The Midnight Library (26 page)

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.’

‘Oh yeah. I do.’

Ewan already had the corkscrew in his hands. ‘Had one hell of a day at work. So I’m happy to guzzle the whole lot straight from the bottle if no one will join me.’

‘I’m in,’ said Ash.

‘I’m okay,’ said Nora, remembering that the last time she had seen him, in the business lounge of a hotel, her brother had confessed to being an alcoholic.

They gave Molly a picture book and Nora read it with her on the sofa.

The evening progressed. They talked news and music and movies. Joe and Ewan had quite enjoyed
Last Chance Saloon
.

A little while later, and to everyone’s surprise, Nora took a left turn out of the safe environs of pop culture and cut to the chase with her brother.

‘Did you ever get pissed off with me? You know, for backing out of the band?’

‘That was years ago, sis. Lot of water under the bridge since then.’

‘You wanted to be a rock star, though.’

‘He still is a rock star,’ said Ewan, laughing. ‘But he’s all mine.’

‘I always feel like I let you down, Joe.’

‘Well, don’t . . . But I feel like I let you down too. Because I was such an idiot . . . I was horrid to you for a little while.’

These words felt like a tonic she had been waiting years to hear. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she managed.

‘Before I was with Ewan, I was so dumb about mental health. I thought panic attacks were a big nothing . . . You know, mind over matter. Man up, sis. But then when Ewan started having them, I understood how real they are.’

‘It wasn’t just the panic attacks. It just felt wrong. I don’t know . . . For what it’s worth, I think you’re happier in this life than the one where you’re’ - she nearly said
dead
- ‘in the band.’

Her brother smiled and looked at Ewan. She doubted he believed it, but Nora had to accept that – as she now knew only too well – some truths were just impossible to see.

Tricycle

As the weeks went by, Nora began to feel something remarkable start to happen.

She began to remember aspects of her life that she had never actually lived.

For instance, one day someone she had never known in her root life – a friend she had apparently known while studying and teaching at the university – phoned her about meeting for lunch. And as the caller ‘Lara’ came up on the phone, a name came to her – ‘Lara Bryan’ – and she pictured her completely, and somehow knew her partner was called Mo, and that they had a baby called Aldous. And then she met her and had all these things confirmed.

This sort-of déjà-vu happened increasingly. Yes, of course there were the occasional slip-ups she made – like ‘forgetting’ Ash had asthma (which he tried to keep under control via running):

‘How long have you had it?’

‘Since I was
seven
.’

‘Oh yes, of course. I thought you’d said eczema.’

‘Nora, are you okay?’

‘Yes. Um, fine. It’s just I had some wine with Lara at lunch and I feel a bit spaced out.’

But slowly, these slip-ups became less frequent. It was as though each day was a piece fitting into a puzzle and, with each piece added, it became easier to know what the absent pieces were going to look like.

Whereas in every other life she had been continually grasping for clues and feeling like she was acting, in this one she increasingly
found that the more she relaxed into it, the more things came to her.

Nora also loved spending time with Molly.

The cosy anarchy of her playing in her bedroom, or the delicate bonding that happened at story time, reading the simple magical brilliance of
The Tiger Who Came to Tea
, or hanging out in the garden.

‘Watch me, Mummy,’ said Molly, as she pedalled away on her tricycle one Saturday morning. ‘Mummy, look! Are you watching?’

‘That’s very good, Molly. Good pedalling.’

‘Mummy, look! Zoomy!’

‘Go, Molly!’

But then the front wheel of the tricycle slipped off the lawn and down into the flowerbed. Molly fell off and knocked her head hard on a small rock. Nora rushed over and picked her up and had a look at her. Molly was clearly hurt, with a scrape on her forehead, the skin grazed and bleeding, but she didn’t want to show it even as her chin wobbled.

‘I’m all right,’ she said slowly, in a voice as fragile as porcelain. ‘I’m all right. I’m all right. I’m all right. I’m all right.’ Each ‘all right’ got progressively closer to tears, then horse-shoed back around to calm again. For all her nocturnal fears about bears, she had a resilience to her that Nora couldn’t help but admire and be inspired by. This little human being had come from her, was in some way a part of her, and if she had hidden strength then maybe Nora did too.

