Coincidence: A Novel (19 page)

The driver started up the wagon and they pulled back out onto the road.

In the back of the truck, Azalea slept. She was holding John Hall by the hand. Ritchie Lewis and Lauren Marks slept with their arms around each other. The mercenaries sat at the back, awake, smoking, with their feet hanging over the tailgate.

They made slow progress along the bad road. The sixty miles took three hours. When they got to Kakuma it was dark, and John Hall had sunk into a very deep slumber. They carried him into the mission hospital. His breathing was shallow.

There was no doctor present, only a girl in a dirty white frock who told them that she was the duty nurse. The doctor, she told them, would be there on a Monday. No one seemed quite sure which day it was, but it wasn't Monday.

‘I guess,' said Ritchie to Lauren, ‘that makes us responsible.'

They operated by the light of a single bulb, stitching every wound they could, cleaning away foreign matter and damaged tissue. They re-bandaged John Hall's eyes with clean white bandages.

The mission gave them space to bed down in the hall. It almost felt like being back at Langadi. There were straw mattresses, wool blankets, chicken-feather pillows. There was blissful darkness and the calling of crickets. In the morning a bell summoned them to breakfast, and they joined a happy throng of children and fed on boiled vegetables and millet meal and sweet milky tea.

Later in the morning the mission chaplain came to see them. ‘Are you in charge of the orphanage here?' Ritchie asked him.

The chaplain nodded with a hint of reluctance. He knew what was coming.

‘We need to leave the Acholi children here,' said Ritchie.

‘They belong in Uganda,' said the chaplain.

Ritchie drew closer. ‘Listen,' he said, ‘these children were kidnapped by Joseph Kony. LRA. Do you know them?'

The chaplain nodded.

‘Then you know they can't go back,' said Ritchie. 'It will never be safe for them.'

The chaplain seemed to consider this. ‘Five Acholi children,' he said at last.

‘Four,' said Lauren Marks, holding up four fingers. She shot a glance at Ritchie. ‘Anyeko comes with us.'

Ritchie looked at her. ‘Five children,' he said, sadly. He turned back to the chaplain. ‘Anyeko will be safer here.' He put out his hand to touch Lauren on the arm. ‘We can't keep her.'

Lauren looked away.

‘Five children,' said Ritchie again to the chaplain.

 

Later that afternoon, the two young doctors sat outside in the garden of the mission under the shadow of a thorn tree drinking Fanta Orange through straws. One of the South Africans came and pulled up a chair. ‘We're leaving you guys here,' he said.

Ritchie nodded.

‘We need to get back to Gulu,' the mercenary said.

‘I understand,' said Ritchie. ‘What about Azalea? What about us?'

‘We leave you here,' said the soldier. ‘It won't be safe back in Langadi. Those LRA guys will go back to look for you.' He gave Ritchie and Lauren an apologetic smile. ‘You're safer here.'

‘And what about John Hall?'

‘He comes with us.'

‘He needs medical care,' Lauren said. ‘Urgently. Or he'll die. He needs antibiotics, blood. We haven't been able to do much for him.'

‘We'll take him to the hospital in Gulu.'

‘He won't be much use to you as a blind guy.'

‘Oh, I don't know,' the South African said. ‘We'll find something for him. We stick together. That's what we do.'

‘I bet you do.' Ritchie offered his hand. ‘Thanks.'

‘Don't mention it.' They shook hands.

‘Will you stick around here?' the South African asked.

Ritchie shrugged. ‘I guess we'll stay here until Luke and Rebecca come for Azalea,' he said. ‘We might be able to help in the hospital. And then we'll see if we can get a bus to Nairobi. Or we'll hitch a ride. We'll go the embassy – see if we can get a flight home.' There was nothing else to say. But there was. ‘Can you lend us fifty dollars?'

The South African laughed. ‘Twenty-five,' he said. He peeled off some notes and pushed them into Ritchie's hand.

‘Thanks again.'

