The Norm Chronicles (12 page)

Even so, people find coincidences weird. Let’s try another way of making them ordinary – by making the extraordinary common. When DS tried his luck on the National Lottery with the numbers 2, 12, 15, 25, 32 and 47, he lost. The winning numbers that came up that week were 4, 15, 19, 44, 45 and 49.

Extraordinary!

‘What’s extraordinary about that?’ you say. He lost. Yes, but what are the chances of his six and the winning six being in this combination of 12 numbers? This is an amazingly rare combination of circumstances with a probability of 1 in 200,000,000,000,000 (1 in 200 trillion), the same chance of flipping a fair coin 48 times and it coming up heads every time. Impressed?

No, you’re not impressed, we can tell. But why not? Well, you say, because the lottery had to come up with some set of numbers and so too did DS, and what’s clever about them being different? But that misses the point. The chance of that precise combination – or of any other – was vanishingly small,
and the same as any other
. And yet it happened, as some combination has to happen. Only after the event does it seem boring, and only then because we give meaning to it. But the numbers don’t care about the meanings we attach to them. They just come up with the same massive degree of unlikeliness in every case. But again the question, if everything is equally unlikely …

So it’s purely the problem of predictability by people that gives this week’s lottery numbers any meaning. The probabilities, or rather the improbabilities, remain the same for all combinations of guesses and results.

The chance of winning the jackpot on Britain’s National Lottery is about 1 in 14 million. The only thing you can do to improve your prospects is try to pick numbers that other people won’t, so you’re less likely to have to share your winnings. So, since many people pick birth dates, avoid numbers below 31 (no one is born on the 32nd of the month).

Something similar applies to coincidences. Predicting precisely which coincidence will happen would be next to impossible. But afterwards: so some numbers/coincidences came up? And …? Some combination of events is inevitable. Things have to happen. Maybe what happens is not meeting a friend in the Pyrenees, but maybe the Alps, or maybe not a friend but a relative, or maybe not carrying a postcard but having thought of them at breakfast, or maybe while singing their favourite song, or maybe not on the path but in the bar, or maybe not to this person but to someone else, or maybe … suggesting that there are innumerable potential coincidences and presumably innumerable near-misses. And whatever it is that happens to happen among all these possibilities that also turns out to be memorable, that’s what happens to be talked about.

Coincidences are just an excuse to pretend that big numbers with limitless possibilities are meaningful in the small and everyday compass of our own lives. They’re not. They just happen to catch our attention. They are a human vanity.

But tell that to the passenger who travelled by coach from Limerick to London and took a copy of
The Name of the Rose
to pass the time, then left the book, by accident, unfinished, on the bus on arrival in London. On the return trip about three months later, there in the pouch at the back of the seat, was a different copy (different cover) of the same book.

Simple chance can be a strange and unintuitive force that throws up surprising concurrences more often than we might think, since truly random events also tend to cluster. Just as, if you throw a bucket of balls
on the floor they won’t arrange themselves in a regular pattern but will probably cluster here and there, so people moving randomly will sometimes find themselves gathered in one place. Ever been sitting on the Tube to look up and find all the passengers on one side?

This characteristic produces brain-mangling results. For example, it famously takes only 23 people in a room to make it more likely than not for two to have the same birthday. We think the best quick way to see this – for those who find it intuitively outrageous – is simply to get a feel for the number of possible pairs of two people from 23 people. Say at the end of a game of football every one of the 23 people on the pitch (two teams and a referee) had to shake hands with everyone else, there would be 253 handshakes (and thus 253 possible birthday pairs). That is, there are an awful lot of possible combinations of two from among 23 people.

This, of course, means that in around half of all football games there will be two people on the pitch who share a birthday. Maybe they could give each other a hug. And that’s just birthdays. Now let’s think of everything else that any two players or the ref might have in common.

Given all the possible places and all the possible ways that two acquainted people could meet, or all the possible things that apparent strangers might have in common, once you start multiplying the possibilities you wonder if every day on the seats of London Transport or slumped on a park bench in the fog, or tucked in a discarded Tesco carrier bag there sit more potential connections than particles in the universe. Some will be a match, somehow, and never know it. Think of Dickens as choosing his plots from an infinity of real-life events, after the event: perfect realism. The only reason Norm passed the audition to be in this book is because he had experienced this remarkable set of coincidences. Otherwise, we’d have chosen someone else.

The final explanation for coincidences is what is called the ‘law of truly large numbers’, one version of which says that anything remotely possible will, if we wait long enough, eventually happen. So even genuinely rare events will occur, given enough possibilities. Take three children in a family. The first comes along on a certain day. The chance of the next one sharing the same birthday is 1 in 365, multiplied by another 1 in 365 chance for the one after that, which equals a 1 in 135,000 chance
of them all sharing the same birthday, and better if there is planning going on. This is rare. But there are a million families in the UK with three children under 18, and so we should expect around eight of them to have children with matching birthdays, with new cases cropping up around once a year, which they do: new examples in the UK occurred on 29 January 2008,
¹¹
5 February 2010
¹²
and 7 October 2010.
¹³
And these are only the ones that got in the papers.

