The Fate of a Smoking Flower

Every human being will experience days in their lives that are special. A day that is out of the ordinary that is unique from all the rest. Not because it’s the day on which they’ve organised their wedding, or because the culmination of their hard work has earned them a big promotion, but because things happen differently. Events occur outside of the standard illusion of control and leave a mark on people they’ll carry with them for the rest of their lives.

Human beings have always mused over these moments, creating their own understanding of them, explaining them as part of a big orchestrated plan, known simply as fate. Even now, on a day just like any other, where science prevails, explains and tells us how to think about these things, even now when something happens that changes a person’s life, the question still gets asked, “What could I have done differently?” And so it was that Henry Flower walked along the road on his way to work on a sunny spring morning, blissfully unaware of the events that would later unfold and change his life forever.

It’s unknown if fate caused the lottery scratch card to blow across the street, landing on the pavement moments before Henry stepped on it. But it is known that if he hadn’t stopped to stroke the little ginger cat on the corner wall of Leaky Avenue, the lottery ticket would have slipped out of the pocket of Dave Woodcraft, the plumber and sailed neatly over the road past the pavement and Henry’s impending shoe and into the garden of number 10, where it would sit beneath the Camellia’s for the next six months until the ink guaranteeing the winner a ten-pound note had completely washed off.

As it had happened, Henry’s commute was disrupted when a swift gust of air that later no one would recall caused the patrolling ginger tabby, Mr Monsieur, to let out a meow of alarm. And thus, as Henry stopped, fate would find the professional accountant and amateur rock polisher, perfectly positioned within space and time to step on the lost lottery ticket at the precise moment it landed in front of him. And with the perfect fortune of one destined to be ten pounds richer, he picked up the ticket and made his way across the street to Arthur’s Newsagents, with the express intention of making himself ten pounds poorer.  

Inside Arthur’s Newsagent’s, Henry immediately found himself the unwitting spectator to a grumbling matrimonial argument between Arthur and Mrs Arthur. Something about Arthur’s stoic appearance suggested that this interaction was something endured regularly, and a jolt of sympathy flowed into Henry’s heart. It was met by the steely gaze of Mrs Arthur, and Henry quickly decided that he might be better off surveying the selection of chocolate bars and hardboiled sweets. He perused them for a short while, checking the packaging on a few things without picking them up before finally deciding on a mint chocolate pyramid and a half a bag of raspberry sours. He still had a significant amount of the ten pounds left, though, and his mind wandered toward the thought of buying another lottery ticket for the main draw on Friday night.

They say the true measure of a gambling addict is when someone doesn’t know they have a problem, and this thought occurred to Henry. Was buying another lottery ticket with the winnings from a lottery scratch card a pattern? No, he decided. It couldn’t possibly be the symptom of a gambling problem because he hadn’t won the first ticket, he’d found it, and therefore he couldn’t be accused of not knowing when to quit. He could only be accused of not appreciating how lucky he was. And with the same logic of a man who goes to the pub on a Friday night for the strict purpose of drinking one pint of beer, only to decide half an hour later that another one wouldn’t actually be a problem, and eventually finds himself lying in the gutter having been kicked out at closing time, Henry realised that he could counter this accusation by simply accepting the good fortune that had blessed him like some magical power, and buy another lottery ticket for the big draw.

As Henry approached the counter, chocolate in hand, his mind was already rehearsing his order of boiled sweets and a lottery ticket. This might sound like the simplest of tasks to the ordinary person. An exercise that didn’t require organised planning or rehearsal. And to a certain extent, that would be true. But to Henry Flower, recovering cigarette smoker, the process of keeping his mind occupied as he stood at the counter of the small family-run newsagents was a crucial mental undertaking because failure to do so would allow his thoughts and attention to focus on the packets of cigarettes stacked like tiny bricks in a wall of tobacco behind the counter. After fifteen years of smoking forty cigarettes a day, Henry found in the last six months that the most effective method of stopping himself from giving in to the cravings that clawed at him like wild animals was to make sure he simply wasn’t in the vicinity of vendors selling cigarettes. So on a day where luck shined on him and practically begged him to buy a lottery ticket for the main draw on Friday, Henry found himself for the first time in half a year, standing at the counter in front of that tobacco wall, looming above him like a colossal civil engineering project, with only a mint chocolate pyramid and an order of raspberry sours to protect his woefully inadequate will power from the desire to chain smoke a whole packet and come back for seconds.

Arthur, who was still reeling from the one-sided disagreement with Mrs Arthur, seemed pleased to have another human being to interact with, even if it was just a run of the mill transaction, just one of the hundreds of thousands he would oversee in his career as the proprietor of Arthur’s Newsagents, it was a welcome distraction all the same.

“What can I get you, Sir?” said Arthur.

“Mint chocolate pyramid”, Henry said, holding out the triangular chocolate confectionery.

“And twenty Lucky Strikes”.

It wasn’t something Henry planned; it was an instinct. In fact, his mind was still printing out the message “lottery ticket for Friday night’s main draw please” as he heard the words, “Lucky Strikes”, come out of his mouth. And in that second, the decision was made, and for Henry, this created its very own chaos. Like a butterfly flapping its wings, the tornado of fate spun in a different direction.

And as the ripples from that twisting, turning tornado spun through time, it created a version of the future where Henry Flower, a smart man by profession, but occasionally the propagator of poor judgement, was on some level aware that twenty Lucky Strikes were the first twenty steps on a journey back to his well-trodden forty a day path. But what couldn’t yet be seen in this new version of the future was that for a set of lungs that had been slowly getting used to the break in daily self-harm and using it as an opportunity to take a breather, the resumption of smoking would put them in a state of shock. And later in the day, as Henry began feeling tired with the physical symptoms of reduced oxygen levels being absorbed by his recently agitated lungs, he would let out a yawn, a sure-fire sign of the condition known in medical circles as ‘Smokers Lethargy’. 

By the end of the workday, he would feel like he’d spent his shift ploughing a field by hand, which for an accountant at Audley and Jones was not something that came naturally to his skillset. By six o’clock he would be sat slumped in his armchair at home watching the BBC News, and by ten minutes past six, he would be passed out asleep, cigarette still burning in his hand. Henry Flower would escape the ensuing inferno that burned down his apartment building with minor burns to his hands and arms. But his home and 200 strong collection of back issues of the Lapidary Journal would be lost.

Back in the newsagent’s, the immediate effects of the decision were starting to be felt. It was a decision that would shape the future not just of a middle-aged recovering smoker as he walked to the door, feverishly unwrapping his twenty cigarettes, but for the glamorously dressed housewife who had at that moment entered Arthur’s newsagents with the similarly express intention of buying a lottery ticket in Friday night’s main draw. She couldn’t have known it at that moment because it seemed to her to be no different to the countless other times she’d purchased a sliver of hope for one pound fifty. But on this occasion, Hannah Sutherland was about to make the most significant purchase of her life. A jackpot-winning lottery ticket, blessed by fate that would free her from the constraints of her marital life, the expectations, dinner parties with the executives and wives from the Hedgwick Potteries upper management team, and most significantly, the philandering habits of her soon to be ex-husband.

And so it was that Henry Flower continued his walk to work on a sunny spring morning, smoking a cigarette bought on impulse that would change his life forever instead of the lottery ticket for the Friday night main draw that would now change someone else’s. It is, of course, a well-known saying that you can’t cheat fate, but the lesser-known caveat to the phrase is that although you can’t cheat fate, you can change its direction.