Nora hugged her. ‘It’s all right, baby . . . My brave girl. It’s okay. How does it feel now, darling?’

‘It’s okay. It’s like on holiday.’

‘On holiday?’

‘Yes, Mummy . . .’ she said, a little upset Nora couldn’t remember. ‘The slide.’

‘Oh yes, of course. The slide. Yes. Silly me. Silly Mummy.’

Nora felt something inside her all at once. A kind of fear, as real as the fear she had felt on the Arctic skerry, face to face with the polar bear.

A fear of what she was feeling.

Love.

You could eat in the finest restaurants, you could partake in every sensual pleasure, you could sing on stage in São Paulo to twenty thousand people, you could soak up whole thunderstorms of applause, you could travel to the ends of the Earth, you could be followed by millions on the internet, you could win Olympic medals, but this was all meaningless without love.

And when she thought of her root life, the fundamental problem with it, the thing that had left her vulnerable, really, was the absence of love. Even her brother hadn’t wanted her in that life. There had been no one, once Volts had died. She had loved no one, and no one had loved her back. She had been empty, her life had been empty, walking around, faking some kind of human normality like a sentient mannequin of despair. Just the bare bones of getting through.

Yet there, right there in that garden in Cambridge, under that dull grey sky, she felt the power of it, the terrifying power of caring deeply and being cared for deeply. Okay, her parents were still dead in this life but here there was Molly, there was Ash, there was Joe. There was a net of love to break her fall.

And yet she sensed deep down that it would all come to an end, soon. She sensed that, for all the perfection here, there was something wrong amid the rightness. And the thing that was wrong couldn’t be fixed because the flaw was the rightness itself. Everything was right, and yet she hadn’t earned this. She had joined the movie halfway. She had taken the book from the library, but truthfully, she didn’t own it. She was watching her life as if from behind a window. She was, she began to feel, a fraud. She wanted this to be
her
life. As in her real life. And it wasn’t and she just wished she could forget that fact. She really did.

‘Mummy, are you crying?’

‘No, Molly, no. I’m fine. Mummy’s fine.’

‘You look like you are crying.’

‘Let’s just get you cleaned up . . .’

Later that same day, Molly pieced together a jigsaw of jungle animals, Nora sat on the sofa stroking Plato as his warm, weighty head rested on her lap. She stared at the ornate chess set that was sitting there on the mahogany chest.

A thought rose slowly, and she dismissed it. But then it rose again.

As soon as Ash came home, she told him she wanted to see an old friend from Bedford and wouldn’t be back for a few hours.

No Longer Here

As soon as Nora entered Oak Leaf Residential Care Home, and before she’d even reached the reception, she saw a frail elderly man wearing glasses whom she recognised. He was having a slightly heated conversation with a nurse who looked exasperated. Like a sigh turned into a human.

‘I really would like to go in the garden,’ the old man said.

‘I’m sorry, but the garden is being used today.’

‘I just want to sit on the bench. And read the newspaper.’

‘Maybe if you’d signed up for the gardening activity session—’

‘I don’t want a gardening session. I want to call Dhavak. This was all a mistake.’

Nora had heard her old neighbour talk about his son Dhavak before, when she had dropped off his medication. Apparently his son had been pushing for him to go to a care home, but Mr Banerjee had insisted on holding on to his house. ‘Is there no way I can just—’

He noticed, at this point, that he was being stared at.

‘Mr Banerjee?’

He stared at Nora, confused. ‘Hello? Who are you?’

‘I’m Nora. You know, Nora Seed.’ Then, feeling too flustered to think, she added: ‘I’m your neighbour. On Bancroft Avenue.’

He shook his head. ‘I think you’ve made a mistake, dear. I haven’t lived there for three years. And I am very sure you were not my neighbour.’

The nurse tilted her head at Mr Banerjee, as if he was a confused puppy. ‘Maybe you’ve forgotten.’

‘No,’ said Nora quickly, realising her mistake. ‘He was right. I was confused. I have memory issues sometimes. I never lived there. It was somewhere else. And someone else. I’m sorry.’

They resumed their conversation, as Nora thought about Mr Banerjee’s front garden full of irises and foxgloves.

‘Can I help you?’

She turned to look at the receptionist. A mild-mannered, red-haired man with glasses and blotched skin and a gentle Scottish accent.