Coincidence: A Novel (6 page)

‘But that assumes,' he went on, ‘that we're all randomly distributed around the country. In reality we can ignore big chunks of the population. We don't need to count children, or the very elderly, or stay-at-home farmers, or the housebound, or people in prison, or anyone you simply wouldn't bump into on a train from London. That should increase your likelihood of a chance encounter to one every fortnight. So the next time you meet a friend in Covent Garden, don't say, “What a coincidence meeting you here!” Because it isn't.'

‘So what are the chances,' he asked them, ‘that two of us will share the same birthday?'

Many of the students had encountered this conundrum before. A quick poll of birthdays was held. In a gathering of twenty-three people, Thomas knew, there is more than a fifty per cent likelihood that two will share a birthday. The maths is counter-intuitive; most people would consider it a great coincidence if two guests at a party shared a birthday. In fact, with the twenty-five students in the room, it would be more unusual if
no
birthdays were shared. As each student called out his or her birthday, there was an air of expectation; but no two matched. Thomas held up his hand. ‘There's one more person left,' he said, and he pointed to himself. ‘My birthday is on the thirtieth of June.' There was a gasp and some applause. ‘Who shares my birthday?' asked Thomas. ‘Can you please stand up?'

A student towards the back of the lecture theatre rose.

‘And can you remind the class of your name?'

The student grinned. ‘My name is Jonathan Post,' he said.

‘We have the same surname. How coincidental is that? And before you ask,' said Thomas, ‘we're not related.' He took a longer look at the student who was on his feet. ‘What did you do to your arm?' he asked.

Jonathan Post raised his arm. It was in a plaster cast.

‘The same name, the same birthday and the same plaster cast,' Thomas told his students. ‘Now go away and calculate the chances of that happening.'

Back in his office, the telephone was ringing. A woman gave her name and asked to speak to Dr Post.

‘Speaking,' said Thomas. He was still feeling a glow of satisfaction from his performance in the lecture hall.

‘Are you the Coincidence Authority?' the voice asked.

Thomas laughed. ‘I've been called a lot of things,' he said, ‘but I don't think I've ever been called that.'

There was an awkward silence.

‘All the same,' he added, ‘I think I'm probably the person you want.'

‘Oh good. I'm a colleague of yours,' said the voice on the phone, ‘from Birkbeck. I've been reading your paper on coincidence.'

‘Well you won't believe this,' said Thomas, ‘but not only have I just come from delivering a lecture on coincidence, but I'm holding that very paper in my hand. Well actually I'm not, because I have only one good hand at present, and that one is holding the telephone. But I'm looking at that very paper on my desk. So we have a coincidence right away.'

The woman laughed, and her laugh was like the tinkling of a wind chime. ‘What I should like,' she said, ‘is to come and talk to you about it.'

‘Of course,' said Thomas, feeling strangely light-headed, ‘any time.'

‘Is your office in the building in Russell Square?'

‘It is.'

‘Then I'll be there in twenty minutes,' she said. ‘I shall see you then.'

So it was, that while Thomas was reflecting on the general gullibility of the population to the very ordinariness of encounters that they still consider remarkable, a soft knock came at his door, and around the door popped the unmistakable face of the woman he had met on the escalator at Euston Station – Azalea Lewis.

Part Two

Losing Azalea

she dwells inside my picture frame

she has a face

she has a name

but i have neither sight nor sense

to trace her fading providence

engulfed in dreams i still await

the calculating hand of fate

but ash from fortune's spiteful cast

has sealed my celebration fast

and thus my providence amassed

its covenant and weight

p. j. loak

8

June 2012

‘I
need to digress a bit,' Thomas says.

They have finished their lunch, but Clementine Bielszowska has an aversion to lifts, so rather than brave the endless flights of stairs back up to Thomas's garret, they are still in the canteen. The lunchtime press of students and staff has eased. It is quieter now, and easier to talk.

‘This whole story feels like one extended digression,' Clementine remarks, but she rests her hand on Thomas's knee to show that this isn't meant unkindly.

‘It isn't easy to put it all in order,' Thomas says. ‘There are different threads, and they all have a different starting point. Azalea's thread starts in Port St Menfre in the seventies. But Luke's thread starts much earlier.'

‘Luke?'

‘Luke Folley. The man who adopted Azalea.'

‘I see. And we need his thread?'

