Coincidence: A Novel (7 page)

Luke Folley turned twenty-one in the autumn of 1969. One evening he came home to find that a security firm with black and gold vans had forcibly repossessed the squat in Ladbroke Grove. It wasn't a great surprise. A dispute over the ownership of the house and the rights of the squatters had been running for several months, and it was said that the house had been sold at a comfortable discount to a foreign buyer who was confident that the freeloading residents might be persuaded to depart. That moment seemed to have arrived. A manifestly persuasive group of large men of African origin had arrived at the house while Luke had been strumming his guitar in the subway, and by the time he had drawn up at the house, the men had persuaded the other occupants to vacate. The locks had been changed again, and Luke's belongings, what few there were, had been roughly packed into cardboard boxes and abandoned on the pavement where they now lay like the strewn wreckage from a hurricane. From a cold, grey sky it was raining softly. The boxes were already damp.

A gaggle of Luke's fellow squatters stood about looking shell-shocked. One of the girls was wailing. Others were remonstrating with two of the African security men, who seemed unmoved by their appeals. Drained of energy, Luke slid down onto the pavement and sank his head into his hands to contemplate his bleak existence. His great dreams and ideals had evaporated. Now here he was – weak, homeless and virtually penniless, sitting on a London pavement looking at the contents of his life in two brown boxes and a guitar case.

A limousine slid up to the kerb. From it emerged a tall African man in a grey suit and a pale European girl wearing Bardot plastic boots and a paisley miniskirt. They were plainly the new owners of the house from which Luke and his feckless companions had been so brusquely evicted. The African man ignored the hippies and let loose a stream of remarks aimed at the two security guards in a language that was so familiar to Luke it might just as well have been English. What he said to the guards was in Acholi, the language of the West Nile. The translation that Luke often quoted to Azalea when he told her the story included the African invective, ‘Get these effing wasters off my effing land before I effing bury them here.'

The shock of hearing the Acholi language made Luke sit up and look at the man. ‘Okot?' he found himself saying. The name ‘Okot' means ‘Born in the rains'.

The African man swung around to look at the thin hippie whose body was littering his pavement. ‘Luke?'

Luke rose weakly to his feet. Talking in Acholi he said, ‘You're a long way from the mission, Mr Okot Lakwo.'

‘As are you, Mr Luke Folley,' said the African, and he broke into the heartiest laugh the Englishman had heard in months.

We don't often think of laughter as a means of communication. We laugh as a reaction to a comic situation; we laugh to relieve stress; we laugh to join in socially with the laughter of others. For Luke, however, bedraggled, cold, homeless and hungry, Okot Lakwo's laugh was none of these. This laugh was a cruel polemic; it was a sermon in sound. It was a laugh that spoke of triumph and exultation. It drew its comedy from the deepest wells of schadenfreude. While Okot Lakwo laughed the world stopped for Luke Folley; laughter that echoed and amplified around the Georgian terraces of Ladbroke Grove.

When it was done, Okot Lakwo slapped his arm around Luke Folley's back. ‘My dear, dear, friend,' he said, now speaking in English. ‘Your father is worried about you.'

Luke shook his head. Long wet strands of hair clung to his face.

‘Why do I find you in this state?' the African asked, the slightest gesture of his head indicating everything.

Luke found himself unable to speak. The great elation of his rebellion had vanished. He could not summon up a peace sign, or a Marxist metaphor, or a single slogan in support of free love. He could not begin to compute the sheer unlikeliness of an orphan from the mission in Langadi buying the very house in which he had been squatting. He was struck only by the penetrating echo of the laugh and by the sheer hopelessness of his situation.

‘It's OK,' he managed to say. He turned as if to walk away.

‘Wait, wait, wait.' Okot's hand was on his shoulder. ‘Are these your things?'

Luke surveyed the wet boxes. He hesitated. ‘No.' And truly they no longer felt like his things. They felt like the loveless impedimenta that occupy the shelves of charity shops. They felt like the clothes and the books and the records of a different, distant person.

‘Let me offer you some hospitality,' Okot smiled. ‘Come inside. Let's get you dry. We'll find you somewhere to stay until you can get back on your feet.'

