Coincidence: A Novel

by J. W. Ironmonger

  First-aiders and paramedics started to arrive and Thomas and Azalea were pulled away and propped up on the cold stone floor, leaning against a wall. His broken arm was still draped around her shoulder as if they were a couple. In shock and in pain, neither of them sought to move it.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked her, unable – or unwilling – to move.

  Azalea shook her head. ‘I think I’ve broken some ribs. You?’

  ‘My arm,’ he said.

  It was difficult to talk. They waited. Station staff tried to clear the crowd. Ambulance men arrived with stretchers.

  ‘It’s all right – I can walk,’ said Thomas, getting to his feet and wincing with the pain.

  ‘Are you two together?’ asked an ambulance man. Thomas shook his head.

  ‘In that case, if you can walk, can you go with my colleague?’ he nodded towards a fellow rescue worker. ‘Let’s have a stretcher over here for this lady,’ he called.

  A first-aider tied a sling around Thomas’s arm, and helped him to make his way back up the central stairwell to the station concourse. Thomas glanced back to see Azalea strapped onto a stretcher behind him. Her eyes were closed.

  At the Accident and Emergency unit of University College Hospital, Thomas looked for the red-haired woman who had shared his step. But some of the ambulance cases were being directed to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead.

  Thus quickly and unexpectedly our lives can change. None of us sets out to break a bone or to participate in an incident like the one that took place at the foot of the escalator at Euston Station that day. These things, when they happen, come as a surprise. Escalator pile-ups, as it turns out, are not especially rare. London Underground suffers dozens of incidents a year. This one was worse than many because of the intensity of the crush and because the couple at the front of the pile-up had heavy suitcases that blocked the way for anyone thrown into the fray. But the incident didn’t even warrant a paragraph in the Evening Standard. A few bones were broken, but no one was killed.

  In the days that followed the accident, Thomas found himself thinking about the woman with the broken rib. They had sat together in the corridor of the Underground station, waiting for the emergency services to arrive. His arm had been draped over her shoulder. He felt embarrassed to think about this. They had barely spoken a sentence to each other. Even in the chaos they had watchfully observed the Londoner’s code of silence. But now he discovered himself trying to picture her face. There was a familiarity to her. Did he know her? He had struggled not to look at her. He had never asked her name, never enquired about her journey, never volunteered his phone number. He had, however, scented a delicate perfume, caught just a faint hint of organic fragrance from her hair, and now he longed to recapture the memory of this elusive aroma. For just a moment her head had rested upon his shoulder, seeking comfort like a lover’s head, and he out of instinct had turned towards her, almost as if he might place a gentle kiss upon her hair. And then the moment had passed. But in his imagination and in his memory of the incident, this was the brief second that Thomas Post would revisit, this fragment of time and this indefinable scent. He thought of calling the accident unit at the Royal Free Hospital, just to enquire about the woman who had broken a rib, and on one occasion he did dial the number and he let it ring a couple of times, but he checked himself and hung up. The hospital would not share patient information unless he could prove that they were related, and how could he claim that if he didn’t even know the woman’s name?

  The day of the escalator incident was a Friday. Thomas was back at work by Wednesday morning, his arm in a plaster cast. He had an ordinary day. He taught a class on the social understanding of unusual events. It was one of his fields of expertise. Most of us, he argued, are bad at calculating the likelihood of quite normal events and we tend, therefore, to see them as remarkable, or divinely inspired. ‘How likely is it,’ he asked his class of twenty-five students, ‘that you visit the theatre, and there in the audience is someone you just happen to know? Or let us say you stop at a motorway service station, or you go on holiday to Ibiza and there, in the same hotel, is someone you knew from school?’ He let the students ponder this. ‘I once flew to Madrid,’ he said, ‘and on the same flight were a couple whose wedding I had attended a year before. Was that a coincidence?’

  He took a marker and did some calculations on a whiteboard. ‘How many Facebook friends do you have?’ he asked a girl in the front row.

