Coincidence: A Novel (13 page)

Two LRA men commandeered the mission bus. ‘We need this vehicle,' Kony said.

‘Don't tell me,' said Rebecca, ‘for God's work.'

Kony shot her a look that indicated this sudden sarcasm was not lost on him. ‘Where does your pastor live?' he asked her.

‘We don't have a pastor,' said Rebecca.

Kony turned to speak to one of his men. Stanton, the driver, was offloaded from one of the trucks. ‘Take him,' said Kony, ‘he will show you where the pastor's house is. Bring him to me.' He gave a sideways sneer. ‘And search the house well,' he said.

Then, without looking back, Kony climbed into the front seat of a truck and in a flurry of dust they were gone.

15

March 2011

T
he trip to North Devon, to see the place where Marion Yves had met her end, did not go without a hitch. For a start, Thomas wasn't sure if he could drive with only one good arm. Azalea drove instead, but after just a few miles she complained that her rib was hurting, so they stopped in a side street and swapped seats. Thomas could steer with his right arm while Azalea could change gear. This arrangement wasn't much better, however. It relied on good communication between them, so Thomas would say, ‘Ready to change into third,' and Azalea would chant, ‘Ready'. Thomas would depress the clutch, Azalea would slip the gearstick, Thomas would release the clutch and on they would go. But they had failed to account for the traffic driving out of London and the constant demands upon the gears, so that for the first half-hour or so of their trip, their conversation consisted of little more than prompts to change gear and apologies when one or the other got the whole thing wrong.

This wasn't quite the start that Thomas had envisaged. To make matters worse, the persistent gear changes soon gave rise to frayed tempers, and by the time they hit the M4 heading west, they had been beaten into silence, and they saw about a dozen miles sweep past without either one uttering a word.

Eventually it was Azalea who broke the impasse. ‘Are we going to continue like this all the way to Devon?' she asked. ‘Only it's five hours' driving, and I don't know if I can go all that way in silence.'

‘There's always the radio,' Thomas suggested.

‘Turn it on then,' said Azalea.

‘I can't,' said Thomas, wobbling his plastered arm.

‘Well then neither can I,' said Azalea, ‘because if I take my hand off this blessed gear knob then I'll get my head bitten off.'

‘It's a gear
stick
,' said Thomas, ‘not a gear knob.' To be fair to Thomas here, he was trying to lighten things up, but this may not have been the best way to do it.

‘Oh pardon me,' said Azalea caustically, ‘I should have known. The gear knob is the one driving the car.'

It really wasn't a good start. Thomas began to wonder about the wisdom of even suggesting this excursion. What had he been thinking? How could he have imagined that a shared trauma on the Underground, and a very odd consultation about coincidences, could ever have been a suitable basis for a whole day in each other's company? Yet now there seemed no turning back. He glanced towards Azalea. Her right hand was firmly clutching the gearstick but her face was pointedly turned away, watching big airliners lumbering into Heathrow.

‘I'm sorry,' he heard himself saying. ‘I
am
the gear knob.'

‘You are,' she said. There was no reciprocal apology.

‘Shall we start again?' said Thomas. ‘I could tell you about my life.' He turned his face to look at her, and this time she returned the look. ‘Just to pass the time,' he added, ‘until we both get our nice personalities back.'

‘Nice personalities?' Azalea echoed.

‘Not very poetic, I know.'

‘Well,' said Azalea, ‘you don't
do
poetry.'

She hadn't forgiven him yet, then.

‘I was born in Belfast,' said Thomas.

‘You don't sound especially Irish,' said Azalea.

‘I'm not,' said Thomas. ‘At least, not all Irish. Northern Irish. My mother was a Belfast girl. My father was English.'

‘That must have made you popular,' said Azalea, with irony.

‘Indeed. And to make things worse, my father was a security consultant. His job was to work with shops, hotels, companies in town to help make them safe from terrorism. He would do a survey of the premises and then advise them to lock any doors or cupboards, to brick up holes, to make sure there were no hiding places where anyone might conceal explosives. He used to seal up the manhole covers and block over the drains, and show them where to put up concrete bollards to stop cars getting too close. He was pretty good at his job, but in the end there isn't a lot you can do to stop a committed bomber. Anyway, his job meant that he wasn't just
English
, but he was a part of the regime too.'

