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The Truth Pixie

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First published in Great Britain in 2020

by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

canongate.co.uk

This digital edition first published in 2020 by Canongate Books

Copyright © Matt Haig, 2020

The right of Matt Haig to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Excerpt from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath, edited by Karen V. Kukil, copyright © 2000 by the Estate of Sylvia Plath. Used by permission of Anchor Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC and Faber and Faber Ltd. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Marriage and Morals , Bertrand Russell

Copyright © 1929. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Group.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on

request from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 78689 270 6

Export ISBN 978 1 78689 272 0

eISBN: 978 1 78689 271 3

To all the health workers.

And the care workers.

Thank you.

I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life.

Sylvia Plath

‘Between life and death there is a library,’ she said. ‘And within that library, the shelves go on for ever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?’

Contents

A Conversation About Rain

Nineteen Years Later

The Man at the Door

String Theory

To Live Is to Suffer

Doors

How to Be a Black Hole

Antimatter

00:00:00

The Librarian

The Midnight Library

The Moving Shelves

The Book of Regrets

Regret Overload

Every Life Begins Now

The Three Horseshoes

The Penultimate Update Nora Had Posted Before She Found Herself Between Life and Death

The Chessboard

The Only Way to Learn Is to Live

Fire

Fish Tank

The Last Update That Nora Had Posted Before She Found Herself Between Life and Death

The Successful Life

Peppermint Tea

The Tree That Is Our Life

System Error

Svalbard

Hugo Lefèvre

Walking in Circles

A Moment of Extreme Crisis in the Middle of Nowhere

The Frustration of Not Finding a Library When You Really Need One

Island

Permafrost

One Night in Longyearbyen

Expectation

Life and Death and the Quantum Wave Function

If Something Is Happening to Me, I Want to Be There

God and Other Librarians

Fame

Milky Way

Wild and Free

Ryan Bailey

A Silver Tray of Honey Cakes

The Podcast of Revelations

‘Howl’

Love and Pain

Equidistance

Someone Else’s Dream

A Gentle Life

Why Want Another Universe If This One Has Dogs?

Dinner with Dylan

Last Chance Saloon

Buena Vista Vineyard

The Many Lives of Nora Seed

Lost in the Library

A Pearl in the Shell

The Game

The Perfect Life

A Spiritual Quest for a Deeper Connection with the Universe

Hammersmith

Tricycle

No Longer Here

An Incident With the Police

A New Way of Seeing

The Flowers Have Water

Nowhere to Land

Don’t You Dare Give Up, Nora Seed!

Awakening

The Other Side of Despair

A Thing I Have Learned

Living Versus Understanding

The Volcano

How It Ends

A Conversation About Rain

Nineteen years before she decided to die, Nora Seed sat in the warmth of the small library at Hazeldene School in the town of Bedford. She sat at a low table staring at a chess board.

‘Nora dear, it’s natural to worry about your future,’ said the librarian, Mrs Elm, her eyes twinkling.

Mrs Elm made her first move. A knight hopping over the neat row of white pawns. ‘Of course, you’re going to be worried about the exams. But you could be anything you want to be, Nora. Think of all that possibility. It’s exciting.’

‘Yes. I suppose it is.’

‘A whole life in front of you.’

‘A whole life.’

‘You could do anything, live anywhere. Somewhere a bit less cold and wet.’

Nora pushed a pawn forward two spaces.

It was hard not to compare Mrs Elm to her mother, who treated Nora like a mistake in need of correction. For instance, when she was a baby her mother had been so worried Nora’s left ear stuck out more than her right that she’d used sticky tape to address the situation, then disguised it beneath a woollen bonnet.

‘I hate the cold and wet,’ added Mrs Elm, for emphasis.

Mrs Elm had short grey hair and a kind and mildly crinkled oval face sitting pale above her turtle-green polo neck. She was quite old. But she was also the person most on Nora’s wavelength in the entire school, and even on days when it wasn’t raining she would spend her afternoon break in the small library.

‘Coldness and wetness don’t always go together,’ Nora told her. ‘Antarctica is the driest continent on Earth. Technically, it’s a desert.’

‘Well, that sounds up your street.’

‘I don’t think it’s far enough away.’

‘Well, maybe you should be an astronaut. Travel the galaxy.’

Nora smiled. ‘The rain is even worse on other planets.’

‘Worse than Bedfordshire?’

‘On Venus it is pure acid.’

Mrs Elm pulled a paper tissue from her sleeve and delicately blew her nose. ‘See? With a brain like yours you can do anything.’

A blond boy Nora recognised from a couple of years below her ran past outside the rain-speckled window. Either chasing someone or being chased. Since her brother had left, she’d felt a bit unguarded out there. The library was a little shelter of civilisation.

‘Dad thinks I’ve thrown everything away. Now I’ve stopped swimming.’

‘Well, far be it from me to say, but there is more to this world than swimming really fast. There are many different possible lives ahead of you. Like I said last week, you could be a glaciologist. I’ve been researching and the—’

And it was then that the phone rang.

‘One minute,’ said Mrs Elm, softly. ‘I’d better get that.’

A moment later, Nora watched Mrs Elm on the phone. ‘Yes. She’s here now.’ The librarian’s face fell in shock. She turned away from Nora, but her words were audible across the hushed room: ‘Oh no. No. Oh my God. Of course . . .’