“I do. Shall we go and find somewhere less public in which to engage in our transaction?”
Then I started to like him a bit less. I didn’t want to be led anywhere by a child I’d only just met, especially as I thought I was meeting an adult.
“Listen, Mr. Walker—Michael. Where are we going? I just want the notebook and I have the reward money with me, so can we…”
“My dear Laureth,” he said. “Please do not be alarmed. I merely advise you that it is unwise to be seen to display sums of money in such a public area. You act as if you do not trust me.”
“Well, to be fair, you were supposed to be a grown-up, and—”
“Why was I supposed to? You made that assumption. I prefer to call myself Mr. Walker to people with whom I have not yet made a formal introduction.”
I was reduced to speechlessness once more.
“You yourself, it appears, are not as old as I was expecting. Nor of the same name. Nor even the same gender.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “I look after my dad’s emails, that’s all. I thought I’d get his notebook back for him.”
“Why didn’t he come himself? Does he usually send his children around the city to run errands?”
“No, no,” I said. “It’s just that … Look. I’m sorry, you’re right. Let’s go and sit somewhere less noisy.”
So he led us out of the library and back into the burning heat of the afternoon. I could smell the city wilting; exhaust from cars, even the scent of the tarmac blacktop melting under our feet.
He took us down the side of the building, and we sat on a bench in the shade, but it was still hard to breathe in the humidity.
“I have calculated that fifty British pounds is worth seventy-nine dollars. You can round that up to eighty if you like since I had to come out on such a hot afternoon.”
“I can, can I?” I said. “Just give me the stupid book and you can have a hundred dollars.”
“A hundred…!” began Michael, and for a second I heard that there might be a little kid underneath his posh voice after all. He recomposed himself quickly, though. “Very well,” he said, “Here it is.”
I put out my hands, but before I could find the book Benjamin took it and placed it there.
“Benjamin?” I said.
“Yes, that’s it,” he said.
“Sure?”
“Is there some reason you need your little brother’s opinion on this?” asked Michael, back in character.
“Yes, there is,” I said. “I can’t see. I’m blind.”
“Ah,” said Michael. “Something else you didn’t see fit to tell me.”
“I don’t see why I should have done.”
“Just as I don’t see why it was relevant to mention that I’m a young adult.”
“You’ve already made your point,” I said. I fished in my right-hand pocket and peeled off one of the hundreds. “My dad’s a generous man. I’m sure he’d be happy for you to have the extra twenty-one.”
“You still haven’t told me why he didn’t come himself.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I didn’t. Anyway, for that extra twenty-one, perhaps you could tell me where you found the notebook?”
“Does it matter?”
“It matters a lot.”
“Why?”
But that’s what I didn’t want to tell him. I’d only just met him; I didn’t trust him. He’d turned out to be some goofy twelve-year-old who spoke as if he had stepped from the pages of Dickens. And I was starting to panic about everything I’d got us into; flying to America without a plan or even a return ticket. What on earth had I been thinking? I knew I’d been angry with Mum, but that seemed a pretty pathetic reason right then.
I was worried about Dad, too—not just that he’d gone astray, but that something seriously bad had happened to him. How did I know this peculiar child wasn’t something to do with it? He had the notebook, after all.
I tried to keep my voice calmer than I felt.
“It matters a lot. Where did you find it?”
“I just found it.”
“So you said in your email. But where?”
Michael sighed.
“It means nothing to me, and probably nothing to you. I was sitting among the trees by the railroad tracks, on the vacant lot on Baisley Boulevard. I like to go there on days when I don’t care to visit school. I go there on vacations, too. It’s quiet and dark and no one … Anyway, I was sitting there yesterday morning rereading Pride and Prejudice when, out of the sky, the book fell on the ground at my feet. Came down through the trees. I thought it was a bird or something at first. That’s all I know. Then I emailed you. And here we are.”
“It fell? From the sky?”
“Just as I said.”
I hesitated. That couldn’t be all. I had to get him to tell me more, but I couldn’t tell him about Dad. Not in front of Benjamin, anyway.
“Benjamin. You still have that money from the taxi?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Yes, Laureth,” I said, bored with myself for sounding so tiresome, but Michael chipped in with “Quite right!”
“Yes, Laureth.”
“Good. Is there a place on the street selling drinks, in sight of here?”
“Yes. There’s a stand over there.”
“Close by?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Good. Go and get us all a drink and buy yourself something to eat if you want. Okay?”
“Okay,” he said, and I handed him the other twenty so he had enough money.
“Why did you do that?” asked Michael when Benjamin had gone.
“Please,” I said. “Please. Can you keep an eye on him? He’s sensible, but…”
“Very well,” Michael said.
Then I began to tell him, and once I’d started, I couldn’t stop.
“Look. The thing is … our dad’s gone missing. I know he’s in New York because he must have been here for you to find his book. Mum doesn’t care and Benjamin doesn’t understand, but I know he’s here and I want to find him. I’m really worried but I can’t tell Benjamin because I don’t want to scare him, so please, please, if you know something else, anything else, then tell me.”
