Мэтт Хейг - The Midnight Library

But Mrs Elm wasn’t listening. Nora noticed something on the desk. An old plastic orange fountain pen. The exact same kind that Nora had once owned at school.

‘Hello? Mrs Elm, can you hear me?’

Something was wrong.

The librarian’s face was tight with worry. She read from the screen, to herself. ‘System error.’

‘Mrs Elm? Hello? Yoo-hoo! Can you see me?’

She tapped her shoulder. That seemed to do it.

Mrs Elm’s face broke out in massive relief as she turned away from the computer. ‘Oh Nora, you got here?’

‘Were you expecting me not to? Did you think that life would be the one I wanted to live?’

She shook her head without really moving it. If that was possible. ‘No. It’s not that. It’s just that it looked fragile.’

‘What looked fragile?’

‘The transfer.’

‘Transfer?’

‘From the book to here. The life you chose to here. It seems there is a problem. A problem with the whole system. Something beyond my immediate control. Something external .’

‘You mean, in my actual life?’

She stared back at the screen. ‘Yes. You see, the Midnight Library only exists because you do. In your root life.’

‘So, I’m dying?’

Mrs Elm looked exasperated. ‘It’s a possibility. That is to say, it’s a possibility that we are reaching the end of possibility.’

Nora thought of how good it had felt, swimming in the pool. How vital and alive. And then something happened inside her. A strange feeling. A pull in her stomach. A physical shift . A change in her. The idea of death suddenly troubled her. At that same time the lights stopped flickering overhead and shone brightly.

Mrs Elm clapped her hands as she absorbed new information on the computer screen.

‘Oh, it’s back. That’s good. The glitch is gone. We are running again. Thanks, I believe, to you .’

‘What?’

‘Well, the computer says the root cause within the host has been temporarily fixed. And you are the root cause. You are the host.’ She smiled. Nora blinked, and when she opened her eyes both she and Mrs Elm were standing in a different part of the library. Between stacks of bookshelves again. Standing, stiffly, awkwardly, facing each other.

‘Right. Now, settle,’ said Mrs Elm, before releasing a deep and meaningful exhale. She was clearly talking to herself.

‘My mum died on different dates in different lives. I’d like a life where she is still here. Does that life exist?’

Mrs Elm’s attention switched to Nora.

‘Maybe it does.’

‘Great.’

‘But you can’t get there.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because this library is about your decisions. There was no choice you could have made that led to her being alive beyond yesterday. I’m sorry.’

A light bulb flickered above Nora’s head. But the rest of the library stayed as it was.

‘You need to think about something else, Nora. What was good about the last life?’

Nora nodded. ‘Swimming. I liked swimming. But I don’t think I was happy in that life. I don’t know if I am truly happy in any life.’

‘Is happiness the aim?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose I want my life to mean something. I want to do something good.’

‘You once wanted to be a glaciologist,’ Mrs Elm appeared to remember.

‘Yeah.’

‘You used to talk about it. You said you were interested in the Arctic, so I suggested you become a glaciologist.’

‘I remember. I liked the sound of it straight away. My mum and dad never liked the idea, though.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t really know. They encouraged swimming. Well, Dad did. But anything that involved academic work, they were funny about.’

Nora felt a deep sadness, down in her stomach. From her arrival into life, she was considered by her parents in a different way to her brother.

‘Other than swimming, Joe was the one expected to pursue things,’ she told Mrs Elm. ‘My mum put me off anything that could take me away. Unlike Dad, she didn’t even push me to swim. But surely there must be a life where I didn’t listen to my mum and where I am now an Arctic researcher. Far away from everything. With a purpose. Helping the planet. Researching the impact of climate change. On the front line.’

‘So, you want me to find that life for you?’

Nora sighed. She still had no idea what she wanted. But at least the Arctic Circle would be different.

‘All right. Yes.’

Svalbard

She woke in a small bed in a little cabin on a boat. She knew it was a boat because it was rocking, and indeed the rocking, gentle as it was, had woken her up. The cabin was spare and basic. She was wearing a thick fleece sweater and long johns. Pulling back the blanket, she noticed that she had a headache. Her mouth was so dry her cheeks felt sucked-in against her teeth. She coughed a deep, chesty cough and felt a million pool-lengths away from the body of an Olympian. Her fingers smelt of tobacco. She sat up to see a pale-blonde, robust, hard-weathered woman sitting on another bed staring at her.

‘God morgen, Nora.’

She smiled. And hoped that in this life she wasn’t fluent in whichever Scandinavian language this woman spoke.

‘Good morning.’

She noticed a half-empty bottle of vodka and a mug on the floor beside the woman’s bed. A dog calendar (April: Springer Spaniel) was propped up on the chest between the beds. The three books on top of it were all in English. The one nearest to the woman said Principles of Glacier Mechanics . Two on Nora’s: A Naturalist’s Guide to the Arctic and a Penguin Classic edition of The Saga of the Volsungs: The Norse Epic of Sigurd the Dragon Slayer . She noticed something else. It was cold. Properly cold. The cold that almost burns, that hurts your fingers and toes and stiffens your cheeks. Even inside. With layers of thermal underwear. With a sweater on. With the bars of two electric heaters glowing orange. Every exhale made a cloud.

‘Why are you here, Nora?’ the woman asked, in heavily accented English.

A tricky question, when you didn’t know where ‘here’ was.

‘Bit early in the morning, isn’t it, for philosophy?’ Nora laughed, nervously.

She saw a wall of ice outside the porthole, rising out of the sea. She was either very far north or very far south. She was very far somewhere.

The woman was still staring at her. Nora had no idea if they were friends or not. The woman seemed tough, direct, earthy, but probably an interesting form of company.

‘I don’t mean philosophy. I don’t even mean what got you into glaciological research. Although, it might be the same thing. I mean, why did you choose to go as far away from civilisation as possible? You’ve never told me.’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I like the cold.’

‘No one likes this cold. Unless they are a sado-masochist.’

She had a point. Nora reached for the sweater at the end of her bed and put it on, over the sweater she was already wearing. As she did she saw, beside the vodka bottle, a laminated lanyard lying on the floor.

Ingrid Skirbekk

Professor of Geoscience

International Polar Research Institute

‘I don’t know, Ingrid. I just like glaciers, I suppose. I want to understand them. Why they are . . . melting.’

She wasn’t sounding like a glacier expert, judging from Ingrid’s raised eyebrows.

‘What about you?’ she asked, hopefully.

Ingrid sighed. Rubbed her palm with a thumb. ‘After Per died, I couldn’t stand to be in Oslo any more. All those people that weren’t him, you know? There was this coffee shop we used to go to, at the university. We’d just sit together, together but silent. Happy silent. Reading newspapers, drinking coffee. It was hard to avoid places like that. We used to walk around everywhere. His troublesome soul lingered on every street . . . I kept telling his memory to piss the fuck off but it wouldn’t. Grief is a bastard. If I’d have stayed any longer, I’d have hated humanity. So, when a research position came up in Svalbard I was like, yes, this has come to save me . . . I wanted to be somewhere he had never been. I wanted somewhere where I didn’t have to feel his ghost. But the truth is, it only half-works, you know? Places are places and memories are memories and life is fucking life.’