The mission nurse was hovering. ‘Dr Lewis,' she said, ‘Please, Dr Lewis.'

‘I'm not a qualified doctor yet, Nurse Matu.'

‘I know that, Dr Lewis. We have a woman who needs to see you. It is very urgent.'

‘Well, if I can help . . .'

‘You can help,' said Nurse Matu, leading him away. ‘And there is a man with a very bad fever.' She held Ritchie by the elbow and steered him towards the clinic.

John Hall was still asleep when his comrades-in-arms lifted him back into the truck. He was still snoring like an Ankole ox.

Azalea watched him being carried away. The man who was – who
said
he was – her father; the man who had lifted a camera and photographed her on a beach in a different lifetime. His face was barely visible now, wound with bandages. He wasn't a man any more. He was a thing, a sack being loaded onto a wagon. Nothing felt real. Still there were no tears.

Lauren came over and took her hand.

‘I should go back with them,' Azalea told Lauren, although she made no move to go. ‘My dad will need me.' She meant Luke. ‘My dad,' she said again, ‘my proper dad.'

The tears were close now.

Lauren squeezed her hand. ‘Your dad wouldn't want us to send you back,' she said. ‘Not yet. You saw the trucks. They were going back to Uganda. It wouldn't be safe.'

‘But my mum . . .'

Lauren looked down. The news of Rebecca's shooting had not reached them, but all the same she spoke with a deep disquiet. ‘Your mum will be happier if you stay here. She needs to know you're safe.' She put an arm around the teenager. ‘Come with me into town. I want to buy you some clothes.'

They took five dollars from Ritchie and walked out of the mission gate. A man sitting cross-legged beneath a tree, with a hand-cranked Singer sewing machine on a low wooden table, took about twenty minutes to stitch together a pale blue dress with a white cotton collar. It cost them three of their dollars. They bought pink flip-flops with flower-patterned straps from a woman who sold shoes alongside cactus pears and pieces of sugar cane. Another dollar. A real shop sold Coca-Cola from a fridge. They shared a bottle, and with some of the change Lauren picked up a newspaper, the Nairobi
Daily Nation
. She carried the paper back to the mission before spreading it out on the table under the thorn tree. ‘Let's see,' she said, ‘if any of this made the papers.'

The photograph on the front page was the one that the Olsen Press Agency reporter had lifted from the desk in Luke Folley's office. ‘Mission Family Murdered' was the headline. Rebecca and Luke were dead, read the story, and it told of a hail of gunfire. Azalea was also reported to be dead, and five children, according to the
Daily Nation
, were missing.

That was when the tears began.

 

There is a postscript to this story. The mercenaries' lorry broke down on the long road back towards Uganda. They simply ran out of diesel. Their glorious anonymity as just another dirty truck on a dusty African road failed to protect them from what happened next. By unhappy chance, as Thomas might have explained it, the first vehicle that stopped to offer help turned out to be a detachment of the Kenyan army. There was no Ritchie present to pull colonial rank. Instead there were two hated Afrikaners, a bemused Ugandan, a belligerent Belgian and a comatose Manxman. This time the lorry was searched. The five were arrested for being in the country illegally and for carrying illegal weapons. They were handcuffed and driven for twenty hours to Nairobi. John Hall did not survive the journey. The Ugandan mercenary served five years in a prison near Kisumu. The Belgian and the two South Africans were deported. Before he boarded the plane, Pieter Van de Merwe, one of the South Africans, wrote a note and passed it to the Kenyan police official responsible for overseeing the deportation. ‘Please,' he said, ‘make sure this message gets delivered.' The note was addressed to Luke Folley. In the note Van de Merwe told Luke that the mission had been a success. Azalea and the rest of the hostages were alive. He would find them all in Kakuma.

‘One of my men will deliver it personally,' said the policeman.

‘Thank you.'

Van de Merwe kicked the dust of East Africa from his boots and never returned. But the policeman was not true to his word. No message made it to Langadi.