Thomas shuts his eyes as if banishing the light will focus his mind on the narrative. ‘Have you ever been to Uganda?'

‘Uganda? No.' Clementine is emphatic. ‘But I know where Uganda is. Have you been?'

‘No,' he shakes his head and there is a suggestion of disappointment in the gesture. ‘All I know is what Azalea told me.' He tries to imagine it, but how can you visualise a place you've never visited? He doesn't even have a photograph. He has scoured the internet for pictures looking for a mission that may, or may not, exist, and a township as remote from his world as any he might dream of; and he has tried to picture the hard red dust and the deep green hills, and the swirl of the great river. But imagination is no substitute for experience. Thomas knows this. He has heard these stories from Azalea. She can talk of the Albert Nile, and the markets of Gulu, and the voices of the Acholi people, and the cold eyes of the Lord's Resistance Army. But can he do the same?

‘It starts,' he tells Clementine, ‘in a little town called Langadi.'

9

1909–1984 / October 1969

T
he little township of Langadi lies north of the Nile River in that part of Uganda known as Moyo District in the province of West Nile. It is a remote place, the West Nile. It hugs the north and west borders of the country, cleanly severed from the rest of Uganda by the great river that snips off its top left corner. Only two fragile connections exist to link this secluded district to the rest of Uganda. One is an ancient ferry service that groans across the Nile at Laropi once every hour between sunrise and sunset, laden with lorryloads of produce from the south en route to the far-flung communities of West Nile and the markets of Sudan. The other is the great bridge at Pakwatch some two hundred miles or so, down perilous roads, to the west. Moyo town itself is little more than a straggle of buildings set around the confluence of half a dozen dusty murrum roads the colour of soft terracotta. There's a sprawling local marketplace and a handful of respectable buildings, and then a spidery network of poorly maintained dirt roadways and footpaths that link the town to its neighbours and to an endless succession of village communities each with its cluster of circular thatched Acholi huts, its farms, animals and ragged children. If you continue to travel north, past the patchwork of farms that roll out to the hills in the west and to the Nile Valley in the east, you will reach the border post with the country we must now call Southern Sudan – although in 1984, when Luke, Rebecca and Azalea Folley arrived in Langadi, the huge country to the north was all simply ‘Sudan', and the region to the north of the border post was the Sudanese district of Central Equatoria. The great civil war that had raged since the mid-1950s in Sudan subsided in the early 1980s, but this was only a temporary armistice; in 1983 it erupted again and would escalate brutally for another two decades as the largely non-Arab, non-Muslim southern Sudanese rebelled against the authoritarian, Islamic rule of the north. For Ugandan border townships such as Langadi, Moyo and Arua, and even for the regional capital, the city of Gulu, two hours' drive to the south-east, the conflict that affected their northern neighbour would encroach upon their life too. Even during lulls in the civil war, the Sudan People's Liberation Army – the SPLA – would mount cross-border attacks. Armed militia groups would cross the border to raid farms and market stalls for food to take to their comrades-in-arms in Sudan; shots would be fired, and sometimes casualties would result.

The upshot of this little piece of history was an influx, every year, of tens of thousands of refugees into a part of the world with a limited ability to accommodate them. It wasn't a particularly proud time in Ugandan history, either. It was a period that became known locally as the ‘Ugandan Bush War' when a whole chaotic gaggle of government and rebel groups pitted forces against one another. Tens of thousands would die in the skirmishes. What the arbitrary colonial mapmakers had done for the northern border of Uganda was hardly less ruinous than the mess they had made of Uganda itself, lumping together into a discrete geography a whole assortment of ethnic groups and tribes – many of whom had never particularly got on. Thus the majority Buganda people in the south were distrusted by the Acholi and the tribes of the north, much as the English are distrusted by the Scots and the French are distrusted by the English. And lest we are tempted to dismiss the bloodshed between tribes in Uganda as anything resembling the rivalry between the English and the Scots, or between the English and the French, it is helpful to remember how many years of bloody conflict arose from those disputes, and how many bodies ended up on battlefields.

To the Ugandan people it must have been a stressful and intensely wearying time. It certainly helped to bankrupt a country that was already very poor. The Uganda Ministry of Defence spent over a quarter of the government's revenue combating militias in 1983, and again in 1984, and yet the opposition kept on fighting, and the body count kept on growing.

