Fates
1
If a French novelist and philosopher believed, John said, that God was chance, John thought chance was God. I wasn’t quite sure of the distinction, but John reckoned so many coincidences that have happened to him must contain a meaning greater than their contingency, and proposed that this was God’s way of talking to him. I think he believed that this was God’s way of talking to all of us. But for whatever and various reasons, most of us don’t listen. Partly what I found interesting in his stance was that he neither insisted anybody else ought to believe as he did (there was no proselytising), nor did he rely on chapter or verse to defend his position. His grandfather may have been a Protestant minister, and over the decade I have known him, I’ve often wondered how this religious expectation he was vaguely brought up with sat inside him. (His father was a schoolteacher and, as far as I knew, of a far more modest faith than either his father or his son.) I even wondered when John started telling me that God was chance, if this was his attempt to find God by other means, almost an Oedipal rejection of his grandfather’s beliefs, while still insistent on finding his own.
I suppose there had always been a messianic side to John, one that I could best describe as enthusiasm. Nobody I knew could get more behind a song, a band, a film or a writer than he could, and while his demeanour was so agreeable that this passion would never likely create disagreement, sometimes I and others wouldn’t quite say what we felt, in case we hurt him, if we didn’t share John’s excitement. Hurt might seem like a strong word in the context of an aesthetic passion, one surely better applied to feelings applicable to relationships rather than artworks. But John managed to convey in his conversation about the things he so adored, much of the feelings others would express when speaking of a loved one or a newly formed alliance.
I’d always found this aspect fascinating, and no less so the absence over the years of any emotional assignation. Was he celibate, asexual, or awaiting a woman he could almost instantly marry? I never quite knew. It wasn’t as though I sensed any conversation with John was off-topic; it was more that he had so many on-topics that others were inevitably ignored. Perhaps what other friends and I recognised was that John wasn’t waiting for the right person, but was waiting for the right feeling. For the rest of us, that feeling manifested itself in a person, even if the relationship failed, and we moved on to the next figure we believed we would spend our lives with. But John, it seemed, wanted to spend his life with God, and yet to phrase it like that doesn’t do justice to the faith, nor even begin to explain it.
2
It was about nine months ago when another friend, Judith, came to me and said she wondered if John was becoming a bit strange. I laughed and said: Hadn’t John always been a bit strange, that even an analytic philosophy degree couldn’t knock sense into him. I offered it less to undermine John than to dismiss Judith’s conformity, applied to another. Judith was the most reliable in our group of about ten friends (and the only one who had been at school with John), the one who you could phone up and drive you to a hospital appointment on the edge of the city, the one who when she made a plan to meet would always stick to it, and the one who any member of her family knew they could rely upon when others had let them down. She was the most grounded of all of us, and maybe I wouldn’t have put it like that if she hadn’t pointed out how ungrounded she believed John was becoming.
We were taking a walk along the Water of Leith after I left the bike attached to a railing near her flat at the bottom of Leith Walk, and she proposed we walk over to Stockbridge. It was a Saturday afternoon, and we could catch the market and get a coffee afterwards. Her partner often played football on the Meadows during this time, and I knew that Saturday was a day for friends, and Sundays just for herself and Jason. Usually she would see me, sometimes others, sometimes a few of us, and we would watch a film, go to a gallery or do what she and I were doing that day: taking a longish walk, visiting a market, and doing some shopping. Judith had her routines, but they were conventional rather than neurotic, and I knew that if anything urgent came up, those Saturday plans would change, her Sunday would be reshaped, and even work commitments would be rearranged if at all possible. Yet she wouldn’t change them for any other reason but necessity, and I realised this about six months before that conversation over John.
It was a late Sunday morning, and she and Jason were getting brunch at a cafe near the Meadows. As I was passing by, I waved and went in. They asked me what I was doing, and I said just wandering around, looking for a cafe. Maybe I would read my book. There was a long silence that I filled too hastily by requesting to join them, and Judith said of course. And yet a glance they gave each other indicated I wasn’t so welcome, but to have changed my mind would have seemed odder than to sit and accept what became a chilly, stilted encounter. As my coffee came and they continued eating their immodestly-priced breakfast, filled with fashionable items predicated on protein, I found myself talking too much as I tried to justify my unwanted presence.
Was I exaggerating this frostiness? I think not. A couple of months later, I was passing the same cafe, and I saw Judith and Jason once again eating lunch. As she was looking out of this glass-facaded cafe, she must have seen me looking in her direction. She hastily looked away. I never brought up either incident in conversation, but I think I might have made a diagnosis: to understand Judith’s character was to comprehend the conventions she lived by and the obligations that were allowed to intrude on those conventions. Obligations could do so, but contingency could not.
So when we were walking together towards Stockbridge, and she was telling me about John’s oddness, I managed to formulate for myself why she believed him to be strange. Contingency seemed to dictate his life, just as convention ruled hers. I didn’t doubt that had John been sitting in that cafe, he wouldn’t have only welcomed me in; he would have seen it in a sign that was greater than mere chance, while all Judith saw was an inconvenience and an intrusion.
3
So while I didn’t offer any of this to Judith when we were walking, I instead listened to the reasons why she found John strange, as I believed it would reveal at least as much about her character as it did about John’s. I’d given plenty of thought to that breakfast, and even more to her turning away, while surely seeing me looking in a couple of months later. Of course, if she had waved, I wouldn’t have gone in; I would have waved back and continued walking, feeling I had, in my gesture, regained my respect, and shown Judith that I understood her need for convention.
She said that John seemed to be living a driftless life, and suspected he was so aimless that he was increasingly trying to generate meaning out of events that, as far as she could see, had no connection or value. The previous weekend, she had been walking along Princes Street with John when he noticed coming towards him a colleague with whom he used to work . He said hello and looked like he might have wished to stop, but the colleague appeared to be in a hurry, and the nod was recognition enough. An hour later, as they were seated at a bookstore cafe near the bottom of Princes Street, he looked out the window and saw another former work colleague passing by. John insisted that seeing two former work colleagues in one day was more than a coincidence; it must have been a sign. Judith said John then talked for twenty minutes about why he might have been wrong to have left his former job, even though, before that day, he had never expressed second thoughts about leaving. Judith tried to find out if there were problems in his present employ and he said not at all. He left the computing firm where he was working for a job at the university, believing that the projects would be more interesting and the security greater. Did he find that this was not so? No, he insisted, as Judith initially assumed he was having regrets, and the presence of two former employees made him more aware of this misgiving. He said that had he seen on the street two people from his university job, he would have been reaffirmed in his decision. This surely didn’t mean he would try and get his old job back, Judith said, and John insisted he wasn’t like that. He merely had to try and understand what this sign was telling him, but that a sign it was.
