The man with three nipples hauled the body from the bottom of the pool. It lay limp and unresponsive despite the pumping and pounding. "How long was he under?" someone asked. Thankfully, I didn't know; it wasn't my shift. I'd only just arrived. We gave up, but then the old man spewed another gallon of water and wheezed back to life. According to the report, his name was Waterman.
I spent several summers working as a lifeguard. That year, it was a glassy new municipal pool in the West Midlands. As well as the man with three nipples, I was working with a powerlifting champion and an escaped convict. A typical snack for the powerlifter would be a whole roast chicken and two pints of milk. We didn't know our colleague was a criminal until the police came to take him away. I was sorry to see him go. His replacement was a waster by the name of Veasey, who didn't last long. The leisure services director turned up with a local dignitary for a tour of the site and they discovered our friend in the plant room sharing a spliff with some shivering nymph in a bikini.
Five years later, I was still lifeguarding-in Oxford now, sometimes at Hinksey pool, sometimes at one or other of the riverside bathing places, more often than not the murky backwater known as Tumbling Bay. It was hidden behind the allotments at the edge of Botley park. No one ever went there. One day I'm sitting in my hut, out of the rain, reading a newspaper, and I chance upon the name Veasey. It's not the same person, but a train of memories is set in motion: the man with three nipples, the near-corpse, the powerlifter, the armed robber and louche, lazy Veasey. I wonder what he's doing now. That same evening I drop in to the Corn Dolly, which is not one of my usual haunts. There's a rock band playing. They're terrible and my brain, primed by beer and reminiscence, starts playing tricks because each time I look at the bass player I find I'm hallucinating Veasey. Later, he materialises right next to me at the bar and I realise that it is Veasey. It seems oddly inevitable. "It's an amazing coincidence," I tell him, "You hadn't crossed my mind in years until this afternoon. And now..." "Yeah," he says, unimpressed. I'm not sure he even remembers who I am. "Good to see you, mate," he says, and then he's off. I have never seen him again.
The Veasey coincidence spooked me. Carl Jung, who coined the term "synchronicity," believed that "at least a part of the psyche is not subject to the laws of space and time." He steeped himself in quantum theory and the I Ching and came up with the acausal connecting principle. Psychological phenomena are a fundamental constituent of the universe, he believed, and the world is threaded through with patterns of connectivity governed by the meaning of events. Meaningful coincidence-synchronicity-is an expression of this. "Oh come," said Freud on one occasion, "That is sheer bosh." I am inclined, for once, to agree with Freud. But I can't shake off the eerie feeling.
The brain is a pattern recognition device and perception is all about attaching meanings to patterns. Our survival depends both on the ability to identify regularities in the world and to respond to irregularities. Generally, we know what to expect. We have an intuitive sense of cause and effect, and of what is probable and what is improbable. In the tumultuous cascade of people and events that constitutes a lifetime, random improbable conjunctions are bound to occur. That they are down to chance doesn't make them any less disconcerting. We still feel impelled to seek an explanation, some superordinate pattern.
Of course, all creative endeavour is geared towards the discovery of new patterns and connections, fresh ways of seeing the world; but sometimes the struggle for insight can be counterproductive. Epiphany (a moment of realisation) has an obscure cousin in the lexicon of madness-apophany. It refers to the point at which an ordinary experience becomes the fountainhead of delusion. The newsreader says "Good evening," and you know at once that he is Satan himself. Your neighbour's car catches the light and you realise that he and his fellow extraterrestrials are bent on destroying your brain with their deadly rays. ("Apophenia" is a theme of William Gibson's latest paranoia-flavoured novel, Pattern Recognition). People vary in their susceptibility to seeing connections between seemingly unrelated events and ideas and, to paraphrase Seneca, all imagination has a dash of madness. But weird coincidences can induce a psychotic wobble in the sanest of minds. You get that vertiginous sense of alienation from consensus reality, that there are more things in heaven and earth. It's no bad thing.
A couple of days after my encounter with Veasey I arrived for my afternoon shift at Hinksey pool. I was taking over from Nick (the gay mountaineer) and Hazel (the wall-of-death rider's assistant). Hazel was writing up an incident report. An old bloke had slipped, cracked his head and fallen, dazed, into the deep end. Nick fished him out, Hazel patched him up. He seemed to recover well enough and they'd sent him on his way. The man's name was Waterman.
