Coincidence: A Novel

by J. W. Ironmonger

  And he flung it down without reading further. In his mind he was already composing a reply. Hurt and angry, his letter would demand some answers. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he would write, ‘Why couldn’t you let me know you were moving out, or where you were going? I thought we had something. I thought we meant something to each other. Clearly I was wrong.’ He left Azalea’s letter unread on his welcome mat as he stormed down four flights of stairs and set off for work. Halfway to the bus stop he relented. He turned back and climbed the steps to his flat. There, he sat on the floor of his living room and read the letter.

  Dear Thomas,

  First, you must know that I love you. If this letter brings you hurt and pain, know, my love, that it wounds me too.

  You, my dearest Thomas, were ever the rational one. I would not change that in you. You understand the clockwork cogwheels of our lives, the tick and the tock of the universe; you can fit together the pieces and count the clicks. You know how the numbers stack up and how the dice will fall, and when I hear you say it I know you speak the truth, and there is nowhere I would rather be in my deepest despair than in your arms, listening to your voice, feeling the beat of your heart.

  But there is, I fear, another truth, and this is one that I can know, and you with your calculations never can. I know, in a way that you do not, that my life has a beginning and a middle and an end. And I know that my destiny does not obey your rules and your logic. I was born because the universe decreed that it should be so. I lost my mother when I was three because the universe decreed this too. I know this to be true. I don’t know, my love, if this was the work of God, or the Devil, or a force that we have never chosen to name. I only know that the pages of the book were written before I was even born. By chance, or by design, I met two men who claimed to be my father; one in a wet and windswept valley, and one in a violent battle in the deserts of Sudan. My grandfather died on a midsummer day in the third year of a decade. My real mother died on a midsummer day in the third year of a decade. The man who must have been my father died at sea on a midsummer day, in the third year of a decade. And the parents who adopted me died, nine years and eight months ago, and they died on a midsummer day, and that midsummer day was a perfect day, a Langadi day with a clear blue sky, and the year was 1992, the third year of the decade. And not a day goes by, my love, when I do not rise and think of that day, and think of another day just four months away when the pieces of the clockwork will come together again, and then there will be only one person left to die. And that person will be me.

  When I talk of this, my love, you dismiss this, as, of course, you must.

  But I cannot run away.

  Maybe you are right. Maybe this is all a random mess. But every day I count down the days.

  I failed in one prediction. This might give us hope. I failed when I said that I would meet another man who called himself my father, and I failed when I said that this man would be blind. Gideon Robertson is at peace beneath the grey waves. I never met him, and he never lost his sight. This gives me comfort, because this is your voice, Thomas, the voice of reason, the voice that says that I have been seduced by a cruel concatenation of events that has no meaning.

  Yet every day the sun must rise. And every day I will count the days. And every day brings me closer.

  I have to go back, Thomas. This is no place for you. I don’t know if the mission at Langadi is still there, but there are hundreds of missions in Uganda. One of them is calling me. I will find it.

  It is not cruelty that makes me leave you, Thomas. It is the call of something greater than us both. It is not cruelty.

  It is love.

  My wish is for us to be together. But the universe does not always grant our wishes, does it? And dreams, as you would say, don’t necessarily come true.

  So take good care, my love. This letter is my goodbye. Hold me in your heart, and I will hold you in mine. But do not look for me over your shoulder. I will not write again. If we meet again, whichever way the universe decrees it, it will be in a better place.

  Azalea

  In the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross grief cycle, anger will morph into a state of mind that Kübler-Ross calls ‘bargaining’. Thomas Post, after all, was not by nature a man given to anger. He was an easy-going man, a conciliatory individual, someone for whom bitterness and self-pity would sit uncomfortably upon his large shoulders. Bargaining is a feature of the grief cycle that should have applied more easily to Thomas than anger. But how do you bargain with an absent lover? And how, more appositely, do you bargain with the universe?