  She giggled. ‘Around, maybe, four hundred,’ she said.

  ‘OK.’ Thomas wrote 400. ‘Now if we add to these all your relatives, and your neighbours and people you’ve lost touch with, then four hundred probably becomes six hundred, doesn’t it? Add all the people you’d recognise from school or university – not friends, just people you know – let’s make it a thousand.’ He crossed out the 400 and wrote 1,000. ‘When we look at it, that turns out to be a good estimate for the number of friends and relatives and acquaintances that each of us will typically have. So you’d probably recognise and go and greet a thousand people if you were to meet them in an unexpected place like an airport lounge or on a beach.’ Again he sketched out the calculation on the whiteboard. ‘How often are we in any kind of situation where there are two or three hundred strangers? At a theatre? In a supermarket? On a tube train? In the high street? Maybe four or five times a day.’ He wrote the numbers up. ‘Now your thousand acquaintances represent, say, one person in every fifty thousand in the UK. But you probably see the faces of fifteen hundred people every day. So you should have at least one chance encounter with somebody you know at least once a month.’ Thomas lowered himself carefully onto the desk at the front of the lecture theatre. His arm was in a sling and it was still uncomfortable.

  ‘But that assumes,’ he went on, ‘that we’re all randomly distributed around the country. In reality we can ignore big chunks of the population. We don’t need to count children, or the very elderly, or stay-at-home farmers, or the housebound, or people in prison, or anyone you simply wouldn’t bump into on a train from London. That should increase your likelihood of a chance encounter to one every fortnight. So the next time you meet a friend in Covent Garden, don’t say, “What a coincidence meeting you here!” Because it isn’t.’

  ‘So what are the chances,’ he asked them, ‘that two of us will share the same birthday?’

  Many of the students had encountered this conundrum before. A quick poll of birthdays was held. In a gathering of twenty-three people, Thomas knew, there is more than a fifty per cent likelihood that two will share a birthday. The maths is counter-intuitive; most people would consider it a great coincidence if two guests at a party shared a birthday. In fact, with the twenty-five students in the room, it would be more unusual if no birthdays were shared. As each student called out his or her birthday, there was an air of expectation; but no two matched. Thomas held up his hand. ‘There’s one more person left,’ he said, and he pointed to himself. ‘My birthday is on the thirtieth of June.’ There was a gasp and some applause. ‘Who shares my birthday?’ asked Thomas. ‘Can you please stand up?’

  A student towards the back of the lecture theatre rose.

  ‘And can you remind the class of your name?’

  The student grinned. ‘My name is Jonathan Post,’ he said.

  ‘We have the same surname. How coincidental is that? And before you ask,’ said Thomas, ‘we’re not related.’ He took a longer look at the student who was on his feet. ‘What did you do to your arm?’ he asked.

  Jonathan Post raised his arm. It was in a plaster cast.

  ‘The same name, the same birthday and the same plaster cast,’ Thomas told his students. ‘Now go away and calculate the chances of that happening.’

  Back in his office, the telephone was ringing. A woman gave her name and asked to speak to Dr Post.

  ‘Speaking,’ said Thomas. He was still feeling a glow of satisfaction from his performance in the lecture hall.

  ‘Are you th
e Coincidence Authority?’ the voice asked.

  Thomas laughed. ‘I’ve been called a lot of things,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think I’ve ever been called that.’

  There was an awkward silence.

  ‘All the same,’ he added, ‘I think I’m probably the person you want.’

  ‘Oh good. I’m a colleague of yours,’ said the voice on the phone, ‘from Birkbeck. I’ve been reading your paper on coincidence.’

  ‘Well you won’t believe this,’ said Thomas, ‘but not only have I just come from delivering a lecture on coincidence, but I’m holding that very paper in my hand. Well actually I’m not, because I have only one good hand at present, and that one is holding the telephone. But I’m looking at that very paper on my desk. So we have a coincidence right away.’

