I clung on to Benjamin’s hand, tighter than before. I told myself it would make him feel safer.
“This is cool!” he said. “We’re really going to America?”
“Shh,” I said. “Of course we are.”
“I’m hungry.”
“You’ve had breakfast.”
“That was ages ago.”
“Miss?”
That was someone else’s voice. The woman in front of me had vanished.
“Come on, love,” said a voice a way behind me, and I knew people were glaring at my back.
I held out our passports, with our boarding passes tucked inside.
Benjamin gave me a tiny tug on my hand, which meant farther forward, so I shuffled a bit and heard a man sigh.
“Just the boarding passes.”
I dropped Benjamin’s hand and slid the slips of card from the passports, and held them out.
“Trying to be clever, are we?”
“No, I…”
I guessed what he meant. I held my arm even farther out and felt the passes snatched away from me.
There was silence. Just the noise of the airport all around; announcements, people’s voices, machines buzzing, and security alarms beeping somewhere ahead of us.
“Take your glasses off, please,” said the man. He said please in that way people do when they really don’t mean it.
I didn’t want to, but I took my sunglasses off.
Then he said, “Look into the camera.”
I panicked.
“Benjamin…”
“Look, we haven’t got all…”
I heard the man’s voice change direction, and then stop as he looked at me.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“There’s nothing wrong with her,” said Benjamin angrily.
“Shh, Benjamin,” I said, loving him for being on my side, but at the same time cringing in case he made things worse. I tried to move him away from the man, away from his equipment. The last thing I wanted now was for the Benjamin Effect to strike.
The man ignored him anyway.
“What’s wrong with your eyes?” he said. “Just look into the camera, will you?”
I didn’t. I couldn’t.
“What’s wrong with you?”
That was it. Too much. Tears started to come, and I snapped.
“There’s nothing wrong with me,” I said.
Then there was another voice. A passenger behind me. He had an old voice, dry and deep, and I heard him move beside me.
“Now come on, can’t you see the young lady is visually impaired?”
“She what?” said the guard dog.
“I’m blind,” I said. “Blind. And I don’t know where your stupid camera is. Okay?”
There was a long silence from the guard dog, and a whole big bunch of muttering and whispering behind me. My cheeks started to burn, and I flailed for Benjamin’s hand.
“Well, what about him?” the guard dog said.
“He can look into your camera if it makes you happy.”
“Are you allowed to be traveling?”
Then the nice gentleman next to me got cross. I mean I think he was actually cross on my behalf, and gave the guard dog an earful about discrimination and rights and customer service and I don’t remember what else.
The guard dog seemed to panic then, he wanted to get rid of us as fast as possible.
“Could you do that all the time, please?” I said to the man who’d stuck up for me.
Suddenly we were through, and whoever he was helped me get Benjamin through the scanners, where there was another set of guard dogs only a bit less scary than the first. The man told us that we had to take liquids and metal stuff out of our bags, and he even waited on the other side until we were all done.
“Can I help you any further?” he asked.
I turned to his voice. I know people feel weird if I don’t pretend to look at them when I speak to them.
“I meant what I said,” I told him. “People aren’t always as kind as you…”
I stopped. He didn’t need to know, I was sure of that. He’d done more than his good deed for the day, and his help was way nicer than what I often get when I’m out in public.
Second gate passed, I thought, the guard dogs were dealt with. I reached for Benjamin’s hand.
“Can we have breakfast now?” he asked.
The man laughed and said goodbye.
“Second breakfast, you mean,” I told him.
“Second breakfast, then,” he said. “Can we?”
* * *
We found somewhere to eat, and that was quite easy. Benjamin started to read me the menu but I always have the same thing in Café Rouge anyway.
Benjamin made sure Stan was eating, too.
“It’s a long flight to American, isn’t it?”
“America,” I said, correcting him. “Yes. Do you remember?”
“No. I was tiny.”
“You still are.”
“Don’t be horrible,” he said, and I apologized.
“It was only two years ago,” I said. “Not even that.”
I remembered the trip. New York, two years ago. Dad’s fortieth birthday. The four of us.
“Why is Dad in American … America?” said Benjamin.
“He’s working on a book,” I said. “I think.”
“What book?”
“That book,” I said.
“Oh,” said Benjamin. “Yes. That book.”
* * *
Maybe I should mention that book.
Dad had been working on that book for a long time. A very long time.
That’s why I knew about such strange things as numinosity when I was twelve, and apophenia when I was thirteen, and a whole lot about these crazy men with funny names like Jung and Pauli. It all happened in the car, on our journeys to and from school.
When Mum picks me up, which isn’t so often, we talk about school, and lessons, and food. Things like that. She likes to hear that stuff, but if I try and tell her about my friends, like about how Robert’s sight is still getting worse, she changes the subject. Usually to clothes. That winds me up a bit because I know why she does it. It’s because she used to do it a lot when I was little, teaching me about clothes and making sure I keep myself clean and brush my hair so I always look nice. Funnily enough, I can do that myself now, but she still seems to think I’m eight and have food down my front all the time. I guess it’s only because she cares, and besides, it was Mum who taught me that jeans are good because jeans go with everything, and that’s very useful stuff to know.
