brightest sun of the year. In approximately ten seconds time I shall step out of the front door and a bullet will hit me in the head, killing me instantly.

I was sent here to kill me. 28 years have passed since my long-forgotten sojourn to Brighton and my career has advanced from that of occasional thug and heavy to that of a professional hitman. I am elusive, low-key, just three or four jobs a year, and only to trusted souls, cash upfront. At the age of 53 I am at the peak of my profession, able to turn down jobs that don’t suit. I pick my work carefully, only taking on a job if I have every conceivable piece of information about my hit, so that I can foresee everything that could possibly go wrong. I insist on thick dossiers, containing photos of the victim from every angle, in a range of clothing styles, information about their family, friends, their usual hangouts, their place of work, what car they drive, what car their partner drives and, if possible, something about the business in hand, why my services are required, is the victim on his/her guard, could they be armed.

But today, for the first time ever, I know nothing. This is a special job. So special that only one man in the world could get me to do a job like this. The Man you can’t say no to.

All I know is that I’m to shoot the guy with the black suitcase leaving the Blue Mongoose Hotel, Brighton, at 9.03 a.m. There’s no photo available, no information about who he is. I’m given a name, but a generic name, Dave Clark, a name so common it’s meaningless and worthless. Even if it were his real name I wouldn’t be able to distinguish him from a million other Dave Clarks, and if I know one thing for sure it’s that this isn’t his real name.

I asked for more details. ‘He’ll be wearing sunglasses and a floppy sunhat’ I’m told, ‘a pair of jeans and a T-shirt.’

“What if it’s the wrong guy, someone else leaving the hotel at the same time with a similar case.”

‘It won’t be the wrong guy.’

Against my better judgement I take the job. The Man has a reputation and I daren’t cross him. Ironically, in fact, I have crossed him already without knowing it, I did a deal trading some merchandise that had been stolen from him. Which is why he has hired me to kill myself.

In 2041 time travel is now possible. The discovery has been reported in the press, though the details are cloaked in secrecy. In reality a few of the super-rich and super-powerful have already bought machines. Unknown to me I am given a ride to the hit in a truck containing one of the first time machines. Without realising it I am escorted back to 2013. I am delivered to a hotel and marched to my room, there is not time for me to notice the peculiarities of life in ancient times, the oddities of the 2013 dwellers.

The hotel is the Hotel de Paris, a hotel so lacking in self-knowledge that it is seemingly unaware that it is in Brighton and equally unaware that it is a uniquely unappealing name. I am frogmarched to a room at the front of the hotel and given gun and instructions. The hit will leave the hotel opposite me, the Blue Mongoose, at 9.03 a.m. I am to kill him and return to the truck – a strange arrangement but I realise that it is so I can be returned to my own time without ever realising I had left it.

I am 93 years old. It has taken me another lifetime to realise the truth, 40 years. Yet this luxury of knowledge, this luxury of life, won’t last. My death 68 years ago will soon take effect, once the ripples of time calm themselves back to normality.

So I must act. I am nearly blind. I retired from 35 years ago, since when I have been living a quiet life by the sea. I have never fired a gun in all that time, neither in anger nor in sport. My hands tremble and I get confused. Yet I must overcome these barriers. Not to save myself now, whatever happens I am dead. If nothing changes I will have died 68 years ago, if I am successful I will have died 40 years ago. Whatever happens I am history and most of my history will never have happened.

But I can still save 28 years of my life.

I have travelled back in time again and taken a room in the Hotel Belvedere, next to the Blue Mongoose and overlooking the Hotel de Paris. I have in my hands the weapon I last used 35 years ago, the same weapon in fact a younger version of myself is holding in the hotel opposite. I will have approximately 13 seconds as I lean out of the window to shoot myself, to lean out of the window and shoot myself.

I worry about my mind. I find telling this story confusing. There are too many versions of myself. I die too often to make sense to my logical mind.

I worry about my shaking hands, the way they tremble I could end up shooting anything from the dog in the street below to an eagle in the sky above.

But this is my one chance. I must kill me now or I will kill myself a second later. I have to hope that my instinct will win over my deformities, that my killer’s nous, the muscle memory of a hit-man’s mind, will deliver the fatal blow.

The window opposite opens. My head, arms and gun emerge into the light.

I shoot.