Coincidence: A Novel by J. W. Ironmonger

glasses. Several people were in shock. The pushchair had buckled; but the baby, thank God, was unharmed.
    First-aiders and paramedics started to arrive and Thomas and Azalea were pulled away and propped up on the cold stone floor, leaning against a wall. His broken arm was still draped around her shoulder as if they were a couple. In shock and in pain, neither of them sought to move it.
    â€˜Are you all right?’ he asked her, unable – or unwilling – to move.
    Azalea shook her head. ‘I think I’ve broken some ribs. You?’
    â€˜My arm,’ he said.
    It was difficult to talk. They waited. Station staff tried to clear the crowd. Ambulance men arrived with stretchers.
    â€˜It’s all right – I can walk,’ said Thomas, getting to his feet and wincing with the pain.
    â€˜Are you two together?’ asked an ambulance man. Thomas shook his head.
    â€˜In that case, if you can walk, can you go with my colleague?’ he nodded towards a fellow rescue worker. ‘Let’s have a stretcher over here for this lady,’ he called.
    A first-aider tied a sling around Thomas’s arm, and helped him to make his way back up the central stairwell to the station concourse. Thomas glanced back to see Azalea strapped onto a stretcher behind him. Her eyes were closed.
    At the Accident and Emergency unit of University College Hospital, Thomas looked for the red-haired woman who had shared his step. But some of the ambulance cases were being directed to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead.
    Thus quickly and unexpectedly our lives can change. None of us sets out to break a bone or to participate in an incident like the one that took place at the foot of the escalator at Euston Station that day. These things, when they happen, come as a surprise. Escalator pile-ups, as it turns out, are not especially rare. London Underground suffers dozens of incidents a year. This one was worse than many because of the intensity of the crush and because the couple at the front of the pile-up had heavy suitcases that blocked the way for anyone thrown into the fray. But the incident didn’t even warrant a paragraph in the Evening Standard . A few bones were broken, but no one was killed.
    In the days that followed the accident, Thomas found himself thinking about the woman with the broken rib. They had sat together in the corridor of the Underground station, waiting for the emergency services to arrive. His arm had been draped over her shoulder. He felt embarrassed to think about this. They had barely spoken a sentence to each other. Even in the chaos they had watchfully observed the Londoner’s code of silence. But now he discovered himself trying to picture her face. There was a familiarity to her. Did he know her? He had struggled not to look at her. He had never asked her name, never enquired about her journey, never volunteered his phone number. He had, however, scented a delicate perfume, caught just a faint hint of organic fragrance from her hair, and now he longed to recapture the memory of this elusive aroma. For just a moment her head had rested upon his shoulder, seeking comfort like a lover’s head, and he out of instinct had turned towards her, almost as if he might place a gentle kiss upon her hair. And then the moment had passed. But in his imagination and in his memory of the incident, this was the brief second that Thomas Post would revisit, this fragment of time and this indefinable scent. He thought of calling the accident unit at the Royal Free Hospital, just to enquire about the woman who had broken a rib, and on one occasion he did dial the number and he let it ring a couple of times, but he checked himself and hung up. The hospital would not share patient information unless he could prove that they were related, and how could he claim that if he didn’t even know the woman’s name?
    The day of the escalator incident was a Friday. Thomas was back at work by Wednesday