  The woman laughed, and her laugh was like the tinkling of a wind chime. ‘What I should like,’ she said, ‘is to come and talk to you about it.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Thomas, feeling strangely light-headed, ‘any time.’

  ‘Is your office in the building in Russell Square?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Then I’ll be there in twenty minutes,’ she said. ‘I shall see you then.’

  So it was, that while Thomas was reflecting on the general gullibility of the population to the very ordinariness of encounters that they still consider remarkable, a soft knock came at his door, and around the door popped the unmistakable face of the woman he had met on the escalator at Euston Station – Azalea Lewis.

  Part Two

  Losing Azalea

  she dwells inside my picture frame

  she has a face

  she has a name

  but i have neither sight nor sense

  to trace her fading providence

  engulfed in dreams i still await

  the calculating hand of fate

  but ash from fortune’s spiteful cast

  has sealed my celebration fast

  and thus my providence amassed

  its covenant and weight

  p. j. loak

  8

  June 2012

  ‘I need to digress a bit,’ Thomas says.

  They have finished their lunch, but Clementine Bielszowska has an aversion to lifts, so rather than brave the endless flights of stairs back up to Thomas’s garret, they are still in the canteen. The lunchtime press of students and staff has eased. It is quieter now, and easier to talk.

  ‘This whole story feels like one extended digression,’ Clementine remarks, but she rests her hand on Thomas’s knee to show that this isn’t meant unkindly.

  ‘It isn’t easy to put it all in order,’ Thomas says. ‘There are different threads, and they all have a different starting point. Azalea’s thread starts in Port St Menfre in the seventies. But Luke’s thread starts much earlier.’

  ‘Luke?’

  ‘Luke Folley. The man who adopted Azalea.’

  ‘I see. And we need his thread?’

  Thomas shuts his eyes as if banishing the light will focus his mind on the narrative. ‘Have you ever been to Uganda?’

  ‘Uganda? No.’ Clementine is emphatic. ‘But I know where Uganda is. Have you been?’

  ‘No,’ he shakes his head and there is a suggestion of disappointment in the gesture. ‘All I know is what Azalea told me.’ He tries to imagine it, but how can you visualise a place you’ve never visited? He doesn’t even have a photograph. He has scoured the internet for pictures looking for a mission that may, or may not, exist, and a township as remote from his world as any he might dream of; and he has tried to picture the hard red dust and the deep green hills, and the swirl of the great river. But imagination is no substitute for experience. Thomas knows this. He has heard these stories from Azalea. She can talk of the Albert Nile, and the markets of Gulu, and the voices of the Acholi people, and the cold eyes of the Lord’s Resistance Army. But can he do the same?

  ‘It starts,’ he tells Clementine, ‘in a little town called Langadi.’

  9

  1909–1984 / October 1969

  The little township of Langadi lies north of the Nile River in that part of Uganda known as Moyo District in the province of West Nile. It is a remote place, the West Nile. It hugs the north and west borders of the country, cleanly severed from the rest of Uganda by the great river that snips off its top left corner. Only two fragile connections exist to link this secluded district to the rest of Uganda. One is an ancient ferry service that groans across the Nile at Laropi once every hour between sunrise and sunset, laden with lorryloads of produce from the south en route to the far-flung communities of West Nile and the markets of Sudan. The other is the great bridge at Pakwatch some two hundred miles or so, down perilous roads, to the west. Moyo town itself is little more than a straggle of buildings set around the confluence of half a dozen dusty murrum roads the colour of soft terracotta. There’s a sprawling local marketplace and a handful of respectable buildings, and then a spidery network of poorly maintained dirt roadways and footpaths that link the town to its neighbours and to an endless succession of village communities each with its cluster of circular thatched Acholi huts, its farms, animals and ragged children. If you continue to travel north, past the patchwork of farms that roll out to the hills in the west and to the Nile Valley in the east, you will reach the border post with the country we must now call Southern Sudan – although in 1984, when Luke, Rebecca and Azalea Folley arrived in Langadi, the huge country to the north was all simply ‘Sudan’, and the region to the north of the border post was the Sudanese district of Central Equatoria. The great civil war that had raged since the mid-1950s in Sudan subsided in the early 1980s, but this was only a temporary armistice; in 1983 it erupted again and would escalate brutally for another two decades as the largely non-Arab, non-Muslim southern Sudanese rebelled against the authoritarian, Islamic rule of the north. For Ugandan border townships such as Langadi, Moyo and Arua, and even for the regional capital, the city of Gulu, two hours’ drive to the south-east, the conflict that affected their northern neighbour would encroach upon their life too. Even during lulls in the civil war, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army – the SPLA – would mount cross-border attacks. Armed militia groups would cross the border to raid farms and market stalls for food to take to their comrades-in-arms in Sudan; shots would be fired, and sometimes casualties would result.