In Kakuma, Ritchie and Lauren did a bit of doctoring and they took care of Azalea. They telephoned home from the post office in Kakuma, and a few days later Ritchie's father showed up at the mission in a British Embassy Range Rover. He was a man with the same tall bearing and slow smile and the same flop of blond hair as Ritchie. There were hugs and there were tears, and the elder Dr Lewis became aware that his mission to rescue his son had become a mission to rescue a family.

They stayed for two more weeks. The man from the British Embassy was most obliging. If Azalea returned to England, he told them, she would go into council care, unless a family member could be found to look after her. It was easier to organise things from the Kenya end, he told them. He would make the arrangements.

Ritchie and Lauren married in the outdoor chapel of the mission at Kakuma, and the children of the school formed the choir; and with the ink still wet on the marriage papers, Azalea Folley became their adopted daughter. The embassy man witnessed the signing of the forms. ‘There are some benefits,' he told them, ‘to a career with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. It opens a lot of doors.' From an envelope he produced three red passports. ‘To replace the ones you lost,' he said. ‘One for Mr Richard Lewis,' he slid it across to Ritchie. ‘One for Mrs Lauren Lewis.' And then he smiled. ‘This one,' he said, ‘was the difficult one.' He flipped open the third passport. ‘One for Miss Azalea Lewis. Now, shall we fly you home?'

Part Three

The Coincidence Authority

You have brains in your head.

You have feet in your shoes.

You can steer yourself any direction you choose.

Dr Seuss,
Oh! The Places You'll Go

20

May 2011

I
t takes around six weeks for a broken arm to heal. It took more than two weeks for Thomas Post to defeat his gloomy reservations and to build up the courage to phone Azalea Lewis.

‘Miss Lewis is away,' her office replied. ‘You just missed her. She's on a teaching assignment in Scotland.'

‘How long for?'

‘A month.'

Thomas marked the date on his calendar, and started counting off the days. ‘It would be good to catch up when you get back,' he emailed her.

‘That would be lovely,' Azalea replied.

But when the month was up his courage failed him. A week passed. He phoned her office, but nobody answered. Another week crawled by, and he tried again.

‘Hello stranger,' was how she responded to his call.

They met for lunch in the same cramped Bloomsbury café where they had once sat and nursed their broken bones; they found themselves on the same two stools at the same narrow table.

‘Coincidence?' remarked Azalea.

‘Far from it,' said Thomas. ‘I told the maître d' to reserve our favourite table.'

She laughed, and he remembered, then, how musical the world could be when Azalea laughed.

‘How's the rib?' he asked.

‘Mended,' she said. ‘And you?'

He held up his hand. ‘My gear-knob hand,' he said.

‘Gear!' she called.

He crunched an imaginary gear, and they both laughed.

‘I enjoyed that day,' she told him.

‘Me too.' Thomas thought back to the trip to Devon. They had bickered like an old married couple; they had suffered from their respective aches and pains; they had driven for long stretches in silence, had spent ten hours of the day on the road and just minutes at the cliff face; and once there, Azalea had railed angrily against the world. Had he really enjoyed that day? And yet he had felt uncommonly relaxed in her company. Even squabbling had been easy. Even silence. He had relished the time they spent over lunch and again over dinner – lingering over their conversations, catching her gaze and holding it in his own. He had shared, with this woman, stories about his life that would normally have remained locked away – and she had done the same with him. They had a connection. That was beyond doubt.

They ordered savoury pastries and muffins.

‘I have two things to tell you,' said Thomas, when the small talk had petered out.

‘Oh good,' Azalea said. ‘I love to be told things.'

‘Number one, we're going with your idea.'

She raised her eyebrows. ‘I had an idea?'

‘You did.' He grinned at her. ‘Do you remember? Anyway, I thought about it.'

She dropped her head to one side. ‘And what did you conclude . . . after all this thinking?'

He leaned towards her and draped his forearms over the narrow table. ‘I did what you suggested,' he said. ‘I've set up a new experiment. It's called
The Coincidence Authority
.'

