Мэтт Хейг: The Midnight Library

On nights when he was home early enough to cook, he made a great lentil dal and a pretty good penne arrabbiata, and tended to put a whole bulb of garlic in every meal he created. But Molly had been absolutely right: his artistic talents didn’t extend to musical ability. In fact, when he sang ‘The Sound of Silence’, accompanied by his guitar, she found herself guiltily wishing he would take the title literally.

He was, in other words, a bit of a dork – a dork who saved lives on a daily basis, but still a dork. Which was good. Nora liked dorks, and she felt one herself, and it helped make her get over the fundamental peculiarity of being with a husband you were only just getting to know.

This is a good life, Nora would think to herself, over and over again.

Yes, being a parent was exhausting, but Molly was easy to love, at least in daylight hours. In fact, Nora often preferred it when Molly was home from school because it added a bit of challenge to what was otherwise a rather frictionless existence. No relationship stress, no work stress, no money stress.

It was a lot to be grateful for.

There were inevitably shaky moments. She felt the familiar feeling of being in a play for which she didn’t know the lines.

‘Is anything wrong?’ she asked Ash one night.

‘It’s just . . .’ He looked at her with his kind smile and intense, scrutinising eyes. ‘I don’t know. You forgot our anniversary was coming up. You think you haven’t seen films you’ve seen. And vice versa. You forgot you had a bike. You forget where the plates are. You’ve been wearing my slippers. You get into my side of the bed.’

‘Jeez, Ash,’ she said, a little bit too tense. ‘It’s like being interrogated by the three bears.’

‘I just worry . . .’

‘I’m fine. Just, you know, lost in research world. Lost in the woods. Thoreau’s woods.’

And she felt in those moments that maybe she’d return to the Midnight Library. Sometimes she remembered the words of Mrs Elm on her first visit there. If you really want to live a life hardenough, you don’t have to worry . . . The moment you decide you want that life, really want it, then everything that exists in your head now, including this Midnight Library, will eventually be a dream. A memory so vague and intangible it will hardly be there at all .

Which begged the question: if this was the perfect life, why hadn’t she forgotten the library?

How long did it take to forget?

Occasionally she felt wisps of gentle depression float around her, for no real reason, but it wasn’t comparable to how terrible she had felt in her root life, or indeed many of her other lives. It was like comparing a bit of a sniffle to pneumonia. When she thought about how bad she had felt the day she lost her job at String Theory, of the despair, of the lonely and desperate yearning to not exist, then this was nowhere near .

Every day she went to bed thinking she was going to wake up in this life again, because it was – on balance, and all things considered – the best she had known. Indeed, she progressed from going to bed casually assuming she’d stay in this life, to being scared to fall asleep in case she wouldn’t.

And yet, night after night she would fall asleep and day after day she would wake up in the same bed. Or occasionally on the carpet, but she shared that pain with Ash, and more often than not it was a bed as Molly was getting better and better at sleeping through.

There were awkward moments, of course. Nora never knew the way to anything, or where things were in the house, and Ash sometimes wondered out loud if she should see a doctor. And at first she had avoided sex with him, but one night it happened and afterwards Nora felt guilty about the lie she was living.

They lay in the dark for a while, in post-coital silence, but she knew she had to broach the subject. Test the water.

‘Ash,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Do you believe in the theory of parallel universes?’

She could see his face stretch into a smile. This was the kind of conversation on his wavelength. ‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Me too. I mean, it’s science, isn’t it? It’s not like some geeky physicist just thought, “Hey, parallel universes are cool. Let’s make a theory about them.”’

‘Yeah,’ he agreed. ‘Science distrusts anything that sounds too cool. Too sci-fi. Scientists are sceptics, as a rule.’

‘Exactly, yet physicists believe in parallel universes.’

‘It’s just where the science leads, isn’t it? Everything in quantum mechanics and string theory all points to there being multiple universes. Many, many universes.’

‘Well, what would you say if I said that I have visited my other lives, and I think I have chosen this one?’

‘I would think you were insane. But I’d still like you.’

‘Well, I have. I have had many lives.’

He smiled. ‘Great. Is there one where you kiss me again?’

‘There is one where you buried my dead cat.’

He laughed. ‘That’s so cool, Nor. The thing I like about you is that you always make me feel normal.’

And that was it.

She realised that you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality. As Thoreau wrote, ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.’ And Ash only saw the Nora he had fallen in love with and married, and so, in a way, that was the Nora she was becoming.

Hammersmith

During half term, while Molly was off school and on a Tuesday when Ash wasn’t in the hospital, they popped on the train to London to see Nora’s brother and Ewan in their flat in Hammersmith.

Joe looked well, and his husband looked the same as he had when Nora had seen him on her brother’s phone in her Olympic life. Joe and Ewan met at a cross-training class at their local gym. Joe was, in this life, working as a sound engineer, while Ewan – Dr Ewan Langford, to be precise – was a consultant radiologist for the Royal Marsden Hospital, so he and Ash had a lot of hospital-related stuff to moan about together.

Joe and Ewan were lovely with Molly, asking her detailed questions about what Panda was up to. And Joe cooked them all a great garlicky pasta-and-broccoli meal.

‘It’s Puglian, apparently,’ he told Nora. ‘Getting a bit of our heritage in there.’

Nora thought of her Italian grandfather and wondered what he had felt like when he realised the London Brick Company was actually based in Bedford. Had he been truly disappointed? Or had he, actually, just decided to make the most of it? There was probably a version of their grandfather who went to London and on his first day got run over by a double-decker bus at Piccadilly Circus.

Joe and Ewan had a full wine rack in the kitchen and Nora noticed that one of the bottles was a Californian Syrah from the Buena Vista vineyard. Nora felt her skin prickle as she saw the two printed signatures at the bottom – Alicia and Eduardo Martìnez. She smiled, sensing Eduardo was just as happy in this life. She wondered, momentarily, who Alicia was and what she was like. At least there were good sunsets there.

‘You okay?’ asked Ash, as Nora gazed absent-mindedly at the label.

‘Yeah, sure. It just, um, looks like a good one.’

‘That’s my absolute fave,’ said Ewan. ‘Such a bloody good wine. Shall we get it open?’

‘Well,’ said Nora, ‘only if you were going to have a drink anyway.’

‘Well, I’m not,’ said Joe. ‘I’ve been overdoing it a bit recently. I’m in a little teetotal patch.’

‘You know what your bro is like,’ added Ewan, planting a kiss on Joe’s cheek. ‘All or nothing.’