by Matt Haig
‘The usual stuff? I didn’t think you’d ever spoken to her before.’
‘I meant the usual stuff that people say. Not what Erin says. Usual people stuff . . .’
‘How’s Will doing?’
‘Er, really well,’ Nora guessed. ‘He says hi.’
Dan’s eyes popped wide with surprise. ‘Really?’
Nora had no idea what to say. Maybe Will was a baby. Maybe Will was in a coma. ‘Sorry, no, he didn’t say hi. Sorry, I’m not thinking. Anyway, I’ll . . . go and get the board.’
She put the cat down on the floor and headed back out. This time she noticed something she had missed on entering.
A framed newspaper article from the Oxford Times with a picture of Nora and Dan standing outside the Three Horseshoes. Dan had his arm around her. He was wearing a suit she had never seen before and she was in a smart dress she would never have worn (she rarely wore dresses) in her original life.
PUB OWNERS MAKE DREAM A REALITY
They had, according to the article, bought the pub cheaply and in a neglected state and then renovated it with a mix of a modest inheritance (Dan’s) and savings and bank loans. The article presented a success story, though it was two years old.
She stepped outside, wondering whether a life could really be judged from just a few minutes after midnight on a Tuesday. Or maybe that was all you needed.
The wind was picking up. Standing out on that quiet village street, the gusts pushed the board a little along the path, nearly toppling it over. Before she picked it up, she felt a buzz from a phone in her pocket. She hadn’t realised it was in there. She pulled it out. A text message from Izzy.
She noticed that her wallpaper was a photo of herself and Dan somewhere hot.
She unlocked the phone using facial recognition and opened the message. It was a photo of a whale rising high out of the ocean, the white spray soaking the air like a burst of champagne. It was a wonderful photo and just seeing it caused her to smile.
Izzy was typing.
Another message appeared:
This was one of the pics I took yesterday from the boat.
And another:
Humpback mother
Then another photo: two whales this time, their backs breaking the water.
With calf
The last message also included emojis of whales and waves.
Nora felt a warm glow. Not just from the pictures, which were indisputably lovely, but from the contact with Izzy.
When Nora backed out of her wedding to Dan, Izzy had insisted that she come to Australia with her.
They’d mapped it all out, a plan to live near Byron Bay and get jobs on one of the whale-watching boat cruises.
They had shared lots of clips of humpback whales in anticipation of this new adventure. But then Nora had wobbled and backed out. Just like she had backed out of a swimming career, and a band, and a wedding. But unlike those other things, there hadn’t even been a reason. Yes, she had started working at String Theory and, yes, she felt the need to tend to her parents’ graves, but she knew that staying in Bedford was the worse option. And yet she picked it. Because of some strange predictive homesickness that festered alongside a depression that told her, ultimately, she didn’t deserve to be happy. That she had hurt Dan and that a life of drizzle and depression in her hometown was her punishment, and she hadn’t the will or clarity or, hell, the energy to do anything.
So, in effect, she swapped her best friend for a cat.
In her actual life, she had never fallen out with Izzy. Nothing that dramatic. But after Izzy had gone to Australia, things had faded between them until their friendship became just a vapour trail of sporadic Facebook and Instagram likes and emoji-filled birthday messages.
She looked back through the text conversations between her and Izzy and realised that even though there was still ten thousand miles between them, they had a much better relationship in this version of things.
When she returned to the pub, carrying the sign this time, Dan was nowhere to be seen so she locked the back door and waited a while, in the pub hallway, working out where the stairs were, and unsure if she actually wanted to follow her tipsy sort-of husband up there.
She found the stairs at the rear of the building, through a door that said Staff Only. As she stepped on the beige raffia carpet heading towards the stairs, just after a framed poster of Things You Learn in the Dark – one of their favourite Ryan Bailey movies which they had watched together at the Odeon in Bedford – she noted a smaller picture on a sweet little window sill.
It was their wedding photo. Black and white, reportage-style. Walking out of a church into a shower of confetti. It was difficult to see their faces properly but they were both laughing and it was a shared laugh, and they seemed – as far as a photograph can tell you anything – to be in love. She remembered her mum talking about Dan. (‘He’s a good one. You’re so lucky. Keep hold of him.’)
She saw her brother Joe too, shaven-headed and looking genuinely happy, champagne glass in hand and his short-lived, disastrous investment-banker boyfriend, Lewis, by his side. Izzy was there, and Ravi too, looking more like an accountant than a drummer, standing next to a bespectacled woman she’d never seen before.
While Dan was in the toilet Nora located the bedroom. Although they evidently had money worries – the nervous appointment with the bank confirmed that – the room was expensively furnished. Smart window blinds. A wide, comfortable-looking bed. The duvet crisp and clean and white.
There were books either side of the bed. In her actual life she hadn’t had a book by her bed for at least six months. She hadn’t read anything for six months. Maybe in this life she had a better concentration span.