‘Good name.'

‘Thecoincidenceauthority,' said Thomas Post, ‘dot com.'

‘It's a website?'

‘It was your idea, remember? It isn't quite live yet. We're going to go global with this. We hope to recruit thousands of subjects.'

Azalea nodded approvingly, and this was an encouragement to Thomas.

‘It's exactly as you imagined it. If anyone has the sensation that they're being afflicted by coincidence, they can go onto the site and make a prediction. A woman came to see me last week. She has two grandchildren, and both were born on her birthday. She's convinced that it must be more than just chance. So all she has to do is go online and forecast the exact date her next grandchild will be born. It's foolproof.'

‘So all you have to do is write down your prediction . . . ?'

‘Exactly. In two hundred words or less.'

‘Two hundred words or
fewer
,' said Azalea. ‘Sorry.' She waved an apologetic hand. ‘Force of habit.'

‘Two hundred words,' said Thomas with emphasis, ‘or fewer. Then you identify this as a serious prediction. And finally you agree to reply to an email questionnaire every month that simply asks whether or not your prediction has come true.' He took a healthy bite of his pastry.

‘And afterwards you work out how many people's predictions have come true – and how many didn't?'

‘Exactly,' said Thomas. ‘And we can look for any that seem to be out of the ordinary. ‘And what will it prove?'

‘Well.' Thomas wiped crumbs from his mouth. ‘I expect the results to show that the world is a random and unpredictable place. I expect them to show that no one can exert any remote influence on events. I expect to show that no one is in control of our lives – except perhaps for ourselves.'

Azalea nodded her understanding. ‘So no coincidences?'

‘Oh yes. There will be coincidences. But only at the level that you'd expect them.'

‘And what if you don't find that the world is random and unpredictable? What if predictions do come true?'

‘They won't.' Thomas gave her a defiant look.

‘What about wishes or dreams? Do they never come true?'

‘Statistically, not more frequently than they would if the wish had never been made.'

Azalea gave a look of mock disappointment. ‘Dreams never come true,' she echoed, ‘
statistically
. There speaks Mr Romantic.'

‘I'm sorry.' Thomas Post almost mumbled this apology. ‘But it isn't about romance. No one is messing with our lives. No one is making predictions come true. There are three fundamental theories of existence. The first is that everything is controlled by an all-knowing creator. This creator can tinker with the laws of physics and bend the future in any way that he – or she – wishes. The second theory is that everything is predetermined from the instant of the Big Bang, and no one can change the way that the universe will unravel – not even a supreme being. And the third theory is that everything happens more or less randomly and that we human beings have tapped into a clever mechanism that allows us to introduce free will into the equation. What we could do is eliminate theory number one.'

Azalea allowed her jaw to drop. ‘You think your website can disprove the existence of God?'

This wasn't going well. Thomas retreated. ‘No, no,' he said, ‘not exactly.' He offered a smile to help recover the situation, and gave one of his anthropoid shrugs. ‘But it might help show that coincidences – when they happen, like your coincidences – aren't the responsibility of any malign force – or even benign force. They're just things that happen from time to time. That's all.'

‘I see.' Azalea looked reflective. ‘What about me, then?'

‘What about you?'

‘Do you think this will help ensure that I don't die on Midsummer's Day next year?'

‘This isn't about your prediction,' Thomas said quietly.

‘No? So you don't want me to use the site?'

He leaned back and took another bite of his pastry. ‘Of course you can use it. I can't stop you, anyway.'

‘But . . . ?'

‘I thought we could use it to do an early test. Do you remember telling me that you expected to meet a third man who says he's your father? And you expect him to be blind? We could try that.'

‘What about my midsummer coincidence?'

He dropped his face, breaking her stare. ‘I think,' he said, ‘that you're assigning too much significance to Midsummer's Day.'

‘Too much significance?'

‘It's only a number on a calendar.'

‘It's the
same
number on the calendar,' said Azalea.

