PROBABILITIES

Probabilities

By Peter Woodgate

Mick had wandered outside for some fresh air. The wedding reception had become somewhat of a bore, you know, after dinner speeches followed by “the first dance” then the Best Man and Chief Bridesmaid get stuck into each other.

No, it was all getting too much and Mick had seen enough.

    He took a long thoughtful drag on his cigarette and wondered what the hell he was doing there. Alright, he was a friend of the bridegroom and, in the past, had many a drunken night out with him, but, since the bride and groom had got together as a couple, Mick had seen little of him.

    Mick’s own love life was non-existent, a situation he was working on with little success. It was not because of his looks, most girls found him extremely attractive, physically, he just lacked personality. You see Mick loved to discuss Physics, Astronomy and Probabilities. His latest “pet subject” was asteroids and the probability of one hitting Earth wiping out all known life. Couple that with the conversation Mick made about paper and the temperature 451 degrees Fahrenheit, the heat at which paper bursts into flames. This, no doubt, was one of the reasons his dates failed to show up a second time.

    He took a final drag on his cigarette, flicked the stub onto the ground and stamped it into the gravel path. He was about to return to the reception when he caught sight of a young woman sitting at one of the external tables. It was September and not particularly warm. She was not smoking and Mick wondered why she was sitting out there on her own. He took a deep breath, walked over to her and asked: “are you ok?”

It was only then that he noticed she was crying.

    Instinctively Mick put his arm around her shoulders and offered her his handkerchief, making sure it had not been used before he did so. She looked up at him with moist red eyes sniffing a “thank you” before breaking into a half smile. Mick had a sharp intake of breath, “I know you don’t I?”  feeling embarrassed as he tried to remember her name. “You are?... She smiled as she answered, “Jane, Jane Tomkins,” she replied. “Of course” Mick sounded quite excited, “you were in my group, Durham Uni, reading Mathematics and Physics.” “And you are Michael Slater, couldn’t forget you, all the girls fancied you then, did you not know?”

Blushing and feeling awkward he looked at Jane. She had stopped crying and smiled as they continued chatting.

“So what have you got to be so sad about?” enquired Mick.

“Oh, the usual, my boyfriend invites me down to this wedding and then I find out he’s been cheating on me with one of the bridesmaids, men eh.”

    They continued talking about their time at Uni, he had always been somewhat of a loner but here, suddenly he felt completely at ease and soon arrived at one of his favourite subjects. The old chestnut, well asteroids actually cropped up and the probability of one hitting earth, they both agreed, was about ten million to one.  “About the same odds as us bumping into each other,” Mick added.

This set them off laughing.

    “That’s funny,” they uttered the words simultaneously.

“Sorry,” Mick interjected, “what were you going to say?”

“I was just thinking I haven’t laughed in ages,” replied Jane.

“That was exactly what I was thinking too,” Mick smiled.

     They stood there, for a moment, smiling at each other, then hugged and kissed. Mick felt embarrassed and stood looking at Jane. She returned the gaze with a smile and for a moment they were motionless.

    They were both brought out of the trance by the sudden increase in the volume of the music pounding out behind them, a rendition of Jailhouse Rock blasted  from the reception drowning the best efforts of the choir singing Rock of Ages in the little chapel just around the corner.

    Many millions of miles away, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, the asteroids Ceres and Vesta collided. This sent a chunk of metallic rock, one hundred and sixty kilometres in circumference, hurtling on a collision course with earth.

    “Shall we go for a drink? Mick turned to Jane feeling happier than he had for goodness knows how many years. They returned to the reception, the music becoming almost painful to their ears.

“What would you like?” Mick turned to Jane as the barman approached.

“I’ll have a scotch on the rocks” she replied, feeling rather daring.

Mick looked at the beer on tap, as usual, no bitter just lager. He didn’t like lager but thought “hey, I need to celebrate with something.”

“I’ll have one of those lagers that are probably the best in the world,” he remarked, sarcastically, unaware that it was probably the last lager that he would ever drink.

Copyright Peter Woodgate

PROBABILITIES (ALTERNATIVE ENDING)

“And you are Mick Maron, king of the public bar in the “Frog and Nightgown.”

The girl responded after the briefest moment of scrutiny.

“Well, well, what a small world. You are the only one from Uni that I have come across since I moved down south. I had a big crush on you in those days but was much too shy to even talk to you. Come, sit by me and tell me what you have been up to.”

    It was as if the sun had just emerged from the clouds on a rainy day as they brought each other up to date with recent history. Mick was surprised at how quickly Jane had thrown off her earlier sadness and felt his own spirit rising as they chatted away.

    She told him about her job in the laboratory and of her ambition to develop a vaccine for coronavirus. The details of her methodology would perhaps have been boring to the average chap but Mick found himself genuinely interested, asking all the right questions in all the right places.

    He was struck by the way her animated face caught the reflected light from a nearby window and how that light seemed to put a sparkle in her eyes. He warned her about the danger from asteroids and when that went down well he told her about his job in a private school. Mick told her about his ambition to develop a new teaching method based on play rather than rote. He spoke of his desire to become a headmaster and even, in time, have his own school.

    Together they explored each other’s minds in the way, lovers explore one another’s bodies and found nothing there that they did not admire.

    And so, viewed from our perspective of a fly on the wall, we watch the pair of them engrossed in each other. From time to time fellow guests would come into the garden, to smoke, to explore, or maybe take a breather. Some would wander over and wait for an opportunity to join their conversation, only to give up after a while and slide away unnoticed, back to, the music, the punch bowl and the platitudes.

    And there they stayed, Mick and Jane, until everyone else had left and the hotel staff politely asked them to leave.

They never saw each other again because, despite their fine intellect, they were socially shallow: she was put off by his single gold earring and he thought her a trifle overweight.

    Of course, they never forgot each other and in their reflective moments the memory that each had of the other, became ever more agreeable.

    Sadly a thin shadow of regret began to invade their busy loveless lives. As they matured that shadow grew until at last each became more and more resolved to try to find the other again, just as soon as the pressure of work decreased: but it never did.