Coincidence: A Novel (25 page)

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

T
homas 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?'

He looks at the page.

‘About midday,' she tells him. ‘Midday on the twentieth of June. The boys stayed out all night looking for him. They radioed the coastguard and they searched all that night and again at first light the next day. He was officially listed as dead when the Clagues moored up without him. That was on the morning of the twenty-first. But do you think he was swimming around in the Irish Sea in a gale for twelve hours?'

Thomas is shaking his head slowly in disbelief.

‘Neither do I.'

‘Which means,' Thomas says, inhaling audibly, ‘that he probably died on the twentieth.'

‘Now we're getting somewhere.' Clementine finds another set of papers. ‘Thank heavens for the internet,' she says. ‘How would we manage without it?'

She passes him a document stapled at the corner. ‘I have friends in the police force,' she says with a smile. ‘I used to do some work for them.'

He is looking at the document in disbelief. ‘The police report on Carl Morse?' he says.

‘In which Morse says that the woman he abducted from the fair at Totnes came of her own free will. But we have our doubts about free will, don't we? Anyhow, he claims to have taken her from the fairground at around nine o'clock. Now he didn't know the date because he made this confession some years later – but we
do
know the date. We know that he abducted Marion on 21 June 1982. In his confession Morse says that he drove her to a lock-up garage in Launceston – where, he says, he entertained her. Then eventually, according to his statement, he left in the early hours of the morning and drove her to the cliffs at Millook. There they argued, and she inconveniently leaped over the edge. What is the key point there, dear boy?'

Thomas is leafing through the report. ‘So she probably died . . .'

‘On the twenty-second of June. Is it all looking quite so coincidental now?'

Some colour seems to have returned to Thomas's face. ‘Is there any more of that cake?'

She passes him the plate and he helps himself.

‘Have we addressed the fixation?' she says, smiling.

‘I'm not sure.'

‘Well then. There is one more thing. Something I need from you.'

‘Anything.' He feels as if a weight is slowly lifting from his shoulders.

‘Five hundred and sixty-two pounds and forty-eighty pence,' she says.

He experiences a moment of dissonance. ‘Five hundred and sixty-two pounds?'

‘And forty-eight pence.'

‘I . . . I . . . don't have it.'

‘My dear boy, I don't expect it now. You may pay me when you get back.'

He looks befuddled. ‘Back? Back from where?'

‘You need to be at Heathrow tomorrow morning at six thirty,' she says. She hands him a final set of papers. ‘You might want to go home and get some sleep.'

‘Where are we going?'

‘Thomas,' she says, ‘you are a wonderful friend and a very fine human being; one of the best I have known. But sometimes you're incredibly slow.
We
aren't going anywhere. You are.'

He is looking at the printout. ‘Uganda?'

‘Treat it as part of your research. Go and see if Luke Folley is still alive. Go and find Azalea. Make sure she is well. You have two days.'

He looks doubtful. She waves him away. ‘Now get yourself out of my house. You need to book a taxi for three forty-five.'

26

June 2012

U
ganda takes Thomas by surprise. It is a whole lot brighter than he'd expected. Greener. More lush and more fertile. It is noisier, dirtier. It is busier. He is startled by the intensity of the place. The bustle of traffic on the road into Kampala; the swarming, weaving throngs of motor scooters with their blaring hooters, the flocks of matatu minibuses packed tight with commuters on their way home, the grinding gears and dust of ancient lorries piled unfeasibly high with produce, the shoals of bicycles flooding into every empty space. He is taken by the shiny, round faces; the beaming smiles of schoolgirls in pristine uniforms and Victorian bonnets and bright, glass earrings; the warm and open faces of the walkers – those thousands who, perhaps, can afford neither a bicycle nor matatu to get home from work; the relaxed and easy faces of the roadside traders sitting alongside giant heaps of shoes or boxes of unidentifiable vegetables, negotiating with raised voices and waving hands. He is struck by the businessmen walking the dusty roadsides in starched and ironed shirts, by the women in their colourful cotton frocks, by the policeman at the junction blowing his whistle and waving his arms, to little avail.

