Coincidence: A Novel

by J. W. Ironmonger

  The earliest photographs of the Folleys that still exist are from the 1960s. It is possible that before this time, no one at the mission had thought to squander God’s money on a camera. There are some snapshots of the second Lester (perhaps we should call him Lester Folley II). They appear to show an elderly man, for although Lester was only in his fifties at the time, Africa had taken a fierce toll on his constitution. He is slightly bowed at the back, with a wild silver beard, and is making an uncomfortable attempt at a smile. In every photograph he carries a carved ebony walking stick – a reminder of the parasitic diseases that afflicted him badly in his childhood, and which left him with limited movement in his right arm and leg.

  Lester Folley II married a French mission doctor in 1942. The couple’s first son, also christened Lester, made his appearance in 1944. Why don’t we, for clarity and consistency, call him Lester Folley III? Luke Folley, his brother, the man who would later adopt Azalea, was born in 1948. Both sons were born at the same mission hospital in Langadi.

  The little mission stumbled by from year to year on meagre donations, most of them from the United States. Each year the mission office would post out twenty thousand leaflets to churches and missionary associations in Europe and America detailing the good work that the St Paul Mission was doing and appealing for funds; and every year the donations would trickle in. In the warm evenings on the veranda of the mission house under the sweep of a great jacaranda tree, Lester and Monique would write by hand letters of thanks for every donation, however small. In each envelope they would enclose one small black and white photograph of a child from the mission orphanage with messages such as ‘A very big thank you from Moses’, or ‘Many thanks from Mariah’ crudely written on the back. Six weeks before Christmas, a small hand-coloured card would go out to each donor from Moses or Mariah, or whichever child had sent the first picture, and soon after, more donations would arrive.

  This, then, had been the home of the Folley family for three generations: the whitewashed mission house, the church with its leaky corrugated-iron roof, the little four-room clinic and dormitory that called itself a hospital, the open-air mess and the two-room schoolhouse where generations of Langadi children had learned their reading and their numbers and their gospel stories.

  There is a languid sense of abandonment that settles upon mission families, a comfortable torpor, an easy-going routine advanced by the agreeable climate and the slow pace of life, and the dust, and the singing of hymns, and the ringing of the mission bell. As history swept up the peoples of Uganda and Sudan, tossing them hither and thither like chaff in a wheat bowl, as European empires rose and then departed, and as the fireworks from independence parties gave way to the gunfire of new despots and transient militias, the mission, with its cluster of buildings, its school, its farmstead, its Sunday services and its quiet sense of duty became just another part of Langadi life. The white-painted board proclaiming The Church of the Holy Tabernacle Mission of St Paul to the Needy of West Nile became so faded that first-time visitors might have struggled to read it. But first-time visitors were rare, and why would local people need a sign? The farmstead grew bananas, sweet potatoes, maize, groundnuts, cassava, sorghum and sesame. The schoolrooms catered to gaggles of local children. The dormitories offered shelter to orphans. The clinic ministered to the sick.

  The funds for the mission itself might have been in short supply, but church missionary societies in London had generous provisions to support the education of the sons of British missionaries. By the time the 1960s arrived, both Lester III and young Luke were back in England kitted out in grey worsted suits and bright straw boaters as pupils of a public school in Kent. Lester III, the elder brother, ever the star pupil, shone at Latin and Greek and history, and rugby and fencing and tennis; and despite the suspicion that none of these skills might be especially useful for a career in an orphanage in the centre of Africa, Lester nonetheless set his sights upon a return to Uganda to continue the family tradition. While his contemporaries were packing to go to Oxford or Cambridge, Lester departed for a theological college in Canterbury, and there he began to learn the lore and teachings of the Church of England. No doubt he would have studied the fine words of Archbishop Cranmer, the very ones intoned by the Reverend Doctor Jeremiah Lender just a decade or so later over the infant Azaliah Yves. Perhaps he would have learned the best way to hold a baby in a glossy christening gown over an old stone font. Unquestionably he would have employed his Greek and Latin to better understand the great scriptures that informed his faith. In that pivotal year of 1969, when the decade of free love was coming to a close, Lester Folley III was ordained as a priest; and with the ink still wet on his certificate of ordination, he returned to Langadi.