‘No. But thank you all the same. I'm all right.' Luke hoisted his guitar case onto his shoulder.

The African looked at him suspiciously. ‘So,' he said, ‘we are to meet a continent away from home, and you are to turn and walk away?' He drew closer. ‘You remember what we say in Acholi?
Okom oyoko langwec
– the stump of a tree can fell a running man. I think, my friend, you have run into a tree.'

Luke tried to wipe the tendrils of hair from his eyes. ‘I think perhaps I have.'

‘Then the running man must pick himself up and run on.'

‘It isn't always as easy as that.'

‘Oh yes it is. Believe me, it is.'

What could Luke say? With his private education and all the benefits of his birth, what words could he utter that would make any sense to this man who had fought his way from a civil war orphanage in Africa to stand above him on this pavement beside his limousine and his trophy girlfriend and his London house? Luke just shook his head miserably.

‘Do you remember another saying in Langadi,
Yoo aryo oloyo lalur
, the hyena is defeated by two roads? He's in full chase of his prey but he comes to a fork in the path. Which way should he choose? He stops. Maybe this way? Maybe that way? Now instead of running he's standing alone in the road, unable to decide. I think this has happened to you, my friend.'

‘Maybe.'

‘So tell me . . . what are the forks that have left you here?'

Luke thought. ‘In one fork,' he said, ‘I will be a famous musician, playing my guitar in the Albert Hall, selling a million records.' He managed a weak smile.

‘And in the other fork?'

‘I go to teacher-training college. Then maybe I teach for a while in England. Maybe one day I go back and help Lester and my dad at the mission.'

Okot nodded his understanding. ‘These are both good forks,' he said. ‘But now, you're like the hyena. The fork in the road is your prison instead of your way out.' He offered a genial grin. ‘What kind of music do you play?'

Luke shrugged. ‘Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel.'

‘Then you're ten years too late, my friend.'

Luke grimaced. The comment stung.

‘How many demonstration tapes have you made for record companies? How many auditions have you been to? How many doors of record producers do you knock on every day to demand that they listen to your music? How many have you spoken to
today
?'

Luke shook his wet head. ‘None,' he admitted.

‘Then you truly are stuck,' said Okot. ‘You haven't chosen to be a famous musician, and you haven't chosen to be a teacher.'

‘But if I choose to be a teacher . . . if I do . . . then I know what would happen. I would have to go back to Langadi.'

Okot laughed. ‘No you wouldn't. You don't have to do anything you don't want to do.'

‘Oh, but you don't know the pressure I would get from my father, and my mother, and from Lester.'

‘Oh but I think I do.' The African gave Luke a kindly smile. ‘Would it be so bad? To go back?'

‘
You
never went back.'

The big Ugandan man laughed again. But it was not the same laugh as before. It was kinder, more understanding. ‘It was different for me, my friend. What would I do in Langadi? Milk the cattle? But for you – you could run your own mission.'

‘That isn't the biggest problem . . .'

‘So tell me the biggest problem.'

‘I don't believe any more.'

‘You don't believe in the work of the mission?'

Luke looked miserable. ‘I don't believe in God.'

For a third time the African exploded into a great gale of laughter. He pounded his big hand like a paddle on Luke's back. ‘My friend, my friend, my friend,' he said in between snorts of hilarity, ‘
nobody
believes in God any more.'

‘My brother still does.'

The big Acholi man grinned widely. ‘Then get him to do the God stories,' he said. ‘You teach everything else.'

Luke bobbed his head weakly.

‘But all the same, I'm not telling you which fork to choose. I'm saying don't make the mistake of the hyena.' Okot reached into a jacket pocket and peeled a dozen large banknotes from a roll. ‘Here is what you do, my friend. You take this money and you turn and you walk away. You leave all of this behind.' He gestured at the boxes, now limp in the rain. ‘Either you go now and start calling on record producers – shall we say, four a day – or you get a haircut at the first barber you pass. You buy a good meal. You buy some good strong clothes and you go down to your father's house in Cornwall. You write to your father and you tell him you're well. Tell him that we met, but never tell him
how
we met. You find a job and you find a girl. And then you enrol in your teacher-training course, and one year from today you visit me here in my house.' He grinned. ‘You know the house – right?'