Thomas sits in the back of his taxi, the tourist who should have taken a front seat, gazing through the soiled window and perspiring into his polo shirt. He has nothing but a vague plan. It has all been too quick. It is almost evening. He will make for a hotel in the capital, stay the night, freshen up and find a way to travel north to Langadi. Tomorrow will be Midsummer's Day.

The taxi swings into the leafy courtyard of a reassuringly modern hotel.

The next morning, with clear instructions from the hotel receptionist, he sets off for the Old Kampala Bus Park. It isn't even seven o'clock, but this part of town is already filled with a density of crowds that Thomas has only ever seen outside a football stadium. The taxi picks its way through the press of people and drops him, apparently at random, when the crowd becomes too dense to navigate.

‘Tell this man where you're going,' the taxi driver says as Thomas counts out the unfamiliar bills for his fare.

‘This man' is a youth who has swung open the car door and has helped himself to Thomas's duffel bag.

‘Er . . . Gulu,' says Thomas, as the youth sets off purposefully with the bag. Thomas, uncertain what to do, gives chase.

He ends up, reunited with his luggage, on a huge yellow bus already heavy with passengers. His duffel bag is squeezed into an impossible space on the luggage rack. The youth pulls him towards a middle seat in a row of four hard seats, and he squeezes improbably between a thin man wearing a white lace hat and a large woman in her Sunday best. By now he is ridiculously hot, sweating into the armpits of a second polo shirt, and asking himself what in heaven he is doing in this far-flung corner of the Commonwealth. Yet it's an adventure. He is no more crushed here than he might have been on a Northern Line tube train to Charing Cross.

It is an hour before the bus pulls away, with accompanying cheers from the passengers, and it feels like another hour before they break free of the Kampala traffic.

‘How long is this trip?' Thomas asks the man in the white lace hat. He points to his watch.

‘To Gulu?' the man asks.

‘Yes. To Gulu.'

‘It is very short,' the man reassures him. ‘Very short.'

Thomas feels himself relaxing. It is Midsummer's Day. He feels an urge to find Azalea before nightfall.

‘Six hours,' the man says, helpfully. ‘No more than seven hours. No more than seven.'

‘I think it will be eight hours,' says the woman in her Sunday best.

‘Eight hours?' Thomas groans.

‘No more than eight hours,' says the man in the hat. ‘No more than eight.'

‘Thank you,' says Thomas. He wants to stop the conversation before the journey gets even longer. How far is it, he wonders, from Gulu to Langadi? He is worried now. What if he should arrive too late? What if Azalea's prediction were to come true?

But of course he mustn't think like this. He checks himself. It is a simple fixation, he tells himself. A psychosexual neurosis.

‘We will be there by six o'clock,' the man in the hat confirms confidently.

Thomas looks at his watch. It is almost nine in the morning.

‘Unless,' the woman adds, ‘we have a breakdown.'

The roadway is tarmac all the way to Gulu. Thomas stares through the window on the long, straight stretches as the farms and fields of Africa roll past. He feels like a child now, struck with an innocent awe by the ancient scenery, by people whose way of life barely seems to have changed for centuries. ‘What are those?' he wants to ask, spying the tall sacks of charcoal for sale along the route. ‘And what is that?' as an Ankole cow with unfeasibly long horns crosses the road in front of them. Every village seems to be baking bricks. Children line the roadsides selling fruits. Every now and then they pass through a township and passengers disembark. And every town has half a dozen shopfronts advertising mobile-phone networks; and every town, large or small, displays a forest of painted signs announcing schools, missions, hospitals, churches or NGOs. Thomas feels encouraged by these. There seem to be countless missions on the road from Kampala to Gulu. Perhaps, he imagines, the Holy Tabernacle Mission of St Paul to the Needy of West Nile might still be there. Perhaps he will find it intact. Perhaps Azalea will still be alive. Perhaps she might come out to greet him.