Michael listened to me and then he said, “I’m very sorry to hear it. I promise you I don’t know anything else about it. I’m sorry.”
I felt so tired, and scared, I didn’t know what to do next.
“Benjamin’s coming back,” Michael said quietly. “There’s one thing, though. As you know I have leafed through the book, primarily to ascertain its contents, but also to photograph certain pages, which I emailed you as verification. There was a bar receipt tucked inside the cover, a receipt from a hotel.”
“A hotel? Do you think it’s where he was staying?”
“That we cannot know, but it surely means he visited there, at least. Perhaps you could go and ask them?”
Benjamin shuffled up.
“Would you like some water, Michael?” he asked, and I was so proud of him for being so polite.
“Thank you, Benjamin.”
I heard him stand.
“Good luck with … with everything. The hotel is called the Black King. It’s in Manhattan.”
“How do we get there?”
“A taxi will do it. You appear to have enough of those crisp greenbacks. On which note,” he added, “I’d be a bit more careful how you wave it around.”
“I will,” I said, though I felt stupid, being lectured by a twelve-year-old.
“Good luck. Goodbye, Benjamin, Stan.”
His footsteps were swallowed in the roar of traffic as we approached the street.
“Well,” said Benjamin. “Are we going to find Dad now?”
“Yes,” I said. “We are.”
I hoped I sounded more certain than I felt.
“Laureth?”
“What?”
“Mr. Walker was one weird dude, wasn’t he?”
I laughed.
“Where on e
arth did you hear an expression like that?”
“The man who sold me the water said it. He asked if we were friends with Michael. He says he’s always hanging out around here.”
“Maybe he’s no weirder than the rest of us,” I said, and I thought again about what Dad says; who knows why we are the way we are?
So then Benjamin told me when to stick my hand in the air, and very soon we were driving into Manhattan in another taxi, heading for the Black King Hotel.
On the way, I got Benjamin to tell me the date and the time on the receipt. It was from Thursday night, around eleven p.m. Just two days ago. It was strange, like almost meeting Dad, and then just missing him. So close. So close it felt like I could reach out and touch him. But that wasn’t true. He could be anywhere by now, anywhere in the world.
Then I got Benjamin to start reading through Dad’s notebook from the start, looking for anything, anything, that might lead us to him.
He started to read, at the beginning, like Dad would have said, and from the very first page there was a lot of talk about one man; a man called Carl Jung.
TWO CRAZY GUYS
“Knows nothing!”
That’s what Freud once said about Jung, apparently, and yet the two men were once firm friends.
* * *
Might be an idea to include some stuff about Jung.
Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud were pretty much responsible for the birth of psychoanalysis. Toured the U.S. together in 1908 to lecture on the subject.
Then their friendship dissolves, and Jung develops new ideas, goes off in a new direction. His work becomes more mysterious, more mystical, including not just psychoanalysis but quantum physics, as well as religion and mythology. UFOs.
In the twenties he develops his ideas about synchronicity, but doesn’t write about it until the early 1950s, thirty years later.
Jung is one of the few thinkers to do serious work on coincidence, using statistics to investigate whether there is any reality behind astrology. His results were inconclusive, and remain disputed. Instead he began to consider coincidence differently.
* * *
He called synchronicity a “connecting principle” between people, or objects, or events, or indeed any combination of these things. But he said that the connections that occurred during a coincidence were not due to “cause and effect,” but that they were “acausal,” which means that one thing had not CAUSED the other thing to happen. Instead of CAUSALITY, therefore, he explained that things could be connected by their MEANING; so the link between seeing a picture of a salmon just as you’re talking to a man called Salmon is that they share the same meaning.
Hmm.
* * *
Jung first thought about coincidence long before all that. One day he was treating a female patient who had dreamed about a scarab beetle, and just as she was telling him about the dream, a similar beetle was crawling over the glass of his office window. It struck him as very odd indeed, and so began his lifelong obsession with coincidence.
He would come to discuss it with other great men of his age and he ended up influencing many other thinkers.
He first discussed it with Albert Einstein over a series of dinners between 1909 and 1913 in Zurich. Einstein famously said: “God does not play dice.” By this he meant that the universe has fixed rules and that all you need to do to understand the universe, and everything in it, is discover what these rules are.
Einstein also said this: “Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.”
What did he mean by that??
Maybe he meant that he didn’t believe coincidences had any deep meaning. He was poking fun at people who think they do—
people who think that coincidences are the clues to some hidden meanings in the universe, some deep knowledge, some great arcane and occult secret.
But is that right?
Can that be right when everything about the feeling of coincidences tells us that THEY MEAN SOMETHING?
We all know they do. We simply feel it.
But what?
What do they mean?
