The Coin That Stood Up: My First Brush With the Unknown

The air in Portobello Road Market on that November afternoon smelled like damp wool, fried dough dusted with cinnamon, and the sharp, sweet rot of overripe pears spilling out of a crate at my feet. I was 22, three months out of university with a degree in English literature and a student loan that felt like a mortgage, two weeks removed from the breakup that had left me sleeping on my friend Joe’s couch and eating cold baked beans for dinner, and four hours fresh from a job interview at a small independent publishing house that had told me, politely but firmly, that I didn’t have enough “commercial experience” to be an editorial assistant. My phone was in my pocket, buzzing with a text from Clara: *Are we ever going to talk about what happened?* I hadn’t replied. I couldn’t. Every time I opened my thumb to type, I thought about the way she’d thrown my dog-eared copy of *The Bell Jar* at the wall the night we broke up, the way she’d said I was “too busy dreaming to live in the real world.” I was standing in front of a stall stacked with vintage 1970s vinyl, trying to decide if I should reply, when my hand brushed the crumpled coin in my jeans pocket.

It was a 1999 two-pound coin, scratched across the Queen’s head where my grandad had dropped it in a pub beer garden in Manchester in 2010, the year I graduated high school. He’d pressed it into my palm at my university graduation that June, after I’d told him I’d broken up with Clara for the first time (we’d gotten back together three

three weeks later, when I’d called her crying from a fresher’s week rave, convinced I’d made a terrible mistake.” He’d slipped the scuffed two-pound piece into my palm, his calloused fingers brushing mine, and said, “Don’t ever let a piece of metal tell you where to go, mate. It’s just a mirror. You’re the one who has to look into it.” I’d laughed then, tucked the coin into my jeans pocket, and forgot about it until that afternoon in Portobello Road, when my thumb rubbed the raised edge of the pound symbol worn smooth by eight years of being shoved and pulled out of pockets, and I decided it was the perfect neutral arbiter for the mess my life had become.

The two options felt like they were carved into stone, no middle ground, no way out. Option one: reply to Clara’s text, meet her for coffee the next day, beg her to take me back, turn down the Bristol offer, stay in the shared flat in Dalston with three other guys who left their dishes in the sink for three days at a time, keep applying for editorial jobs at London publishers even though I’d already been rejected by twelve of them, and spend the next three years trying to rebuild the four-year relationship everyone from our sixth-form tutor to my grandad had assumed would end in marriage. Option two: turn off my phone, ignore Clara’s text forever, accept the £22,000-a-year job as an editorial assistant at a tiny independent publisher in Bristol that specialized in picture books for neurodivergent kids, move into a box room in a house share with a nurse and a PhD student, leave behind all the cafes where Clara and I used to sit for hours writing bad poetry, and spend the next three years trying to build a career I wasn’t sure I was good enough for. I’d spent three nights lying on Joe’s couch staring at the ceiling, running through both scenarios in my head so many times I could recite the dialogue, but every time I got to the part where I had to actually make the call, my throat closed up. A coin, I thought, would make it simple. No more agonizing. No more 3 a.m. spirals about whether I was throwing away my “one true love” or my “only shot at a real career.” A coin was objective. It didn’t care about my feelings. It would just give me an answer, and I could blame it if things went wrong.

I fished the coin out of my pocket, held it up between my thumb and forefinger, and let the thin November sun catch the scuffed edge of the pound symbol. The market hummed around me: a busker playing a badly tuned acoustic guitar, a vendor yelling about “vintage Levi’s for a fiver,” the smell of roasted chestnuts drifting from a stall three feet away. I set the rules in my head before I tossed it, the way I’d seen people do in movies a hundred times: pound symbol up, I stay in London, reply to Clara, fight for us. Royal coat of arms up, I go to Bristol, turn off my phone, start over. I flicked my wrist, hard enough that the coin spun so fast it was a blur of silver against the grey sky, and watched it rise, hang for a split second at the top of its arc, then fall.

It hit the cobblestones with a sharp *ting* that cut through the market noise, bounced once, twice, then wobbled. I held my breath, leaning forward to see which side it would land on, but instead of tipping to one side or the other, it settled. Straight up. Edge down. It stood there on the narrow gap between two cobblestones, rocking slightly in the wind, like it was teetering on the edge of a decision of its own. I stared at it for three full seconds, too confused to move, then a gust of wind off the nearby canal caught it, and it rolled, fast and straight, under the wooden slat base of the silver jewelry stall ten feet away.

I knelt to look for it, but the stall’s wooden slats were spaced too close together, and I could see the glint of the coin tucked in the crack between two slats, still standing on its edge, half in shadow, half lit by the weak sun. The woman running the stall looked up from the chain she was repairing, her silver hair pulled back in a loose bun, tortoiseshell glasses slipping down her nose. She was in her late seventies, I guessed, her hands gnarled with arthritis but steady as she held the tiny link of silver she was soldering. She nodded at the crack where the coin was stuck. “Don’t bother,” she said, her voice rough from years of yelling over market noise. “It doesn’t want to be found. Not yet, anyway.”

I sat back on my heels, my hands hovering over the slats, and laughed, a sharp, disbelieving sound. I’d spent three nights agonizing over a choice I’d framed as life or death, and the coin I’d trusted to make the decision for me had refused to pick a side. It had chosen the middle, the gap between the options, the space I hadn’t even considered existed. The logical part of my brain wanted to write it off as a fluke, a one-in-a-thousand chance that the coin would land on its edge and roll exactly into that crack, but the part of me that had been crying for three nights, the part that had been too scared to even think about what I actually wanted, felt a crack open in the stone I’d built around my two choices.

That was the first time I ever thought about what divination actually is, though I wouldn’t have called it that then. I just knew that the coin had refused to give me the answer I thought I wanted, and for some reason, that felt like a relief.

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My grandad wasn’t the only person in my family who had a history with small, quiet divinations. My nan, his ex-wife, lived in a terraced house in Wythenshawe, Manchester, and she’d been reading tea leaves since she was 16, when her own nan taught her the trick after her first boyfriend broke up with her the week before her O-levels. I was 12 the first time she read my leaves, after I’d snuck out to a school disco and gotten suspended for fighting with a boy who’d made fun of my grandad’s accent. She’d poured my tea into a chipped white mug, let it steep for three minutes, then turned it upside down onto a saucer, swirled it three times clockwise, and set it upright again. She leaned over the rim, her nose almost touching the brown stains left by the tea, and hummed for a minute before she looked up at me. “You’re angry,” she said, which was obvious, “but you’re also scared people will think he’s stupid because he talks like he’s from Manchester. He’s not stupid. You know that, right?” I’d stared at her, too shocked to speak. I’d never told anyone about the way kids at school mocked my grandad’s