Coincidence: A Novel

by J. W. Ironmonger

  ‘Oh, how rude of me.’ Thomas extended his good arm. ‘Thomas Post.’

  ‘You’ll forgive me if I don’t shake hands. I’m Azalea Lewis. I teach at Birkbeck.’

  Thomas withdrew his arm. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Pleased to meet you, Ms Lewis.’

  Another smile.

  ‘Isn’t that funny?’ she remarked. ‘After all, we have already met. After a fashion.’

  ‘Yes. But we were never properly introduced,’ Thomas said. ‘Can I rustle you up a tea – or maybe a coffee?’

  ‘Do you do real coffee, or instant?’

  ‘Ahh.’ Thomas looked apologetic. ‘Only the plastic stuff, I’m afraid. I’m a bit of a tea drinker myself.’

  ‘Well then, I shall have tea.’

  While Thomas busied himself with the kettle, they talked about the incident on the escalator. Azalea confirmed that she had been taken to the Royal Free Hospital. She told him that no one she had seen there had been seriously hurt. Thomas told her that one woman at UCLH had broken her neck. She was all right, but it could have been touch and go.

  They talked about the whole risky business of commuting in London. Azalea declared that she would never go on an escalator again. ‘Not unless there are hardly any people on it,’ she added.

  Thomas returned with the tea. ‘I almost tried tracking you down,’ he confessed. ‘I thought about phoning the Royal Free. Only I bottled out.’

  ‘What would you have done if you had phoned, and if they had given you my name?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He looked sheepish. ‘Sent you some flowers, maybe.’

  Azalea offered a disarming grin. ‘You old romantic.’

  ‘Less of the “old”, if you don’t mind.’

  Azalea looked into her tea. Thomas reflected that she was prettier than he’d remembered; perhaps she was prettier than he wanted to remember.

  Now aged either thirty-two or thirty-three, depending on which birthday she might select, Azalea Lewis still possessed the willowy frame of the thirteen-year-old Azalea Folley and the russet hair of the foundling Azaliah Yves. Her features may have been unremarkable – nose and mouth and chin – but she had a subtle asymmetry to her face, like an imperfect painting, mismatched freckles on her cheekbones, smile lines that turned this way and that and of course that trace of a scar. Perched carefully on the edge of the armchair, with one arm cradling her ribs, there was, Thomas noticed, an intensity about this woman. He could feel it. She turned her face upwards to look at him and the glance of her deep green eyes felt almost physical; he felt captured in their beam, unable to break her stare until she released him and he could cast his eyes away. He found himself recalling that faint scent, the dark olfactory memory of the day they had squeezed together on the cold stone floor of the subway. With deliberation he inhaled through his nostrils. There it was again – a musky, feminine odour, unfamiliar in the dank masculinity of his room.

  On that day they talked about the coincidence of meeting after the escalator pile-up. ‘And as you know, I’ve been reading your paper on coincidence,’ Azalea said.

  ‘Ah, that.’ Thomas Post was in a light mood. ‘And what is your interest in the subject, Ms Lewis?’

  Azalea seemed to reflect upon this. She nodded slowly, resting her teacup on his desk. ‘I seem to be afflicted by coincidences, Dr Post.’

  ‘Afflicted?’

  ‘Afflicted. Affected. Benighted. Bedevilled. Whatever word you wish to choose. They seem to follow me, or infect me. I don’t really know how to explain this. I was hoping perhaps you might help.’

  Thomas raised his eyebrows. ‘Help? How could I possibly help?’

  ‘Well, not in any practical way, I don’t suppose. I mean, I’m not looking for an exorcist. I don’t expect you to mount a white charger and take on the forces of nature, or anything.’

  ‘Pity,’ said Thomas, ‘I quite fancy the white charger.’

  ‘It wouldn’t suit you,’ said Azalea, sweeping away the fantasy. ‘I was hoping you might be able to help me to understand it. To make sense of it.’

  ‘I see.’ Thomas narrowed his eyes. ‘And now, I suspect, you’ll add this very meeting to your list of strange coincidences.’

  Azalea nodded. ‘I think I was less astonished than you,’ she said. ‘I’m getting used to the universe springing surprises.’

