Coincidence: A Novel (28 page)

Thomas leads Luke to his seat. ‘When did you . . . lose your sight?'

‘Oh, you know. A long time ago. Long enough to be fairly used to it, anyway.' Luke lowers himself carefully into his seat. ‘Have you thought about how long you're going to stay?'

Thomas looks around. The children seem to span an age range from possibly nine or ten through to late teens. All wear simple blue uniforms and plastic sandals, and Thomas notes that there is a crest badge in white embroidered cotton on every breast pocket. The badge reads, ‘The Rebecca Folley Centre for the Children of Conflict'. There are a dozen adults, too, one wearing the uniform of a nurse, one in a business suit with a starched shirt, several dressed like the security man at the gate. They all have cheerful faces, the stoic yet jovial expressions of men and women who follow a calling. The big cook is ladling stew onto tin plates, a younger cook in a tall chef's hat is straining potatoes, two of the older girls are delivering jugs of water to the tables. It is a scene of practised routine, of comfortable, homely domesticity. But in the eyes of the children, Thomas fancies, just for the brief flicker of a moment, he can see something else. Something burns in those eyes, in those nervous, fleeting expressions that tell of a different, darker narrative. Every child in this hall has their own story, Thomas thinks. And every story is one of violence and unhappiness, of pain and loss.

Luke is facing him, waiting for an answer to his question.

Outside the mess hall the sky is the colour of bougainvillea.

‘Have you given it any thought?' Luke asks.

And truly Thomas hasn't. ‘It depends,' he finds himself saying.

‘Upon what?'

And to this question he possesses no answer.

Outside, and up the driveway, a car is approaching, and the gate is being swung aside to let it pass. Thomas rises to his feet. Something pulls him forward. He takes a hesitant step, and then another.

Along the driveway the old car is rattling in a slipstream of dust.

The car door opens. In the amber glow of sunset, a glimpse of hair that seems like a flame.

And now she steps out, lifting herself into a world she thought she was leaving, on a day she believed she would never see. Her gaze flickers out toward the mess hall, and her expression transforms into a smile.

27

November 2012

f
ar far out on ocean's swell

and all is well

all is well

 

the clapping of the klaxon bell

and all is well

all is well

 

the crack of boots on iron deck

a silent twisting of the neck

the echo of a distant yell

and all is well

all is well

 

the slamming of a steel hatch

the sliding of a heavy latch

a crashing hammer blow from hell

and naught is well

naught is well

 

and thirty years of darkness pass

black paint upon my looking glass

and time placates that lethal shell

all will be well

all will be well

 

a visitor from long times past

unlashed me from the mizzen mast

she led me from the deathly knell

to where a young man never fell

to where the memories dispel

and all is well

all is well

 

so let cruel providence compel

the exodus of personnel

and when the mysteries foretell

the coming of the sentinel

then send for me

and I will tell

that all is well

all is well

 

p. j. loak

 

. . . there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.

If it be now, 'tis not to come;

if it be not to come, it will be now;

if it be not now, yet it will come:

the readiness is all:

William Shakespeare,
Hamlet

 

P. S.
Insights, Interviews & More . . .

About the author

Meet J. W. Ironmonger

I
N
M
AY 2011
I flew into Kampala with my son, Jon, and together we set off on an overland journey through Uganda to West Nile Province. For me it was nostalgic return to a place I once knew well. I was a teenager when I first made this trip, working as a spanner-boy for my brother-in-law, Graham “Doop” Doupé. Doop was an engineer, employed on a series of well-intended construction projects funded by the government of Sweden. His work took him the length and breadth of Uganda. He and I spent a good few weeks on hospital building sites in places like Gulu, Moyo, and Arua, all townships close to the borders of Congo and Sudan, and all locations that would eventually feature in
Coincidence
. I developed an enormous affection for the region and its people on that trip. We stopped one afternoon, in a place whose name I have long forgotten, and we shared a beer with a missionary couple in the shade of their veranda. Afterward they showed us around their makeshift school, their refectory, and their basic clinic, and this was the place I visited in my memory and my imagination when I wrote about the mission in Langadi.