By the time we had reached the market, Judith had given me another couple of examples of John’s belief in signs, and in turn wondered if what I had noticed in him could pass for what we both agreed to call John’s contingent mysticism. Judith at first resisted the term, reckoning it was too pretentious. When I asked for a better one, she couldn’t come up with anything other than that John was just being delusional. That seemed to be both too general and too judgmental, and if we wanted to understand John’s beliefs, best that we start with a neutral term, no matter how highfalutin.
I mentioned to Judith an occasion when John and I were talking about his parents, who were soon to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary. He said they were made for each other, and so obvious a statement, he explained, was justified by the exceptional circumstances that brought them together. His father was holidaying in Morocco and, for some reason, he couldn’t quite understand, didn’t want to leave the coastal town in which he was staying, Essaouira. His father had only gone there to visit a house Jimi Hendrix had stayed in for a while, a few miles from the city. His father was a decent guitarist and, at the time, had hopes of becoming a much greater one, an ambition he never quite fulfilled, perhaps because the instrument’s purpose had been served during that trip. His father had booked into the hotel within the city’s walls for two nights, but he was still there after six. While inside the walls and passing through the narrow streets, the wind howled; it was only outside that it would become whipping, as a walk along the coastline left you struggling to remain vertical. But there were also the sunsets, and his father may have retrospectively realised he was staying there so long because he was waiting to meet someone to share one with.
On his fifth night in the town, a group of tourists arrived, and while this might have been expected in so pretty a place as Essaouira, this was the middle of March, and his father had managed to find a cheap flight to Casablanca after losing his first career job as a data entry manager. The company folded, he was offered some compensation, and there he was, travelling with the money. He did so initially, perhaps, hoping to find himself, but hardly expecting to find his true love, while most of the time, he couldn’t find company beyond the local population, who sometimes looked at him as if he were lost and sad. This was perhaps a perception exacerbated, as the hotel staff would, no doubt, have heard his guitar playing as they passed his hotel door.
The group of tourists were pensioners from the Netherlands, and they were accompanied by a bus driver and two tour guides. One of those guides was the woman who was to become John’s mother. The guests may not have been young, but they filled what had been an almost empty hotel with a cheery excitement, and the hotel was happy to have forty paying customer at a time when there had been John and only a forlorn looking couple, a couple who looked like they may have spent their honeymoon in the hotel at a happier time, and were now reliving memories that they couldn’t quite find.
Anyway, that first evening, his father was watching the sun set, and John’s mother was seated on a rampart next to his, doing likewise. The guests were having dinner, and she took the chance to enjoy some time alone and take in what she had heard was one of the most beautiful sunsets in the world. For the first night since he’d arrived, the wind was calm, and he looked across at her, saying she was lucky. He realised as he spoke that she could only hear because the wind’s howl had become a murmur, and she replied by asking him what he was doing in this place at the end of the world. He realised that his answer would be quite different from hers, and noticed also, as he explained to her that he didn’t really have one, that this seemed to intrigue her. He asked her how long the couch tour was going to stay in the town, and she said three days. As they walked back to the hotel together, his father had found the reason why he had been compelled to stay despite the solitude and the wind. The following evening, when hotel staff passed his room, they would have heard his guitar again, but this time he was not alone, as he played for a woman who was to become his wife.
John had relayed this to me several months earlier and had done so with the specific purpose of saying that their meeting was somehow more than chance. It was fate. They were destined to meet. At the same time, he supposed that if fate might seem too strong, then they at the very least had honoured chance. Many people don’t. When he mentioned fate, Iwouldn’t have been surprised if this was how his parents had couched it also. But when I asked him this, he said no – they simply saw it as a chance they took advantage of, and it could easily enough not have happened, or they could have ignored it as any sort of sign. They would have married someone else, and both would have had children who were not John and his sister. His parents acknowledged good fortune: they had met in romantic circumstances, found they were immediately compatible, and this compatibility had survived forty years of marriage. John thought they were underestimating chance’s workings. They were destined to be together, and they were in danger of underestimating how lucky they were.
4
I didn’t know any more about quantum mechanics than the next person who would have read a few popularising articles about parallel worlds, but I said to Judith that while there might well be multiple versions of reality constantly forking in different directions, and few of us can comprehend the maths, many can at least understand a counterfactual life, one that could have turned out differently than it has. John’s parents clearly understood this, but not quite John, and yet who was to say John was wrong? After all, in an unusual way, John was more materially practical, for all his notion of fate, than his parents or anyone else. He believed in the only reality there was, even if he credited it to a higher force. Without that belief, he would be the most stubbornly materialist person I knew. Yet there was this belief, and if it meant John assumed only one categorical world that could not be otherwise, he could also see that this one reality was causally connected in ways most would find overemphatic. Where Judith and I saw randomness, John would see deliberation.
When I asked Judith what she believed in, she said that if she was late for work, a patient might be found having soiled themselves, if she failed to be there for a friend in a time of crisis, they might do something stupid, and if she didn’t attend to her grandmother when the help couldn’t make it, and cover couldn’t be found, her grandmother would go unwashed and unfed. She offered this breezily and yet with an undercurrent of anxiety, just as I noticed while talking to John, he would speak with immense seriousness, yet with a sense of calm. After all, the world couldn’t be other than it was; what was there to get anxious about? Judith could see numerous counterfactuals if she didn’t make sure that she acted constantly to prevent them.
I asked Judith for the first time about her need for routine and her willingness to deviate from it when necessity demanded. I expected a deflection, but instead the answer was succinct and precise. She said that both gave her comfort, even if she couldn’t pretend that she often had a feeling of unease. She had habit and necessity, and though they might seem contrary, she reckoned for her they were inevitably compatible.
I still didn’t ask her about the day at the cafe when I joined them and how awkward it seemed to have been, but I did feel that I understood it better. This had been a needlessly chance encounter, and such moments would pointlessly upset routines, while emergencies would purposefully allow for a deeper need than habit. If in the cafe I had rushed in and said that I’d just twisted my ankle and could she take me to the hospital, I didn’t doubt she would have done so, but there I was asking for no more than a bit of companionship.
I began to understand that Judith wished to talk about John because his life was so antithetical to her own way of living, and this was revealed when we went into one of the few cafes in Stockbridge that closed later than 5. She ordered a hot chocolate (she didn’t drink tea or coffee), and as she supped it, commenting on what looked like the wateriness of my coffee, no matter that it was a latte, she talked about John again. She wondered if he needed help, and I said he seemed to have that more than anybody we knew. If he didn’t quite have an angel on his shoulder, it seemed the God he believed in had his back. But what if his beliefs are nonsense, Judith exclaimed, and I said they were certainly not nonsense – over sense perhaps, but not nonsense.
