Blind Chance

By Ruth Bullivant

The world believes Alex King lives the perfect life. He is a successful man, aware of his good fortune and a born leader, respected and admired by all who know him. But he has two terrible secrets: one he has buried for two decades; the other he has yet to learn. 

 

Everyone loves Alex except Charles. Outwardly respectable, inwardly Machiavellian, Charles has one driving obsession: he loves his ex-wife dearly. And on the day Kaz left him for Alex, he swore deadly vengeance.

 

A contemporary thriller based on the Greek legend of Oedipus, Charles heroically but fruitlessly pursues Alex from America's East Coast to Venice, via Istanbul and Prague. The gods themselves seem to protect Alex until as a result of Charles' machinations, both Alex's secrets are revealed to him – but not to Charles - in a shocking twist.

 

Alex, now stripped of everything except his profound self-knowledge, escapes to Greece. There he is tracked down by Charles who is intent on wreaking his revenge. As Charles raises his hand, he is faced with Alex's secrets and forced to decide the justice of his revenge in a world ruled by Blind Chance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arbie Publishing
• Release date: Feb 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781838315207

Book preview

BLIND CHANCE

Ruth Bullivant

First Edition published 2021

Copyright © 2021 Ruth Bullivant.

Ruth Bullivant

Cover: David Collins

dccovercreations.com

ISBN Digital Edition 978-1-8383152-0-7

ISBN Print Edition 978-1-8383152-1-4

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Except as permitted by copyright law, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the author, nor (in the case of the paperback version) be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the purchaser. All characters and events in this book, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

The chorus

Before the shadow lengthened to darken the life of Alex King, its seed lay dormant, buried deep in the lap of Blind Chance.

Some people call her Luck. A euphemism.

Chance is no god but, though she has no sight, she can see better than Alex King who is setting out on his first train journey across Europe. She knows the importance of being in the proper frame of mind to make the right choices. To know what is unknown. Choice leads to consequence and Consequence is the price we pay for our freedom to choose.

Alex’s choice sprang from his arrogance. He thought he could control his life, for the good, by the decisions he made. But for that Hubris, the seed would have stayed buried. Instead, his choice led to Catastrophe. His life was overturned and so was that of his wife, Kaz and their son, Nikki.

Prophecy

It is 1997 and Alex, seventeen, is in Italy, travelling southwards in a battered old train. The Art Deco insignia of Ferrovia del Stato shows everywhere, on the window, above the rusty carriage door, even on the wall of the lavatory, which is just a hole in the floor and allows a bird’s eye’s view of the rusty track that Alex finds inhibiting.

Since Alex left the stone house in the Yorkshire Dales where he had grown up, passing through London, over the Channel, past Paris and Lyon and the Alps, the trains had grown slower and more thoughtful. His objective was Greece: to walk in the wild, northern mountains, maybe see wild boar and eagles. To see pure, cobalt blue lakes with tiny Byzantine churches scattered like jewels around their shores. His well–thumbed red Thomas Cook Timetable shows the ferry times to Greece from Bari in the deep south, on Italy’s heel.

Thomas Cook, guide to epic journeys. Alex loves the whole thing with trains. You decide where you want to go and you find a train, or a series of trains with gaps in between that you fill with paninis and ice–cream at the station bar and you go to where you want to be. You get to choose. Over the mountains or round by the sea? Get off the train in the centre of a city or stay in a tiny village and spend a day walking in the countryside? With trains, you were in control of your journey. Alex has never had this sense of control over his life before and he relishes it.

And the trip gives him space to think and decide what he’s going to do next with his life. He is done with school. University? Not a chance. There is a whole wide world out there to see and learn from. And he wants to make money. Lots of it and by his own hard work.

But at this moment, he has fallen in love with Italy and is not yet ready to leave. Yorkshire was home for all of Alex’s childhood. If Yorkshire is God’s County, Italy, in June, is God’s Heaven. Alex is delighted with everything he sees and he roams as the whim takes him, through hill–top villages, sun–baked cities and salt–sticky seaside resorts. The sun grows in intensity every day and makes the days white.

Now, he is south of Rome and following the coast to poorer, wilder lands south of Naples. On the edge of a crumbling village, he finds the ruins of a small town built by ancient Greek adventurers. When it was built, it was a harbour town, controlling trade for miles along the coast in each direction. Corn from Egypt, silks and perfumed woods from unnamed lands further east. It flourished for the better part of a millennium and then its inhabitants were wiped out by malaria, the menace of swamplands, as the shoreline retreated. The town was left for another thousand years marooned in a marsh.