THE BLACK KING
That fear had begun to crawl into me was undeniable. I knew I was fighting against it, trying to stop it taking hold. I knew that what I had done was irresponsible. In fact, I knew that what I had done was dangerous, and I wondered how much trouble I would be in. But every time I thought about that I also thought about Dad. I knew something was wrong. I’d had no replies to my texts, which was totally unlike him. When I tried to call his phone again from the taxi into Manhattan I got the recorded voice. It was Dad that I was really scared about, and if only I could find him, then it wouldn’t matter how much trouble I was in.
Benjamin struggled to read Dad’s notebook to me, and who can blame him—the notes were strange, very hard to understand. Sometimes there were just lists of words, other times short essays.
Once or twice Benjamin would read something that had nothing to do with that book; like a note that Dad had written to remind him to buy me a birthday present. That felt odd. It was like seeing inside Dad’s thoughts and it didn’t feel right, but it was nice, too. It made me think of the last time we’d been together. He’d driven me back to King’s College one Sunday night, a few weeks before.
“Going to be gone awhile,” he’d said. “Research trip.”
To be honest, I was worried about some stuff at school. It was the week before our drama assessment, and I hate drama. Standing in front of everyone, trying to pretend to be someone else. I dread it.
I think Dad was saying something about Austria. Or maybe Switzerland. And then we were there and I rushed off before I even heard the car pull away. When I remembered that I ached inside, and tried to focus on the book instead.
It was so confusing; Benjamin had a tough time of it. I was hoping for a clue of some kind, something that would take us straight to Dad, but all there was so far was rambling passages about Carl Jung, and about what he thought about coincidences.
“Why is Dad so interested in co-inky-dinks?” Benjamin said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Because he had a big one happen to him, I suppose.”
“Mum says he’s obsessed,” Benjamin said.
I didn’t reply.
“What does obsessed mean?” Benjamin said.
I opened my mouth, then shut it. Then opened it again and said, “It’s when you like something, a lot.”
Too much, I thought, but kept that to myself.
“Like I like Stan, you mean?”
“No, not quite, more like…”
Then Benjamin said, “Wow,” and had obviously seen something, and I didn’t have to explain any further.
“What is it?” I asked.
“We’re crossing a huge river. On a big bridge. A big, big bridge. And there are lots of skyscrapers. It’s just like in Godzilla.”
“Oh,” I said, “that must be Manhattan. We’ll be at the hotel soon. Listen, Benjamin, can you read me a couple more pages?”
“They’re boring, Laureth. I don’t want to. I want to look at the buildings.”
“I know, but it’s important. We—”
I stopped. Benjamin needed a break. To be honest, so did I. I was tired, and Dad’s notebook was doing my head in. Something about it scared me. Parts seemed coherent, but other bits were peculiar and disjointed, and it worried me that the Black Book was a reflection of Dad’s state of mind. But then, I’d never known how his notebooks work. He’d never read them to me before; I don’t even think he let Mum look inside them. Not that she was interested, not anymore. Maybe they were always like this; fragmented and odd.
Dad’s always talking about writers. How they hear characters speaking to them and are compelled to write about them. He says if other people hear voices in their heads they get locked up in rooms that have nothing sharp in them. Maybe writers are just a bit bonkers anyway. Maybe any writer’s Google searches would get a normal person committed.
The taxi was stoppin
g and starting in Saturday afternoon traffic. There were the sounds of horns, of cars and bigger vehicles, and I could tell the city was busy.
“What do you see?” I asked Benjamin.
“Wow,” he said.
I was glad Benjamin was happy. He still didn’t seem to understand that we were doing something very unusual, but he’s not stupid, and I wondered how long it would be before he figured out I really didn’t have a clue where Dad was. Then he might get upset, and scared, and I couldn’t afford for that to happen. I couldn’t do this without him, so he had to stay happy. A wave of tiredness came over me, but I pushed it away, and from nowhere a new thought occurred to me, one that frightened me more than anything.
Maybe Dad didn’t want to be found. Maybe he had left Mum. Maybe he had left her and just not told her yet. Maybe he had told her, and she was just not telling us—Benjamin and me. I knew things were bad between them but somehow I’d never imagined they’d split up, perhaps because I’d never allowed that thought to enter my head.
What had Mum said?
Right now, I could not possibly care less where your father is.
I went cold. Just like that, it hit me. They had broken up, and not told me, and then I felt a lot of things at once—fear, and anger—and I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t, because there was Benjamin to think of. I had to hold it together, but then the taxi came to another stop, and this time the driver mumbled something.
“Pardon?” I called.
“Thirty-five dollars and forty cents.”
I wasn’t ready with the money.
“Benjamin,” I said. “What do you have?”
Between us we fished around and found the right money plus a little tip.
“Which side is the curb?” I asked Benjamin.
“Your side.”
“Well, scoot over here and come out with me.”
We got out.
“Can you see the hotel? It’s called the…”
“The Black King,” said Benjamin. “I know. There’s a huge picture of a playing card by the door. The king of spades.”
Benjamin was holding my hand and began to tug. I pulled him back.
“Listen, Benjamin. I want you to let me do the talking in there, okay?”