As I said this, I noticed, coming towards our table, a colleague from work, and while in typical circumstances I would have been pleased to see them, sitting there with Judith, I was happy our table was a tight two-seater with no space even for someone to pull up a chair. We said a few words to each other as Judith accepted the interruption with forbearance, and the colleague, seeing the cafe had no available tables, said they would search the length and breadth of Stockbridge to find another that didn’t close at a stupidly early time. I was relieved there really was no room to accommodate him, knowing if there had been, I would have felt obliged to let him sit with us, and also obliged to Judith in telling him that he couldn’t. I suppose John would have seen in this fate; all I saw was a busy cafe after 5 in the afternoon, and that I was saved from a difficult choice.
5
Judith and I parted after exiting the cafe, as she continued in the Leith direction, and I walked back to my flat in Newington. Along the way, I saw a person I recognised from another cafe I would regularly frequent, an advert for a film on the side of a bus I had planned to see later that evening, and also a ten-pound note I found on the pavement. It was the same amount as the price of the film ticket, and I didn’t doubt that John would have seen all this as fated, especially when I saw the woman at the cinema that evening, the very person I had seen only hours earlier, and before finding the note. She didn’t seem to be seeing the same film as I was, but I suspected this wouldn’t have stopped John from viewing her as one of a series of signs that shouldn’t be ignored. But even if I had wished to act upon them, believing that the film advert, the tenner and the presence of the person at the cinema were all deliberate signs from the universe, would going up to this person I had never even nodded a hello to seem like an act of insanity? At the very least, it would be deemed eccentric, and at most, harassment. Yet while I was sure Judith would have seen this as just a series of contingent moments, I did find myself thinking that these were at least things I’d noticed.
When Judith earlier that day had said she noticed very little, that she sometimes passed people she knew and didn’t see them until they pointed out, sometimes days later at work, that they passed by her, or would miss an incident taking place on the other side of the road, she added that she didn’t see this as any kind of failure. She insisted, out of all the many details we can pay attention to, why wouldn’t we spend most of it chiefly on those features that are pertinent to our immediate lives? (Did she not notice me that lunchtime?) She was talking about John as a daydreamer, and I supposed that if John happened to be so, it was of a certain sort. When people are accused of daydreaming, it usually means they have their head in the clouds, but John would probably claim his head was focused very much on what he saw around him. How could he have recognised all these signs if he weren’t observing the world? But perhaps he was a proper daydreamer, if we accept that the dream can enter our reality and fold back into it. What did I mean by this? I wasn’t quite sure, but I remember John telling me that while many accept that events in our lives impact our dreams, not many believe our dreams have consequences in our lives. I had asked him to explain more.
John said that if at work we believe somebody is bullying us and then later that night we dream of someone chasing us over a cliff, even if that person isn’t the boss, and even if the person pushed doesn’t seem to be us, we might see in the dream the manifestation of our workplace anxieties. Few would deny this as an explanation. It has a cause and effect that many would acknowledge. But how many would accept the reverse: the dream state having a consequence in the real world? He believed this often happened to him, and gave me an example from the previous week.
He woke from a dream where he had been walking up the winding and steep Cockburn Street towards the Royal Mile, and in the dream the street was so much steeper than it actually was, with the gradient closer to the steps nearby, Warriston’s Close. Later in the day, walking from Princes Street back home, he ventured up Cockburn Street and found it much more exhausting than usual, as if, indeed, he had been walking up the much sharper and steeper steps. Later that evening, he understood why, as he started to notice a mild soreness in the throat, and the next morning woke with a temperature and runny nose, as his symptoms developed into a full cold that he had only the day before meeting me, fully recovered from. He supposed I might call it a coincidence, but aren’t coincidences usually taking place in actual time and space? And when an actual event finds its manifestation in dreams, we don’t call them coincidences: we call them causes. But most are resistant to calling causes dreams that manifest themselves in reality.
6
I didn’t say this to John at the time, and probably partly because I didn’t want to undermine what he said, but also because it hadn’t quite occurred to me as we spoke. But giving it some thought over the following days, and a couple of weeks before that time Judith and I saw the person in the Stockbridge cafe we found no place to accommodate, I came to believe the best word to describe what John wanted to convey was projection. He would take the consequence, and find in it a cause, and is this what people do all the time when they read their horoscope and discover its manifestation in various events not long after reading it in the paper? That tall, dark stranger may be anyone from a person who passes them in the street, to someone who works in the bank, someone they see while watching a film that evening, or a friend they haven’t seen for a while. It may possibly be the love of their life, but all will be projections to varying degrees. We find in reality what we are looking for. After all, there is a lot of it to choose from.
If I never quite expressed this to John, as I didn’t wish to undermine him, I never said anything about it to Judith, believing she would agree with what I was saying too readily. I did believe these were projections rather than consequences, but also wondered if there was a wider cosmic set of rules that would show that such notions as cause and effect were merely our way of comprehending events we couldn’t quite understand. What I did say to John when we met up not long after I had found the ten pounds etc, was, what did he make of horoscopes? He thought they were nonsense, or rather that they were so generic as to be useless. He reckoned they were written so vaguely that almost anything could happen to someone, and they would read it as a sign. The problem was also that they were externally prompted rather than internally revealed. A person would be idly writing in a newspaper, and many thousands would be seeing signs everywhere they looked, while potentially being blind to the signs that belonged exclusively to them.
I then asked him about my walking back from Stockbridge and seeing the woman, finding the money, going to the cinema, and seeing the woman once again there. He insisted these were indeed signs, and while I might not have chosen to act upon all of them, I did acknowledge one of them and turned it into cause and effect. I said to John I was thinking of seeing the film that evening, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go home, have dinner and go back out again. I was seeing the film alone and had no obligation to anyone, and yet I admitted to John that, seeing the poster, and then finding the tenner, created a demand of some sort.
We were sitting in the very bar of the cinema where I had seen the film, and he said that people have obligations all the time, but they usually insist they come from practical purposes and other people’s demands. Here I was, he said, admitting to what he would call the spiritually mandatory, seeing in signs that could easily be ignored, because there was no practical need to act upon them, nor anybody’s feelings being hurt if I didn’t - that sense of duty. John said he felt the spiritual insistence often, and ever since he was a child. His parents thought he would grow out of it, but he supposed he had grown into it instead: grown into a belief that these signs weren’t empty perceptions in search of logic, but full ones in search of a meaning. He said this is what he disliked about pseudo-science, with people determined to find objective reasons for what amounted to subjective states. He had no problem with anyone believing the earth was flat if they insisted not on explaining why it was (since all scientific evidence seemed to suppose it wasn’t), but on conveying their feeling that how could it be spherical when the way we occupy our place on the planet is on the daily assumption that it is flat. Equally, when someone insists that eating certain foods cures cancer when nothing objectively suggests they do, then John wouldn’t have a problem if someone believed that eating a special diet saved their life. People have all sorts of beliefs that cannot be scientifically validated, but nevertheless have a personal claim that shouldn’t be undermined.
