Coincidence: A Novel (24 page)

It was raining hard as she walked out of the coffee shop. On the Hungerford Bridge she drew her phone from the pocket of her coat and she cast it over the rail. Above the grey waters of the Thames a rainbow had formed. She looked at it with satisfaction. The hyena was on its way.

24

February 2012–June 2012

I
n the weeks that followed that rainy February day when Azalea Lewis had walked out of the riverside café, Thomas Post was forced to come to terms with the vacancy in his life that Azalea had created. Clementine Bielszowska might have recognised the symptoms, might have been able to offer a diagnosis of Thomas's condition during those weeks. She might have referenced a familiar psychological pathway, the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross grief cycle. The five stages – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, finally, acceptance – are not unique to bereavement; they can equally apply to personal life changes. In the case of Thomas Post, they could tender to the break-up of a relationship.

Denial, the first stage, infected Thomas even as he sat in the dismal coffee shop, even as Azalea's final words to him echoed in his ears. He took his time, waited for the rain to abate and then he strolled east along the Thames pathway and across the river on the Millennium footbridge. Denial defined Thomas Post at this moment. He would give Azalea an hour or so to work out whatever it was that was bothering her, then he would telephone. Perhaps later they could meet up in Highgate. Maybe they might go to see a film. He walked the three and a half miles back to his flat, up past Shoreditch, cutting through the park to London Fields. In the park he tried to call her. Her number was unobtainable. Perhaps, he told himself, she was on the Underground somewhere. He didn't leave a message.

He didn't visit her flat that night. Nor the next. But something was up. Her phone, he decided, must be out of order. At lunchtime on the Monday he popped his head around the door of the little office at Birkbeck College. ‘Do you know where Azalea is?' he asked of the round-faced, dreadlocked woman who had once slid a vase across a desk to accommodate his damaged flowers.

‘Apparently,' said the woman, ‘she has resigned.'

‘Resigned? What do you mean . . . resigned?' Denial.

‘I thought you might know about it.' It was almost an accusation.

There was a removal van parked outside Azalea's apartment building in Highgate that evening. Two men were heaving the last of a pile of boxes into the back. Thomas ignored the van – barely noticed it – as he pushed past to the front door and scaled the steps to Azalea's flat. His key still worked, but the flat was bare.

Even denial on the scale of Thomas's must admit some evidence to the contrary. He descended the steps two at a time. The removal van was pulling away from the kerb.

‘Wait!' Thomas found himself knocking desperately on the window of the cab. ‘Where are you taking this stuff?'

One of the removal men slowly wound down his window. ‘Is it yours?' he asked.

‘No,' said Thomas. ‘Yes . . . No . . . I mean, I know the woman who lived here.'

The removal man proffered a meaningful smile. ‘It sounds to me, mate, as if she doesn't want you to know.' The window slid back up.

Denial.

Trudging back to Highgate tube, Thomas tried to remember their closing conversation. What had Azalea said? Two weeks in Africa, wasn't that it? Hadn't she said she would be gone for two weeks? He could wait for two weeks. Two weeks would be nothing. Maybe, when she got back, she would move in with him. Maybe they would find a flat together.

But something was gnawing away at him. He was at that stage in the cycle when denial passes the baton onto anger.

The letter arrived at his house a week later, and was pushed underneath his front door by a neighbour. It seemed hastily written, in fading biro, on the notepaper of a Kampala hotel.
Dear Thomas
, it read.

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 asserted 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.