Coincidence: A Novel (16 page)

Azalea shook her head. ‘You tell me.'

‘OK. So you'd expect that the intervention of an intelligence capable of interfering with the way that everything unravels would leave one universe measurably different to the other.'

‘But we only have one universe,' Azalea pointed out.

‘Exactly,' Thomas thumped the table. ‘So let's extend our thought experiment to just one universe. What would be the characteristics of a universe determined by free will?'

‘I don't know.'

Thomas grinned. ‘Non-randomness,' he said, and he laughed at Azalea's perplexed expression. ‘We need to look for things in the universe that ought to be random, but aren't.'

‘What – like the distribution of stars, or something?'

He shook his head. ‘No. We need to look at the areas where we might
expect
free will to make a difference. And there is only one area where we can realistically look for that – and that has to be in
human events
.'

Azalea took a swig of her beer. ‘So we're looking for . . . what . . . miracles?'

‘Miracles, well yes, perhaps . . . but I don't really like the idea of miracles; coincidences, on the other hand, yes.' Thomas spread out his hands as if coincidences might just fall into them from above. ‘Look at it this way. Do you have a cleaner?'

‘What – like a vacuum cleaner?'

‘Like a person who comes into your flat and cleans?'

‘You clearly haven't seen my flat.'

‘OK, so you don't have a cleaner. But imagine if you did. Now imagine if you were to come back from work one day and look around your flat and you were to ask yourself, “Has my cleaner been here today or not?” How would you know? Easy. You'd look to see if the place was any tidier than when you left it. Let's say, for example, that when you left this morning your books were randomly distributed over the carpet in your living room.'

‘That's a fairly accurate description of my living room,' Azalea agreed.

‘Now when you get home you find your books are no longer in a random sprawl. Instead they are in a neat pile. Maybe they're now arranged on your shelves in alphabetical order by author. Ergo, you can conclude that a supreme cleaning being has visited and cleaned up your room.'

‘So,' she suggested, ‘you are looking for non-randomness in a random world?'

‘And they call that phenomenon “coincidence”,' said Thomas, ‘or sometimes “serendipity”. Or sometimes they simply call it luck.'

‘I see.' Azalea fell silent. The waitress arrived with two plates of fish and chips, and the subject fell off the radar for a while as they set about tackling the food.

‘So maybe my coincidences prove that the universe really is non-random,' Azalea said when they were able to pick up the conversation again.

‘Well, they're interesting,' Thomas agreed. ‘But coincidences always are.'

‘But you don't think they're significant enough to prove anything?'

‘Well, it certainly helps if you can demonstrate how unlikely a coincidence is. But remember the case of Violet Jessop. It isn't always easy to measure.'

‘I can imagine.'

‘Sometimes we can pick a coincidence and assign a fairly accurate probability value to it. Take the case of Richard Parker, for example.'

‘Richard Parker? Wasn't that the name of the tiger in . . .'

‘
The Life of Pi
?' Thomas finished the sentence for her. ‘Great novel. Yes it was. Yann Martel chose the name because of its association with a famous coincidence. It started with a novel by Edgar Allan Poe called
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
.'

‘Catchy title.'

‘It's the story of a whaling ship that sinks. All the survivors are adrift in a lifeboat and they draw lots to decide which one of them should be eaten. The unfortunate sailor who gets to be dish of the day is a cabin boy called Richard Parker. Then, forty years later, a real whaling boat called the
Mignonette
sank. And guess what?'

‘They ate a real cabin boy?'

‘Exactly. And his name was . . .'

‘Richard Parker?'

‘Spot on.' Thomas grinned.

‘Quite a coincidence.'

‘Yes.' He leaned back slowly, swinging his arms. ‘The interesting thing is that we can calculate just how much of a coincidence it was. We can look up actuarial tables from nineteenth-century America to find out how likely it would be that the real cabin boy on the
Mignonette
would also be called Richard Parker. And it turns out that Richard was a fairly popular name. Around seventeen boys in a thousand were Richards. And Parker was a common enough name, too. So if we do the maths, we find out that about twenty-five men in a million were Richard Parkers. There's your probability.'

