Coincidence: A Novel

by J. W. Ironmonger

  ‘What – like a vacuum cleaner?’

  ‘Like a person who comes into your flat and cleans?’

  ‘You clearly haven’t seen my flat.’

  ‘OK, so you don’t have a cleaner. But imagine if you did. Now imagine if you were to come back from work one day and look around your flat and you were to ask yourself, “Has my cleaner been here today or not?” How would you know? Easy. You’d look to see if the place was any tidier than when you left it. Let’s say, for example, that when you left this morning your books were randomly distributed over the carpet in your living room.’

  ‘That’s a fairly accurate description of my living room,’ Azalea agreed.

  ‘Now when you get home you find your books are no longer in a random sprawl. Instead they are in a neat pile. Maybe they’re now arranged on your shelves in alphabetical order by author. Ergo, you can conclude that a supreme cleaning being has visited and cleaned up your room.’

  ‘So,’ she suggested, ‘you are looking for non-randomness in a random world?’

  ‘And they call that phenomenon “coincidence”,’ said Thomas, ‘or sometimes “serendipity”. Or sometimes they simply call it luck.’

  ‘I see.’ Azalea fell silent. The waitress arrived with two plates of fish and chips, and the subject fell off the radar for a while as they set about tackling the food.

  ‘So maybe my coincidences prove that the universe really is non-random,’ Azalea said when they were able to pick up the conversation again.

  ‘Well, they’re interesting,’ Thomas agreed. ‘But coincidences always are.’

  ‘But you don’t think they’re significant enough to prove anything?’

  ‘Well, it certainly helps if you can demonstrate how unlikely a coincidence is. But remember the case of Violet Jessop. It isn’t always easy to measure.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘Sometimes we can pick a coincidence and assign a fairly accurate probability value to it. Take the case of Richard Parker, for example.’

  ‘Richard Parker? Wasn’t that the name of the tiger in . . .’

  ‘The Life of Pi?’ Thomas finished the sentence for her. ‘Great novel. Yes it was. Yann Martel chose the name because of its association with a famous coincidence. It started with a novel by Edgar Allan Poe called The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.’

  ‘Catchy title.’

  ‘It’s the story of a whaling ship that sinks. All the survivors are adrift in a lifeboat and they draw lots to decide which one of them should be eaten. The unfortunate sailor who gets to be dish of the day is a cabin boy called Richard Parker. Then, forty years later, a real whaling boat called the Mignonette sank. And guess what?’

  ‘They ate a real cabin boy?’

  ‘Exactly. And his name was . . .’

  ‘Richard Parker?’

  ‘Spot on.’ Thomas grinned.

  ‘Quite a coincidence.’

  ‘Yes.’ He leaned back slowly, swinging his arms. ‘The interesting thing is that we can calculate just how much of a coincidence it was. We can look up actuarial tables from nineteenth-century America to find out how likely it would be that the real cabin boy on the Mignonette would also be called Richard Parker. And it turns out that Richard was a fairly popular name. Around seventeen boys in a thousand were Richards. And Parker was a common enough name, too. So if we do the maths, we find out that about twenty-five men in a million were Richard Parkers. There’s your probability.’

  She mused on this. ‘It’s still a pretty startling coincidence.’

  ‘Of course. But you can’t always work things out like that. Human events are tough to unpick. I meet a lot of people who come to me with extraordinary stories. And the thing they want to know is nearly always the same – is this just a remarkable coincidence, or is there something else at work here?’

  ‘And the answer is?’

  ‘ . . . Very hard to supply.’

  ‘Did you ever hear the story,’ Azalea asked him, ‘about the man who walks past a telephone box?’

  Thomas laughed. ‘And the phone is ringing . . .’

  ‘You know the story then?’

  ‘And when he answers the phone,’ said Thomas, ‘it’s his secretary. She wanted to call him but she made a mistake and she didn’t dial his phone number, she called his social security number because that was written on his Rolodex card . . .’

  ‘And it just happened to be the telephone number of the very phone box he was walking past!’

  ‘Good story, isn’t it?’ Thomas said.