Azalea was silent. They had passed the M25 and now the green fields of the Thames Valley beckoned.

They drove for a while without saying anything, then Thomas picked up the story again. ‘So we lived in a state of constant alert,' he said. ‘We lived in the middle of a loyalist estate, surrounded by Protestant families and UVF lookouts and British Army checkpoints.'

Azalea seemed to be getting restless. ‘I don't know if I want to hear this,' she said suddenly.

‘Oh.' Thomas fell silent. ‘OK,' he said, after a while.

The countryside of Berkshire rolled past.

‘How old were you?' asked Azalea, softly.

‘How old was I when . . . what?'

‘When your father was killed?' Azalea was looking at him now. ‘That's what you were going to tell me, wasn't it? You were going to tell me that one dark night the IRA broke into your house and blew up your father.'

Thomas looked at her and then looked away. He didn't speak.

Azalea released the gearstick and reached out to turn on the radio.

‘Wait.' Thomas caught her hand with his heavy, plastered elbow. ‘Is this a special skill of yours? Do you magically know what everyone is about to say? Maybe you want to tell the story for me?'

Azalea looked down. ‘I guess it's my turn to say sorry,' she said. She gave a slow grimace. ‘I'm the gear knob now. Tell me the story.'

‘You've already told it,' he said. ‘Some of it. I was five years old when the hunger strikes were on. That was the year it all began to change.'

‘When was that?'

‘Nineteen eighty-one. Ten Republican prisoners starved themselves to death in the Maze Prison at Long Kesh. You couldn't cross the city without passing half a dozen army barricades. There were soldiers everywhere, big sectarian slogans on the sides of buildings, and every night there was some atrocity or other. We all knew kids that were caught up in it. It was like this deep tribal divide. There was no logic to any of it. It wasn't even about religion, or Republicanism, or what your accent was; it was all about the mantras that had been drummed into you as a child.'

‘Your parents were Protestants?' said Azalea.

Thomas nodded rhythmically. ‘My mother was a Protestant,' he said.

‘And your father?'

‘ . . . Was an atheist. But as my mother would always say of him, he was an atheist in the Protestant tradition, not in the Catholic tradition.' Thomas smiled as he made this remark. It was a kind of joke.

Azalea smiled too. ‘How old were you?' she asked again.

A loud motorbike roared past them and was gone. Azalea flinched as if it might have been a gunshot.

‘Would you rather I slowed down?'

‘No. No, I'm OK.'

Thomas slowed a little anyway. He watched the car ahead pull away. A Motorway Services sign appeared. ‘Do you want to stop for a tea?'

‘Already?'

‘I think I need one.'

Azalea seemed to relax. She let her head fall back. ‘Will they do real coffee?' she asked.

‘I'm sure they will.'

‘OK then.'

Thomas flicked the indicator. ‘I'm going to need you on gear-knob duty,' he said.

‘Right-ho, Cap'n.' She saluted.

He pulled into the slow lane. ‘I was eleven,' he said as Azalea nodded. ‘It wasn't a bomb. Gear!'

They managed a slick change from fifth to fourth.

‘They stalked my father home from work one day.'

Azalea was holding her breath.

‘Gear!'

Down they changed into third.

‘We were all sitting in the front room, watching television.' He turned to look at her. ‘Gear.'

Down to second.

They pulled into the services. Thomas found a space and parked the car. Azalea slid the stick into neutral. They stayed sitting, looking forward, as the engine died.

‘A bullet came through the window,' said Thomas.

‘I'm sorry,' said Azalea.

‘My father had just sat down. The bullet whipped past his ear and then it bounced off the radiator with one hell of a bang, but of course all of that happened at once – all in one single instant – then there was glass everywhere. And I was screaming. And my father was screaming. And I remember thinking, Why isn't Mum screaming too? Why is she just sitting there?'

Now Thomas was looking at his feet.

‘I think,' said Azalea after a few heartbeats had passed, ‘that we may have more in common than just a couple of broken bones.'

 

After the refreshment break, they drove again in silence, but this time it was a different
sort
of silence. Azalea pushed back her seat, kicked off her unsuitable shoes and put her bare feet up on the dashboard. For Thomas this was an unnerving distraction, although politeness intervened to prevent him looking too directly at Azalea's feet, or from watching the way that she would twiddle her toes, or from observing the way that her second toe seemed so much longer than her first. Neither did he notice the faint, but slightly intoxicating, odour, or the soft curve of her ankle.

