Sam Leith - The Coincidence Engine

He studied his face in the mirror, sometimes, wondering what she saw there, and not liking what he did. Alex, when he looked at himself, saw a weak chin and watery features. He had eyes that flinched away from the camera. In the family photograph, blown up big and behind glass on the half landing of the old house, the two brothers stood in front of their parents: Saul already as tall as their mother, wearing his four-square smile; Alex’s head minutely blurred with motion, eyes down and to one side, hooding his lids. The old wallpaper from that same room in the background, gold striping the green.

But it went on, nevertheless. Alex never asked Carey whether he had been a factor in her choosing to do her postgraduate work in Cambridge. And – at her request – they still hadn’t moved in together. She said she was ‘funny about sharing space’. But the fact that he loved her, after they had been going out for three years, was something he took for granted. It was another fact about her, like her beauty and the fact that he didn’t understand her.

She wasn’t delving, introspective, exhausting in that way some girls he’d known had been – even though, as he knew, she’d had it tougher than most of the thoroughgoing neurotics he’d been out with previously. She didn’t talk endlessly about her emotions, or expect him to. Good.

Alex, there and here, had made some miles without even thinking about it. He’d noticed the state line going past about an hour back. The afternoon was mellowing, and he was in Alabama. He turned off the air con, wound down the window. Warm air came in, the smell of gasoline. He thought of singing Lynyrd Skynyrd to himself but the urge to sing had left him.

What Alex didn’t know, as he was moving west, was that things were happening all around him.

Ahead of him, in Birmingham, a man stopped dead on the steps of the 16th Street Baptist church, in slanting sunlight, startled by the sound of birdsong. He shook his head. In the chattering of half a dozen birds on a telephone wire he could have sworn he had heard the first few bars of ‘Amazing Grace’.

In the time it took Alex to pass through the Talladega National Forest, every shop in the state of Alabama sold out of Chicken & Broccoli Flavor Rice-A-Roni. In one shop in Gadsden, a fight broke out over the last packet on the shelf. A pregnant woman, overcome by her craving, pulled a gun on the teenage boy who had beaten her to it. She did not shoot.

In two small towns, equidistant to north and south of the I-40, the highway down which Alex was travelling, two men fell back in love with their wives for the first time in forty years. The names of both men were ‘Herb’, and both of them had woken up that morning and rubbed their stubble sleepily while looking in the mirror and thought about shaving but decided not to bother. One of them was to live happily ever after. The other one was to fall down a well on his next birthday.

All over the state, brothers and sisters bumped into each other by chance as one was leaving the dry-cleaner’s, and the other was running in to try to pick up her laundry.

In Las Vegas, still many miles away, the odds tilted for the first time very slightly against the house in low-stakes blackjack. Red Queen would be told about this in due course – as soon as it became detectable.

Unknown to anyone but you, in the Gulf of Mexico a sailfish of prodigious size, aided by a freakish current off the coast, spent thirty minutes keeping pace exactly with Alex’s car. Then a shark took it.

Other things were happening. Things unknown to you, but known to me.

And other things, I suspect, were happening that are unknown even to me.

You need to know, though, what happened when Isla Holderness met Banacharski. That’s where this begins. It begins with a woman with short, dark blonde hair, and a handsome pointed nose, and windburned cheeks, walking up a cart track in the French Pyrenees. This is May 1998, and the hills are very beautiful. Buttercups nod in the cold wind.

Isla is carrying an old-fashioned backpack – it belonged to her father, and has a frame made of hollow aluminium poles. She has on thick hiking socks, made of grey wool, and jeans tucked into them. She is tired. She has been walking and – where possible – hitchhiking around this area for nearly two weeks now. In her pocket is a passport-sized photograph snipped from an academic journal. It has been creased and recreased.

It shows a thin man frowning with an expression of, she judges, concentration or toleration of having concentration broken. His hair is dark, and very close-cropped, nearly a skinhead – a reaction, perhaps, to a hairline already prematurely receded. It suits him. His cheekbones are sharp and he looks handsome. He’s looking not at the camera, but downwards and slightly to one side. Something like amusement plays around his mouth. The photograph is ten years old.

She is excited, because she thinks she may have found him. She started from Carcassonne, and she has been walking from town to town, going deeper into the countryside. She told her colleagues, most of them at least, that she was going on a walking holiday. Nobody mentioned Banacharski, except Mike – Mike, she thought, liked her – who when he heard she was going to the eastern Pyrenees said: ‘Off for a tryst with your boyfriend, I shouldn’t wonder.’

She is on a walking holiday. She’s thirty-two years old and she’s happy. She has been camping most nights, not more than one night in three treating herself to an inn. It’s warm in the days, but most mornings she wakes in her tent with dew on her feet. She hasn’t got much money. She eats chunks of saucisson sec with a penknife, and tears bits of bread to go with it. She has, in a compartment of her backpack, a jar of cassoulet and a tin of pineapple pieces for an emergency.

But when she passes through each village, she shows the photograph. She enjoys doing what a tourist would do – sitting in the village square, if there is one; eating her lunch quietly. She asks, with her halting French. At first it was hard. Now easy.

‘ Cet homme – un ami… vous savez ou il est ?’ She’d show the photograph. Cheeks would be rubbed, grunts emitted, more grizzled friends summoned over sometimes.

‘ Il s’appelle Nicolas. Nicolas Banacharski. Il est un… il fait le mathematique …’ Here, she’d find herself feebly miming something halfway between a scribble on an imaginary table and a scribble on an imaginary blackboard. Her mime for mathematics was no more necessary, nor more plausible, than her mime for telephoning, or typing – the former consisting of an imaginary Bakelite earpiece and the latter of a peculiar ragtime piano solo played at the level of her clavicles with her eyebrows around her hairline.

Still, all this seems to endear her to the gruff old Frenchmen. Most of them seem to have heard some stories of a crazy mathematician. She has been following, generally, whichever wave of an arm her last informant offered. She’s tried to pick market towns when there were markets. But she isn’t hunting. Her idea is simply to have a holiday – to give it shape by hoping she’d stumble across the great man, but that isn’t the point of it, not at all.

Then, yesterday, she was buying her lunch in a boulangerie in Nalzen and waiting for the orange-haired old chimp to ring up her sandwich. She was wondering how long that display of Chupa Chups lollipops had been there, when she looked out of the window over a display of baroquely iced cakes and exquisitely lacquered strawberry tarts.

It was him. To the life. He was going past on a bicycle, lolling, with one hand on the handlebars and the bicycle describing lazy, open sweeps back and forth across the empty street.