Мэтт Хейг - The Midnight Library

Amanda Sands, the internet told her, was ‘ghost-writer to a whole host of sporting celebrities’.

Then she looked at her watch. It was time to head to the lobby.

Standing waiting for her were two smartly dressed people she didn’t recognise and one she most definitely did. He was wearing a suit and was clean-shaven in this life, his hair side-parted and business-like, but he was the same Joe. His dark eyebrows as bushy as ever – ‘That’s the Italian in you,’ as their mother used to say.

‘Joe?’

What’s more, he was smiling at her. A big, brotherly, uncomplicated smile.

‘Morning, sis,’ he said, surprised by and a little awkward from the length of the hug she was giving him.

When the hug was over, he introduced the other two people he was standing with.

‘This is Priya from Gulliver Research, the people organising the conference obviously, and this is Rory, obviously, from Celebrity Speakers.’

‘Hi Priya!’ said Nora. ‘Hi Rory. So nice to meet you.’

‘Yes, it is,’ said Priya, smiling. ‘We’re so pleased to have you.’

‘You say that like we’ve never met before!’ said Rory, with a booming laugh.

Nora backtracked. ‘Yes, I know we’ve met, Rory. Just my little joke. You know my sense of humour.’

‘You have a sense of humour?’

‘Good one, Rory!’

‘Okay,’ her brother said, looking at her and smiling. ‘Do you want to see the space?’

She couldn’t stop smiling. Here was her brother. Her brother, whom she hadn’t seen in two years and hadn’t had any semblance of a good relationship with in far longer, looking healthy and happy and like he actually liked her. ‘The space?’

‘Yeah. The hall. Where you’re doing the talk.’

‘It’s all set up,’ Priya added, helpfully.

‘Bloody big room,’ said Rory approvingly, as he cradled a paper cup of coffee.

So, Nora agreed and was led into a vast blue conference room with a wide stage and around a thousand empty chairs. A technician in black came up and asked her: ‘What do you fancy? Lapel or headset or handheld?’

‘Sorry?’

‘What kind of mic will you want up there?’

‘Oh!’

‘Headset,’ her brother interjected on Nora’s behalf.

‘Yeah. Headset,’ said Nora.

‘I was just thinking,’ her brother said, ‘after that nightmare we had with the microphone in Cardiff.’

‘Yeah, totally. What a nightmare.’

Priya was smiling at her, wanting to ask something. ‘Am I right in thinking you’ve got no multimedia stuff? No slides or anything?’

‘Um, I—’

Her brother and Rory were looking at her, a little concerned. This was clearly a question she should know the answer to and didn’t.

‘Yes,’ she said, then saw her brother’s expression, ‘I . . . don’t. Yes, I don’t. I don’t have any multimedia stuff.’

And they all looked at her like she was not quite right but she smiled through it.

Peppermint Tea

Ten minutes later she was sitting on her own with her brother in something called the ‘VIP Business Lounge’, which was just a small, airless room with some chairs and a table offering a selection of today’s newspapers. A couple of middle-aged men in suits were typing things into laptops.

By this point she had worked out that her brother was her manager. And that he’d been her manager for seven years, since she’d given up professional swimming.

‘Are you okay about all this?’ her brother asked, having just got two drinks from the coffee machine. He tore a sachet to release a teabag. Peppermint. He placed it into the cup of hot water he’d taken from the coffee machine.

Then he handed it to Nora.

She had never drunk peppermint tea in her life. ‘That’s for me?’

‘Well, yeah. It was the only herbal they had.’

He had a coffee for himself that Nora secretly craved. Maybe in this life she didn’t drink caffeine.

Are you okay about all this?

‘Okay about all what?’ Nora wondered.

‘The talk, today.’

‘Oh, um, yeah. How long is it again?’

‘Forty minutes.’

‘Sure.’

‘It’s a lot of money. I upped it from ten.’

‘That’s very good of you.’

‘Well, I still get my twenty per cent. Hardly a sacrifice.’

Nora tried to think how she could unlock their shared history. How she could find out why, in this life, they were sitting together and getting along. It might have been money, but her brother had never been particularly money-motivated. And yes, sure, he’d obviously been upset when Nora walked away from the deal with the record company but that had been because he wanted to play guitar in The Labyrinths for the rest of his life and be a rock star.

After dipping it a few times Nora let the teabag free in the water. ‘Do you ever think of how our lives could have been different? You know, like if I had never stuck with swimming?’

‘Not really.’

‘I mean, what do you think you’d be doing if you weren’t my manager?’

‘I manage other people too, you know.’

‘Well, yeah, of course I know that. Obviously.’

‘I suppose I probably wouldn’t be managing anyone without you. I mean, you were the first. And you introduced me to Kai and then Natalie. And then Eli, so . . .’

She nodded, as if she had any idea who Kai and Natalie and Eli were. ‘True, but maybe you’d have found some other way.’

‘Who knows? Or maybe I’d still be in Manchester, I don’t know.’

‘Manchester?’

‘Yeah. You remember how much I loved it up there. At uni.’

It was really hard not to look surprised at any of this, at the fact that this brother she was getting on with, and working with, was also someone who went to university. In her root life her brother did A-levels and applied to go to Manchester to do History, but he never got the grades he needed, probably because he was too busy getting stoned with Ravi every night. And then decided he didn’t want to go to uni at all.

They chatted a bit more.

At one point he became distracted by his phone.

Nora noticed his screensaver was of a radiant, handsome, smiling man she had never seen before. She noticed her brother’s wedding ring and feigned a neutral expression.

‘So, how’s married life?’

Joe smiled. It was a genuinely happy smile. She hadn’t seen him smile like that for years. In her root life, Joe had always been unlucky in love. Although she had known her brother was gay since he was a teenager, he hadn’t officially come out until he was twenty-two. And he’d never had a happy or long-term relationship. She felt guilt, that her life had the power to shape her brother’s life in such meaningful ways.

‘Oh, you know Ewan. Ewan’s Ewan.’

Nora smiled back as if she knew who Ewan was and exactly what he was like. ‘Yeah. He’s great. I’m so happy for you both.’

He laughed. ‘We’ve been married five years now. You’re talking as if me and him have just got together.’

‘No, I’m just, you know, I sometimes think that you’re lucky. So in love. And happy.’

‘He wants a dog.’ He smiled. ‘That’s our current debate. I mean, I wouldn’t mind a dog. But I’d want a rescue. And I wouldn’t want a bloody Maltipoo or a Bichon. I’d want a wolf. You know, a proper dog.’

Nora thought of Voltaire. ‘Animals are good company . . .’

‘Yeah. You still want a dog?’

‘I do. Or a cat.’

‘Cats are too disobedient,’ he said, sounding like the brother she remembered. ‘Dogs know their place.’

‘Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.’

He looked perplexed. ‘Where did that come from? Is that a quote?’