John insisted that nothing he believed was contrary to science. He had no interest in trying to deny the laws of physics. His only claim was that there are aspects to these laws that we ignore all the time, partly because we are so focused on the practical that we don’t notice them. He said to me that if I had a clear purpose and was focused upon it, I wouldn’t have seen the advert on the bus, the ten pounds on the pavement, the woman on the street, nor the woman again at the cinema. Looking at the world around me made me see connections that could easily be missed, and usually are. John said all he wanted to claim is that the world is a lot more connected than ready cause and effect and practicalities tend to allow. He never claimed these were all signs of God’s will, though they might be. All he would insist is that they can be signs of our will when we apply our minds to seeing more than most usually see.
Didn’t he see this as God’s way of talking to him, I wondered. He admitted he supposed it was, but only if we accept that God moves in mysterious ways, and that science moves in predictable ones. It was his purpose to observe the mystery rather than the practicality. I looked at him with an ironic gaze ,and he added that, of course, he had to admit that he lived practically as well. He knew the distance to work and how long it would take him, knew that when he went into the supermarket, he was aware of the hours it was open and the expectation he could find in it the necessities he was seeking. He hardly lived the life of a mystic. But then a mystic wasn’t living a life like his: sitting atop a mountain didn’t lend itself well to the accessing of signs that John sought. If he acknowledged he was interested in the spiritual mandator, he also perhaps saw himself as an urban mystic.
7
I would probably have liked to assume John was a little mad, and to find in my judgment a clear understanding of my own sanity. Judith wouldn’t have couched it like this, but I am sure that in judging John, she was reassuring herself. I wouldn’t wish to insist she was wrong, and the many people she has helped would no doubt have been happy that, rather than reading adverts on buses as signs, she was answering a call to pick up some groceries she could deliver at their house, often in a situation where the person was bedridden or housebound.
Yet while thinking this, I recalled a film that I remember watching on TV when I was a child. It was set in New York in the late sixties, and there was a man lying in the middle of the street, possibly homeless, maybe unconscious, perhaps dead. People walked past, too busy to pay attention, yet our central character notices, and he does so because he is a newcomer to the city and is fascinated by this new world so different from the small Texan town from whence he has come. If he were to become one of these people with no time to see ,even so terrible an event as the one he witnesses, he too would become a New York success story. Though we might see the man on the street as a form of foreshadowing, as the central character will end up in straits only a little less dire, when thinking about that scene after the conversation I had with John, I saw that the character in his gaucheness seeing things that a sophisticated New Yorker would screen out, and saw John as someone living in a rather less frenetic urban environment, nevertheless refusing that sophistication.
The next time I saw John, it was on an evening out to celebrate Judith’s birthday. There were a dozen of us at a long table in a beer garden with heat lamps keeping us warm while destroying the environment. The subject at our end of the table turned to the environmental catastrophe and, more broadly, the political, and one of us asked John what he was willing to do to save the planet. He said he didn’t want to save the planet; only his soul, and if the planet could be saved as a consequence, he would be happy. But he wouldn’t be if saving the planet meant no longer being able to save his soul. A friend who had always referred to John as a crank muttered that this was mumbo jumbo, and John smiled, saying that maybe others could save the planet without any concern for their souls, and this wasn’t to criticise them, only to express what he believed. Jason more politely proposed that John was being selfish, even seeing himself as the centre of the universe. He didn’t deny it, but added that the person he was speaking to was the centre of the universe too. But their centre was where they were sitting; his centre was where he was sitting. The centre of the universe, John insisted, was everywhere and nowhere, but if we can see it scientifically as everywhere, lose all faith in it and see it as nowhere (was this the metaphysics of depression, he said, no doubt aware the term would seem to some empty and pretentious), or do we see it as somewhere, and that we are that somewhere?
While Judith was at the other end of the table, Jason was at ours, and while he was usually less outspoken than Judith, it was as though he was channelling through his own thoughts what I suspected had been her claims about John. After all, she knew John much better than Jason did, and yet Jason, on this occasion, seemed to take further remarks Judith had offered to me. I wondered if this was partly because while Judith may have been closer to John, she wasn’t inclined to disagree with him. She had taken the friendship as a given and his behaviour as an anomaly that she could tolerate. But when she said to me during that walk, believing John was getting stranger, it was as though that evening in the pub, Jason had been delegated with countering what they both no doubt saw as John’s outlandish claims. Jason, like John, had studied philosophy at Edinburgh, and much of the degree was based on logic and, in turn, much of it concentrated on analytic philosophy, thinking based on categorical propositions and reasoning procedures. Subjectivity had little place. That was at least how John and Jason agreed to describe it when someone asked them what they had studied and what they were arguing over.
8
The issues started with what constitutes evidence, as Jason feared that we were returning to the dark ages, as many people now believed in what they wished to be true, rather than what happened to be so. John agreed with him, and Jason looked surprised: wasn’t John the most mystical person everyone knew, the one who would see irrational signs wherever he looked? I was ready to interrupt, surprised how keen I was to defend John’s position, and unsure whether I wished to do so as a friend watching John attacked, or as someone who perhaps was closer to his position than I had hitherto realised. But John was keener still to defend himself, saying he had no interest in questioning facts, only in extending belief. Again, Jason looked surprised, maybe even irritated, yet let John continue. John insisted that what it seemed Jason was attacking were those who wanted to fight facts with facts claiming they were entitled to their own counter-facts that were mutually incompatible with facts. Someone insisted the economy was weak, and if their party was in power, they refused to accept the data; climate scientists show man-made damage to the planet, and they might insist that this is not so, and come up with facts that dispute this, even if almost all the evidence moves in the other direction. What you have is people arguing over what is the case, as if it isn’t the case. John could see that this led to inevitable disagreement and discord, perhaps not a little like the medievalism Jason was accusing John over. This would be where rival religions insist that they are right and can find no point of agreement because their identities depend on contrary positions. John admitted this was for a much bigger debate, but all he wanted to insist upon was that he saw no reason why what he believed need cause anyone else to get into an argument with him. He wanted to defend the complexity of causality, not the brutality of fact.