He walks across the tracks and leaves the station. Not so much a station as parallel platforms: a simple halt in the middle of bare fields, already harvested. At the end of a long, dusty road lined with cypress trees, he sees three Greek temples, near–perfect, dominating the ruins.

At the ramshackle entrance hut, Alex hands crumpled lira notes to an ancient woman dressed in black. She, finding he spoke no Italian, smiles and pats his hand and mimes an invitation to leave his heavy rucksack. He slides it off and she presses a boiled sweet into his reluctant hand, with gnarled, horn–nailed fingers.

He looks for a place to read his guidebook. A pile of tumbled slabs under an oak along the grass grown cobbled path invite him with seat and shade. He sits and dutifully reads among scarlet poppies. A faint, warm breeze dries the sweat on his back.

The book absorbs him into the flow of life on this spot two and a half thousand years ago. As well as the temples, he reads, there was an amphitheatre, tiny and beautifully preserved, which served as an open air town hall, theatre, music hall and church. It was the centre of political life in the town and political debates were conducted side by side with the plays and poetry readings that formed the town’s religious life.

He turns a page. In ancient times, the town had been famous as the site of an oracle expressed through the mouth of the Sibyl, the priestess. The guidebook noted that the Sibyl kept up with the political zeitgeist. Uttering her prophecies under the stimulation of burning herbs, she could be relied on for overt support of the town council’s proposals to fund expeditions to establish colonies that would return tribute to the mother colony. And the Sibyl was subtle, but determined, in encouraging a policy of tolerance towards new arrivals on the shores of Magna Graecia. A footnote remarked, dryly, that the oracle, discovered by the Greeks on their arrival at the little fishing village, appeared to have been unknown to the original, Italian, inhabitants.

Alex closes the book and gazes around him at the fallen stones and toppled columns, lushly overgrown. The deep silence was only broken by an occasional cricket or bird. The harbour and shoreline used to be a matter of feet from where Alex was sitting. He imagines the hungry Greeks, searching for rest and shelter from a hostile world, weary from their sea crossing and exiled from an Athens unable to feed its growing population, landing in their curved wooden ships just there, where a line of scarlet poppies flutters in the soft breeze.

Two thousand, six hundred years later, Alex shades his eyes to peer at the sea which is just visible two miles off. Storm clouds are blotting out the horizon and heaviness is building in the air. He guesses rain is not far off and checks the guidebook to see how far is the oracle. Not far.

His feet tangle with thick green grass not yet burnt by the summer sun and he joins an easier path, a lane paved by the ancients. The ruts of cartwheels lead past stone foundations of houses. At the houses’ entrances, in thresholds worn down by centuries of boots, he fingers the holes where hinges had supported wooden front doors. The shape of the rooms marked out by low walls look impossibly small to live in as he thinks of the living room in the farmhouse he grew up in, in the Dales. Even one piece of the furniture there, his mother’s armchair, say or the dresser, would barely fit in one of these rooms. You couldn’t even get the sofa through the doorway.

Beyond the last temple he finds himself in a large field. At the far corner is a raised, round platform where, his guidebook tells him, the priestess would wait for supplicants who wanted a prophecy. The surrounding wall of the little temple was long gone but the stone platform is shoulder high.

There were steps but now, they are a mound of rubble. He places his hands on the platform and levers himself up, as if pulling himself out of a pool. He wants to see the famed crack in the temple’s floor that gave the priestess access to the wisdom of the Underworld.

He reaches the top of the platform and is on his knees when a shrill whistle splits the air. A torrent of outrage rushes towards him. He turns as a middle–aged woman, uniform jacket unbuttoned and swinging as she strides towards him, points at Alex and stabs the air with her whistle. Her full chest is heaving with indignation.

Alex’s heart is thumping. The woman’s aggression is as terrifying as it is unexpected. He has seen no guards on the site since paying for his ticket and there are no fences around the ruined buildings. What has he done wrong? The woman has reached the foot of the platform and he wants to run away but his legs are not responding.

The woman is swaying in front of a fallen column six feet away. She is trampling red poppies underfoot and is still shouting, the phrases soaring and dipping, as a glowing, liquid stream of red–hot abuse pours from her. It is almost poetic in its rhythm.

Alex watches her gaze intensify and in another second Alex understands what she is saying. He cannot pinpoint the moment the words change from Italian to English. If they do.

‘I see you! I see you, in the future,’ the guard screams, gesticulating with her whistle. ‘I see you, sitting there, hated by the gods. I see your father’s death. It is you, ignorant boy, you who will kill him. It will happen at the crossroads. And your mother,’ the guard lowers the whistle, sways and steadies herself on the fallen drum.