  There is a saying in Uganda: ‘The older son inherits the farm, the younger son goes astray’. This is how it was for Lester and Luke Folley. Lester the diligent elder son had devoted himself to preparing for his return to the family mission; but could it ever be that simple for Luke? The times were a-changing, and Luke chose not to return. Although he might have said that he didn’t exercise any choice at all. In a sense it was never a decision for Luke; it was, at best, the deferring of a decision. It was the brief rebellion of the prodigal son. As a non-decision, as a deferred decision, it was something that grew easier to bear with each day that passed. Luke Folley, a continent away from parental advice or family disapproval, did not excel in Latin or Greek or even, particularly, in history. He felt no calling to the priesthood. He developed a disdain for the prose of Thomas Cranmer. He dropped out of school and grew his hair. In the amiable language of the time, he found that he had somehow become a hippie. Comfortable with this new identity, Luke set about relishing the dying years of the 1960s. It was a career arc familiar to many of his generation. Together with a group of friends and like-minded dropouts, he moved into a squat in Ladbroke Grove. Burning with enthusiasm, the squatters changed the locks, repainted the walls with paisley swirls and psychedelic motifs, spread posters on the walls of Hendrix and Dylan and Che Guevara and drew Ban the Bomb symbols on the doors in pink and yellow paint. With the decoration complete, they opened those doors to fellow squatters. At one time ten, or twelve, or even fifteen people might have shared the four-bedroomed home. Sleeping arrangements were free and easy. Property was theft. Luke flirted, as many did, with Marxism and dialectical materialism and free love and LSD. He made a little money doing casual jobs: stacking shelves in a chemist shop, offloading vegetables at Old Covent Garden Market, selling small quantities of marijuana. He learned to play the guitar, and wrote songs that were vaguely Dylanesque; he wore sandals and tie-dyed shirts and an inside-out sheepskin coat and a headband from Peru. It was the uniform of his day. His hair was uncut and unwashed. Soap was an invention of the bourgeoisie. He washed in cold water and smelt of patchouli oil. He read discarded copies of Oz magazine, and comic strips by Robert Crumb, and books by Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg and leaflets by Timothy Leary. He burned incense sticks and listened to the music of The Grateful Dead and Iron Butterfly and Jimi Hendrix. He protested against the war in Vietnam. He joined CND, and practised the ironic two-fingered V with its accompanying drop of the head and unhappy smile and dutiful chant of ‘Peace, man’.

  With the great courage afforded by hindsight, Luke would later describe these as his ‘lost years’. He grew thin on his new vegan diet. He developed a morose look. He stopped replying to letters from his parents in Langadi, or from his brother Lester at the seminary in Kent. He gave up his job at Covent Garden Market because he couldn’t manage the early-morning starts. He was sacked from the chemist shop because his appearance was unsuitable for a family business. He resisted the bourgeois temptation to sign on the dole, and took to playing his guitar in a subway at Marble Arch, effectively begging for small change. It was a desperate move for a desperate young man.

  Luke Folley turned twenty-one in the autumn of 1969. One evening he came home to find that a security firm with black and gold vans had forc
ibly repossessed the squat in Ladbroke Grove. It wasn’t a great surprise. A dispute over the ownership of the house and the rights of the squatters had been running for several months, and it was said that the house had been sold at a comfortable discount to a foreign buyer who was confident that the freeloading residents might be persuaded to depart. That moment seemed to have arrived. A manifestly persuasive group of large men of African origin had arrived at the house while Luke had been strumming his guitar in the subway, and by the time he had drawn up at the house, the men had persuaded the other occupants to vacate. The locks had been changed again, and Luke’s belongings, what few there were, had been roughly packed into cardboard boxes and abandoned on the pavement where they now lay like the strewn wreckage from a hurricane. From a cold, grey sky it was raining softly. The boxes were already damp.