  ‘It is,’ Azalea agreed. ‘Only when I heard it, it wasn’t his social security number, it was his credit-card number.’

  ‘It often is,’ said Thomas.

  ‘Often?’

  ‘There are dozens of versions.’ He laughed again, his goofy, deep laugh. ‘I’ve found the story in about six different countries. Often the man has a name, but he’s surprisingly difficult to track down.’

  ‘So it’s an urban myth?’

  He nodded. ‘Almost certainly.’

  ‘What about Kennedy and Lincoln? I remember reading a whole set of coincidences that linked the way they were assassinated. Like Kennedy was shot from a warehouse and the guy ran to a theatre, while Lincoln was shot in a theatre but his killer ran to a warehouse. That sort of thing.’

  Thomas bobbed his head. ‘It’s a famous set of coincidences – you’re right.’

  ‘And is there anything in them?’

  ‘Well, according to the story Lincoln had a secretary called Kennedy and Kennedy had a secretary called Lincoln.’ Thomas grinned. ‘It’s nonsense, of course. Lincoln had two secretaries – one was called John Nicolay and the other was John Hay. Kennedy and Lincoln were born a hundred years apart. Big deal. How is that a coincidence? Both were shot by Southerners. Except that John Wilkes Booth was born in Maryland, which is not very Southern, really.’

  She laughed along with him. ‘I always thought it was a strange coincidence,’ she said, ‘that two of the great civilisations of the Mediterranean – Minoan Crete and Ancient Rome – turn out to be anagrams of each other.’

  ‘Only in English,’ Thomas said.

  ‘Still, it’s useful for the people who set crosswords.’

  ‘The problem is, you can’t run any statistics on one unexpected event. And you especially can’t do real statistics on an event that has been selected after the event, because all it means is that you’re selectively excluding a whole set of events that don’t coincide. So we can say what a coincidence that Minoan Crete is an anagram of Ancient Rome, but we conveniently ignore the Ancient Greeks, or the Egyptians, or the Mesopotamians or Sumerians. We can marvel at the coincidence of Richard Parker’s story, but ignore the fact that Poe’s captain was called Barnard while the real captain of the Mignonette was called Dudley. Or we can say that Lincoln and Kennedy each have seven letters in their surname, but quietly overlook the less convenient fact that Abraham has seven letters while John has only four. It’s like spraying a barn door with a burst of machine-gun fire and then finding the tightest cluster of bullet holes, drawing a circle around them and saying, “There’s our target – look how many random bullets hit the bullseye!” And even if you could calculate the chances of an unusual event happening, well, it doesn’t really help. We are all the product of a whole host of staggeringly unlikely events.’

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘We are?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Thomas said. ‘We are all fabulously luckier, and more unlikely, than any lottery-winner in history. Just consider that an average man can produce around one hundred million sperm a day – that would be about two thousand billion sperm in a lifetime, more sperm than there have ever been human beings on Planet Earth. Forget the one-in-fourteen-million chance of winning the English lottery – you had a one-in-a-thousand-billion chance of being born. So you, Azalea, are an amazing fluke of nature. And yet, here you are, sitting in a pub in Tiverton with another person who is also a one-in-a-thousand-billion lotter
y-winner. What are the chances of that?’

  Azalea furrowed her forehead. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘So what does this prove?’

  ‘It proves that you can’t calculate chance retrospectively,’ said Thomas, tapping the table for emphasis. ‘So when anybody comes to me and says, “Something astonishing has happened”, or, “What are the chances of this big coincidence that happened to me?” Well, I can always answer these questions. If you tell me that you bumped into your old childhood sweetheart in a souk in Cairo, and you ask me what are the chances of that happening, the answer is one hundred per cent. It is one hundred per cent certain to have happened, because it did happen.’

  ‘So you can’t measure coincidence, then?’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ said Thomas. ‘I said you can’t measure coincidence retrospectively. But we can if we measure it proactively. So if you already met your long-lost childhood sweetheart in a Cairo souk, then the chances of that happening are one hundred per cent. But if you were to tell me that you’re going to Cairo next week, and you want to know the odds that you will meet your lost sweetheart – well now, that’s a different matter.’