  Thomas’s bargain with the universe was his website. He set to it with a new sense of vigour. The experiment, so the bargain went, would prove to humanity that only chance and purpose govern the unfolding of our lives. No supernatural being or fantastic illusion can spell out our destiny for us; can say, ‘On this day you will meet your long-lost father’, or ‘On this day you will surely die’. If this was a bargain, then it would seem to break all of the natural rules of contract; but Elisabeth Kübler-Ross might have recognised it all the same. Thomas’s covenant with the cosmos was fuelled by defiance. ‘I will prove you wrong,’ Thomas seemed to be crying. ‘I will prove you wrong, and Azalea will live.’ At another time, in another set of circumstances, Thomas might have seen the folly of his enterprise. But this wasn’t, at its heart, an attempt to challenge the cherished beliefs of religionists or New Age thinkers; it was, for Thomas, more of a mathematical challenge, an empirical snub of the nose towards the universe itself. Effect will follow cause, reasoned the philosopher. The hand will pull the tiller and the boat will turn. But there is no invisible hand. There can be no invisible effect.

  For if there was, then Azalea might be right.

  And if Azalea was right, then the calendar would spin on its evil wheel.

  And on Midsummer’s Day, Azalea would die.

  Depression will follow bargaining. It is a part of the cycle. Thomas spent Easter at an aunt’s home in Belfast. She was his mother’s only sister. They sat down, just the two of them, to a roast dinner as sleet lashed the windows of the little council house.

  ‘What became of that girlfriend of yours?’ asked his aunt.

  ‘We’re not together any more,’ said Thomas. It was the first time he had used these words. It almost shocked him to be saying them. It surprised him, too, how true the statement felt.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said his aunt.

  ‘Don’t be,’ said Thomas reflexively. ‘We weren’t right for one another.’ And that, of course, felt like a lie.

  He was going to phone Ritchie and Lauren. He was going to ask them about Azalea. He would ask where she was. Had she found a mission? Had she found somewhere to live? Was she in touch? Did they have a telephone number? An address?

  But depression prevented that call. Depression inhibited his fingers from dialling their number. Depression is the enemy of action.

  He walked into Belfast on a day when the clouds seemed heavy with rain, past the Harland and Wolff shipyards on Queen’s Island, with their gigantic steel gantries and their sense of desolation. This is where they built the Titanic, he thought. And he thought about Violet Jessop, who had boarded the Titanic as a stewardess, here in Belfast docks. He walked across the Queen Elizabeth Bridge and into the city. He knew these streets from his childhood, but how they had changed. The roadblocks and checkpoints were gone. There were new buildings of steel and glass. There were billboards, and cheerful lights, and crowds hunting for bargains in the sales.

  The shoppers should have lightened his mood, but they served instead to magnify his loneliness. He wasn’t a Belfast boy any more. His accent was more Bloomsbury than Sandy Row. ‘Where do any of us belong?’ he wondered. Azalea was a Manx girl who could only feel at home in the heat and dust of West Nile. Where was home for Thomas Post?

  Still, just as anger was never a defining trait for Thomas, neither, thankfully, was depression. Back in London, as April spent out its days, as routine and habit a
sserted their hold, so the darkest days of Thomas’s winter began to lift. Depression was giving way to acceptance. The numbers were starting to clock up for his experiment as early users began to register outcomes. It was far too early, of course, for any real conclusions, but Thomas built his spreadsheets and constructed his graphs in preparation. Yet there was also a sense of hopelessness about the enterprise. He was struck by the triviality of the incidents he was trying to compute. Here was a woman who lost a book on a train, and found another book, of the same title, abandoned in a hotel room. Then she lost the second book. She registered onto The Coincidence Authority website and forecast that she would find a third copy of the book. Then she wrote again with an outcome. She had discovered a volume by the same author on her sister’s bookshelves. Only the title was different. Thomas hunched over his computer and hazarded some mathematics. What were the chances, he thought, that sisters might share an interest in the same author? High. And his interest would wane. He would score down the outcome and turn to another. A woman had visited two psychics and both had predicted that she would come into a fortune. She’d been onto Thomas’s website to forecast that a third psychic would make the same prediction. Now, two weeks later, lo and behold, the impossible had happened. A Gypsy fortune teller had painted the same rosy picture. Thomas sighed. What odds would you offer on a psychic not predicting a fortune? He punched his keyboard. Trivial, he thought. Trivial, trivial, trivial.