  ‘Would it help if I were to explain why coincidences happen? Why it is that we frail humans have to find patterns in nature?’

  ‘It might help.’

  ‘I’m not a psychiatrist.’

  ‘I don’t need a psychiatrist. I’m not going mad, Dr Post.’

  ‘Good.’ Thomas pulled a sheet of paper from his desk and slid it across to her. ‘Do you have a pen?’

  Azalea produced one from her bag.

  ‘I want you to draw a squiggle on this sheet of paper. Just a scribble – as random as you like.’

  ‘Like this?’ Azalea let her pen zigzag and curl over the page.

  ‘Splendid.’ Thomas drew the paper back to his side of the desk. ‘Have you played this game before?’ he asked. ‘You draw a scribble, and the other person has to turn it into a picture. So if I turn this loop here into a hat,’ he added a few lines, ‘and if I give him an eye, and maybe this bit here could be a moustache . . .’ He sketched for a moment, then stopped. ‘There.’ He flipped the page back to Azalea. ‘Charlie Chaplin.’

  She took the picture and laughed. ‘You’re an artist, Dr Post.’

  ‘Thomas.’

  ‘So what’s that supposed to prove?’

  He grinned at her. ‘It doesn’t prove anything. But it does illustrate the extraordinary human capacity to see patterns in random shapes. We look at the moon and we see the face of a man. We look at clouds and we see animals. Pareidolia. That’s the name for it.’

  She smiled at him. ‘ “Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?” ’

  ‘Is that a quotation?’

  ‘It’s Hamlet. He’s teasing his girlfriend’s father. Polonius says, “ ’tis like a camel, indeed”. Then Hamlet says, “Methinks it is like a weasel”, and Polonius has to agree. He says, “It is backed like a weasel.” Hamlet says, “Or like a whale?” “Very like a whale,” says Polonius.’

  ‘There you go, then.’ Thomas gave a laugh. ‘That was very good.’

  ‘I teach English literature.’

  ‘I see. The point is that we human beings have a great ability to take random events from our lives and construct patterns around them. Synchronicity is a curious thing when it happens to us, but only because we neglect to include in our calculations the seven billion people in the world that it didn’t happen to. One person wins the lottery and that person has just experienced a fantastic coincidence, an almost unbelievable piece of serendipity, a fourteen-million-to-one chance that the very six numbers they chose on their ticket were the exact same numbers that came out of the machine during the draw. But we don’t call that an amazing coincidence, do we? That’s because we know that twenty million people have tickets that didn’t match.’

  ‘But you’ve studied this, haven’t you . . . Thomas?’

  ‘I have,’ said Thomas Post. He was enjoying this. He offered a broad and self-satisfied smile – his boyish smile that was part of his armoury for dealing with the opposite sex.

  ‘So you know that what you’ve just said is a load of bollocks?’

  It wasn’t the reaction he’d expected. He felt surprised and faintly hurt. ‘Why bollocks?’

  ‘Because no one would suggest that one person winning the lottery is a coincidence. What would be a coincidence is one person winning the lottery twice.’

  He leaned back and gave one of his shrugs. ‘You’re quite right, of course, but then nobody ever actually wins the lottery twice.’

  ‘Maybe after the first win they stop buying tickets.’

  ‘Maybe that’s it.’

  Azalea took a sip of her tea and let the moment hang. After a while she said, ‘So if I see pa
tterns in my life that seem to be . . . I don’t know . . . fate, destiny . . . then I’m just a simple girl seeing patterns in the clouds that aren’t really there?’

  Thomas opened his mouth to reply, but then he caught himself. He was suddenly unsure if he wanted to dismiss this woman quite so quickly. He tugged abstractedly on his earlobe. ‘I tell you what,’ he said, ‘why don’t you start right at the beginning and talk me through it?’

  ‘All of it? That could take some time.’

  ‘We may have to break for lunch,’ he said, ‘and it could take more than one session.’ He felt a strange sensation like bubbles floating up his spine. He tried to catch himself from beaming too widely, and looked suddenly down to conceal his expression.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Azalea, ‘that is what I was hoping you might say.’ Her voice was like a melody in his head. This was when she slid the slim paperback across the desk towards him.