Luke nodded. There was something irresistibly compelling about the situation. It wasn't simply Okot, with his natural wisdom and his Acholi generosity; it was the strange and unexpected providence that had brought them here, the alignment of circumstances that had led them both to this London street at this moment in time.

‘One year from today. You visit me in my house and you pay me back my money.'

‘I will.'

‘One year from today?'

‘I will.'

‘Go then.'

Luke raised his head, and for the first time he looked Okot right in the eye. He reached out a hand and took the money. ‘
Apwoyo
,' he said. Thank you. And then, because this was the Acholi way, he turned and walked away. One of the hippies called after him, but he didn't break his stride. He had run into a tree stump but the stump hadn't killed him. It was raining hard when he turned the corner and left it all behind. Across the road was the red and white pole of a barber shop.

10

January 1978

I
t wasn't long after the incident with Marion Yves and the seagull that the story took hold in the Manx village of Port St Menfre. The Reverend Jeremiah Lender, who must have been bound by
some
obligation regarding clerical confidentiality, nonetheless recounted the story of the seagull to his wife Ruth, making her promise faithfully not to share these secrets with a soul –
not with a single soul
– a pledge that Ruth Lender solemnly extracted later that same day from her sister Mary. Mary, in turn, swore secrecy with her cousin Eve; and after that the trail has faded. But it does appear that within twenty-four hours the tale was common currency among all but six members of the village population: Marion herself, the vicar, Gideon Robertson the fisherman, Peter the barman and Mr and Mrs John Hall at the Bell Inn.

Versions of the seagull story varied in their particulars, especially when it came to the final outcome. Marion had left the Reverend Lender without revealing the course that God had chosen through the medium of the seagull. But the vicar told his wife that
he
was sure that the piece of bread snatched up by the first gull had in
fact
corresponded to one of the potential fathers, and not to either of the less palatable options of single parenthood or termination of the pregnancy.

Eventually, of course, the story
did
find its way to the three putative fathers.

The first to appear at the gate of 4 Briny Hill Walk was the landlord of the Bell Inn. John Hall was a bulldog of a man, a former SAS soldier, built like a rugby full back and with a face as red as a strong rosé wine, a neck as wide as a cider barrel and a look of permanent outrage. He stormed up the pathway and rapped belligerently on the door. Marion admitted him, and the door was closed for almost an hour before he left the cottage, as scarlet-faced and furious as he had been on arrival. It hadn't been an easy encounter. He demanded to know what Marion thought she was doing, spreading rumours through the village; rumours that he, Sergeant Hall, the innocent and irreproachable landlord of the inn, had somehow fathered a child by her. He, the blameless husband, the ex-soldier with the spotless reputation, was now tarred with the brush of suspicion.

‘Don't you remember fucking me, down in the beer cellar,' she asked, ‘with your trousers around your ankles and me pressed up against boxes of cider, while your wife pulled pints in the bar above our heads? Don't you remember lying me down on an old wooden pallet, and tearing my knickers in your haste to get your thing inside me? Don't you? Don't you?'

He might have wished to protest his innocence, but how could John Hall deny it? He was a military man; he was possessed of a code of honour. He squared up to the truth. ‘In that case,' he said, ‘you must tell me if the child is mine.'

‘Can't you tell yourself?' Marion replied. ‘Did you fire blanks from that thing? Didn't I have to douse myself with bottled water before going back to the bar, in case the smell of your spunk should give me away to your wife?'

It wasn't the only exchange that took place between Marion and John Hall that evening, but it was the one that mattered. One hour after he arrived, John Hall left 4 Briny Hill Walk in little doubt that the child in Marion's womb was his, but resolved to admit it to no one.