  He would stare for long minutes from his attic window, would throw breadcrumbs to visiting pigeons, would make endless cups of weak tea, would sit at his desk with his head buried in his hands. He would deliver his lectures, conduct his tutorials, mark student papers. But all the magic, the sense of discovery, the drive to experiment seemed to have deserted him. Only one coincidence now mattered. Sometimes he could imagine the universe turning, like great brass cogwheels in a cosmic clock, and a pendulum swinging among the galaxies, and giant hands sweeping across all of creation, and all of this to deliver one bitter judgement every ten years to the bloodline of Azalea Lewis.

  No. No.

  He would pound his desk with a fist.

  No.

  The universe didn’t work like that. There was no hitsuzen. Only guzen. No stars directing our fate. No evil watchmaker. No magic.

  But still his eyes would flash to the calendar, to a single date. The twenty-first of June. He never needed to count the days. He had started the countdown in his head almost from the day that Azalea had left. Now he knew. He always knew. ‘Twenty-seven days,’ he would whisper. ‘Nineteen days.’

  ‘Eleven days.’

  He would stalk morosely down the corridors of the university, would sit alone in the cafeteria with his crossword and his desolate thoughts. Thomas Post, the Coincidence Man, was withdrawing into a shadow, a pensive, waiting presence. And every tick of every clock was part of the great machinery of providence, the inexorable, inevitable collisions of atoms, of billiard balls and human beings, thrown off course by the impact, but only into new trajectories – ones that had been preordained by science and mathematics and eternal logarithms, tick tock, tick tock.

  Eight days.

  Seven days.

  Six days.

  25

  June 2012

  Thomas walks from his office to Primrose Hill. It is a beautiful afternoon. He takes the footpath through Regent’s Park, up through St Mark’s Square under the canopy of trees. There are tourists picnicking on the lawns and couples enjoying the sun. He has plenty of time. He sits for a while on a bench, watching a squirrel inspect a waste bin. Four months have passed since Azalea walked out of his life. He feels a longing for her now, an aching to see her face, to touch her hair, to breathe her soft scent. If he closes his eyes he can see her. There are little crease-lines round her eyes; a tilting asymmetry to her smile. There’s a frown she makes when he catches her deep in thought. He can hear her soft laughter.

  There are few places quite as solitary as a park bench when thoughts like this invade. Thomas feels the depression of Azalea’s loss returning and he stands up with resolve.

  The pathway takes him up past the zoo and down along the canal towpath. He can see the swaying necks of the giraffes.

  Clementine is at her front door even as he rings the bell. ‘Come in, dear boy, come in.’ She bustles him down the hallway and into her library. ‘Take a seat.’

  He’s in a book-lined room. There is heavy oak furniture, and an upright piano bearing upon it the marble bust of a bearded man. He lowers himself tentatively onto the edge of a chaise longue.

  ‘I promised you tea,’ Clementine says. ‘So tea you shall have.’

  ‘Really, you don’t need . . .’ he protests.

  But she waves him down. ‘Wait there.’

  She bustles out of the room, walking, he notices, without her stick. He considers following. Perhaps he should offer to help. But her instructions were clear. He must wait. He casts his eyes about the room. He has been here before, but only once. Clementine is his mentor, assigned on the day he joined the university. He met her here and they talked into the night, drank a great deal of claret, shared a good many secrets. Since then she has become less of a mentor and more a friend.

  She re-emerges with a tea tray. He is relieved to find that her definition of making him tea does not extend to a meal. She has brewed tea in a pot, and provided a plate of Polish placek and petits fours.

  ‘Clementine, you are a wonder,’ he says.