I was born in Africa. My father was a British civil servant, part of the Colonial Service in Kenya. My mother was a typist at Shell Oil. The need for colonial administrators disappeared after Kenyan independence in 1963, and my father became a bursar at Nairobi University. We lived in a succession of houses on the outskirts of the city, and I grew up (like so many of my contemporaries) comfortable in English and Swahili cultures, fluent in both languages, barefoot, sunburned, with a taste for local delicacies and a familiarity with the all the bugs, snakes, and hostile plants that infested the landscape around Nairobi. It was an extraordinary place to be a child. Now and then, the wildlife of the savannahs invaded our domain: A neighbor's dog was eaten by a leopard. A local man was killed by a puff adder. Vervet monkeys robbed fruit from gardens. Africa was right on our doorstep. It was sometimes frightening. But it was always magical.

At the age of thirteen I was dispatched to school in England. The high cost of flights meant that for the next few years I would wave goodbye to my parents in January and I wouldn't see them again until July. And as I write this paragraph it strikes me, for the very first time, that this was when (and why) I became a writer. I would write epic letters back home to my family, letters so long I could barely squeeze them into envelopes. I spared my parents no details of life at my English boarding school: the cold dormitories, the bullies, the canings, the rugby games played on frozen pitches, and (to use a word that may be unfamiliar to American readers) the “fagging.” (My online dictionary defines fagging as:
the practice whereby a student at a British public school is required to perform menial tasks for a student in a higher class
. That pretty much covers it.)

I'm conscious, now, that this portrays my schooldays in England as an ordeal. They weren't. This was Hogwarts but without the magic. (Or the girls.) It was a place where learning was an adventure, where Shakespeare was performed and revered, where I became an athlete and learned to fence, and made strong friendships and became a writer.

Now here is a coincidence: I sat in my school common-room alongside two friends who have both become successful novelists. Colin Greenland writes science fiction. His best-known novel,
Take Back Plenty
, won several major awards. Humphrey Hawksley is a journalist who writes political thrillers, bestsellers in Britain, with titles like
Absolute Measures
and
The Third World War
.

Perhaps our school put something in the water.

In
Coincidence
there is a character called Luke Folley who drifts a little after leaving school. He is swept up by the hippie culture of the sixties, the drugs, the music, and the casual lifestyle. This wasn't me, but it nearly was. I see in Luke the man I almost became. I saw Jimi Hendrix play the Isle of Wight festival in 1970 (his last concert ever), and it lives in my memory as a week of excess, musical ecstasy, and near-starvation. Somehow, it brought me to my senses. But I know how Luke Folley felt when he sat on his boxes and saw his dreams dissolving in the London rain.

The sixties ended and we all grew up. The Beatles had split, psychedelia was evaporating, hairstyles were becoming more sensible (slowly), and my generation in England was faced with the economic realities of the seventies. I went to university, met and married a wonderful girl (Sue), and plotted to become a zoologist. I had met zoologists in Africa. They had the most glamorous lives I could imagine. They trailed around the national parks in Land Rovers, with scientific instruments and long-lensed cameras. They hung around beach bars in Mombasa regaling tourists with unlikely tales of man-eating lions and charging rhinos. I wanted to do that.

For a while it all looked good. I studied zoology, and my wife had become a zoologist herself. I wrote an eight-hundred-page thesis on leeches, and in 1979 set off to teach zoology at a University in Nigeria. I was back in Africa. But it was short-lived. The job fell apart under a welter of disorganised bureaucracy and we fled back to London. I took a job selling computers, and for three decades that was where I built my career. Our daughter, Zoe, made her appearance, and a few years later our son, Jon. We made a home in the north of England, we had livestock and horses; and in the long winter evenings I started to write.

My first novel,
The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder
, tells the story of a young man who sets out to catalogue his brain. He locks himself away in the empty library of his manor house, closes his curtains, and thus insulated from the world, starts his grand project. It will, he imagines, take him three years to record every scrap of information in his brain, every memory, every conversation, every half-remembered lyric. But he's wrong. It takes him thirty years, and it costs him his life. Max Ponder and I share many of the same memories. We grew up in the same Nairobi suburbs, went to the same schools, and shared, as eleven-year-olds, a similar trauma in Uganda.