She mused on this. ‘It's still a pretty startling coincidence.'

‘Of course. But you can't always work things out like that. Human events are tough to unpick. I meet a lot of people who come to me with extraordinary stories. And the thing they want to know is nearly always the same – is this just a remarkable coincidence, or is there something else at work here?'

‘And the answer is?'

‘ . . . Very hard to supply.'

‘Did you ever hear the story,' Azalea asked him, ‘about the man who walks past a telephone box?'

Thomas laughed. ‘And the phone is ringing . . .'

‘You know the story then?'

‘And when he answers the phone,' said Thomas, ‘it's his secretary. She wanted to call him but she made a mistake and she didn't dial his phone number, she called his social security number because that was written on his Rolodex card . . .'

‘And it just happened to be the telephone number of the very phone box he was walking past!'

‘Good story, isn't it?' Thomas said.

‘It is,' Azalea agreed. ‘Only when I heard it, it wasn't his social security number, it was his credit-card number.'

‘It often is,' said Thomas.

‘Often?'

‘There are dozens of versions.' He laughed again, his goofy, deep laugh. ‘I've found the story in about six different countries. Often the man has a name, but he's surprisingly difficult to track down.'

‘So it's an urban myth?'

He nodded. ‘Almost certainly.'

‘What about Kennedy and Lincoln? I remember reading a whole set of coincidences that linked the way they were assassinated. Like Kennedy was shot from a warehouse and the guy ran to a theatre, while Lincoln was shot in a theatre but his killer ran to a warehouse. That sort of thing.'

Thomas bobbed his head. ‘It's a famous set of coincidences – you're right.'

‘And is there anything in them?'

‘Well, according to the story Lincoln had a secretary called Kennedy and Kennedy had a secretary called Lincoln.' Thomas grinned. ‘It's nonsense, of course. Lincoln had two secretaries – one was called John Nicolay and the other was John Hay. Kennedy and Lincoln were born a hundred years apart. Big deal. How is that a coincidence? Both were shot by Southerners. Except that John Wilkes Booth was born in Maryland, which is not very
Southern
, really.'

She laughed along with him. ‘I always thought it was a strange coincidence,' she said, ‘that two of the great civilisations of the Mediterranean – Minoan Crete and Ancient Rome – turn out to be anagrams of each other.'

‘Only in English,' Thomas said.

‘Still, it's useful for the people who set crosswords.'

‘The problem is, you can't run any statistics on one unexpected event. And you especially can't do real statistics on an event that has been selected
after
the event, because all it means is that you're selectively excluding a whole set of events that don't coincide. So we can say what a coincidence that Minoan Crete is an anagram of Ancient Rome, but we conveniently ignore the Ancient Greeks, or the Egyptians, or the Mesopotamians or Sumerians. We can marvel at the coincidence of Richard Parker's story, but ignore the fact that Poe's captain was called Barnard while the real captain of the
Mignonette
was called Dudley. Or we can say that Lincoln and Kennedy each have seven letters in their surname, but quietly overlook the less convenient fact that Abraham has seven letters while John has only four. It's like spraying a barn door with a burst of machine-gun fire and then finding the tightest cluster of bullet holes, drawing a circle around them and saying, “There's our target – look how many random bullets hit the bullseye!” And even if you
could
calculate the chances of an unusual event happening, well, it doesn't really help. We are all the product of a whole host of staggeringly unlikely events.'

She raised her eyebrows. ‘We are?'

‘Oh yes,' Thomas said. ‘We are all fabulously luckier, and more unlikely, than any lottery-winner in history. Just consider that an average man can produce around one hundred million sperm a day – that would be about two thousand billion sperm in a lifetime, more sperm than there have ever been human beings on Planet Earth. Forget the one-in-fourteen-million chance of winning the English lottery – you had a one-in-a-thousand-billion chance of being born. So you, Azalea, are an amazing fluke of nature. And yet, here you are, sitting in a pub in Tiverton with another person who is also a one-in-a-thousand-billion lottery-winner. What are the chances of that?'