Jason said all he wished to make clear is that there was a real world, and anybody who doubted this is an irrationalist. Again, John didn’t disagree. He only insisted that this real world can be understood in various ways and that the Hopi Indian who prays for rain, needn’t have any problem with the scientific explanation of its presence, just that they reckon a dance or a prayer might help it along. If that dance or prayer in anyway stopped the well-being of those practising the dance, then this might become a problem. He could understand why those refusing to take vaccines and relying on folk remedies might be deemed irrationalists as they choose a belief over a rational cure, but the Hopi Indian would be superstitious rather than irrational. They might accept science, but didn’t have any problem with the aid of a belief others might find nonsense. John reckoned the problem was with people countering science, whatever its limitations, with pseudoscience. In this, they came into conflict with each other, tensions would develop, and it became a battle between views and counter-views. John insisted he wasn’t against science and had no time for pseudo-science; he just wished to believe there was more to the world than science could readily explain. Jason looked not only placated but even perhaps disarmed, as though he couldn’t quite deny that, if he thought about it, there were areas of his thinking still influenced by superstition.
What Jason did say was that if John was half mad, he was still lucid. As I had listened to the pair of them talk, missing the odd word amongst the hubbub of a large crowd getting increasingly raucous as we moved into the third round of drinks, I knew that I had no interest in questioning science, that I accepted hundreds of years of observation and experimentation had led to numerous developments that wouldn’t have taken place without this rigour. I also knew, though, that I needed to accept in my life an aspect of superstition, fate, mystery or whatever else, to make it meaningful. Hadn’t science increasingly helped people’s lives to become more livable, from anaesthetics during an operation, to aspirin for a headache? But had it also become a system of paradoxical belief: the more one believed in science, the less one could believe in any possibilities beyond it, creating a restricted, claustrophobic, rational universe? I remembered reading somewhere a writer claiming that love was a sudden lapse of logic in the world, and wondered if even love wasn’t any longer allowed this irrational place. All I knew was that I was resistant to dating apps and abhorred the notion that people should get together based on possessing numerous things in common. Would one want an algorithm to find a partner, just as it proposed a film or a book based on others one would read? What if one inputted data based on the various qualities one saw in previous girlfriends and removed all the qualities one disliked? Would the dating website come up with the love of one’s life?
After Jason went back to sit next to Judith, John said I seemed to have been lost in thought. I replied, saying perhaps it was more I was trying to find one. Instead of revealing my half idea, I instead asked him about what seemed increasingly a fully-fledged belief system, as though out of the philosophy he had once studied, he insisted on an ontology he could call his own. He proposed that ontology was a big word, and was surprised I used it, but I admitted, for me, it was a word that seemed to fill in for many things that I didn’t quite know how to describe. I suppose I could have used the word system – yes, he seemed to have developed a system of belief that was strong enough to counter Jason’s rationality, without Jason seeing in it nonsense. He said if it was a system, it was one that he could only explain tentatively, and saw in it no aim or purpose. But perhaps it could be viewed as a reflexive rejection of conventional cause and effect, which risked narrowing down the world, while his need to see signs that created new causes and effects, held together chiefly by his own perceptual apparatus, opened it up.
I thought again about that sudden lapse of logic that led to love, and wondered if, while I might have been willing to entertain it in this one area of my life, John was willing to extend it into so many areas that I could only call it generosity. I didn’t quite know what I meant by this that evening, so I simply said to John that he had a very generous personality. I thought about it more over the next few days, as I could see people would say the same of Judith, if for very different reasons.
9
The drinks with everyone had been on Friday night, and it was Sunday afternoon when I saw once again the woman I would sometimes see in a cafe, and who I hadn’t seen there for some time. I’d been in Stockbridge, getting an early afternoon coffee, and visited the market. I passed her on my way back up before Princes Street in almost exactly the same spot as weeks before, and then saw her once more at the cinema as she again saw a different film. We didn’t acknowledge each other, and I wondered if this was a certain form of shyness or merely an understandable form of social etiquette. I’ve noticed that even when people are introduced to each other by a third party in passing, they rarely acknowledge the person if they then see them again on the street or in a cafe. They might if they’ve met each other during a social occasion where they have talked at length, even then, I have sometimes seen someone recognise me from a chat in a pub and nevertheless failed to acknowledge me, or I have failed to acknowledge them. It is hard to say sometimes, as these moments are brief and the feeling is oddly instinctive. Are such moments shyness or rudeness, I cannot quite say. But it wouldn’t have been rude if either of us failed to acknowledge the other’s presence, since the premise to say hello is based on what is already a prior introduction. But is it more resistance to rudeness rather than shyness which leads people who have seen each other often, but where no third party has introduced them, to resist a nod of acknowledgement? Was I merely being polite rather than shy, in not saying to this woman that we keep seeing each other in cafes, on the street and in cinemas?
So nothing was said that day, either on the street or at the cinema, but about ten days afterwards, I was in the regular cafe and so was she. It was 3 in the afternoon, the cafe was still hectic with late lunches, and I was sitting at a table with two seats. When she arrived, with a friend, the only table available had just one chair. Her friend promptly asked if she could grab the spare in front of me, and I said of course, offered a smile, and offered another to the woman I would often see. In the friend’s smile back, I saw a simple thank you, but believed I witnessed, in the woman I often saw, something else, or something more. It was a smile I read as saying that, she too, would often sit alone and occasionally people, in company, would grab her spare chair. I didn’t doubt that Judith would say I was reading too much into a moment, while John might insist that this would be just one of many signs that I could have perceived, and that the validity of an assumption rests on its consequences.
A few days after the cafe, I saw Judith, and we met at the Meadows, walked up through Morningside, and carried on through the Braids, before returning to our starting point and grabbed ourselves a hot chocolate in a place she recommended. Throughout this walk, I didn’t say anything about the smile I shared with the woman in the cafe, and it made me realise that with some friends, it is as if events have two sides, and only one of them contains anything of value. I thought about this as the actual and the possible, and that when I talked to Judith, it would almost always be about things that have happened or were going to happen. (If we discussed John’s beliefs, it was not because he had them, but because she was worried about him.) That day, we talked about whether or not she and Jason were going to move into a bigger place and, ideally, with a garden. I knew for a while they’d been thinking of starting a family, a phrase I found odd, and that this most contingent of things (two people in sexual unison leading to pregnancy and in time to the birth of a child) seemed too prosaically and predictably presented in such a claim. But, obviously, this was a practical matter as well as a detail reliant on various contingencies coming together beyond the interactions of two bodies, and if anybody was going to be thinking about the practical side, it would be Judith. For much of the walk, we discussed several properties she had looked at online, and she and Jason would go and see a financial advisor the following week. I didn’t at all find the conversation boring, and would have to admit that there was an enormous difference between moving house and starting a family, and sitting in a cafe and finally smiling at a woman I’d seen on numerous occasions but could never before justify offering a smile. I could see why she might have found what was on my mind dull indeed. It was, I suppose, an example of the possible, but with so negligible a practical side that there was nothing to say which wouldn’t be met by ridicule (Judith wasn’t at all a cruel person), but I suspected with incomprehension. She probably wouldn’t have quite understood what it was I was seeing in the anecdote I was telling. How could it seem significant next to the bricks and mortar of a home, and the flesh and blood of a future child?
