Мэтт Хейг - The Midnight Library

Nora supposed it was because she had already been super-famous with The Labyrinths before Izzy decided to go to Australia, so Nora’s decision not to go may have been more understandable. Or maybe Izzy just liked the idea of a famous friend.

Izzy wrote something under the picture of the whale.

All good things are wild and free .

She must have known about the tattoo.

Another message came through now from her.

‘Hope Brazil was a blast. Am sure you rocked it! And thanks ten million for sorting out the tix for Brisbane. Am totally stoked. As we Gold Coasters say.’

There were a few emojis of whales and hearts and thanking hands and a microphone and some musical notes.

Nora checked her Instagram. In this life she had 11.3 million followers.

And bloody hell , she looked amazing. Her naturally black hair had a kind of white stripe in it. Vampiric make-up. And a lip piercing. She did look tired but she supposed that was just a result of living on tour. It was a glamorous kind of tired. Like Billie Eilish’s cool aunt.

She took a selfie and saw that while she didn’t look exactly like the excessively styled and filtered photos on her feed, which had been for magazine shoots, she did look cooler than she ever imagined she could look. As with her Australian life, she also put poems up online. The difference with this life, though, was that each poem had about half a million likes. One of the poems was even called ‘Fire’ but it was different to the other one.

She had a fire inside her.

She wondered if the fire was to warm her or destroy her.

Then she realised.

A fire had no motive.

Only she could have that.

The power was hers.

A woman sat next to her. This woman wasn’t in the band, but she exuded importance. She was about fifty years old. Maybe she was the manager. Maybe she worked for the record company. She had the air of a strict mum about her. But she began with a smile.

‘Stroke of genius,’ she said. ‘The Simon & Garfunkel thing. You’re trending across South America.’

‘Cool.’

‘Have posted about it from your accounts.’

She’d said this like it was a perfectly normal thing. ‘Oh. Right. Okay.’

‘There’s a couple of last-minute press things tonight at the hotel. Then tomorrow it’s an early start . . . We fly to Rio first thing, then eight hours of press. All at the hotel.’

‘Rio?’

‘You’re up to speed with this week’s tour schedule, right?’

‘Um, kind of. Could you just remind me again?’

She sighed, with good humour, as if Nora not knowing the tour schedule was totally in character. ‘Sure. Rio tomorrow. Two nights. Then the final night in Brazil – Porto Alegre – then Santiago, Chile, Buenos Aires, then Lima. And that’s the last leg of South America. Then next week it’s the start of the Asia leg – Japan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Taiwan.’

‘Peru? We’re famous in Peru?’

‘Nora, you’ve been to Peru before, remember? Last year. They went out of their minds. All fifteen thousand of them. It’s at the same place. The racecourse.’

‘The racecourse. Sure. Yeah. I remember. Was a good night. Really . . . good.’

That’s what this life probably felt like, she realised. One big racecourse. But she had no idea if she was the horse or the jockey in that analogy.

Ravi tapped the woman on the shoulder. ‘Joanna, what time’s that podcast tomorrow?’

‘Oh damn. Actually, it’s tonight now. Timings. Sorry. Forgot to say. But they only really have to speak to Nora. So you can get an early night if you want.’

Ravi shrugged, dejected. ‘Sure. Yeah.’

Joanna sighed. ‘Don’t shoot the messenger. Though it’s never stopped you before.’

Nora wondered again where her brother was, but the tension between Joanna and Ravi made it feel wrong to ask something she should so obviously know. So she stared out of the window as the coach drove along the four-lane highway. The glowing tail-lights of cars and lorries and motorbikes in the dark, like red and watching eyes. Distant skyscrapers with a few tiny squares of light against a humid backdrop of dark sky and darker clouds. A shadowy army of trees lined the sides and middle of the highway, splitting the traffic into two directions.

If she was still in this life tomorrow evening, she would be expected to perform an entire concert’s worth of songs, most of which she didn’t actually know. She wondered how quickly she could learn the set list.

Her phone rang. A video call. The caller was ‘Ryan’.

Joanna saw the name and smirked a little. ‘You’d better get that.’

So she did, even though she had no idea who this Ryan was, and the image on the screen seemed too blurry to recognise.

But then he was there. A face she had seen, in movies and imaginings, many times.

‘Hey, babe. Just checking in with a friend. We’re still friends, right?’

She knew the voice too.

American, rugged, charming. Famous.

She heard Joanna whispering to someone else on the coach: ‘She’s on the phone to Ryan Bailey.’

Ryan Bailey

Ryan Bailey .

As in the Ryan Bailey. As in the Ryan Bailey of her fantasies, where they talked about Plato and Heidegger through a veil of steam in his West Hollywood hot tub.

‘Nora? You there? You look scared.’

‘Um, yeah. I’m . . . yeah . . . I’m . . . I’ve just . . . I’m here . . . On a bus . . . A big . . . touring . . . yeah . . . Hi.’

‘Guess where I am?’

She had no idea what to say. ‘Hot tub’ seemed entirely inappropriate as an answer. ‘I honestly don’t know.’

He panned the phone around a vast and opulent-looking villa, complete with bright furnishings and terracotta tiles and a four-poster double bed veiled in a mosquito net.

‘Nayarit, Mexico.’ He pronounced Mexico in a parody of Spanish, with the x as an h. He looked and sounded slightly different to the Ryan Bailey in the movies. A bit puffier. A bit more slurred. Drunker, perhaps. ‘On location. They got me shooting Saloon 2 .’

‘ Last Chance Saloon 2 ? Oh, I so want to see the first one.’

He laughed as if she had told the most hilarious joke.

‘Still dry as ever, Nono.’

Nono?

‘Staying at the Casa de Míta,’ he went on. ‘Remember? The weekend we had there? They’ve put me in the exact same villa. You remember? I’m having a mezcal margarita in your honour. Where are you?’

‘Brazil. We were just doing a concert in São Paulo.’

‘Wow. Same landmass. That’s cool. That’s, yeah, cool.’

‘It was really good,’ she said.

‘You’re sounding very formal.’

Nora was aware half of the bus was listening in. Ravi was staring at her as he drank a bottle of beer.

‘I’m just . . . you know . . . on the bus . . . There are people around.’

‘People,’ he sighed, as if it was a swear word. ‘There are always people. That’s the fucking problem. But hey, I’ve been thinking a lot recently. About what you said on Jimmy Fallon . . .’

Nora tried to act as if every sentence he said wasn’t an animal running into the road.

‘What did I say?’

‘You know, about how it just ran its course. Me and you. How there were no hard feelings. I just want to thank you for saying that. Because I know I am a difficult fucking person. I know that. But I’m getting work for that. The therapist I’m seeing is really fucking good.’

‘That’s . . . great.’

‘I miss you, Nora. We had great times. But there is more to life than fantastic sex.’

‘Yes,’ said Nora, trying to keep her imagination in check. ‘Absolutely.’