  A book of poems. He picked it up almost cautiously. The cover bore a rough finger painting of hills in black and a stream in grey.

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘Dark Lakeland. It’s by p. j. loak. Have you heard of him?’

  Thomas shook his head. ‘I don’t really do poetry.’

  Silly thing to say. Damn damn damn.

  She surveyed him. Self-conscious now, he opened the book. Poems in unremitting lower case with minimum punctuation. He coughed. ‘Is there any particular poem I should read?’

  ‘No, it’s OK. I’m not going to make you do poetry.’

  He grimaced.

  ‘I teach poetry,’ Azalea explained. ‘For my master’s degree I needed to find a modern poet to study. I chose p. j. loak. His writing is quite plain. Unadorned. I like that.’

  Thomas nodded. He leafed through the book.

  ‘Now here is the thing. Why did I choose Loak? I wrote a thesis on his poetry. I invested two years of my life dissecting every line he’s ever written. I tried to interpret him. I deconstructed his poems like Jacques Derrida taught. I argued about his use of rhythm and metre, and I looked for hidden meanings in between the lines. These are the sort of things you do when you study literature, Dr Post.’

  ‘Thomas.’

  ‘But why did I choose Loak? I wanted a modern poet, but there are hundreds I could have picked. Shall I tell you why?’ Azalea looked at Thomas and held him again with the earnestness of her gaze. ‘Loak always wanted to be a Lakeland poet. I’d never been to the lakes before I discovered his writing, so maybe I was curious. I don’t know. But it turns out that Loak isn’t really a Lakeland writer, he’s a damaged writer. That should be a genre of its own. He fought in the Falklands War. I say “fought”, but he didn’t actually do any fighting. In 1982 he was on a Royal Navy ship called HMS Sheffield. He was a communications officer. They’d been on tour in the Middle East and they were on their way home when the war began and so they were rerouted down to the South Atlantic. Loak was on Deck Two, somewhere near the galley, when the Sheffield was hit by an Exocet missile eight feet above the waterline. It was 4 May 1982. Twenty men were killed.’

  Thomas exhaled. ‘But not Loak?’ he said.

  ‘No. Not Loak,’ Azalea said. She paused, nodding gently. ‘The missile didn’t explode. It was faulty, thank God. But it severed a power main and set light to a fuel store. Loak was lucky,’ she said, ‘if you can call it luck . . . He was blinded.’

  ‘Permanently blinded?’

  ‘Yes. They invalided him out of the navy and he went back to Buttermere.’

  Thomas opened the book.

  ‘Why not read one?’

  He flicked through the pages, not wanting anything too long. He found a poem and cleared his throat. ‘Shall I read it aloud?’

  ‘I’d like that,’ Azalea said.

  This is the poem that Thomas Post read:

  an owlet slight alighted by a stream

  where foxgloves grew

  where all of nature scented and aglow

  did rise anew

  where spanned aloft a small stone bridge

  where sprang a salmon up the ridge

  among the stones and the pale cascade

  where dragonflies and stoneflies played

  where naked as a boy i laid

  with all the canvas of a world displayed

  and when the gunshot sounded plain

  as a whistle from a distant train

  and i half turned and turned again

  i saw the bridge

  i saw the salmon leap upstream

  i felt the splash of spray

  as one might dream

  of sunlight and shadow

  of presence and place

  where naked as a man i laid

  with blood upon my face

  there are no guns on red pike crag

  no missiles on scafell

  there is no sound of cannon fire

  no tolling of the bell

  there are no cries from wounded men

  no one to weep for solace when

  the blood upon your face runs thin

  and darkness takes away your pen

  where naked as an ancient now

  i beckon back and turn my brow

  and think of her who lay with me

  beside the stream

  beneath the tree

  Thomas closed the book. ‘Is it good?’ he asked.

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘I don’t know. What do I know about poetry?’

  ‘No, it isn’t especially good,’ she said. ‘The metaphors are superficial, the language is very plain, the passion is pretty muted. He isn’t always faithful to the metre, and the rhymes are simple – thin/pen, brow/now, stream/dream; but he has a following of a sort, and I wanted to explore that. I wanted to understand what draws people to his poetry.’