It would be truly strange if memorable coincidences didn’t happen to you. But this may be difficult to keep in mind when you’re walking past a phone box, it rings, you decide to answer it, and you find the call is for you.
¹⁴

It’s the detail that makes us sit up. ‘A postcard, you say? Fancy that. In the Pyrenees? Well, of all places.’ But the more detail we allow, the more possible points of contact there are. Just think of all the people you have ever known. Then think of all the people that you have had some connection with, such as attending the same school, being friends of friends or family and so on. There will be tens of thousands. Perhaps the best way to think about coincidences is not how rare and strange they are, but how many we might be missing. If you’re the sort of person who talks to strangers, you will find more of these connections. If you’re not, then you have probably sat on a train next to a long-lost twin from whom you were separated at birth and never realised it. Coincidences are simply a refreshing reminder that we live among infinite possibilities. Even as that thought makes them less surprising, it also makes them wonderful.
*

That might never free coincidences in fiction from being obvious structural devices, but perhaps we should go easier on them. The only problem is, if we did lose some of our wonder at coincidence, would we lose some of our fascination for the story?

8
SEX

K
ELVIN’S DIARY, AGED
19¾:

Woke up. Head hurt.

Kath in the bed – asleep. ‘Oi, Kath!’ Had shag.

Read paper. Seemed familiar.

Last week’s paper.

Opened curtains. Sunny day.

Closed curtains.

Half tin Stella under bedside table. Downed Stella. Had shag.

Slept.

Woke up. Hungry.

3pm. Found socks. Off to Mr Singh’s.

Bought lunch for two: tin of Fray Bentos Ready-Made steak and kidney pie, 2 Flakes, tin of Stella.

Ate Flake. Ate Kath’s Flake. Drank Stella.

Home. Hi Kath.

Put tin of Fray Bentos Ready-Made s&k in oven.

25 minutes. Long time. Turned up oven.

Had shag (sofa).

Had kip (sofa).

Got up.

Strange smell. Brushed teeth.

Strange smell cont’d.

Remembered tin of Fray Bentos Ready Made.

Took tin of Fray Bentos Ready Made out of oven.

Tin of FBRM very large/spherical. Also black + red glow.

Realised had forgotten to pierce tin of Fray Bentos Ready-Made before cooking as instructed.

Pierced tin of Fray Bentos Ready Made.

Whooshing sound.

Tin of FBRM very fast.

ToFBRM flight-path erratic.

Ducked.

ToFBRM hit cupboard.

Kath not ducked.

Kath struck on shoulder by rebounding tin of flying red-hot FBRM.

FBRM does spinning thing on floor until hiss gone.

Kath lying down, moaning.

Can see knickers. Red. Looks nice.

Suggest shag.

No shag.

Hospital crowded.

10pm. Home. No Kath. Kath parents collected Kath, Kath fractured clavicle.

Eat tin of FBRM. Nice.

Call Emma.

BE HONEST, WHAT GRABS
you: the number 5.6 per 100,000 population or a pressurised tin of Fray Bentos ready-made steak and kidney pie pinging around the kitchen? The first is the rate of new cases of syphilis diagnosed in the UK in 2011. The Fray Bentos is an image, no more, a crazy metaphor for carelessness. But it’s the image that sticks in the mind.

Visual images of danger are usually sexier than numbers, for obvious reasons: they smack the senses with sound, colour, movement and violence. More sneakily, they also slant the way that the danger appears, showing us its consequences, often ignoring the probabilities.

It’s the same split between consequence and probability that we met in the chapter on accidents, when Norm fixated on losing his willy to a
pike. It’s not likely, but it’s everything. Pictures of danger are usually the same, a vivid image of a bad ‘what if?’
*
, not a probability. The danger of skiing – which, based on the odds, ought to be illustrated by someone simply skiing, safely, having (dare we say it?) fun – is more likely to be pictured as a leg in plaster or a whirl of skis and snow off a precipice. We don’t ‘see’ odds – how likely the thing is – we ‘see’ consequences. That’s what people would mean if they were to say ‘picture the risk’. They mean picture the worst that can happen.

Advertisers and governments know this. When they want to change our behaviour because ‘it’s risky’, or persuade us to buy something to make us safer, they often choose images of worst-case ‘what if?’s.

One of the most famous sex-risk images in the UK was what’s known as the AIDS monolith advertisement in 1987. As the smoke clears, we see something like a tombstone carved in rock blasted from the mountainside. The chilling, brilliant voiceover is by the actor John Hurt:

There is now a danger that has become a threat to us all.

It is a deadly disease and there is no known cure.

The virus can be passed during sexual intercourse with an infected
person. Anyone can get it, man or woman.

So far it’s been confined to small groups, but it’s spreading … If
you ignore AIDS, it could be the death of you.

Other public information films about danger from a time when governments still made them include one about road safety with an image of a hammer swinging into a peach:

It can happen anywhere, to anyone.

An ordinary street.

A moment’s thoughtlessness.

Then splat, the hammer hits the peach.

Another, on the risk of crime, has hyenas prowling around a parked car. All very vivid and scary – and all consequential, not probabilistic.
*
But then, how do you do an image of one in a thousand, or any other odds? Not easily, not vividly. Numbers don’t splat like the flesh of a peach or a human being; they don’t bite like hyenas. In contrast, images of the worst-case ‘what if?’ are easy, especially for one victim. And then comes the extrapolation to everyone else, as we’re told that this tombstone/hyena/splatted peach could be you. Think again of Norm’s paralysis as he imagines the teeth and glassy eye of the pike in the reservoir. The consequential image dominates the odds for him too.