‘Do you think losing your mother the way you did explains why you're such a rationalist now?' Azalea asked him after a while.

‘Why would it do that?'

‘Because it was such a random event, perhaps? The bullet might have ricocheted anywhere, but it didn't; it struck the one person who might have believed in a divine protector.'

‘You should meet my mentor at the university,' Thomas said, ‘Dr Bielszowska. That's the kind of theory she always likes.'

‘Were you ever married? I mean – I take it you're not married now. You're not married, are you?'

Thomas grinned. ‘No,' he said, ‘I'm not married.' He turned to look at her ‘I'm not . . . in a relationship,' he said.

‘Oh my God. You're not gay? I mean . . . it's perfectly cool if you are. Are you gay?'

Thomas gloried at the question. It wasn't so much that she had recovered from her first ‘oh my God', it was more the fact that she had reacted like that in the first place. Why would she have done that if she hadn't, in some way, been sizing him up as a possible . . . a possible . . . what? A possible partner? The suggestion sent a sweet electric thrill along the very bones of Dr Thomas Post, philosopher. ‘I'm not gay,' he said, and he could feel his heartbeat quickening.

‘I'm sorry,' said Azalea, ‘I didn't mean to pry.'

‘I was engaged for a while,' he said. There was a flutter of space-time. ‘It didn't work out.'

‘What constitutes “a while”? I mean, how long is a while? Are we looking at weeks? Months?' enquired Azalea.

‘ . . . Or even years,' said Thomas.

‘Years?'

‘Three.'

‘That,' said Azalea, ‘is one long engagement. No wonder the poor girl didn't go through with it. I mean – who gets engaged for
three
years
?'

‘Well. Like I said . . . it didn't work out,' Thomas said. They were somewhere in the Wiltshire countryside.

‘Did she leave you, or did you leave her?'

Wasn't she going to let go of this? Thomas said, ‘It was six of one and a dozen of the other.' He caught a reflection in the window of Azalea smiling at this. ‘I was the awkward one,' he said. ‘I wouldn't leave London. She wanted to up sticks and go off to County Durham, or some other godforsaken place and I . . . well, I had my job, my flat . . .'

‘So you had to choose between her and London – and London won,' said Azalea.

‘It wasn't quite as simple as that,' said Thomas. ‘But in the end, I suppose that was the last straw. Anyway. Have you ever been to County Durham? It's a miserable place.'

‘I'm sure the people who live there don't think so,' said Azalea.

For you, thought Thomas, I would move to Murmansk. But he didn't say this. Instead he asked, ‘How about you?'

‘What?' she laughed. ‘Are you asking if
I'm
gay?'

He laughed with her now. ‘Well,' he said, ‘are you?'

‘Would it matter if I was?'

‘Of course not,' came back Thomas. Any other answer might have seemed wholly presumptuous. Although, he might like to have added, cautiously, I would be a little disappointed.

‘Well I'm not.'

He avoided saying, ‘Good'.

‘And before you ask, I'm not in a relationship either. But that's by choice. I don't do relationships.' She shot him a satisfied smile. ‘We can all choose what we do. And what we don't.'

They arrived at Bude at lunchtime, and stopped at a pub on Marine Drive on the way out to Widemouth Sands. Their mood had lightened a great deal on the drive, but now that they were close to the spot where Marion died, Azalea became contemplative. They sat at a table in the window like the two invalids they were. The weather wasn't especially kind; a stiff wind was blowing in across the sound, but at least, as Thomas remarked, it wasn't raining.

‘Does it seem like a silly thing to do?' Azalea asked. ‘Driving all this way just to chuck some flowers off a miserable cliff for someone I have no real memory of?' She turned away from him, but there was moistness in her eye.

Very soon after Widemouth Bay the road wound steeply uphill towards Millook, and there, to their right, were the Penhalt Cliffs and beneath them, the sharp rocks and churning waters of the Irish Sea. They parked and walked together over a short grassy field. Not a long way to carry a body, Thomas thought. He tried to imagine Carl Morse here with the lifeless body of Marion Yves.

At the top of the cliff it was easy to see why Morse might have chosen this spot. The tide was neither high nor low, but the waves, picked up by the cold Irish wind, were slapping the cliffs way down and the rocks looked grey and wet and sharp.