  A gaggle of Luke’s fellow squatters stood about looking shell-shocked. One of the girls was wailing. Others were remonstrating with two of the African security men, who seemed unmoved by their appeals. Drained of energy, Luke slid down onto the pavement and sank his head into his hands to contemplate his bleak existence. His great dreams and ideals had evaporated. Now here he was – weak, homeless and virtually penniless, sitting on a London pavement looking at the contents of his life in two brown boxes and a guitar case.

  A limousine slid up to the kerb. From it emerged a tall African man in a grey suit and a pale European girl wearing Bardot plastic boots and a paisley miniskirt. They were plainly the new owners of the house from which Luke and his feckless companions had been so brusquely evicted. The African man ignored the hippies and let loose a stream of remarks aimed at the two security guards in a language that was so familiar to Luke it might just as well have been English. What he said to the guards was in Acholi, the language of the West Nile. The translation that Luke often quoted to Azalea when he told her the story included the African invective, ‘Get these effing wasters off my effing land before I effing bury them here.’

  The shock of hearing the Acholi language made Luke sit up and look at the man. ‘Okot?’ he found himself saying. The name ‘Okot’ means ‘Born in the rains’.

  The African man swung around to look at the thin hippie whose body was littering his pavement. ‘Luke?’

  Luke rose weakly to his feet. Talking in Acholi he said, ‘You’re a long way from the mission, Mr Okot Lakwo.’

  ‘As are you, Mr Luke Folley,’ said the African, and he broke into the heartiest laugh the Englishman had heard in months.

  We don’t often think of laughter as a means of communication. We laugh as a reaction to a comic situation; we laugh to relieve stress; we laugh to join in socially with the laughter of others. For Luke, however, bedraggled, cold, homeless and hungry, Okot Lakwo’s laugh was none of these. This laugh was a cruel polemic; it was a sermon in sound. It was a laugh that spoke of triumph and exultation. It drew its comedy from the deepest wells of schadenfreude. While Okot Lakwo laughed the world stopped for Luke Folley; laughter that echoed and amplified around the Georgian terraces of Ladbroke Grove.

  When it was done, Okot Lakwo slapped his arm around Luke Folley’s back. ‘My dear, dear, friend,’ he said, now speaking in English. ‘Your father is worried about you.’

  Luke shook his head. Long wet strands of hair clung to his face.

  ‘Why do I find you in this state?’ the African asked, the slightest gesture of his head indicating everything.

  Luke found himself unable to speak. The great elation of his rebellion had vanished. He could not summon up a peace sign, or a Marxist metaphor, or a single slogan in support of free love. He could not begin to compute the sheer unlikeliness of an orphan from the mission in Langadi buying the very house in which he had been squatting. He was struck only by the penetrating echo of the laugh and by the sheer hopelessness of his situation.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he managed to say. He turned as if to walk away.

  ‘Wait, wait, wait.’ Okot’s hand was on his shoulder. ‘Are these your things?’

  Luke surveyed the wet boxes. He hesitated. ‘No.’ And truly they no longer felt like his things. They felt like the loveless impedimenta that occupy the shelves of charity shops. They felt like the clothes and the books and the records of a different, distant person.

  ‘Let me offer you some hospitality,’ Okot smiled. ‘Come inside. Let’s get you dry. We’ll find you somewhere to stay until you can get back on your feet.’

  ‘No. But thank you all the same. I’m all right.’ Luke hoisted his guitar case onto his shoulder.

  The African looked at him suspiciously. ‘So,’ he said, ‘we are to meet a continent away from home, and you are to turn and walk away?’ He drew closer. ‘You remember what we say in Acholi? Okom oyoko langwec – the stump of a tree can fell a running man. I think, my friend, you have run into a tree.’

  Luke tried to wipe the tendrils of hair from his eyes. ‘I think perhaps I have.’

  ‘Then the running man must pick himself up and run on.’

  ‘It isn’t always as easy as that.’

  ‘Oh yes it is. Believe me, it is.’

  What could Luke say? With his private education and all the benefits of his birth, what words could he utter that would make any sense to this man who had fought his way from a civil war orphanage in Africa to stand above him on this pavement beside his limousine and his trophy girlfriend and his London house? Luke just shook his head miserably.

