Мэтт Хейг - The Midnight Library

‘What?’

‘I know he’d love it if you could come up and see us.’

Her whole body went cold and weak, as if she had seen a ghost.

She remembered her father’s funeral, hugging her brother as they cried on each other’s shoulders.

‘My dad?’

My dad. My dead dad .

‘He’s just come in from the garden. Do you want a word with him?’

This was so remarkable, so world-shattering, it was totally out of synch with her tone of voice. She said it casually, almost as if it was nothing at all.

‘What?’

‘Do you want a word with Dad?’

It took her a moment. She felt suddenly off-balance.

‘I—’

She could hardly speak. Or breathe. She didn’t know what to say. Everything felt unreal. It was like time travel. As though she had fallen through two decades.

It was too late to respond because the next thing she heard was Nadia saying: ‘Here he is . . .’

Nora nearly hung up the phone. Maybe she should have. But she didn’t. Now she knew it was a possibility, she needed to hear his voice again.

His breath first.

Then: ‘Hi Nora, how are you?’

Just that. Casual, non-specific, everyday. It was him. His voice. His strong voice that had always been so clipped. But a little thinner, maybe, a little weaker. A voice fifteen years older than it was meant to be.

‘Dad,’ she said. Her voice was a stunned whisper. ‘It’s you.’

‘You all right, Nora? Is this a bad line? Do you want to FaceTime?’

FaceTime. To see his face. No. That would be too much. This was already too much. Just the idea that there was a version of her dad alive at a time after FaceTime was invented. Her dad belonged in a world of landlines. When he died, he was only just warming to radical concepts like emails and text messages.

‘No,’ she said. ‘It was me. I was just thinking of something. I’m a bit distant. Sorry. How are you?’

‘Fine. We took Sally to the vets yesterday.’

She assumed Sally was a dog. Her parents had never had a dog, or any pet. Nora had begged for a dog or a cat when she was little but her dad had always said they tied you down.

‘What was wrong with her?’ Nora asked, trying to sound natural now.

‘Just her ears again. That infection keeps coming back.’

‘Oh right,’ she said, as though she knew Sally and her problematic ears. ‘Poor Sally. I . . . I love you, Dad. And I just want to say that—’

‘Are you all right, Nora? You’re sounding a bit . . . emotional.’

‘I just didn’t . . . don’t tell you that enough. I just want you to know I love you. You are a good father. And in another life – the life where I quit swimming – I am full of regret over that.’

‘Nora?’

She felt awkward asking him anything, but she had to know. The questions started to burst out of her like water from a geyser.

‘Are you okay, Dad?’

‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

‘Just. You know . . . You used to worry about chest pains.’

‘Haven’t had them since I got healthy again. That was years ago. You remember. My health kick? Hanging around Olympians does that to you. Got me back to rugby-fit. Coming up to sixteen years off the drink too. Cholesterol and blood pressure low, the doc says.’

‘Yes, of course . . . I remember the health kick.’ And then another question came to her. But she had no idea how to ask it. So she did it directly.

‘How long have you been with Nadia now again?’

‘Are you having memory problems or something?’

‘No. Well, yes, maybe. I have just been thinking a lot about life recently.’

‘Are you a philosopher now?’

‘Well, I studied it.’

‘When?’

‘Never mind. I just can’t remember how you and Nadia met.’

She heard an awkward sigh down the phone. He sounded terse. ‘You know how we met . . . Why are you bringing all this up? Is this something that therapist is opening up? Because you know my feelings on that.’

I have a therapist .

‘Sorry, Dad.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘I just want to know that you’re happy.’

‘’Course I am. I’ve got an Olympic champion for a daughter and have finally found the love of my life. And you’re getting back on your feet again. Mentally, I mean. After Portugal.’

Nora wanted to know what had happened in Portugal but she had another question to ask first.

‘What about Mum? Wasn’t she the love of your life?’

‘Once upon a time she was. But things change, Nora. Come on, you’re a grown-up.’

‘I . . .’

Nora put her dad on speaker. Clicked back to her own Wikipedia page. Sure enough, her parents had divorced after her father had an affair with Nadia Vanko, mother of a Ukrainian male swimmer, Yegor Vanko. And in this timeline her mother had died way back in 2011.

And all this because Nora had never sat in that car park in Bedford and told her dad that she didn’t want to be a competitive swimmer.

She felt that feeling again. Like she was fading away. That she had worked out that this life wasn’t for her and was disappearing back to the library. But she stayed where she was. She said goodbye to her dad, ended the phone call and continued to read up on herself.

She was single, though had been in a relationship with the American Olympic medal-winning diver Scott Richards for three years, and briefly lived with him in California, where they resided in La Jolla, San Diego. She now lived in West London.

Having read the entire page she put the phone down and decided to go find out if there was a pool. She wanted to do what she would be doing in this life, and what she would be doing was swimming. And maybe the water would help her think of what she could say.

It was an exceptional swim, even if it gave her little creative inspiration, and it calmed her after the experience of having a conversation with her dead father. She had the pool to herself and glided through length after length of breaststroke without having to think about it. It felt so empowering, to be that fit and strong and to have such mastery of the water, that she momentarily stopped worrying about her father and having to give a speech she really wasn’t prepared for.

But as she swam her mood changed. She thought of those years her dad had gained and her mother had lost, and as she thought she became angrier and angrier at her father, which fuelled her to swim even faster. She had always imagined her parents were too proud to get divorced, so instead let their resentments fester inside, projecting them onto their children, and Nora in particular. And swimming had been her only ticket to approval.

Here, in this life she was in now, she had pursued a career to keep him happy, while sacrificing her own relationships, her own love of music, her own dreams beyond anything that didn’t involve a medal, her own life . And her father had paid this back by having an affair with this Nadia person and leaving her mother and he still got terse with her. After all that.

Screw him. Or at least this version of him.

As she switched to freestyle she realised it wasn’t her fault that her parents had never been able to love her the way parents were meant to: without condition. It wasn’t her fault her mother focused on her every flaw, starting with the asymmetry of her ears. No. It went back even earlier than that. The first problem had been that Nora had dared, somehow, to arrive into existence at a time when her parents’ marriage was relatively fragile. Her mother fell into depression and her father turned to tumblers of single malt.

She did thirty more lengths, and her mind calmed and she started to feel free, just her and the water.

But when she eventually got out of the pool and went back to her room she dressed in the only clean clothes in her hotel room (smart navy trouser suit) and stared at the inside of her suitcase. She felt the profound loneliness emanating from it. There was a copy of her own book. She was staring out from the cover with steely-eyed determination and wearing a Team GB swimsuit. She picked it up and saw, in small print, that it was ‘co-written with Amanda Sands’.