It is almost dusk when they reach Gulu. ‘How do I get to Langadi?' he asks the bus driver.

‘Langadi?'

‘Near Moyo.'

‘Ah. Moyo. You need a matatu,' the driver says. ‘A taxi.' He points to the minibuses all around the bus station. ‘Tomorrow,' he says.

‘No,' Thomas is anxious now. ‘Not tomorrow. I need to be there today.'

The bus driver places a hand on his shoulder. ‘Not today,' he says. He wags a long finger. ‘Tomorrow.' He catches Thomas's crestfallen expression. ‘Look,' he takes hold of Thomas's wrist and points to his watch. ‘No ferry,' he says, and he shakes his head in sorrow.

‘No ferry?'

The driver lets go of his arm. ‘No ferry,' he confirms. ‘The last one is at six.'

Thomas finds a room at the Acholi Inn. It is a little oasis of calm in a dusty township that has been within a war zone for almost three decades. It is the same place where Luke Folley passed his envelope to John Hall.

Twenty years have passed since that day.

Thomas Post sits outside in the pool garden in the cool of the evening and listens to the cicadas and the grumble of city traffic. He looks at the faces of the hotel guests sitting at tables around the bar, drinking African beers, putting the continent to rights in alcohol-fuelled conversations. Despite everything, he feels peculiarly at home here. He imagines Azalea visiting this garden as a girl – swimming in the pool, eating sliced pineapples in the shade of the jacaranda trees.

 

It is the day after midsummer. The sun still rises. His heart still beats. He takes a matatu minibus to Moyo, squeezed up by a window. The tarmac is no more. The matatu leaves the road for detours through every village, and sometimes on the whim of a single passenger it barrels off to destinations miles from the main route. But by now Thomas is more relaxed. Infected by the amiable and easy-going ways of the people, he leans back in his seat and watches Africa bounce past.

They rest in a town called Adjumani, and Thomas sits at a roadside bar and drinks three bottles of water. The landscape is changing. The hard red dust of Africa is giving way to the softer, whiter soil of the desert.

Another hour in the minibus, and they are at the Nile River. The ancient ferry breathing dense, black fumes clanks its way across the water towards them. This must be the Laropi ferry, Thomas thinks, remembering all that Azalea told him about this fragile lifeline to the people of West Nile Province. There is a wait of almost an hour, but Thomas relishes the opportunity to stretch his long legs and watch the slow, heavy waters of the Nile slide past on their way to the deserts of Sudan and Egypt.

After Laropi the road climbs dangerously into the mountains. Thomas should really have brought a camera. He tries to photograph one of the villages with his mobile phone but it comes out as little more than a blur on the tiny screen.

And then, at last, they are in Moyo. The matatu empties of people, and Thomas finds himself standing, slightly dazed, in a busy town square. He feels unsure quite what to do. He is aware now, as never before, of just how remote this place is. Never in his life has he travelled so far, or for so long – and his destination, now that he is here, seems disappointingly anticlimactic.

He slings his duffel bag over a shoulder and ambles into the town. No one seems to notice him. The presence of a tall, angular Englishman is clearly unremarkable even in this far-flung outpost of the old empire.

‘Excuse me?' he catches the eye of a young man strolling in his direction. ‘Do you know the St Paul Mission?'

The young man seems eager to help. ‘The St Paul Mission?' he says, nodding his head emphatically. ‘The St Paul Mission?'

‘Yes,' Thomas says. ‘It's in Langadi.'

‘You want the hospital?' says the young man, helpfully. ‘I shall show you the hospital.'

‘No, no. I want the mission in Langadi. The St Paul Mission. To the Needy. Here.' Thomas pulls from a pocket a card on which he has written the name of the mission. He hands it to the young man who surveys it gravely.