  ‘Do you remember another saying in Langadi, Yoo aryo oloyo lalur, the hyena is defeated by two roads? He’s in full chase of his prey but he comes to a fork in the path. Which way should he choose? He stops. Maybe this way? Maybe that way? Now instead of running he’s standing alone in the road, unable to decide. I think this has happened to you, my friend.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘So tell me . . . what are the forks that have left you here?’

  Luke thought. ‘In one fork,’ he said, ‘I will be a famous musician, playing my guitar in the Albert Hall, selling a million records.’ He managed a weak smile.

  ‘And in the other fork?’

  ‘I go to teacher-training college. Then maybe I teach for a while in England. Maybe one day I go back and help Lester and my dad at the mission.’

  Okot nodded his understanding. ‘These are both good forks,’ he said. ‘But now, you’re like the hyena. The fork in the road is your prison instead of your way out.’ He offered a genial grin. ‘What kind of music do you play?’

  Luke shrugged. ‘Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel.’

  ‘Then you’re ten years too late, my friend.’

  Luke grimaced. The comment stung.

  ‘How many demonstration tapes have you made for record companies? How many auditions have you been to? How many doors of record producers do you knock on every day to demand that they listen to your music? How many have you spoken to today?’

  Luke shook his wet head. ‘None,’ he admitted.

  ‘Then you truly are stuck,’ said Okot. ‘You haven’t chosen to be a famous musician, and you haven’t chosen to be a teacher.’

  ‘But if I choose to be a teacher . . . if I do . . . then I know what would happen. I would have to go back to Langadi.’

  Okot laughed. ‘No you wouldn’t. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.’

  ‘Oh, but you don’t know the pressure I would get from my father, and my mother, and from Lester.’

  ‘Oh but I think I do.’ The African gave Luke a kindly smile. ‘Would it be so bad? To go back?’

  ‘You never went back.’

  The big Ugandan man laughed again. But it was not the same laugh as before. It was kinder, more understanding. ‘It was different for me, my friend. What would I do in Langadi? Milk the cattle? But for you – you could run your own mission.’

  ‘That isn’t the biggest problem . . .’

  ‘So tell me the biggest problem.’

  ‘I don’t believe any more.’

  ‘You don’t believe in the work of t
he mission?’

  Luke looked miserable. ‘I don’t believe in God.’

  For a third time the African exploded into a great gale of laughter. He pounded his big hand like a paddle on Luke’s back. ‘My friend, my friend, my friend,’ he said in between snorts of hilarity, ‘nobody believes in God any more.’

  ‘My brother still does.’

  The big Acholi man grinned widely. ‘Then get him to do the God stories,’ he said. ‘You teach everything else.’

  Luke bobbed his head weakly.

  ‘But all the same, I’m not telling you which fork to choose. I’m saying don’t make the mistake of the hyena.’ Okot reached into a jacket pocket and peeled a dozen large banknotes from a roll. ‘Here is what you do, my friend. You take this money and you turn and you walk away. You leave all of this behind.’ He gestured at the boxes, now limp in the rain. ‘Either you go now and start calling on record producers – shall we say, four a day – or you get a haircut at the first barber you pass. You buy a good meal. You buy some good strong clothes and you go down to your father’s house in Cornwall. You write to your father and you tell him you’re well. Tell him that we met, but never tell him how we met. You find a job and you find a girl. And then you enrol in your teacher-training course, and one year from today you visit me here in my house.’ He grinned. ‘You know the house – right?’

  Luke nodded. There was something irresistibly compelling about the situation. It wasn’t simply Okot, with his natural wisdom and his Acholi generosity; it was the strange and unexpected providence that had brought them here, the alignment of circumstances that had led them both to this London street at this moment in time.

  ‘One year from today. You visit me in my house and you pay me back my money.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘One year from today?’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Go then.’

  Luke raised his head, and for the first time he looked Okot right in the eye. He reached out a hand and took the money. ‘Apwoyo,’ he said. Thank you. And then, because this was the Acholi way, he turned and walked away. One of the hippies called after him, but he didn’t break his stride. He had run into a tree stump but the stump hadn’t killed him. It was raining hard when he turned the corner and left it all behind. Across the road was the red and white pole of a barber shop.