valorous idylls chapter 30

Coincidences

Sitting in a cafe with the business woman Nessa Dunlea.
She says: "You know that a few weeks after you had your fall, Trevor Baines' brother had a fall. He died from his one."
Then she indicates a man across the room chatting to a group of people.
"That man is a teacher at the Cross And Passion Convent. He took a fall a few months ago. The doctors said he wouldn't live. Then they said he'd never talk again. Then they said he'd never walk."
As we watch him, the man says goodbye to his friends and walks from the cafe.
Later that week I meet Maggie O'Clare in the street.
"What happened to you?" she exclaims.
Evidently she missed the memo.
I give her a limited update.
She pales.
"When did it happen?"
"January."
"What day?"
"Er, Wednesday... the 30th."
"What time?"
"Some time after three o'clock in the afternoon. About 3.15pm. Why?"
"A priest friend of mine was killed in a freak accident on that day at exactly that time."
A few days after Maggie's consummate attempt to give me a permanent case of the heebie jeebies, I'm called back to the Dolce And Gabbana Fashion House, known as Tallaght hospital.
The dude doctors probably need a good laugh or to check on Lefty The Arm, or something.
As Farmer Jones is driving me there, I think: "What would confirm for me the providence of God in any of this? I suppose if I met that woman from gangland again."
At the hospital, A Muslim doctor taps my chart and asks: "How did you fall?"
Muslims are close to eternal things.
I consider telling him the whole story.
He might actually believe it.
I decide to restrict my account to the more prosaic sphere and say: "There must have been frost on the ground."
Out in the corridor. the throng of stylishly dressed health care professionals, clerical staff, nurses, doctors and patients, parts suddenly and the woman from gangland strolls up to me.
She looks about a hundred times better than the day she told me she couldn't give up drugs.
We both stare.
She gives me a hug.