Would Uganda be a recurring theme for me? In 2010 I started work on
Coincidence
. I had been struggling to choose between two competing ideas for a second novel. In my first idea, I would revisit East Africa. I wanted to tell a story set in West Nile, a tale that would cast light upon the decades of civil war and conflict the region has suffered. In particular I planned to feature the monstrous activities of Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army. I wanted to expose this dark piece of modern history. Perhaps, I thought, I could set it in a mission, like the one I had visited as a teenager.

My second idea was more prosaic, but better developed. In this story I would explore determination and free will. The central character would be an academic, a creature of science who could not believe that the universe would do anything but play dice with our lives. His worldview would be challenged by a series of encounters with coincidence. I made the decision to go with this idea. A week before Christmas I started to write. One winter morning, I was walking my dog across the fields behind our home, contemplating the character of Azalea. She would have a more exotic background than the one I had planned for Thomas. Perhaps, I thought, she could grow up in Africa. And before I reached my gate I had an insight. Maybe this was my Uganda novel after all. All I had to do was to find a way to get Azalea to Acholiland.

So this was why, four months later, Jon and I found ourselves waiting on the Nile wharf at Laropi for the ferry that would carry us across to West Nile. I had to go back if I was to write Azalea's story. The civil war in this corner of Africa was over. The LRA was in retreat. Elections had just been held. This was a country and a people that I felt I knew. Under a blazing sun we boarded the ancient vessel. There were hippos watching us as the ropes were untied, and we started across the great river to the green hills beyond.

About the book

Explaining Kony

T
HIS STORY
is a work of the imagination. All the characters in this book are fictional, and none is based on any person, living or dead. Except:

Joseph Kony is a real person. His cult-like Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) has been operating in Uganda, Sudan, and the Congo for more than twenty years. The BBC reports that tens of thousands have been killed by the LRA, and one and a half million people have been displaced. Thousands of children have been abducted. No one knows how many have been mutilated. As far as we know, Joseph Kony is alive and still evades capture.

The abduction of children from the Sacred Heart Secondary Boarding School for Girls and the St Mary's Girls School were real events. In March 1989, the LRA raided St Mary's Girls School and abducted ten schoolgirls and thirty-three seminarians and villagers. Nine of the ten girls eventually escaped. The tenth was killed some years later.

As recently as Christmas Eve 2008, according to the United Nations peacekeeping force, the Lord's Resistance Army massacred 189 people and abducted twenty children during a celebration sponsored by the Catholic Church in Faradje, Democratic Republic of Congo.

Joseph Kony is ranked as the seventh most-wanted criminal in the world. Like me, you may be left wondering who the other six are, and how their crimes could possibly exceed his.

BBC reports have described how Kony created an aura of fear and mysticism around himself. His rebels follow strict rules and rituals. They are commanded always to make the sign of the cross before fighting. They are also instructed to take oil and draw a cross on their chest, forehead and shoulder, and to make a cross in oil on their guns. They believe that the oil is the power of the Holy Spirit.

In 2003, Uganda's parliamentary defense committee proposed hiring South African mercenaries to “eliminate” LRA rebels. Uganda's president squashed the idea, saying that the suggestion to hire mercenaries showed a lack of confidence in Uganda's army.

The missions depicted in Langadi and Kakuma were invented for the purposes of the story, and are not intended to resemble any missions present or past.

As for free will: No one can say for certain if we have it or we don't. Neuroscientists have developed ways of measuring brain activity that suggest that the unconscious part of the brain is active in making a decision around half a second before the conscious brain, and some have theorized that this is proof of determinism. Not every neuroscientist accepts these conclusions, and you may prefer to go along with Søren Kierkegaard, who argued that God would hardly have wasted his time creating us if all we were going to do was to follow a predetermined path. Whatever you choose to believe, you will probably want to agree with the philosopher John Locke, who argued that the whole debate is largely irrelevant. If it feels to us like free will, then let's treat it as free will and get on with our lives. A lesson that Thomas Post, eventually, may have grasped.