# The Backwards Life of Stuart

## Chapter One: The End at the Beginning

Chapter Summary: Stuart Shorter dies under a train, and Alexander Masters begins to piece together his backwards story. The chapter establishes the central theme – that a life can only be understood from its end – and introduces the complex, contradictory man at the heart of the book.

Tags: backwards life, Stuart Shorter, Alexander Masters, death, train, homelessness, biographical storytelling, redemption, memory

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The day Stuart Shorter died, the rain was coming down in sheets over Cambridge. Not that Stuart would've cared about the weather—he'd slept in worse. Under bridges. In doorways. In the stairwell of that council block where the junkies shot up and the landlord never bothered to fix the lock.

But on this day, December 8th, 2002, Stuart wasn't sleeping rough anymore. He'd been clean for months. He had a flat. He had a key. He had a future, or something like it.

And he had a train coming at him at sixty miles per hour.

The 23:14 from London Liverpool Street hit him just past the Mill Road bridge. The driver never had a chance. Neither did Stuart, really—not in the way most people mean when they use that phrase. But Stuart had been cheating death for thirty-three years. He'd been stabbed, beaten, shot at, overdosed, and once—this is true—he'd fallen out of a third-story window and walked away with nothing but a bruised hip.

So maybe the train was just the one thing he couldn't dodge.

Or maybe—and this is what Alexander Masters would spend the next three years wondering—maybe Stuart finally caught the one thing he'd been chasing his whole life.

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Alexander didn't know any of this when he first met Stuart. He was just a grad student volunteering at a homeless shelter in Cambridge, trying to write his thesis and keep his own life from falling apart. He'd walk into the shelter on a Tuesday evening, set up the tea urn, and try not to think about the PhD he was supposed to be finishing.

Stuart was already there when Alexander arrived that first night. Sitting in the corner with his legs tucked up underneath him—his body twisted by muscular dystrophy so that he couldn't straighten them. He had a face like a boxer who'd lost more fights than he'd won, but with these electric blue eyes that …