Did I resent Judith for this? Did I believe that here was a friend I couldn’t talk to about thoughts and feelings that were important to me? I didn’t think so, as I knew too that were anything practical to go wrong in my life, Judith would be the first to help, as I knew there was a friend she put up for a month when this friend had sold her flat, and hadn’t yet moved into her new place. There were the lifts she gave friends who didn’t have cars, to out-of-town garden and home improvement centres to pick up plants and small items of furniture. Judith was there for people, but she had to see in their need a practical purpose. All I could offer at that moment was a desire to talk to someone about a smile I received as a chair was moved from one place to another.
10
Of course, the person I believed I could talk to about it was John, but he’d been away for ten days at a retreat, a place where he would sit in silence for a period with numerous other people and devote each day to meditation. You would only talk on the final day, as on the previous ones, one would wake early, eat without any communication, and leave ten days later a more spiritually enlightened person. He laughed when he said this, telling me, shortly after he got back, that it may have been an important exercise for many, but it made him realise that whatever spiritual growth he was seeking (if spiritual growth it was), didn’t rest on the contraction of the world, but its expansion. He was never going to be someone who could sit at the top of a mountain and find peace and fulfilment, and, while at the centre, he didn’t find himself retreating into his mind, but micro-observing those around him. He would notice who was making eye contact with others, who would wish to sit next to whom during those mute meals, and who looked most likely to crack as a couple of people ended up leaving the centre before the period was up. It wasn’t an exercise in spiritual enhancement; it felt more like one of limited perception. When he was back in Edinburgh, it was as though he could breathe again because his world was no longer so perceptually limited. John added that he was aware that for some Edinburgh was too small a city, and yet for others, big enough because there were plenty of things to do within it. He supposed next to London, New York, Berlin and Paris, it could seem culturally cramped, consumer-constricted and limited in its nightlife. But it was a city that had more than enough opportunities to perceive the world for him to have no need to disappear to a bigger one, just as he would be unlikely to seek a much smaller environment like a tiny town or village. His experience at the retreat taught him that.
I said to John that I didn’t quite see the world as he did, that I didn’t quite want to live my life as a constant observer, and seeing all sorts of connections that others would miss. And yet, perhaps more than most, I was happy to see in the smallest of gestures the largest of meanings, even if, by John’s standards, these might seem egotistical. He found what I was saying puzzling, and said that wasn’t it usually the other way round? Wasn’t he the one usually accused of obscurity? We both laughed before I added that I suppose I was looking for love out of chance, and he seemed to be looking for life out of it. I wanted to narrow it down to personal feeling; he appeared to want contingencies to happen all the time, all around him.
John said that he felt he had no choice, and laughed loudly at the irony of someone so open to chance acknowledging the limitations of it as a condition of his existence. It was just how he saw the world, and to find it in love wouldn’t make it special, except to him, and that seemed to be what I was saying, with a key difference. While he would see it as a drop in the ocean of contingency, however meaningful it would become, and close to what he saw in his parents’ meeting, I would see it as something akin to fate, and perhaps the most important moment in my life. I didn’t disagree, and wondered if all I was offering was a variation of the horoscope: that I was putting myself at the centre of the world, and then claiming signs that were specific to me and ignoring all the others that were of no interest. He believed both in fate and chance: that events had far more meaning than mere contingency, but that at the same time the world was vibrating with this potential meaningfulness. If he believed his parents’ meeting was fate, this didn’t mean that they had to act upon it. They merely would have needed to feel the weight of the decision they were resisting. John had arrived at a paradox too far, but I reckoned too that whatever inconsistency I might have found would be weak next to the intricacy of his claim.
He said he wanted to reassure me that to seek love out of contingency was surely better than seeking it out of probability and predictability, as he asked me without prompting whether I had seen the woman in the cafe, the street and the cinema again. I mentioned the moment with the chair, and he reckoned I was a patient and practical reader of signs, someone who could see in life neither chaos nor purpose, but the need to observe contingent opportunities and to understand them, and possibly act upon them. An admirable quality, he said, again laughing. Many people are so oblivious to what is around them that they cannot see that the cause and effect of their lives isn’t inevitable. It is simply likely because they have perceptually ruled out so many other possibilities in their lives. They will not have seen the person they have passed a dozen times, as they focus on getting to work on time, on checking their phones constantly in the cafe, and focusing only on their friends in the pub. What he wanted to make clear, whatever confusions he may have offered me, was that many people seem to narrow the world down to a pragmatic function, and he wanted what might be two contraries, chance and fate, to open the world up, not close it down.
He said a couple of ideas that were useful in this context were from a philosopher and a psychologist. The philosopher proposed that when looking for someone in a cafe, even if there are other people you know there, you might not see them at all if your purpose is to see one person who isn’t. You are there to see this friend, and his absence is much stronger than several other friends’ actual presence. In psychology, there is the idea of figure and ground, as he said, I no doubt well knew in the famous experiment that shows two faces or a vase, according to how one attends to the image. In these instances, John said, we can understand something of how the mind concentrates on certain things and ignores others. We put ourselves at the centre of the world, view what we need from it, and what others need from us, and act accordingly.
Maybe I didn’t quite share John’s interest in seeing contingencies and new causalities wherever I looked, but I did seem to accept it over romance. As we talked, we discussed how I’d met previous girlfriends: one on a backpacking holiday through Europe, another in a bookshop in Glasgow, and a third while watching a film. We’d both been laughing at almost all the same things, and were sitting next to each other coincidentally. As we exited the cinema at the same time, we said a few words to each other. After all, I’d often enough been to films with friends and shared far less complicity as we didn’t laugh at all at the same bits, that to say nothing, to someone with whom I had shared so much in common during a screening, would have been odd. The circumstance had created its own appropriateness, and we were both responsive to it. Even if none of these relationships went anywhere, as people might say, they came from somewhere that wasn’t common, and I admitted to John that I seemed to see love as a contingent act, and not a predictable or predictive one. I never wanted friends to arrange dates with other single people they knew, and hated the idea of an algorithm being involved in my emotional life. I might have seen the world less complexly than John did, but maybe still more so than many who expected life to be organised around the most direct of ways.