  She pours the tea, and as Thomas helps himself to a cake, she settles into an armchair. ‘Are you familiar with Dr Freud’s concept of fixation?’

  He shakes his head. ‘Should I be?’

  ‘Not necessarily.’ She waves a dismissive hand. ‘You know what I think of Herr Freud. Anyhow. Freud saw it as a psychosexual neurosis. I’m far less sure.’

  ‘Clementine, what are we talking about, exactly?’

  ‘Ah.’ She gives him a smile. ‘I think perhaps all these coincidences surrounding Azalea. I think perhaps it gives you a fixation. Would you agree?’

  ‘I might,’ he says, ‘if I knew what you were talking about.’

  ‘Number one,’ she raises a slim finger, ‘you have a fixation on this girl. You think about her all the time. Am I right?’

  He shakes his head. ‘Clementine, you promised not to psychoanalyse me.’

  ‘This isn’t psychoanalysis,’ she protests, ‘this is helping a friend.’

  ‘But you’re talking about Freud.’

  ‘Then let us forget him. Let’s talk about you.’

  He sighs, giving in to the inevitable.

  ‘Number two. You have a fixation on this date. Midsummer’s Day.’ She arches her eyebrows. ‘Am I right?’

  He finds himself nodding.

  ‘If anyone else were to come to you, anyone in the world, with a trillion-to-one prediction, would you give it serious consideration?’ She cocks her head gently.

  ‘Perhaps not.’

  ‘Most certainly not.’ She claps her hands. ‘But this is Azalea, and she is the one person – the only person – who could convince the Coincidence Man to believe in the unbelievable.’

  Thomas shrugs his shoulders. It is never easy to disagree with Clementine Bielszowska.

  ‘So how do we cure a fixation?’

  ‘Does it matter?’ he replies. ‘In two days it’ll be midsummer. After that it won’t matter what I believe.’

  ‘Maybe so. Maybe so.’ She raises her teacup. ‘But maybe we can break the fixation before then.’

  He is uncomfortable. He shifts on the chaise longue.

  ‘Do you think she will kill herself?’

  The question surprises him. ‘Azalea?’

  ‘Of course Azalea.’

  ‘Why would I think that?’

  ‘Because she is convinced that the day after tomorrow should be the day of her death? Because she has persuaded herself?’

  Thomas shakes his head. ‘No. She wouldn’t do that.’

 
’Good.’ Clementine seems happy with this answer. ‘Then let us consider your fixation. It is consuming you from within. And how shall we address this? Hm?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘We must demolish the logic. We have to unpick this set of coincidences. Would you agree?’

  He feels a sense of reluctance. Does he really want to explore this again? ‘I don’t know,’ he protests. ‘I have been over it a hundred times.’

  ‘I’m sure you have.’ She puts down her tea. ‘First,’ she says, ‘shall we demolish this one hundred and seventy trillion figure? Now I’m not the expert, but it seems to me that your sums don’t work.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because first, all of the deaths up to and including Rebecca Folley’s death had already happened when Azalea made her prediction. So the chances of them happening were . . . ?’

  ‘One,’ Thomas says.

  ‘Good. So Azalea’s prediction – if it is worth anything – should be based on the actuarial tables of her life. What are the chances of a healthy thirty-two-year-old accurately predicting the day of her death?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Indulge me. Do some sums.’

  ‘Well I don’t have the tables, but let’s say she might reasonably have expected to live for fifty more years. Fifty multiplied by three-six-five is . . . I don’t know, but it isn’t anywhere near the trillions.’

  ‘No,’ Clementine agrees. ‘It isn’t. So here’s another thing.’ She turns some papers over on her tea table. ‘This was hard to find.’ She hands a page to him.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Weather records. For the Irish Sea, in 2002.’

  He looks at them, uncomprehending.

  ‘So when was the squall?’

  ‘Which squall?’

  ‘Thomas,’ she says kindly, ‘do you have to be so slow?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He sits upright. ‘The squall that killed Gideon?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘When was it?’