  ‘So what drew you to him?’

  ‘His blindness.’

  ‘You wanted to know what it might be like . . . to be blind?’

  Azalea nodded. She held back her head as if decanting a tear.

  ‘Do you have blindness in your family?’

  ‘I once met a man who said he was my father. He was blind.’

  ‘You met a man who said . . . he was your father?’

  ‘Long story.’

  ‘And he was blind?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that drew you to this poet. This Loak?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So where’s the coincidence?’ Thomas asked.

  She gave a gentle groan as if recalling this story would be painful. ‘A little while ago I resolved to meet p. j. loak,’ she began. ‘It was while I was writing my thesis on his poetry. So I wrote to him, via his publisher of course, and I asked if we could meet. He wrote back – eventually. He doesn’t do email, you see. But it wasn’t a very helpful reply. All he said was, “Do drop in if ever you’re passing.” No phone number. No way of contacting him. But I did, at least, have an address, and of course it was way up in Cumbria. Anyway, a day came when I really didn’t have a lot to do, and I found myself deciding to do exactly as he had suggested. Only it wasn’t quite so simple. I packed a little overnight case, and I took a train up to Oxenholme and a bus to Cockermouth and then a taxi to his cottage in the hills. I don’t really know what I expected. It was November. I should have thought about miserable hail and wind, but somehow I’d read so many Lakeland odes that in my mind I’d imagined this land of perpetual springtime and daffodils and babbling brooks.’

  ‘Wordsworth,’ said Thomas.

  ‘Indeed. Anyway, by the time I reached Loak’s driveway it was almost dark and it was raining hard. The taxi dropped me at the gate, but the cottage itself was up a long steep driveway and there I was, in a ridiculous city coat, no umbrella, heels, with a silly little suitcase on wheels. I paid the taxi and then I sheltered under a tree for a long while, asking myself what the hell I was doing there. I tried to look down into the valley but everywhere was steamy and misty and all I could really see were a few drystone walls and some s
ad-looking sheep.’

  ‘Should I be writing any of this down?’ Thomas asked.

  Azalea shook her head. ‘So here’s the first strange thing. I was standing there in the rain, trying to shelter under a tree with no leaves, when suddenly I had this overwhelming feeling of déjà vu. I thought perhaps I’d read so much Lakeland poetry that now I felt as if I’d already visited this place. It was unsettling. I thought, “If I follow that little path, I know where it’ll lead – it will climb slowly up to the left, and it will curl around the hill to the right, and then it will cross a beck over some stepping stones, and there will be an ancient tree with roots like a giant’s fingers bursting out of a buried glove.” That’s what I thought.’

  ‘That’s poetic.’

  Azalea smiled. ‘I didn’t mean to come over all purple. But you see, it was such a strange feeling. How could I possibly know a strange pathway in a county I had never visited? Even if I’d read the most lucid poems, even if I’d studied the maps, even if I’d seen photographs – well, even then I wouldn’t have felt the way I did right then. It was something eerie – something other-worldly.’

  Thomas gave a gentle cough. ‘I think perhaps it’s a feeling we all get from time to time.’

  Azalea shook her head. ‘But you need to let me finish,’ she said. ‘You see, there are some things you don’t know about me, Dr Post.’

  ‘Thomas.’

  ‘Well, one thing you don’t know about me is that I never knew my mother. My real mother. She abandoned me when I was three.’

  ‘Abandoned you?’

  ‘Well, no. Not exactly. But we used to think she had abandoned me. That was the story I grew up believing. It was the story my parents – my adopted parents – believed right up to their deaths, and I believed it too until that day, the day that I went to visit p. j. loak. That was the day I learned the truth. My mother didn’t abandon me. She just took me to a fair, and then she was abducted. And murdered.’

  ‘Oh my God!’

  ‘But what matters is that I have no memories of her. No real memories. I have some memories that I may have made up, but there is no picture of her in my mind.’

  ‘That’s a shame.’

  ‘Yes, it is. But here’s the funny thing. As I stood there, I could somehow feel my mother with me. My real mother.’