She whispers, ‘Your mother.’

Alex is mesmerized and leans forward.

‘Your mother. Your seed will mingle with hers.’ And in a stronger voice she cries, ‘You will sleep with your mother.’

There is silence for a moment. The guard looks dazed and rubs her mouth with the back of her hand. Her knees give way underneath her and she sits down hard on the grass, taking no notice of Alex.

Alex feels breathless, as if he has been punched in the stomach. As he controls his breathing, he becomes conscious of pain and realises he is digging his fingernails into the ball of his thumb. He relaxes his hands. The world around him seems to come back into focus. He needs to get away from this. He gives the blank–faced woman a wide berth and stumbles over the grass to the paved lane. At the entrance hut, he retrieves his rucksack from the old woman who pats his cheek and smiles fondly with bright, black eyes.

With frequent glances over his shoulder, he near as runs, so far as teenage dignity will allow, to the shelter of his hostel in the modern village.

In the dormitory room, Alex lies on the bed and stares at the underside of the top bunk. What set the woman off like that? He hadn’t been doing anything. She was out of control. What she said didn’t make sense. How could he ever kill his father?

He swallows as he remembers her whisper.

The woman was mad. Was she malicious? But she didn't know him. Why say things like that?

He shuts his eyes tight and thinks of home. The sound of ewes calling to their lambs as they graze in the fields along the lower slopes of the moor. He pictures high tea in the low–ceilinged farmhouse kitchen in the Dales. His mother, Christine, at one end of the long table, furthest from the stove. Petite, black hair swept into a chignon, her presence graceful and commanding as the prima ballerina she had been. When he was much younger, he liked to imagine her curtseying to wild applause, showered with roses, presented with a big bunch of flowers.

Dinah, at the other end of the table. Warmth comforts him as he thinks of her pale blue eyes and round face, reddened by Dale winds and frozen winters. Dinah was almost as much his mother as Christine. Her mother and before that, she used to tell him, her grandmother, kept the house right for the King family.

Next to Dinah, her husband Peter. A kind man. He managed the farm and, being present, not spending weeks at a time in London, was as much of a father to him as Jacob.

Jacob. Dad. Alex clenches his fists.

Dad. Mum. Alex kicks over to lie on his stomach and slips a hand under his pillow for the red timetable. He fingers the soft edges of the pages. He visualises the journey. Two days journey? Three, maybe.

Problem was, if he went back home now, there would still be Dad. Wanting him to stay on the farm and not to make his way in the world. But then, if he didn’t go back home, now or in a bit, he’d spend the rest of his life thinking he was avoiding them, that he’d given in to this stupid Prophecy. If that’s what it was. That he was scared to go home in case he killed his father. Married his mother.

How weird was that? Not going to happen.

The wall between Child and Adult at Alex’s age is elastic and membrane thin. Each side competes for advantage, pushes against the wall, gains ground, loses it. Child Alex stares at his pillow and finds himself longing to be eating shepherd’s pie at the oak table, listening to Dinah’s questions about the new lambs and Peter’s laconic replies. Adult Alex wants to make his own way in the world. He fears he’ll spend the rest of his life feeling undermined, believing it wasn’t his choice to leave home.

A tiny part of him fears the prophecy might turn out to be true.

All this anxiety, just because by pure chance he ran up against a madwoman in some ancient ruins while bumming around Italy.

He props himself up on his elbows and opens the timetable, turning the floppy pages to ITALY, looking as much for reassurance that trains still ran north, and still ran south, from the tiny halt in the middle of the fields. That he still had choices.

His dad wants him to stay in the big stone house in the Dales. Help Peter manage the farm. Be company for his mother with him, Jacob, working in London most of the time. Keeps going on at him, on and on. ‘When are you going to knuckle down, son? What are you going to do with your life? You’ve got to make plans, Alex. Know where you’re headed.’

Needling away, prick, prick, prick.

Prick.

If anyone was going to decide what he was going to do with his life, it would be him, Alex. Not his dad. His dad wasn’t going to tell him what to do.

The Prophecy was a complication he could do without. On the slow journey south, he’d almost made up his mind to leave. Leave England altogether and make his fortune abroad. Show his dad he didn’t need his money. But now, because of this woman ranting at him, it’d look like he was running away, not making the decision himself to forge his own way in life.

Not that anyone would ever know. He’d never tell anyone about this. But he’d know. And look, it was his life and he was in control of his own life.

The arguments keep circling around Alex’s brain. He is still scared. The woman was so intense. She must have been talking to him. There wasn’t anyone else around. And that weird, deep voice. More like groaning from deep underground – maybe she’d been having some sort of fit.