11
It wasn’t until almost three weeks after that, and in early December, that I saw the woman again. It was in our usual cafe and, as I came in, I saw her sitting at a table next to the window, working on a laptop. I took the only other one available that led us to face each other, though about ten metres apart. As I sat down, she looked up, and I offered a small, tentative smile, and was met with a large one, perhaps made larger by an anomalous tan, bringing out her white teeth. She had clearly been abroad, and would help explain why I hadn’t seen her here, in the cinema or on the street. People go missing all the time, except they usually, of course, don’t go missing at all. They are simply no longer to be seen in the same places as we are and so appear missing. I realised I was perhaps closer to the philosopher’s claim than I might have liked, and noted too that it was only with this thought in mind that I noticed any of the other cafe regulars.
She continued working; I took out my book and had been reading for thirty minutes when a loud clanging sound came from the kitchen area, as several pans fell to the ground after a rail containing them collapsed. Someone shouted to the other staff that there was nothing to worry about, and the woman and I shared another smile, one that we didn’t feel obliged to share with other customers, and one I don’t think we ourselves would have shared before that last occasion with the chair. We didn’t acknowledge each other again until after she went to the till, paid, and, as she passed my table, she said her name was Samantha, or Sam, and I said mine was Thomas, or Tom. Exchanging names isn’t quite the same thing as sharing phone numbers, and I would have felt it presumptuous to ask for hers. Instead, I said I hoped to see her soon, and she said I no doubt would.
We saw each other again a couple of days afterwards, in the same cafe, and she said hello, using my name, and then the diminutive, and I replied doing the same. Our tables this time were next to each other, and it was easy to converse, as we lobbed the odd remark back and forth, as she was once again working on her laptop, and I was reading the same book. As the cafe filled up, and people were waiting for a table, I suggested she share mine. I asked her where she got her tan, and she said the friend I may have recalled seeing her with a few weeks ago, had dragged not only a chair from my table to theirs, but also dragged her to the Canary Islands for a week long excursion of sun, sand and an attempt to forget a partner who had broken up with her, and became instead the main conversational subject. She said she shouldn’t sound so uncaring, but she did find it exhausting, and they might have been better staying in Edinburgh and going for long walks around the city, discussing the ex, rather than going on excursions where the bus ride consisted of only one subject. The sights were all but ignored as the topic came up and made volcanic landscapes secondary. But she came away with a tan and suspected that if she had been so badly treated by a boyfriend, she would want to talk and talk about it as well. Sam fell silent and looked despondent. She couldn’t believe she was talking about her friend like this, and to a stranger, adding that she would be horrified if someone were to do this to her in a similar situation. She blamed the winter tan, saying it made her more bubbly and insensitive than she was. An odd claim, she admitted, but there it was. By way of amends, she offered an anecdote.
12
When she was nineteen, and after her first year at university, she travelled with a couple of friends through Morocco. But at a certain point, they wanted to go into the desert, and she wanted to see the coast. So they travelled further into the interior, while she stayed for three days in the town of Essaouira. She had heard about the famous sunsets and the strong winds, and was sure she would find her first love there. And so she did, sitting on a rampart that initial night, and seeing a boy around her own age, his long hair fluttering in wind that was billowy rather than blustery, his skin a couple of shades darker than hers was now, and they didn’t talk at all for thirty minutes until the sun had properly set. While it did, so they would often look across at each other, and after, they walked back to the hotel they realised they were both staying in, and were inseparable until she got on a bus three days later. She never saw him again. It was indeed her first great love affair, and yet she did nothing to sustain it and has never regretted not doing so. It was like a product of her imagination that had become real, but might as well have been a dream, as she had never before told anyone about it, and had accepted that she would never see him again. Why was she telling him this? She didn’t know. Perhaps because she felt as though she had betrayed her friend, and now needed to offer up a confession to make amends.
I said in turn I would tell her something about a friend, or rather a friend’s parents. The story she told was very similar to one he told me, about his parents who, too, had met on the ramparts in Essaouira. But it was not the briefest of affairs, but a lengthy marriage that included the birth of the very friend who told me the story of his parents’ meeting. I said he offered it as an example of fate, but what she offered was a story about refusing it. Sam believed it wasn’t that she refused it; more that she contained it. She knew that they were both very young, both were probably looking for experiences, and between them had a very important one, but expected others as well, even if she would like to think he would also look back on those days on the Moroccan coast as memorable many years later. She said they were watching the sunset separately, and they turned it into a moment of togetherness that extended for forty eight hours. Out of nothing came something, and there would have been plenty of other people who would also watch sunsets simultaneously, and out of fear of rejection, timidity or simply the inability to notice others around them, fail to turn these chances into experiences.
Over the following weeks, Sam and I met up regularly, became lovers after a fortnight, were both tentative about what we had created, and both agreed that we liked the idea of a combination of chance, observation and that the smallest of details (a stolen chair,) had been turned into what we both refused to call a relationship, and seemed happy to call an experience.
13
It was perhaps why I was wary of inviting Sam along to Jason’s 40th birthday party. He was the oldest in our group, five years older than Judith, and a week before, Judith had told me she was pregnant. They were going to make the public announcement when everybody was gathered to celebrate, and they would be given two reasons instead of one. I had mentioned Sam to her, and she insisted she must come along, and I said it was all very new, and we didn’t know where it was going, offering it in language that didn’t quite describe what I felt, but might just have appeased Judith, as she said she wanted to meet my girlfriend. I said I would ask Sam and leave it to her, but if it was okay to keep the invite open, and Judith said of course. She was hiring the backroom of a pub, and if we spilt out into the rest of the bar, then so be it.
Sam agreed to come, though wondered if there was any way of doing it without offering the predictability of the new couple, and when I said that the venue was a pub and that Judith had hired the backroom, she said why didn’t she arrive later than me, appear as if on her own and, while ordering drinks, I would start up a conversation. We could act throughout the evening as if we had just met. Nobody knew we were together except Judith, and presumably now Jason, and all I had to say to Judith when I arrived was that Sam would appear when she was good and ready. She asked what name I had given to Judith. I said Samantha. That night, she would be Sam.