So we chatter away about clothes and TV and so on when I’m in the car with Mum, and by the time we get back, I feel I’ve caught up on home life again.
With Dad it’s different. It’s almost like he’s not interested in me at all, and you might think I’d hate that, but I don’t, because I get to just listen to him, and talk to him, and he talks to me as if I’m much smarter than I actually am, which has the strange effect of making me feel a bit smarter than I am.
I loved sitting next to him in the car when I was little. I could feel him next to me and smell that smell that was a mixture of the old wool coat he had and him. And ever since I was little, when Dad picks me up, he tells me about what he’s working on, the ideas he’s going to use, and cool things he’s read about.
When I was younger, I know he had one book published every year, and people liked them a lot. He wrote funny books, and I know they sold well because he told me so, and because we used to have really nice holidays. Mum loves her job, but being a nurse is not well paid, which I don’t understand. It must be tough to do it properly, so she ought to get more than she does, I think, but Mum told me I was naïve when I said that.
If Dad’s writing’s not going so well, we tend to hang out at Granny’s in Cumbria, which is nice, too, or at Auntie Sarah’s, which is not so nice, because of my cousins.
So after a few years, Dad wrote a really different book. It was called The Fifth
Gate, and it was different because it was more serious, he told me. He wrote another one after that. I know they didn’t sell well because he didn’t tell me so.
Mum kept saying he should write the funny books again, but Dad said he didn’t want to. He said he didn’t feel funny anymore; he said he wanted to write serious books. Mum said they weren’t serious, they were miserable, and then there was a seriously big argument, which still makes me hurt if I think about it, so I try not to.
Dad started traveling more after that. Looking for things to write about that would make good stories, even though we didn’t have as much money as we used to. Mum and Dad stopped talking about his writing; or if they do, I’ve not heard them, anyway.
It still gets to Dad, the business about his old books. All the time, when he meets people, and they realize who he is, they say the same thing.
“Oh, oh, yes,” they say. Then there’s a pause of about four seconds. “Yes, I like your earlier books. The funny ones. They were great.”
It’s a miracle he hasn’t killed anyone. Yet.
And then, Dad had an idea for a new book, which he said was neither funny, nor serious. I didn’t understand what he meant by that.
“What’s it about?” I asked.
We were in the car on the way home from school. Term had ended and he’d come to pick me up for Christmas.
He always says the same thing when he picks me up. He comes to my room, where I’ll have been waiting for him. I’m usually the last to go because Dad is always late, so I’m always worrying that something has happened, and then I hear footsteps outside and I know it’s him.
“Shall we?” he says.
And I always say the same thing back.
“Why not?”
Then we laugh, and Dad carries my bag and holds my hand and we get into the car for the ride home.
And this particular time he told me about his new idea.
“Well,” he said, “it’s about coincidence.”
* * *
Mr. Walker had emailed me pictures of three pages, and I’d forwarded them to my email and saved them on my phone. One of them was the inside front cover, the bit that talked about the reward and so on. The others were some of Dad’s pages of notes about coincidence, and while we had second breakfast, I got Benjamin to read it to me.
THE FIRST PAGE
Learn something the hard way, Jane always says …
Learn something the hard way and you won’t forget it.
In which case, I ought to remember this stuff till the day I die. My brain is starting to melt.
So, a quick recap:
Coincidences: a coincidence is when two or more things happen or occur together even though there seems to be no CAUSE for them to do so.
They are much misunderstood. So …
Maybe there should be some sections explaining PROBABILITIES?
Some coincidences that seem remarkable ONLY DO SO because most people do not understand much about MATHEMATICS.
Use, for example, the Birthday Problem:
You’re at a party and you meet someone with the same birthday as you. Pretty amazing coincidence, you say to each other. You laugh about it. You tell your wife; Hey, come over here! This guy has the same birthday as me! Cool huh?
All the way home you have that nice little feeling you get when a coincidence happens to you.
But should you really be so amazed?
If you were to do the maths, you could work out for yourself that you only need 23 people in a room for there to be a better than fifty-fifty chance that two of them share the same birthday.
Given that it’s a pretty stinky party that has less than 23 people at it, this kind of thing must happen all the time.
In a classroom of 30 students, you might be amazed if the teacher gets you all to call out your birthdays, and you find two of you have the same one. But the way the maths works means that with 30 students there’s around a 70% chance that this is true. With 57 people in the room, the chance is a coincidence-busting 99%.
Not so amazing after all.
It’s all about probabilities.
There’s even a name for it; Littlewood’s Law, after a professor at Cambridge. Professor Littlewood defined a miracle as something that might have a one-in-a-million chance of happening. And then he worked out that given the huge number of events that a person experiences on a daily basis, you can expect to see something miraculous happen once every 35 days or so.