  They left the pub and took a stroll into the town. A thin wind blew down Angel Hill. Thomas tucked his broken arm into his coat and thrust his good hand deep into a pocket. Azalea hugged her coat around her.

  ‘Are we ready for the road?’ Thomas asked when they had walked around the block and the pub came back into view.

  They drove out of town with ease and were back on the motorway in less than ten minutes.

  ‘I’ve enjoyed the day,’ Thomas said.

  ‘We’ve still got two hundred miles to go,’ she reminded him.

  ‘I know. All the same . . .’

  ‘I’ve enjoyed it too.’ She leaned across and placed a kiss upon his cheek. ‘Thank you for taking me.’

  ‘It has been a pleasure,’ he said, and it was true at that moment, with the soft imprint of her kiss still on his face and the hint of her perfume in his nostrils.

  ‘Do you know what you should do?’ she said.

  ‘What should I do?’

  ‘You should set up a website.’ She sank into her seat and lifted her feet up onto the dashboard. ‘Somewhere where people can go and forecast a coincidence. People like me.’

  ‘You mean, there are others like you?’ He meant this in jest.

  ‘There may be,’ she said. ‘Who knows?’

  ‘And in what way, exactly, might they be like you?’

  ‘They’ll be people who’ve been afflicted by coincidences, just like me. They’ll know in their bones that it isn’t just . . . random, or chance. Something, or someone, is messing with their lives. That’s the kind of people they’ll be.’

  ‘I see.’

  She seemed taken by the idea now. ‘What you have to do is to give people the opportunity to predict a coincidence . . . or something really unlikely that they think is going to happen to them. This is for people who’ve already noticed a pattern developing in their lives. This way you’ll be able to measure the coincidence, and it won’t be retrospective.’

  Thomas nodded slowly. ‘It’s an interesting idea.’

  ‘It’s more than an interesting idea, it’s a brilliant one.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I do.’ Azalea fell silent, pondering. ‘Then . . . what I shall need to do,’ she said, ‘if I want to convince you that my coincidences are more than just unfortunate throws of the dice, is to go onto your site and forecast something that might happen to me at some time in the future.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And if I do that, and if the prediction comes true, then will you believe that something strange is happening?’

  Thomas wasn’t taking this seriously enough. He gave one of his gentle laughs.

  ‘So what if I predict that I’ll have a chance encounter with a third man who claims to be my father?’ Azalea pulled up a leg and began to unstrap her shoe.

  ‘You could do that,’ said Thomas, ‘although it wouldn’t constitute proof that the encounter – if it happened – was part of any predetermined destiny. It would still be anecdotal. It would be persuasive, I admit, but not necessarily compelling. Just because someone predicts that they’ll win the lottery doesn’t necessarily make it a miracle when they do.’

  ‘No, but if they predict that they’ll win the lottery on the first Saturday of October with the numbers five, seventeen and forty-two, that would be a miracle,’ said Azalea.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘So, what if I predict that he’ll also be blind?’ said Azalea. She pulled off one shoe and started on the other. ‘Blindness seems to figure in every story.’

  ‘Well,’ said Thomas, trying to be encouraging, ‘details like that would certainly help.’

  ‘So the more predictions I make that come true, then the more likely it’ll be that . . .’ she tailed off.

  ‘That what?’ Thomas asked her. She was placing her bare feet back on the dashboard.

  ‘That someone – or something – is fucking with my life,’ said Azalea.

  ‘I’m glad,’ said Thomas, ‘that you’re using the technical term.’

  ‘Let’s make it more interesting.’ Azalea turned to look at him with a defiant expression. ‘You set up the website, and I’ll post my predictions. And I’ll add one more.’

  ‘And what will that be?’

  ‘That on 21 June 2012,’ Azalea said, ‘Midsummer’s Day, thirty years to the day after the death of Marion and twenty years after the deaths of Rebecca and Luke – I will die.’