  The upshot of this little piece of history was an influx, every year, of tens of thousands of refugees into a part of the world with a limited ability to accommodate them. It wasn’t a particularly proud time in Ugandan history, either. It was a period that became known locally as the ‘Ugandan Bush War’ when a whole chaotic gaggle of government and rebel groups pitted forces against one another. Tens of thousands would die in the skirmishes. What the arbitrary colonial mapmakers had done for the northern border of Uganda was hardly less ruinous than the mess they had made of Uganda itself, lumping together into a discrete geography a whole assortment of ethnic groups and tribes – many of whom had never particularly got on. Thus the majority Buganda people in the south were distrusted by the Acholi and the tribes of the north, much as the English are distrusted by the Scots and the French are distrusted by the English. And lest we are tempted to dismiss the bloodshed between tribes in Uganda as anything resembling the rivalry between the English and the Scots, or between the English and the French, it is helpful to remember how many years of bloody conflict arose from those disputes, and how many bodies ended up on battlefields.

  To the Ugandan people it must have been a stressful and intensely wearying time. It certainly helped to bankrupt a country that was already very poor. The Uganda Ministry of Defence spent over a quarter of the government’s revenue combating militias in 1983, and again in 1984, and yet the opposition kept on fighting, and the body count kept on growing.

  This was the baffling, and rather intimidating, backdrop that confronted Luke and Rebecca Folley and their newly adopted daughter Azalea when they arrived in Langadi in Januar
y 1984. We first met the Folleys as primary-school teachers, but this was not their calling. Their true vocation was to be missionaries. Luke and Rebecca were to become teachers at the grandly named ‘Holy Tabernacle Mission of St Paul to the Needy of West Nile’. It was a new and rather frightening venture for Rebecca Folley, but for Luke it was a return home; the end of a brief, ill-fated period of rebellion that had swept him up a decade earlier. It began as a turbulent attempt by the young Luke to thwart his destiny, to defy providence and to carve out a life a long way from the northern hills of Uganda. Moving to Langadi wasn’t a calling from God for Luke; it was an acceptance of his fate. Luke Folley was a third generation missionary. This was, if you like, the family business. Luke’s grandfather, the Reverend Lester Baines Folley, a Cornishman and a preacher of the ‘fire-and-brimstone’ variety, had founded the first Holy Tabernacle Mission of St Paul to the Needy at Langadi as long ago as 1907, when he was only thirty years old. These were early days for the white man in Africa, and Lester Folley was a pioneer, carving his way with considerable courage, and not a little recklessness, into the dark heart of Africa to bring the Good News of God to the villages of the West Nile. He was joined a year or so later by Elizabeth Jane Folley, the bride he had left behind in St Piran, and we can only imagine that she, too was as redoubtable as he. Lester Bryant Folley, their son, was born in the newly built Langadi Mission Hospital in 1909. The younger Lester grew up to inherit the running of the mission from his father. It was the first indication that each successive generation of Folley children would inherit an obligation to succeed to the family calling.