‘Yes, but there's nothing magical about calendar dates,' said Thomas. This was an argument he had pressed before, on different occasions with different people, always confronting the same look of disbelief as he tried to explain the simple mathematics of synchronicity, but never before had it felt so personal. Never before had he cared about the outcome.

‘Take an obvious objection,' he said. ‘Our leap-year date is wholly arbitrary. We pop it at the end of February but we could equally have put it in, say, July. If that was the case, then Luke and Rebecca would have died on 22 June because they died in a leap year.'

Azalea gave him a look. ‘But we don't have our extra day in July,' she said as if she was explaining this to a nine-year-old. ‘We have it in February. So Marion died on 21 June, and Luke and Rebecca died on 21 June exactly ten years later.'

‘But ten years is an arbitrary measure too,' protested Thomas. ‘What if it was eight years? Or twelve? Would that be just as big a coincidence? We only think decades are special because we happen to have ten fingers, and so we count in tens. But there is nothing intrinsically distinctive about the number ten.'

‘But the fact remains,' said Azalea, ‘that we
do
count in tens and we
do
use a calendar that makes those two days significant.'

‘OK,' said Thomas. ‘So let's assume, just for a moment, that you're right. What about 21 June 2002? Why didn't anything happen on that date? By your logic
you
should have died
then
– ten years after Luke and Rebecca. That would have been quite an interesting coincidence. But you didn't. You're still very much here. So all 21 June 2012 will be is a twenty-year anniversary. What's so special about that?'

The exchange seemed to have exhausted Thomas. He half lifted himself from the uncomfortable stool and as he did so, his face passed uncommonly close to Azalea's and he caught a rush of her soft perfume; in one blink he could have touched her face and kissed her. ‘I'll just go and pay,' he said.

‘Do you want to know what I think?' she said.

‘Of course,' he said, sinking back onto the stool.

‘You won't like it.'

Thomas raised his eyebrows. ‘Is it that bad?'

‘What I think,' said Azalea, ‘is that everything that happens, happens for a reason.'

‘Everything that happens . . .' echoed Thomas.

‘ . . . Happens for a reason.' Azalea held out two open hands. ‘That's it. That's what I think.'

‘It isn't a particularly easy hypothesis to test,' Thomas said, making every effort to sound positive. But he felt disappointed by Azalea's observation. It was a familiar enough world view, and he had heard it expressed countless times. It was hitsuzen writ large. Deo volente.

‘I was right, wasn't I? You don't like it.'

‘Oh, I wouldn't say that.'

‘Oh, I would.' Azalea neutralised his disappointment with a fetching smile. ‘Thomas the Philosopher doesn't like New Age poppycock.'

‘I didn't call it New Age poppycock.'

‘But that's what you think. If everything happens for a reason, then there must be a planner. That's what you're thinking.'

Thomas nodded slowly. ‘Maybe.'

Azalea laughed. ‘You remind me of my father,' she said. ‘You remind me of Luke.'

‘I just prefer to believe that nothing is preordained.'

She moved close to him and touched him affectionately on the nose. ‘I've put this out of joint,' she said.

Her proximity had brought back the faint aroma of her perfume, and the touch of her fingertip on his face felt like the breaching of a boundary. He reached up and took hold of her hand, and she didn't pull away.

‘And what was the other thing?' she asked.

‘The other thing?'

‘You were going to tell me two things.'

‘Ah.' He looked down, unsure, releasing his hold on her hand.

‘What have you done?'

‘'I've bought some tickets,' he said. Something a little like fear was stalking his arteries.

‘Theatre?' she asked. ‘The ballet?'

‘Do I look like the sort of person,' asked Thomas, ‘who would enjoy the ballet?'

Azalea bit her lip, trying to look remorseful. ‘Cinema?' she asked him. ‘A Royal Garden Party?'

Thomas Post shook his head, enjoying the guessing game but nervous about the way it might conclude.

‘What are you doing this weekend?'