Gideon Robertson lumbered up to Number Four as the sun set, just a few hours after John Hall's visit. He did not march up and strike the door like the ex-soldier had done; instead he stood hesitantly at the gate of the cottage he had once shared with Marion, and for a while he sat on the low wall looking out at the tide, watching the last of the mackerel boats returning. The sun had disappeared beneath the Irish Sea before he headed gingerly up to the front door and tapped as gently as a child. He too was admitted.

How did this conversation go? There was much more history between Gideon and Marion. Theirs had not been a hasty knee-trembler in a beer cellar; they had shared a bed like husband and wife, had rolled nightly into each other's arms, had slept and caressed and loved and argued and done all those things that lovers do. Gideon was more hurt than angry; more concerned for Marion than for himself. He had no reputation to protect. ‘How are you taking all this gossip?' he asked her. ‘How will you manage this pregnancy on your own?'

He begged her to let him stay, flattered and cajoled in his big, cumbersome way. He made promises. He would look for work on the island. He would raise the child as his own with no care if it were his or some other man's. And there is no doubt that Marion found his suit difficult to resist. She cared for Gideon. So why didn't she relent, and let him take his place beside her and raise the child as his own? Was it the seagull and the bread that swayed her? Perhaps. Was it the fear that one dark night when the swell was high he would sail out and never return? Certainly this preyed on Marion's mind – she, who was the daughter of a man who had died at sea and the granddaughter of another. Did she look at him and see no future for herself or her baby? We do not know. All we know is that the interview took about an hour.

No one saw Peter the barman visit. He came after midnight, after the inn had closed its doors.

‘They are saying,' he said dramatically to Marion, ‘that you have fallen pregnant.'

Marion laughed at this ponderous accusation. ‘Fallen pregnant?
Fallen
? Is that how it happens? Why didn't they teach us this at school? Well, well. And I always imagined there would be some screwing involved.'

Peter sheepishly corrected himself. ‘They're saying you are with child.'

Marion was weary of these encounters by now. She was in her dressing gown and the two were standing in her kitchen. ‘Are they really,' she said with some sarcasm in her voice. ‘Well it must be true then, if that's what they're saying.'

‘They are saying,' insisted Peter, ‘that I'm the father.'

‘Well, well,' said Marion again. ‘And could it be true?'

‘You must tell me,' said Peter. ‘Tell me if it's true.'

‘Don't you remember being in my bed?' asked Marion.

Peter looked bowed. ‘Of course I remember.'

‘And do you remember wearing any protection?'

The boy shook his head.

‘And didn't they teach you at school in England what might happen if you come into a girl with no protection?'

‘I thought . . .'

‘What did you think, young Peter?'

‘I thought you were on the p-pill.' He stammered this out.

‘And did you ask me? Did you ask if I was on the p-p-p-pill?'

He shook his head again.

‘No,' she said. ‘You didn't. You just assumed.'

‘So I
am
the father then?'

She looked at him. He was eighteen. He was slight and pale and he was frightened of what she might say, of what this might mean.

‘Do you remember that day . . . up by the stream?'

He bobbed his head.

‘We lay in the long grass.'

‘I remember. We were underneath a hornbeam tree.'

‘Is
that
what it was? You quoted poems to me as the sun went down.'

‘ “Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?” '

‘That was one of them.'

‘ “Thou art more lovely and more temperate”.'

She slid an arm around him.

‘Was it that day?' he whispered.

‘Of course not.' She allowed their eyes to meet. ‘That was September.'

‘ . . . And this baby?'

‘Was conceived in November.'

‘Ah,' he said. ‘ “Winter when icicles hang by the wall . . .” '

‘Is this another poem?'

‘ “And Dick the shepherd blows his nail, and Tom bears logs into the hall, and milk comes frozen home in pail”.'

She laughed and pretended to slap him but he caught her hand and held it.

‘So, is it mine?'

‘Where were you in November?'

‘You know where I was in November.'

‘Then you know as much as I do.'

He released her hand. They were both breathing heavily now. Softly he recited, ‘ “Not yesterday I learned to know, the love of bare November days, before the coming of the snow”.'

‘Is this another poem?'

‘Robert Frost.' He held her then, and whispered the lines into her ear. And a little while later they went up the small staircase to bed.