There were about fifty people at the party in the large backroom, and many of them were couples; many of us had known each other for years, and it had the air of a convivial yet stifled familiarity. People were talking about their work, one or two of their children, and others about their mortgages, and I didn’t overhear one conversation that interested me, except when I passed John, and he seemed to be continuing the conversation he had with Jason some weeks earlier. This was when I heard him say a philosopher thought God was chance, but he thought chance was God, as he began to elaborate what he meant. Jason, who was all but married to Judith and soon to have a child, who was celebrating his fortieth birthday and no doubt was expected to be the centre of attention, at this moment looked like he would have preferred nothing more than to be immersed in a quiet corner, thrashing out what these differences might be. But at the same time, I suspected he was so interested in speaking to this friend of ours who could see everything as fated, and yet also see contingencies were everywhere, and we simply needed to pay them attention, because he wanted to understand whether his life that was becoming so categorical was the right one. This was one of the conundrums he couldn’t quite understand, he said to John. There, John believed in fate and at the same time, everything was contingent. John said he couldn’t answer this, but perhaps one day quantum physics might. All he was sure about was that there were things happening all the time that were not at all random, even if that is how we happen to perceive them. What makes them seem so is our lack of concentration, our inability to see causalities all over the place that aren’t obviously and immediately rational. Did John assuage Jason that evening? I didn’t find out, as I noticed Sam sitting at the bar in the other room.
She was dressed in jeans, a blouse and wearing flat shoes, looking like a woman who had an hour to kill before a film or a concert, rather than someone who was about to be introduced to a new social circle. I asked her if she would have dressed up if we had gone down the route of official introductions. She said that would have been a different character and insisted I get into mine: a person meeting a random stranger at a bar. And so I did, though neither of us quite performed somebody other than who we happened to be. After all, how could I, when I had fifty people who knew me in the room next door, and who, if I did adopt a different persona, might have suddenly thought I was a lot stranger than John. It was only after thirty minutes of us both playing versions of ourselves, which amounted to no more than pretending we hadn’t previously been acquainted ,that several people came from the book room. They said they were wondering where I had gone, and insisted I join them and take my newfound friend with me.
We did so, and most offered polite hellos and curious glances, while only one drunken friend cheekily proposed that he wanted to know more about this enigmatic and alluring woman who had dragged me away from the party for so long. Sam replied that she did no such thing. There was no dragging at all; I was a barfly who got caught in her web. He looked at me as if to say this was a feisty one, and Sam asked if he was married. I said he was, and she said he probably cheats on his wife, or would, if given a chance. That was a hasty judgment, I offered. Sam reckoned that what might seem hasty to me can be an eternity for a woman when a man looks at her a certain way. What she liked about me was that I hadn’t looked at her like that. I asked how I looked at her, and as we chatted for a few minutes, disappearing back into the front pub and once again sitting at the bar, she said that when we passed each other on the street, saw each other in the foyer at the cinema, or on all those occasions in the cafe, I looked at her with wonder. This wasn’t the wonder, she quickly added, that would have put her on any sort of pedestal. It was the look of wondering more than wonderment, a look that was a question, not an expectation nor a captivation. It was as though I wanted to know her, and that was a rarer look on a man’s face than I might think. It was certainly not the look on the friend’s face who had just talked to us.
14
She still hadn’t seen or met John or Judith, and with the possible exception of Jason, these were the two people I was most interested in her meeting, After twenty minutes, we ventured back into the main room and Judith extricated herself from some well wishers commenting on her pregnancy, and apologised for having no moment for me, but added that she didn’t feel she had a moment to herself. She said this must be Samantha, and her forthrightness disarmed us as we both nodded in agreement. I believed I saw in Judith’s look, for a moment, a cross between admiration and disrespect, a look that suggested she thought Sam could have made more of an effort to dress up, and also that this was someone who wasn’t inclined to feel obligated to social expectations. It was an expression I hadn’t seen before on Judith’s face, and for a moment I wondered if the doubt I might have recognised in the conversation Jason had earlier with John was also on her visage in that moment: that she was having a child because she ought to have one, rather than a great wish for one. Yet it was probably just a flicker of envy for a life not lived, which isn’t quite the same as wishing to live that life for any more than the moment of that flicker. But Judith did seem to recognise that while she could claim Sam was under-dressed for the occasion, and that in her bottle green dress with a slit up the side, and her bottle green matching shoes, she might have seemed, again, only for a moment, overdressed. It was as if, perhaps, the clothes she wore created a sense of obligation in her no less great than when she would attend to friends and relatives in need. What she wore was appropriate to the occasion, but Sam’s look indicated that what was appropriate wasn’t the occasion, but how one felt.
All these thoughts didn’t quite occur to me that evening, but they were part of a sense I had, and I didn’t doubt they were details I would discuss later with Sam. As Judith was called away by a friend, Samantha looked across the room and asked who someone was. He was wearing clothes that were both well-fitted and ill-matched. The suit was a sober dark blue, but the tie was bright pink, and the shirt sky blue. His shoes were plimsolls similar to Sam’s. I said it was John, who I didn’t doubt had borrowed the suit, probably from Jason, and bought the tie from a charity shop, and perhaps the shirt too. The plimsolls were his own. I hadn’t paid much attention to what he was wearing when I overheard his conversation with Jason earlier, but looking at him from across the room, and with Sam’s eyes accompanying mine, I saw that he had accepted chance as readily into his dress sense as in other areas of his life. Sam said he looks like someone who doesn’t care about what people think but probably cares about how people feel. I said that was astute, but added it was as though he didn’t quite distinguish between thinking and feeling.
As he saw us looking in his direction, he waved across and started to come over. After I introduced them, he said to us that he had heard from Judith that I was going to bring someone I’d just started seeing, but that he’d also just heard from someone else when he asked where I was, that I seemed to have become very friendly with a person whom I met at the bar. He wouldn’t like to mistake one for the other, he said, and asked me which one to whom he’d just been introduced. Both of them, I said, looking at Sam and Samantha, who nodded in agreement. You contain multitudes, John proposed, as do we all. I couldn’t quite tell if he was offering it ironically, understood that Sam was indeed both persons, or that there was, in his belief in the world and how it works, a notion that there need be nothing incompatible in two people being the same one, and that it wouldn’t have required a rationalisation to explain it. I suppose if he tried, the rationale might sound crazier than the assumption.
I suspected he would explain what he meant next time we would meet up alone, but that evening I sensed an odd feeling of fate meeting non-fate, that whatever was happening between Sam and me was of great importance, and yet it didn’t at all feel as though my fate was sealed, as if fate were a coffin waiting to be closed. The three of us looked across and saw Jason and Judith dancing for the first time that evening. Everyone else retreated from the floor and formed a circle around them, clapping and whooping to a song I knew was Judith’s favourite. I wondered if it was also Jason’s.
© Tony McKibbin