Мэтт Хейг - The Midnight Library

She left the changing rooms and walked along a beachside path. It was a warm day. Maybe life was automatically better when the sun shone so confidently in April. Everything seemed more vivid, more colourful and alive than it had done in England.

She saw a parrot – a rainbow lorikeet – perched on the top of a bench, being photographed by a couple of tourists. A surfy-looking cyclist passed by holding an orange smoothie, smiling and literally saying, ‘G’day.’

This was most definitely not Bedford.

Nora noticed something was happening to her face. She was – could she be? – smiling . And naturally, not just because someone expected her to.

Then she noted a piece of graffiti on a low wall which said THE WORLD IS ON FIRE and another that said ONE EARTH = ONE CHANCE and her smile faded. After all, a different life didn’t mean a different planet.

She had no idea where she lived or what she did or where she was meant to be heading after the swimming pool, but there was something quite freeing about that. To be existing without any expectation, even her own. As she walked, she googled her own name and added ‘Sydney’ to see if it brought up anything.

Before she scanned the results she glanced up and noticed a man walking on the path towards her, smiling. A short, tanned man with kind eyes and long thinning hair in a loose ponytail with a shirt that wasn’t buttoned correctly.

‘Hey, Nora.’

‘Hey,’ she said, trying not to sound confused.

‘What time you start today?’

How could she answer that? ‘Uh. Oh. Crap. I’ve totally forgotten.’

He laughed, a little laugh of recognition, as if her forgetting was quite in character.

‘I saw it on the roster. I think it might be eleven.’

‘Eleven a.m.?’

Kind Eyes laughed. ‘What’ve you been smoking? I want some.’

‘Ha. Nothing,’ she said, stiffly. ‘I’ve not been smoking anything. I just skipped breakfast.’

‘Well, see you this arvo . . .’

‘Yes. At the . . . place. Where is it again?’

He laughed, frowningly, and kept walking. Maybe she worked on a whale sight-seeing cruise that operated out of Sydney. Maybe Izzy did too.

Nora had no idea where she (or they) lived, and nothing was coming up on Google, but away from the ocean seemed the right direction. Maybe she was very local. Maybe she had walked here. Maybe one of the bikes she saw locked up outside the pool café had been hers. She rummaged in her tiny clasp wallet and felt her pockets for a key, but there was only a house key. No car keys, no bike keys. So it was a bus or by foot. The house key had no information on it at all, so she sat on a bench with the sun beating hard on the back of her neck and checked her texts.

There were names of people she didn’t recognise.

Amy. Rodhri. Bella. Lucy P. Kemala. Luke. Lucy M.

Who are these people?

And a rather unhelpful contact titled, simply: ‘Work’. And there was only one recent message from ‘Work’ and it said:

Where r u?

There was one name she recognised.

Dan.

Her heart sank as she clicked on his most recent message.

Hey Nor! Hope Oz is treating you well. This is going to sound either corny or creepy but I am going to go all out and tell you. I had a dream the other night about our pub. It was such a good dream. We were so happy! Anyway, ignore that weirdness, the point of this is to say: guess where I’m going in May? AUSTRALIA. First time in over a decade. Am coming with work. I’m working with MCA. Would be great to catch up, even for a coffee if you’re around. D x

It was so strange she almost laughed. But she coughed instead. (Maybe she wasn’t quite so fit in this life, now she thought about it.) She wondered how many Dans there were in the world, dreaming of things they would hate if they actually got them. And how many were pushing other people into their delusional idea of happiness?

Instagram seemed to be the only social media she had here, and she only seemed to post pictures of poems on it.

She took a moment to read one:

FIRE

Every part of her

That changed

That got scraped off

Because of schoolyard laughter

Or the advice of grown-ups

Long gone –

And the pain of friends

Already dead.

She collected those bits off the floor.

Like wood shavings.

And she made them into fuel.

Into fire.

And burned.

Bright enough to see for ever.

This was troubling, but it was – after all – just a poem. Scrolling through some emails, she found one to Charlotte – a ceilidh band flautist with earthy humour who’d been Nora’s only friend at String Theory before she had moved back up to Scotland.

Hi Charl!

Hope all is fine and dandy.

Pleased the birthday do went well. Sorry I couldn’t be there. All is well in sunny Sydney. Have finally moved into the new place. It’s right near Bronte Beach (beautiful). Lots of neighbourhood cafes and charm. I also have a new job.

I go swimming in a saltwater pool every morning and every evening I drink a glass of Australian wine in the sunshine. Life is good!

Address:

2/29 Darling Street

Bronte

NSW 2024

AUSTRALIA

Nora

X

Something was rotten. The tone of vague, distant perkiness, as if writing to a long-lost aunt. The Lots of neighbourhood cafes and charm , as though it was a TripAdvisor review. She didn’t speak to Charlotte – or indeed anyone – like that.

There was also no mention of Izzy. Have finally moved into the new place . Was that we have or I have? Charlotte knew of Izzy. Why not mention her?

She would soon find out. Indeed, twenty minutes later she was standing in the hallway of her apartment, staring at four bags of rubbish that needed taking out. The living room looked small and depressing. The sofa tatty and old. The place smelt slightly mouldy.

There was a poster on the wall for the video game Angel and a vape pen on a coffee table, with a marijuana leaf sticker on it. A woman was staring at a screen, shooting zombies in the head.

The woman had short blue hair and for a moment Nora thought it might be Izzy.

‘Hi,’ Nora said.

The woman turned. She was not Izzy. She had sleepy eyes and a vacant expression, as if the zombies she was shooting had slightly infected her. She was probably a perfectly decent person but she was not anyone Nora had ever seen in her life. She smiled.

‘Hey. How’s that new poem coming along?’

‘Oh. Yeah. It’s coming along really well. Thanks.’

Nora walked around the flat in a bit of a daze. She opened a door at random and realised it was the bathroom. She didn’t need the toilet, but she needed a second to think. So she shut the door and washed her hands and stared at the water spiral down the plughole the wrong way.

She glanced at the shower. The dull yellow curtain was dirty in a vague student-house kind of way. That’s what this place reminded her of. A student house. She was thirty-five and, in this life, living like a student. She saw some anti-depressants – fluoxetine – beside the basin, and picked up the box. She read Prescription for N. Seed at the top of the label. She looked down at her arm and saw the scars again. It was weird, to have your own body offer clues to a mystery.

There was a magazine on the floor next to the bin, National Geographic . The one with the black hole on its cover that she had been reading in another life, on the other side of the world, only yesterday. She sensed it was her magazine, given she had always liked reading it, and had been known – even in recent times – to buy it on the occasional spontaneous whim as no online version ever did the photos justice.