This was the baffling, and rather intimidating, backdrop that confronted Luke and Rebecca Folley and their newly adopted daughter Azalea when they arrived in Langadi in January 1984. We first met the Folleys as primary-school teachers, but this was not their calling. Their true vocation was to be missionaries. Luke and Rebecca were to become teachers at the grandly named ‘Holy Tabernacle Mission of St Paul to the Needy of West Nile'. It was a new and rather frightening venture for Rebecca Folley, but for Luke it was a return home; the end of a brief, ill-fated period of rebellion that had swept him up a decade earlier. It began as a turbulent attempt by the young Luke to thwart his destiny, to defy providence and to carve out a life a long way from the northern hills of Uganda. Moving to Langadi wasn't a calling from God for Luke; it was an acceptance of his fate. Luke Folley was a
third generation
missionary. This was, if you like, the family
business
. Luke's grandfather, the Reverend Lester Baines Folley, a Cornishman and a preacher of the ‘fire-and-brimstone' variety, had founded the first Holy Tabernacle Mission of St Paul to the Needy at Langadi as long ago as 1907, when he was only thirty years old. These were early days for the white man in Africa, and Lester Folley was a pioneer, carving his way with considerable courage, and not a little recklessness, into the dark heart of Africa to bring the Good News of God to the villages of the West Nile. He was joined a year or so later by Elizabeth Jane Folley, the bride he had left behind in St Piran, and we can only imagine that she, too was as redoubtable as he. Lester Bryant Folley, their son, was born in the newly built Langadi Mission Hospital in 1909. The younger Lester grew up to inherit the running of the mission from his father. It was the first indication that each successive generation of Folley children would inherit an obligation to succeed to the family calling.

The earliest photographs of the Folleys that still exist are from the 1960s. It is possible that before this time, no one at the mission had thought to squander God's money on a camera. There are some snapshots of the second Lester (perhaps we should call him Lester Folley II). They appear to show an elderly man, for although Lester was only in his fifties at the time, Africa had taken a fierce toll on his constitution. He is slightly bowed at the back, with a wild silver beard, and is making an uncomfortable attempt at a smile. In every photograph he carries a carved ebony walking stick – a reminder of the parasitic diseases that afflicted him badly in his childhood, and which left him with limited movement in his right arm and leg.

Lester Folley II married a French mission doctor in 1942. The couple's first son, also christened Lester, made his appearance in 1944. Why don't we, for clarity and consistency, call him Lester Folley III? Luke Folley, his brother, the man who would later adopt Azalea, was born in 1948. Both sons were born at the same mission hospital in Langadi.

The little mission stumbled by from year to year on meagre donations, most of them from the United States. Each year the mission office would post out twenty thousand leaflets to churches and missionary associations in Europe and America detailing the good work that the St Paul Mission was doing and appealing for funds; and every year the donations would trickle in. In the warm evenings on the veranda of the mission house under the sweep of a great jacaranda tree, Lester and Monique would write by hand letters of thanks for every donation, however small. In each envelope they would enclose one small black and white photograph of a child from the mission orphanage with messages such as ‘A very big thank you from Moses', or ‘Many thanks from Mariah' crudely written on the back. Six weeks before Christmas, a small hand-coloured card would go out to each donor from Moses or Mariah, or whichever child had sent the first picture, and soon after, more donations would arrive.

This, then, had been the home of the Folley family for three generations: the whitewashed mission house, the church with its leaky corrugated-iron roof, the little four-room clinic and dormitory that called itself a hospital, the open-air mess and the two-room schoolhouse where generations of Langadi children had learned their reading and their numbers and their gospel stories.

There is a languid sense of abandonment that settles upon mission families, a comfortable torpor, an easy-going routine advanced by the agreeable climate and the slow pace of life, and the dust, and the singing of hymns, and the ringing of the mission bell. As history swept up the peoples of Uganda and Sudan, tossing them hither and thither like chaff in a wheat bowl, as European empires rose and then departed, and as the fireworks from independence parties gave way to the gunfire of new despots and transient militias, the mission, with its cluster of buildings, its school, its farmstead, its Sunday services and its quiet sense of duty became just another part of Langadi life. The white-painted board proclaiming
The Church of the Holy Tabernacle Mission of St Paul to the Needy of West Nile
became so faded that first-time visitors might have struggled to read it. But first-time visitors were rare, and why would local people need a sign? The farmstead grew bananas, sweet potatoes, maize, groundnuts, cassava, sorghum and sesame. The schoolrooms catered to gaggles of local children. The dormitories offered shelter to orphans. The clinic ministered to the sick.