Which means that what appears to be a miraculous coincidence is actually rather ordinary.
THE STRAY BOOK
What Dad meant was this: He was trying to say that perhaps not all coincidences are that amazing. That you only need a little understanding of probability to see that sometimes it’s just a question of maths, and not a question of anything freaky going on.
Benjamin went back to feeding Stan, and I thought about when Dad had first told me that thing about birthdays. It was ages ago. I was probably still struggling at primary school and I wasn’t getting on great with anything, let alone mathematics that were way too hard for an eleven-year-old.
But I understood now.
I tried to get Benjamin to read it to me again, but he moaned and said it was hard, so I left it. He’s a good reader for his age, but I was having to zoom in and all around the photo Mr. Walker had sent, since I didn’t dare let Benjamin touch my phone. If anything happened to it I knew I was in big trouble. So I was pinching and zooming where Benjamin told me to, but it was slow and frustrating getting it right. On top of that, Benjamin said the photos were a bit fuzzy. And then there were some pretty long words in there, but then that’s Dad for you; he does seem to like using long words when short ones would do just fine.
Although Benjamin struggled a bit with probabilities, he knew coincidence, since Dad had been banging on about it for probably almost all of Benjamin’s life. Benjamin still prefers to call them “co-inky-dinks” because he found it hard to say when he was younger and it kind of stuck.
Coincidences had become Dad’s thing. So when we talked about that book, it was all we needed to say.
That book that wouldn’t get written. That book that seemed to have stopped Dad from writing anything else. That book that meant Mum would rather go to Auntie Sarah’s party in Manchester than worry about whether her husband had gone missing.
To be fair, she had a point. Dad was not himself, even he admitted it, and Mum wasn’t the only one who wished he’d just give up on that book and write something else instead. Preferably something funny.
I remember way back, Dad announced over dinner that he had made an important discovery. Given that he’d probably been working on that book for so long already, I think we were expecting something pretty spectacular. A really rather ground-breaking announcement, but what we got was this: the reason, Dad said, that he was having trouble writing about coincidence was that it was a very hard thing to write about.
He stopped and waited. In the silence, Mum said, “That’s it?”
“That’s quite a lot,” Dad said, already sounding defensive. He spoke quickly and his voice was a little higher than usual.
“Listen,” he said. “It’s like this. There’re two reasons why writing about coincidence is impossible. First, think about when a coincidence happens to you. It feels pretty incredible, doesn’t it? You get that shiver down the back of your neck, and you think to yourself, what does it mean? That’s the point, isn’t it? It feels as though it has to mean something. And it feels incredible, so you turn to the nearest person, and you tell them, and they have that look in their eye, and they say, in a really flat voice, ‘Yeah. That’s amazing.’ And then they change the subject as fast as possible.”
“What look?” I asked. “What look in their eye?”
“Oh, well, it’s hard to say,” Dad said. “They sort of look over your shoulder, not into your face, and you can just see what they’re thinking.”
“You can see what they’re thinking?”
&nb
sp; “Not literally, Laureth,” Mum said. “He just means you can see they’re not impressed. There’s no reaction on their face.”
“Yes, that’s it, Jane,” said Dad. He sounded calmer. “That’s just it. There’s no reaction. It doesn’t mean anything to them, because it didn’t happen to them. And usually it sounds pretty lame. I mean, say you’re on the way home and you’re thinking about salmon.”
“Salmon?”
“Salmon, Manchester United, the moon landings. Quadratic equations. Anything—but let’s say you’re thinking about salmon. And then just as you’re thinking about it, you drive past a huge advert with a picture of Scotland and there’s a salmon leaping out of a river.”
“Yeah,” said Mum. “That’s amazing.”
“I know it’s not,” said Dad irritably. “That’s my point. If it happens to you, it seems cool, but you tell anyone else about it, and…”
“They’re not impressed,” I said. “So why does that make it hard to write about?”
“Like I said, two reasons. First, because it’s impossible to get anyone else to feel the way you do when the thing happens to you. It might not sound impressive to anyone else in real life. So it’s sure as hell not going to seem impressive on the pages of a book. No tingles up the back of the neck.”
No one said anything. I was thinking about what Dad had said and Benjamin was stuffing his face and chatting quietly to Stan.
“So that’s one thing,” Dad said. “So then, what do you do? In order to make your reader think your coincidence is cool, you exaggerate it. You make it a whopper. Huge, extravagant, and very, very unlikely to have happened. You see a salmon while thinking about a salmon while sitting next to a man whose name is Salmon who works for the Alaskan Salmon Foundation, and is wearing salmon-colored trousers. So what does that do for you?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I don’t care,” Mum muttered. I think she was trying to be funny. Dad didn’t take it well.
“I bloody care,” he said. “What it does for you is absolutely the opposite of what you wanted. You’re trying to impress your reader, and what happens is the reverse. Why? Because ludicrous coincidences are well known by everyone to be what terrible writers use to get themselves out of problems with their plot.”