Azalea furrowed her forehead. ‘I see,' she said. ‘So what does this prove?'

‘It proves that you can't calculate chance retrospectively,' said Thomas, tapping the table for emphasis. ‘So when anybody comes to me and says, “Something astonishing has happened”, or, “What are the chances of this big coincidence that happened to me?” Well, I can always answer these questions. If you tell me that you bumped into your old childhood sweetheart in a souk in Cairo, and you ask me what are the chances of that happening, the answer is one hundred per cent. It is one hundred per cent certain to have happened, because it
did
happen.'

‘So you can't measure coincidence, then?'

‘I didn't say that,' said Thomas. ‘I said you can't measure coincidence
retrospectively
. But we can if we measure it proactively. So if you already met your long-lost childhood sweetheart in a Cairo souk, then the chances of that happening are one hundred per cent. But if you were to tell me that you're going to Cairo next week, and you want to know the odds that you
will
meet your lost sweetheart – well now, that's a different matter.'

They left the pub and took a stroll into the town. A thin wind blew down Angel Hill. Thomas tucked his broken arm into his coat and thrust his good hand deep into a pocket. Azalea hugged her coat around her.

‘Are we ready for the road?' Thomas asked when they had walked around the block and the pub came back into view.

They drove out of town with ease and were back on the motorway in less than ten minutes.

‘I've enjoyed the day,' Thomas said.

‘We've still got two hundred miles to go,' she reminded him.

‘I know. All the same . . .'

‘I've enjoyed it too.' She leaned across and placed a kiss upon his cheek. ‘Thank you for taking me.'

‘It has been a pleasure,' he said, and it was true at that moment, with the soft imprint of her kiss still on his face and the hint of her perfume in his nostrils.

‘Do you know what you should do?' she said.

‘What should I do?'

‘You should set up a website.' She sank into her seat and lifted her feet up onto the dashboard. ‘Somewhere where people can go and forecast a coincidence. People like me.'

‘You mean, there are others like you?' He meant this in jest.

‘There may be,' she said. ‘Who knows?'

‘And in what way, exactly, might they be like you?'

‘They'll be people who've been afflicted by coincidences, just like me. They'll know in their bones that it isn't just . . . random, or chance. Something, or someone, is messing with their lives. That's the kind of people they'll be.'

‘I see.'

She seemed taken by the idea now. ‘What you have to do is to give people the opportunity to predict a coincidence . . . or something really unlikely that they think is going to happen to them. This is for people who've already noticed a pattern developing in their lives. This way you'll be able to measure the coincidence, and it won't be retrospective.'

Thomas nodded slowly. ‘It's an interesting idea.'

‘It's more than an interesting idea, it's a brilliant one.'

‘If you say so.'

‘I do.' Azalea fell silent, pondering. ‘Then . . . what I shall need to do,' she said, ‘if I want to convince you that my coincidences are more than just unfortunate throws of the dice, is to go onto your site and forecast something that might happen to me at some time in the future.'

‘OK.'

‘And if I do that, and if the prediction comes true, then will you believe that something strange is happening?'

Thomas wasn't taking this seriously enough. He gave one of his gentle laughs.

‘So what if I predict that I'll have a chance encounter with a third man who claims to be my father?' Azalea pulled up a leg and began to unstrap her shoe.

‘You could do that,' said Thomas, ‘although it wouldn't constitute proof that the encounter – if it happened – was part of any predetermined destiny. It would still be anecdotal. It would be persuasive, I admit, but not necessarily compelling. Just because someone predicts that they'll win the lottery doesn't necessarily make it a miracle when they do.'

‘No, but if they predict that they'll win the lottery on the first Saturday of October with the numbers five, seventeen and forty-two,
that
would be a miracle,' said Azalea.