Мэтт Хейг - The Midnight Library

‘Yeah. Henry David Thoreau. You know, my fave philosopher.’

‘Since when were you into philosophy?’

Of course. In this life she’d never have done a Philosophy degree. While her root self had been reading the works of Thoreau and Lao Tzu and Sartre in a stinky student flat in Bristol, her current self had been standing on Olympic podiums in Beijing. Weirdly, she felt just as sad for the version of her who had never fallen in love with the simple beauty of Thoreau’s Walden , or the stoical Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, as she had felt sympathy for the version of her who never fulfilled her Olympic potential.

‘Oh, I don’t know . . . I just came across some of his stuff on the internet.’

‘Ah. Cool. Will check him out. You could drop some of that into your speech.’

Nora felt herself go pale. ‘Um, I’m thinking of maybe doing something a little different today. I might, um, improvise a little.’

Improvising was, after all, a skill she’d been practising.

‘I saw this great documentary about Greenland the other night. Made me remember when you were obsessed with the Arctic and you cut out all those pictures of polar bears and stuff.’

‘Yeah. Mrs Elm said the best way to be an arctic explorer was to be a glaciologist. So that’s what I wanted to be.’

‘Mrs Elm,’ he whispered. ‘That rings a bell.’

‘School librarian.’

‘That was it. You used to live in that library, didn’t you?’

‘Pretty much.’

‘Just think, if you hadn’t stuck with swimming, you’d be in Greenland right now.’

‘Svalbard,’ she said.

‘Sorry?’

‘It’s a Norwegian archipelago. Way up in the Arctic Ocean.’

‘Okay, Norway then. You’d be there.’

‘Maybe. Or maybe I’d just still be in Bedford. Moping around. Unemployed. Struggling to pay the rent.’

‘Don’t be daft. You’d have always done something big.’

She smiled at her elder brother’s innocence. ‘In some lives me and you might not even get on.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘I hope so.’

Joe seemed a bit uncomfortable, and clearly wanted to change the topic.

‘Hey, guess who I saw the other day?’

Nora shrugged, hoping it was going to be someone she’d heard of.

‘Ravi. Do you remember Ravi?’

She thought of Ravi, telling her off in the newsagent’s only yesterday. ‘Oh yeah. Ravi.’

‘Well, I bumped into him.’

‘In Bedford?’

‘Ha! God, no. Haven’t been there for years. No. It was at Blackfriars station. Totally random. Like, I haven’t seen him in over a decade. At least . He wanted to go to the pub. So, I explained I was teetotal now, and then I got into having to explain I’d been an alcoholic. And all of that. That I hadn’t had a glass of wine or a puff on a joint in years.’ Nora nodded as if this wasn’t a bomb-shell. ‘Since I got into a mess after Mum died. I think he was like, “Who is this guy?” But he was fine. He was cool. He’s working as a cameraman now. Still doing some music on the side. Not rock stuff. DJ-ing apparently. Remember that band me and him had, years ago. The Labyrinths?’

It was becoming easier to fake vagueness. ‘Oh yeah. The Labyrinths. Course. That’s a blast from the past.’

‘Yeah. Got the sense he pines for those days. Even though we were crap and I couldn’t sing.’

‘What about you? Do you ever think about what could have been if The Labyrinths had made it big?’

He laughed, a little sadly. ‘I don’t know if anything could have been .’

‘Maybe you needed an extra person. I used to play those keyboards Mum and Dad got you.’

‘Did you? When did you have time for that?’

A life without music. A life without reading the books she had loved.

But also: a life where she got on with her brother. A life where she hadn’t had to let him down.

‘Anyway, Ravi wanted to say hi. And wanted a catch-up. He only works one tube stop away. So he’s going to try and come to the talk.’

‘What? Oh. That’s . . . I wish he wouldn’t.’

‘Why?’

‘I just never really liked him.’

Joe frowned. ‘Really? I can’t remember you saying that . . . He’s okay. A good guy. Bit of a waster, maybe, back in the day, but he seems to have got his act together a bit . . .’

Nora was unsettled. ‘Joe?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You know when Mum died?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Where was I?’

‘What do you mean? Are you okay today, sis? Are the new tablets working?’

‘Tablets?’

She checked in her bag and started to rummage. Saw a small box of anti-depressants in her bag. Her heart sank.

‘I just wanted to know. Did I see much of Mum before she died?’

Joe frowned. He was still the same Joe. Still unable to read his sister. Still wanting to escape reality. ‘You know we weren’t there. It happened so fast. She didn’t tell us how ill she was. To protect us. Or maybe because she didn’t want us to tell her to stop drinking.’

‘Drinking? Mum was drinking?’

Joe’s worry increased. ‘Sis, have you got amnesia? She was on a bottle of gin every day since Nadia came onto the scene.’

‘Yeah. Course. I remember.’

‘Plus you had the European Championships coming up and she didn’t want to interfere with that . . .’

‘Jesus. I should have been there. One of us should have been there, Joe. We both—’

His expression frosted suddenly. ‘You were never that close to Mum, were you? Why this sudden—’

‘I got closer to her. I mean, I would have. I—’

‘You’re freaking me out. You’re acting not quite yourself.’

Nora nodded. ‘Yes, I . . . I just . . . yes, I think you’re right . . . I think it’s just the tablets . . .’

She remembered her mother, in her final months, saying: ‘I don’t know what I would have done without you.’ She’d probably said it to Joe too. But in this life, she’d had neither of them.

Then Priya arrived into the room. Grinning, clutching her phone and some kind of a clipboard.

‘It’s time,’ she said.

The Tree That Is Our Life

Five minutes later Nora was back in the hotel’s vast conference room. At least a thousand people were watching the first speaker conclude her presentation. The author of Zero to Hero . The book Dan had beside his bed in another life. But Nora wasn’t really listening, as she sat in her reserved seat in the front row. She was too upset about her mother, too nervous about the speech, so she just picked up the odd word or phrase that floated into her mind like croutons in minestrone. ‘Little-known fact’, ‘ambition’, ‘what you may be surprised to hear is that’, ‘if I can do it’, ‘hard knocks’.

It was hard to breathe in this room. It smelled of musky perfume and new carpet.

She tried to stay calm.

Leaning into her brother, she whispered, ‘I don’t think I can do this.’

‘What?’

‘I think I’m having a panic attack.’

He looked at her, smiling, but with a toughness in his eyes she remembered from a different life, when she’d had a panic attack before one of their early gigs with The Labyrinths at a pub in Bedford. ‘You’ll be fine.’

‘I don’t know if I can do this. I’ve gone blank.’

‘You’re overthinking it.’

‘I have anxiety. I have no other type of thinking available.’

‘Come on. Don’t let us down.’

Don’t let us down .

‘But—’

She tried to think of music.

Thinking of music had always calmed her down.

A tune came to her. She was slightly embarrassed, even within herself, to realise the song in her head was ‘Beautiful Sky’. A happy, hopeful song that she hadn’t sung in a long time. The sky grows dark / The black over blue / Yet the stars still dare / To shine for—