People are arriving from all directions to help.

‘I can take you to the hospital,' says one man. ‘Come. Come with me.'

‘No, no. Thank you all the same. I don't want the hospital.'

‘We have a very good hospital here in Moyo.'

‘I'm sure you do.' Thomas is feeling flustered. ‘But I don't need the hospital. Here.' He points to the card. ‘I want this place. This mission. In Langadi.'

The card is passed around among the growing cluster of helpful bystanders.

‘You want Langadi?' one man says.

‘Yes,' Thomas nods. ‘Langadi.'

‘This is not Langadi. This is Moyo.'

‘I know,' says Thomas. It is midday and uncomfortably hot now. He really should have brought a hat. Or held this conversation somewhere in the shade.

The bystanders are conferring loudly, and Thomas feels strangely removed from the hubbub. He reaches out and retrieves the card.

‘There is no mission in Langadi,' a woman says firmly.

‘Was there ever a mission?' Thomas looks around at the young faces. No one would remember a mission that might have closed two decades before.

‘No.' The crowd seems to agree on this.

‘There is a mission here in Moyo,' offers the first man. ‘I shall take you there.'

‘No, but thank you all the same,' Thomas says. ‘I want to go to Langadi.'

A young man approaches on a bicycle.

‘You want this man,' one of the locals tells him. ‘You need to take this bicycle.'

But it isn't easy for Thomas with his dangling limbs and his heavy bag and his awkward sense of balance. He perches uncomfortably on the luggage rack and they wobble away from the crowd.

‘How far is it to Langadi?'

‘Ten miles.'

Can he endure this discomfort and this dreadful heat for ten long miles? The bicycle hits a pothole and Thomas feels as if his abdomen has been thrust up into his ribcage. His foot hits a lump in the road, the duffel bag swings heavily against his side and then he is falling – Thomas Post, and the young cyclist, and the bicycle – into the dust of the road to a chorus of amusement from the crowd.

He dusts himself off and pays the boy. ‘I'll walk,' he says. He buys a bottle of water, almost aware as he does that it will be insufficient for a ten-mile walk in this heat. But now he is feeling reckless. Some of the bystanders offer to show him the way, and some walk with him for a while, but a hundred yards or so from the town he has shaken them all off and is on his own.

He sits beneath the shade of a mango tree and does some calculations. How long will this take him? Two hours, perhaps, at a jog. But never in this heat. Three hours, then. He checks his watch. It is nearly three o'clock. He reproaches himself for having abandoned the bicycle taxi quite so easily. Perhaps, he thinks, if another bicycle comes past, he could flag it down and make another attempt. But the few that do come by have passengers already. They glide effortlessly past with the feet of their customers soaring above the dust of the road.

He sets off again at a brisk pace, but the heat is gruelling and the shade intermittent. Half an hour into the walk and his water bottle is empty. Damn. He curses himself for being so impetuous.

There is a large tree ahead. Perhaps he should wait there and cool down. Maybe he will pass someone selling water.

And so it is, for an hour, and then for two. He buys a pair of mangoes from a barefoot boy and devours them like apples. Five o'clock. Surely, Thomas thinks, the sun will start to set. All along the road are the little farmsteads of the Acholi; round huts of baked brick topped with cool black thatch. It isn't correct to think that the Acholi live in mud huts, Thomas realises. This is a European perspective. The Acholi people, he sees, live outside. They simply
sleep
in their huts. These are their
bedrooms
. An Acholi man, Thomas sees, has a bigger house than any Englishman because his house is the great wide panorama of the West Nile, his roof is the blue sky of Africa, his lighting comes from the sun and the moon and the Milky Way. An Acholi man can rest in the gentle shade of his own mango tree and feast off the fruit, and then he can retire to the dark comfort of his roundhouse and let the soft smoke of his charcoal keep away the insects. Is this really so bad?