The funds for the mission itself might have been in short supply, but church missionary societies in London had generous provisions to support the education of the
sons
of British missionaries. By the time the 1960s arrived, both Lester III and young Luke were back in England kitted out in grey worsted suits and bright straw boaters as pupils of a public school in Kent. Lester III, the elder brother, ever the star pupil, shone at Latin and Greek and history, and rugby and fencing and tennis; and despite the suspicion that none of these skills might be especially useful for a career in an orphanage in the centre of Africa, Lester nonetheless set his sights upon a return to Uganda to continue the family tradition. While his contemporaries were packing to go to Oxford or Cambridge, Lester departed for a theological college in Canterbury, and there he began to learn the lore and teachings of the Church of England. No doubt he would have studied the fine words of Archbishop Cranmer, the very ones intoned by the Reverend Doctor Jeremiah Lender just a decade or so later over the infant Azaliah Yves. Perhaps he would have learned the best way to hold a baby in a glossy christening gown over an old stone font. Unquestionably he would have employed his Greek and Latin to better understand the great scriptures that informed his faith. In that pivotal year of 1969, when the decade of free love was coming to a close, Lester Folley III was ordained as a priest; and with the ink still wet on his certificate of ordination, he returned to Langadi.

There is a saying in Uganda: ‘The older son inherits the farm, the younger son goes astray'. This is how it was for Lester and Luke Folley. Lester the diligent elder son had devoted himself to preparing for his return to the family mission; but could it ever be that simple for Luke? The times were a-changing, and Luke chose not to return. Although he might have said that he didn't exercise any choice at all. In a sense it was never a decision for Luke; it was, at best, the
deferring
of a decision. It was the brief rebellion of the prodigal son. As a non-decision, as a deferred decision, it was something that grew easier to bear with each day that passed. Luke Folley, a continent away from parental advice or family disapproval, did not excel in Latin or Greek or even, particularly, in history. He felt no calling to the priesthood. He developed a disdain for the prose of Thomas Cranmer. He dropped out of school and grew his hair. In the amiable language of the time, he found that he had somehow become a
hippie
. Comfortable with this new identity, Luke set about relishing the dying years of the 1960s. It was a career arc familiar to many of his generation. Together with a group of friends and like-minded dropouts, he moved into a squat in Ladbroke Grove. Burning with enthusiasm, the squatters changed the locks, repainted the walls with paisley swirls and psychedelic motifs, spread posters on the walls of Hendrix and Dylan and Che Guevara and drew Ban the Bomb symbols on the doors in pink and yellow paint. With the decoration complete, they opened those doors to fellow squatters. At one time ten, or twelve, or even fifteen people might have shared the four-bedroomed home. Sleeping arrangements were free and easy. Property was theft. Luke flirted, as many did, with Marxism and dialectical materialism and free love and LSD. He made a little money doing casual jobs: stacking shelves in a chemist shop, offloading vegetables at Old Covent Garden Market, selling small quantities of marijuana. He learned to play the guitar, and wrote songs that were vaguely Dylanesque; he wore sandals and tie-dyed shirts and an inside-out sheepskin coat and a headband from Peru. It was the uniform of his day. His hair was uncut and unwashed. Soap was an invention of the bourgeoisie. He washed in cold water and smelt of patchouli oil. He read discarded copies of
Oz
magazine, and comic strips by Robert Crumb, and books by Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg and leaflets by Timothy Leary. He burned incense sticks and listened to the music of The Grateful Dead and Iron Butterfly and Jimi Hendrix. He protested against the war in Vietnam. He joined CND, and practised the ironic two-fingered V with its accompanying drop of the head and unhappy smile and dutiful chant of ‘Peace, man'.

With the great courage afforded by hindsight, Luke would later describe these as his ‘lost years'. He grew thin on his new vegan diet. He developed a morose look. He stopped replying to letters from his parents in Langadi, or from his brother Lester at the seminary in Kent. He gave up his job at Covent Garden Market because he couldn't manage the early-morning starts. He was sacked from the chemist shop because his appearance was unsuitable for a family business. He resisted the bourgeois temptation to sign on the dole, and took to playing his guitar in a subway at Marble Arch, effectively begging for small change. It was a desperate move for a desperate young man.