Мэтт Хейг - The Midnight Library

‘What?’

He hadn’t heard her over the noise, but now she had a different question.

‘Where is Joe?’ she asked, almost as a shout.

Ravi looked momentarily confused, or scared, and Nora braced herself for some terrible truth. But none came.

‘The usual, I reckon. Schmoozing it up with the foreign press.’

Nora had no idea what was going on. He seemed to be still part of the band, but also not in the band enough to be performing on stage with them. And if he wasn’t in the band, then whatever had caused him to leave the band hadn’t caused him to disappear completely. From what Ravi said, and the way he said it, Joe was still very much part of the team. Ella wasn’t there, though. On bass was a large muscly man with a shaved head and tattoos. She wanted to know more, but now was clearly not the time.

Ravi swept his hand through the air, gesturing towards what Nora could now see was a very large stage.

She was overwhelmed. She didn’t know what to feel.

‘Encore time,’ said Ravi.

Nora tried to think. It had been a long time since she had performed anything . And even then it was only in front of a crowd of about twelve uninterested people in a pub basement.

Ravi leaned in. ‘You okay, Nora?’

It seemed a bit brittle. The way he said her name seemed to contain the same kind of resentment she’d heard when she’d bumped into him yesterday, in that very different life.

‘Yes,’ she said, full shouting now. ‘Of course. It’s just . . . I have no idea what we should do for the encore.’

Ravi shrugged. ‘Same as always.’

‘Hmm. Yeah. Right.’ Nora tried to think. She looked out at the stage. She saw a giant video screen with the words THE LABYRINTHS flashing and rotating out to the roaring crowd. Wow, she thought. We’re big . Proper, stadium-level big. She saw a keyboard and the stool she had been sitting at. Her bandmates whose names she didn’t know were about to walk back on stage.

‘Where are we again?’ she asked, above the crowd noise. ‘I’ve gone blank.’

The big shaven-headed guy holding the bass told her: ‘São Paulo.’

‘We’re in Brazil?’

They looked at her as if she was mad.

‘Where have you been the last four days?’

‘“Beautiful Sky”,’ said Nora, realising she could probably still remember most of the words. ‘Let’s do that.’

‘ Again? ’ Ravi laughed, his face shining with sweat. ‘We did it ten minutes ago.’

‘Okay. Listen,’ said Nora, her voice now a shout over the crowd demanding an encore. ‘I was thinking we do something different. Mix it up. I wondered if we could do a different song to usual.’

‘We have to do “Howl”,’ said the other band member. A turquoise lead guitar strapped around her. ‘We always do “Howl”.’

Nora had never heard of ‘Howl’ in her life.

‘Yeah, I know,’ she bluffed, ‘but let’s mix it up. Let’s do something they aren’t expecting. Let’s surprise them.’

‘You’re overthinking this, Nora,’ said Ravi.

‘I have no other type of thinking available.’

Ravi shrugged. ‘So, what should we do?’

Nora struggled to think. She thought of Ash – with his Simon & Garfunkel guitar songbook. ‘Let’s do “Bridge Over Troubled Water”.’

Ravi was incredulous. ‘What?’

‘I think we should do that. It will surprise people.’

‘I love that song,’ said the female bandmate. ‘And I know it.’

‘Everyone knows it, Imani,’ Ravi said, dismissively.

‘Exactly,’ Nora said, trying her hardest to sound like a rock star, ‘let’s do it.’

Milky Way

Nora walked onto the stage.

At first she couldn’t see the faces, because the lights were pointing towards her, and beyond that glare everything seemed like darkness. Except for a mesmerising milky way of camera flashes and phone torches.

She could hear them, though.

Human beings when there’s enough of them together acting in total unison become something else. The collective roar made her think of another kind of animal entirely. It was at first kind of threatening, as if she was Hercules facing the many-headed Hydra who wanted to kill him, but this was a roar of total support, and the power of it gave her a kind of strength.

She realised, in that moment, that she was capable of a lot more than she had known.

Wild and Free

She reached the keyboard, sat down on the stool and brought the microphone a little closer.

‘Thank you, São Paulo,’ she said. ‘We love you.’

And Brazil roared back.

This, it seemed, was power. The power of fame. Like those pop icons she had seen on social media, who could say a single word and get a million likes and shares. Total fame was when you reached the point where looking like a hero, or genius, or god, required minimal effort. But the flipside was that it was precarious. It could be equally easy to fall and look like a devil or a villain, or just an arse.

Her heart raced, as if she were about to set foot on a tight-rope.

She could see some of the faces in the crowd now, thousands of them, emerging from the dark. Tiny and strange, the clothed bodies almost invisible. She was staring out at twenty thousand disembodied heads.

Her mouth was dry. She could hardly speak, so wondered how she was going to sing. She remembered Dan mock-wincing as she’d sung for him.

The noise of the crowd subsided.

It was time.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Here is a song you might have heard before.’

This was a stupid thing to say, she realised. They had all paid tickets for this concert presumably because they had heard a lot of these songs before.

‘It’s a song that means a lot to me and my brother.’

Already the place was erupting. They screamed and roared and clapped and chanted. The response was phenomenal. She felt, momentarily, like Cleopatra. An utterly terrified Cleopatra.

Adjusting her hands into position for E-flat major, she was momentarily distracted by a tattoo on her weirdly hairless forearm, written in beautifully angled calligraphic letters. It was a quote from Henry David Thoreau. All good things are wild and free . She closed her eyes and vowed not to open them until she had finished the song.

She understood why Chopin had liked playing in the dark so much. It was so much easier that way.

Wild , she thought to herself. Free .

As she sang, she felt alive. Even more alive than she had felt swimming in her Olympic-champion body.

She wondered why she had been so scared of this, of singing to a crowd. It was a great feeling.

Ravi came over to her at the end of the song, while they were still on stage. ‘That was fucking special, man,’ he shouted in her ear.

‘Oh good,’ she said.

‘Now let’s kill this and do “Howl”.’

She shook her head, then spoke into the microphone, hurriedly, before anyone else had a chance to. ‘Thank you for coming, everybody! I really hope you all had a nice evening. Get home safely.’

‘Get home safely?’ Ravi said in the coach on the way back to the hotel. She hadn’t remembered him being such an arse. He seemed unhappy.

‘What was wrong with that?’ she wondered out loud.

‘Hardly your normal style.’

‘Wasn’t it?’

‘Well, bit of a contrast to Chicago.’

‘Why? What did I do in Chicago?’

Ravi laughed. ‘Have you been lobotomised?’

She looked at her phone. In this life she had the latest model.

A message from Izzy.

It was the same message she’d had in her life with Dan, in the pub. Not a message at all but a photo of a whale. Actually, it might have been a slightly different photo of a whale. That was interesting. Why was she still friends with Izzy in this life and not in her root life? After all, she was pretty sure she wasn’t married to Dan in this life. She checked her hand and was relieved to see a totally naked ring finger.