  18

  June 1992

  John Gropius Hall was fifty-one years old. He stood six feet one and a half inches tall in his heavy military boots, and he weighed sixteen stones. Most of that weight was muscle. He worked out. He had lost whatever hair he once had. In a lounge suit and tie you could have taken him for a nightclub bouncer. But he didn’t dress like that. He wore loose camouflage trousers and a khaki T-shirt that struggled to accommodate his torso but allowed him to exhibit his muscles and his tattoos. John Hall was not the kind of man you would want to pick a fight with. You would avoid him if you saw him in a bar. He was a man who had flirted briefly with civilian life, but who now knew keenly where his skills lay. He was not made to stand behind a bar and splash gin into glasses; he wasn’t born to wash out ashtrays or make polite conversation with drunken tourists. He was a fighting man, a soldier, a man born to bring about order through force. He was also a disturbed man, a morose man. He didn’t smile a great deal.

  John Hall was the man that Luke Folley met in the garden of the Acholi Inn on 21 June 1992. We, of course, have already met him. We know that he was one of the godfathers of Azaliah Yves; one of the candidate fathers. We don’t know why he left the Bell Inn at Port St Menfre on the Isle of Man. Nor do we know what became of the forgiving wife. Perhaps she was less forgiving than first appearances suggested. Maybe Marion Yves was only one in a succession of barmaids to be pressed up in the cellar against boxes of cider, while the unhappy wife pulled pints in the bar above. Perhaps Mrs John Hall lost patience with her faithless husband. We don’t know, but it doesn’t really matter. We can construct any number of stories to account for John Hall’s translocation from the comfort of a Manx village to a mercenary army unit in Uganda. It matters only that it happened.

  The mercenaries travelled by night. The unit numbered six men, no more. They drove in convoy in two nondescript lorries of the type that belched black smoke all the way across Africa; they travelled three to a vehicle, and they crossed the Nile River on the ancient Laropi ferry on the last crossing of the day and made the border post into Sudan sometime after midnight, leaving the border guards rather wealthier than they had been before.

  There were two South Africans, a Belgian, two former Ugandan army officers and a Manxman. The Manxman was John Hall. They carried enough ordnance to equip a platoon.

  They did it for the money. In the safety deposit box of John Hall’s hot
el were the envelopes that Luke Folley had passed to him. Inside one was a string-bound package of two thousand American dollars; inside the other was a document duly signed and witnessed that would transfer to John Hall the deeds of ownership to the Folley house in St Piran.

  John Hall had told Luke that speed was essential. ‘We need to do it,’ he said, ‘while we can still smell them.’

  ‘How will you find them?’ Luke had asked.

  John Hall was checking the signatures on the deed that would make him the owner of an English Edwardian seaside home. Satisfied, he folded the pages and slid them into a long pocket in his trousers. ‘We already know where they are,’ he told Luke. ‘Everyone knows where the bastards hide out.’

  ‘I see,’ said Luke. ‘So why doesn’t the Ugandan army just take them out?’

  The mercenary feigned a look of indifference. The look said, ‘This is Africa – why do you need to ask?’ But then he said, ‘There’s a whole bunch of reasons why Museveni and his men might be perfectly happy to keep Kony alive. Kony’s a madman. He captures kids, for Christ’s sake. And the people up here think he’s some kind of wizard. They’re scared of him. They think he can do magic.’ Hall spat carelessly on the ground. ‘But one thing Kony doesn’t do is present any real Acholi opposition to the government in Kampala that the people here can identify with. Now that would worry Museveni and his thugs. All Kony has is a gang of trigger-happy kids and a load of home-made guns, so the Acholi are even more scared of Kony than they are of Museveni. That’s a good position for the President. He likes that.’

  Luke nodded. ‘So where are they hiding?’

  Hall laughed. ‘Not in Uganda,’ he said. ‘Kony rounds up kids from villages in Acholiland and takes them across into Sudan. President Bashir lets the Ugandan army chase Kony across the border, but only as far as a line that runs across the country about a hundred miles north of the border. So Kony has his camps just the other side of the line.’

  ‘Is that where they’ll have taken Azalea?’ Luke asked.