Мэтт Хейг - The Midnight Library

Nora took all this in. Ingrid was clearly telling this to someone she thought she knew reasonably well, and yet Nora was a stranger. It felt odd. Wrong. This must be the hardest bit about being a spy, she thought. The emotion people store in you, like a bad investment. You feel like you are robbing people of something.

Ingrid smiled, breaking the thought. ‘Anyway, thanks for last night . . . That was a good chat. There are a lot of dickheads on this boat and you are not a dickhead.’

‘Oh. Thanks. Neither are you.’

And it was then that Nora noticed the gun, a large rifle with a hefty brown handle, leaning against the wall at the far end of the room, under the coat hooks.

The sight made her feel happy, somehow. Made her feel like her eleven-year-old self would have been proud. She was, it seemed, having an adventure .

Hugo Lefèvre

Nora walked with her headache and obvious hangover through an undecorated wooden passageway to a small dining hall that smelled of pickled herring, and where a few research scientists were having breakfast.

She got herself a black coffee and some stale, dry rye bread and sat down.

Around her, outside the window, was the most eerily beautiful sight she had ever seen. Islands of ice, like rocks rendered clean and pure white, were visible amid the fog. There were seventeen other people in the dining hall, Nora counted. Eleven men, six women. Nora sat by herself but within five minutes a man with short hair and stubble two days away from a full beard sat down at her table. He was wearing a parka, like most of the room, but he seemed ill-suited to it, as if he would be more at home on the Riviera wearing designer shorts and a pink polo shirt. He smiled at Nora. She tried to translate the smile, to understand the kind of relationship they had. He watched her for a little while, then shuffled his chair along to sit opposite her. She looked for a lanyard, but he wasn’t wearing one. She wondered if she should know his name.

‘I’m Hugo,’ he said, to her relief. ‘Hugo Lefèvre. You are Nora, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘I saw you around, in Svalbard, at the research centre, but we never said hello. Anyway, I just wanted to say I read your paper on pulsating glaciers and it blew my mind.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. I mean, it’s always fascinated me, why they do that here and nowhere else. It’s such a strange phenomenon.’

‘Life is full of strange phenomena.’

Conversation was tempting, but dangerous. Nora smiled a small, polite smile and then looked out of the window. The islands of ice turned into actual islands. Little snow-streaked pointed hills, like the tips of mountains, or flatter, craggy plates of land. And beyond them, the glacier Nora had seen from the cabin porthole. She could get a better measure of it now, although its top portion was concealed under a visor of cloud. Other parts of it were entirely free from fog. It was incredible.

You see a picture of a glacier on TV or in a magazine and you see a smooth lump of white. But this was as textured as a mountain. Black-brown and white. And there were infinite varieties of that white, a whole visual smorgasbord of variation – white-white, blue-white, turquoise-white, gold-white, silver-white, translucent-white – rendered glaringly alive and impressive. Certainly more impressive than the breakfast.

‘Depressing, isn’t it?’ Hugo said.

‘What?’

‘The fact that the day never ends.’

Nora felt uneasy with this observation. ‘In what sense?’

He waited a second before responding.

‘The never-ending light,’ he said, before taking a bite of a dry cracker. ‘From April on. It’s like living one interminable day . . . I hate that feeling.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘You’d think they’d give the portholes curtains. Hardly slept since I’ve been on this boat.’

Nora nodded. ‘How long is that again?’

He laughed. It was a nice laugh. Close-mouthed. Civilised. Hardly a laugh at all.

‘I drank a lot with Ingrid last night. Vodka has stolen my memory.’

‘Are you sure it’s the vodka?’

‘What else would it be?’

His eyes were inquisitive, and made Nora feel automatically guilty.

She looked over at Ingrid, who was drinking her coffee and typing on her laptop. She wished she had sat with her now.

‘Well, that was our third night,’ Hugo said. ‘We have been meandering around the archipelago since Sunday. Yeah, Sunday. That’s when we left Longyearbyen.’

Nora made a face as if to say she knew all this. ‘Sunday seems for ever away.’

The boat felt like it was turning. Nora was forced to lean a little in her seat.

‘Twenty years ago there was hardly any open water in Svalbard in April. Look at it now. It’s like cruising the Mediterranean.’

Nora tried to make her smile seem relaxed. ‘Not quite.’

‘Anyway, I heard you got the short straw today?’

Nora tried to look blank, which wasn’t hard. ‘Really?’

‘You’re the spotter, aren’t you?’

She had no idea what he was talking about, but feared the twinkle in his eye.

‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘Yes, I am. I am the spotter.’

Hugo’s eyes widened with shock. Or mock-shock. It was hard to tell the difference with him.

‘The spotter ?’

‘Yes?’

Nora desperately wanted to know what the spotter actually did, but couldn’t ask.

‘Well, bonne chance,’ said Hugo, with a testing gaze.

‘Merci,’ said Nora, staring out at the crisp Arctic light and a landscape she had only ever seen in magazines. ‘I’m ready for a challenge.’

Walking in Circles

An hour later and Nora was on an expanse of snow-covered rock. More of a skerry than an island. A place so small and uninhabitable it had no name, though a larger island – ominously titled Bear Island – was visible across the ice-cold water. She stood next to a boat. Not the Lance , the large boat she’d had breakfast on – that was moored safely out at sea – but the small motor-dinghy that had been dragged up out of the water almost single-handedly by a big boulder of a man called Rune, who, despite his Scandinavian name, spoke in languid west-coast American.

At her feet was a fluorescent yellow rucksack. And lying on the ground was the Winchester rifle that had been leaning against the wall in the cabin. This was her gun. In this life, she owned a firearm. Next to the gun was a saucepan with a ladle inside it. In her hands was another, less deadly, gun – a signal pistol ready to fire a flare.

She had discovered what kind of ‘spotting’ she was doing. While nine of the scientists conducted a climate-tracking fieldwork on this tiny island, she was the lookout for polar bears. Apparently this was a very real prospect. And if she saw one, the very first thing she had to do was fire the flare. This would serve the dual purpose of a) frightening the bear away and b) warning the others.

It was not foolproof. Humans were tasty protein sources and the bears were not known for their fear, especially in recent years as the loss of habitat and food sources had made them ever more vulnerable and forced them to be more reckless.

‘Soon as you’ve fired the flare,’ said the eldest of the group, a beardless, sharp-featured man called Peter who was the field leader, and who spoke in a state of permanent fortissimo, ‘bang the pan with the ladle. Bang it like mad and scream. They have sensitive hearing. They’re like cats. Nine times out of ten, the noise scares them off.’

‘And the other time out of ten?’

He nodded down at the rifle. ‘You kill it. Before it kills you.’

Nora wasn’t the only one with a gun. They all had guns. They were armed scientists. Anyway, Peter laughed and Ingrid patted her back.