After a couple of hours, Alex’s gurgling stomach crowds out his spinning thoughts. He swings his legs off the bunk and leaves the hostel. There is a lot of activity around a pizzeria on the main street. He realises how much he wants to be surrounded by people.

A nimble waiter lays a place for him on the corner of a large, crowded table. He slips into a chair between a woman and a man and finds himself part of a group of animated American students. They give him casual nods with gleaming smiles.

‘She was so rude!’ says the woman next to him. She glances at Alex and she runs her hand lightly down her long, blonde hair and tosses it over her shoulder.

A man in a black t–shirt nods vigorously. ‘She seemed really pissed at me. I only knelt down to see through the crack. It would have been cool to see Hell.’

The waiter appears between Alex and the woman and stands braced for action, pen poised over his notebook.

‘OK, guys. You want what?’

Alex wants to hear what the Americans had to say about the guard at the site. Luck is on his side as they fail to notice the waiter. A woman with thick auburn hair shudders.

‘I thought she was going to hit you, Will. Scary.’

Black T–shirt nods. ‘She yelled at me like she was crazy.’

‘You are talking about Sibylla, I think.’

Now they look at the waiter. A large young man in a red–checked shirt leans towards him.

‘You mean the woman at the site – the guard?’

‘Si. She’s lived all her life here. I know her from the time I was little.’ The waiter pats the air next to his thigh. ‘She’s a bit matto. You say,’ the waiter waves the pen in an elegant arc, searching for the word, ‘simple. She love the stones.’ He pauses. ‘I mean, the old town. She shouts and gets angry but they say she has gifts.’

‘Gifts? What sort?’

The waiter shrugs. He needs to get on with his job. Other customers are waiting. ‘You want pizza? What sort?’

Alex wonders if Sibylla’s gifts run to predicting the future. He hopes not. He feels cold in his stomach again. It is nonsense of course, just superstition to think the village simpleton can tell the future when she gets angry. But he is unsettled.

‘Are you travelling solo?’

The blonde woman with skin the colour of peaches speaks with a Californian lilt. Alex relaxes and his anxiety melts in the warmth of his new friends’ laughter.

The Americans are staying at the same hostel and by the time they all turn in for the night, he has forgotten the encounter with Sibylla at the site. He falls asleep in his bunk before the last light is turned out.

A dream wakes him. As he opens his eyes on the dark dormitory, a memory of dark apertures and piercing whistles slips away but leaves him feeling profoundly disturbed. He spends the rest of the night turning Sibylla’s words over in his mind until they become as twisted as the sleeping bag that winds itself tightly around his body.

Over rolls and coffee the following morning, the Americans encourage Alex to join them. They have room in the mini bus that will be driven by the man in the red checked–shirt and they are bound south, for Sicily. But Alex’s confidence is shaken and he refuses the chance, even while he watches disappointment flash in the eyes of the girl with peach skin.

At Paestum station, he boards a battered train that will take him, village by village, north to Naples. There he wraps the atmosphere of the riotous, black–cobbled streets around him like a comforting blanket. Once cocooned, insulated from the mysterious and the atavistic by the mass of human life and energy, he can hear the small voice of reason that has been trying to make itself heard since the encounter yesterday: Sibylla was mad. Raving.

Determined to continue his journey to Greece, Alex enjoys a few days in Naples. Life and vigour laps around him. He is reassured.

Walking through the streets after a solitary, late evening meal, he turns a corner and happens on a knife fight, a silent and lethal struggle. His fear resurfaces, wordless, smothering and unreasoning and the child in him, not yet outgrown, longs again to return home to his mother, familiar, graceful and Dinah: comfortable, filled with solid good sense and uncompromising in the face of nightmares. He climbs into bed and makes up his mind to catch the train to England in the morning.

His dreams that night have no sense or purpose but he is always running, across great plains stretching to the horizon, across empty mountain ranges, sometimes even across the sea, always running from something he cannot see. He is unable to reach safety but is never caught. He is pursued in a grey, rocky desert lit by harsh sunlight. Every shadow of every stone shows black and razor–edged.

When he slips into unconsciousness, he sleeps for two hours and wakes with a pounding headache. The sheets are damp with sweat. He dry swallows four aspirin, washes cursorily and leaves the hostel. He heads for Napoli Piazza Garibaldi, his mind is fogged and he has no clear idea of where he will go.

He fingers a thick espresso cup on a station bar counter. He leafs through the dog–eared timetable, calculating routes and train changes north. He knows his