She picked up one of the books, Meditation for Beginners. Underneath it was a copy of a biography of her favourite philosopher, Henry David Thoreau. There were books on Dan’s bedside table too. The last book she remembered him reading had been a biography of Toulouse-Lautrec – Tiny Giant – but in this life he was reading a business book called Zero to Hero: Harnessing Success in Work, Play and Life and the latest edition of The Good Pub Guide.
She felt different in her body. A little healthier, a little stronger, but tense. She patted her stomach and realised that in this life she worked out a bit more. Her hair felt different too. She had a heavy fringe, and – feeling it – she could tell her hair was longer at the back. Her mind felt a little woozy. She must have had at least a couple of glasses of wine.
A moment later she heard the toilet flush. Then she heard gargling. It seemed to be a bit noisier than necessary.
‘Are you all right?’ Dan asked, when he came into the bedroom. His voice, she realised, didn’t sound like she remembered. It sounded emptier. A bit colder. Maybe it was tiredness. Maybe it was stress. Maybe it was beer. Maybe it was marriage.
Maybe it was something else.
It was hard to remember, exactly, what he had sounded like before. What he had been like, precisely. But that was the nature of memory. At university she had done an essay drily titled ‘The Principles of Hobbesian Memory and Imagination’. Thomas Hobbes had viewed memory and imagination as pretty much the same thing, and since discovering that she had never entirely trusted her memories.
Outside the window the streetlamp’s yellow glow illuminated the desolate village road.
‘Nora? You’re acting strange. Why are you just standing in the middle of the room? Are you getting ready for bed or are you doing some kind of standing meditation?’
He laughed. He thought he was funny.
He went over to the window and pulled the curtains. Then he took off his jeans and put them on the back of a chair. She stared at him and tried to feel the attraction she had once felt so deeply. It seemed to require a Herculean effort. She hadn’t expected this.
Everyone’s lives could have ended up an infinite number of ways.
He collapsed heavily on the bed, a whale into the ocean. Picked up Zero to Hero. Tried to focus. Put it
down. Picked up a laptop by the bed, shoved an earphone into his ear. Maybe he was going to listen to a podcast.
‘I’m just thinking about something.’
She began to feel faint. As if she was only half there. She remembered Mrs Elm talking about how disappointment in a life would bring her back to the library. It would feel, she realised, altogether too strange to climb into the same bed with a man she hadn’t seen for two years.
She noticed the time on the digital alarm clock. 12:23.
Still with the earphone in his ear, he looked at her again. ‘Right, listen, if you don’t want to make babies tonight you can just say, you know?’
‘What?’
‘I mean, I know we’ll have to wait another month until you are ovulating again . . .’
‘We’re trying for a baby? I want a baby?’
‘Nora, what’s with you? Why are you strange today?’
She took off her shoes. ‘I’m not.’
A memory came to her, related to the Jaws T-shirt.
A tune, actually. ‘Beautiful Sky’.
The day she had bought Dan the Jaws T-shirt had been the day she had played him a song she had written for The Labyrinths. ‘Beautiful Sky’. It was, she was convinced, the best song she had ever written. And – more than that – it was a happy song to reflect her optimism at that point in her life. It was a song inspired by her new life with Dan. And he had listened to it with a shruggish indifference that had hurt at the time and which she would have addressed if it hadn’t been his birthday.
‘Yeah,’ he’d said. ‘It’s okay.’
She wondered why that memory had stayed buried, only to rise up now, like the great white shark on his fading T-shirt.
There were other things coming back to her now too. His over-the-top reaction when she’d once told him about a customer – Ash, the surgeon and amateur guitar player who came into String Theory for the occasional songbook – casually asking Nora if she wanted to go for a coffee some time.
(‘Of course I said no. Stop shouting.’)
Worse, though, was when an A&R man for a major label (or rather, a boutique former indie label with Universal behind them) wanted to sign The Labyrinths. Dan had told her that it was unlikely they’d survive as a couple. He’d also heard a horror story from one of his university friends who’d been in a band that signed to a label and then the label ripped them off and they’d all become unemployed alcoholics or something.
‘I could take you with me,’ she said. ‘I’d get it in the contract. We could go everywhere together.’
‘Sorry, Nora. But that’s your dream. It’s not mine.’
Which hurt even more with hindsight, knowing how much – before the wedding – she’d tried to make his dream of a pub in the Oxfordshire countryside become her dream as well.
Dan had always said his concern was for Nora: she’d been having panic attacks while she was in the band, especially when she got anywhere near a stage. But the concern had been at least a little manipulative, now she thought about it.
‘I thought,’ he was saying now, ‘that you were starting to trust me again.’
‘Trust you? Dan, why wouldn’t I trust you?’
‘You know why.’
‘Of course I know why,’ she lied. ‘I just want to hear you say it.’
‘Well, since the stuff with Erin.’
She stared at him like he was a Rorschach inkblot in which she saw no clear image.
‘Erin? The one I was speaking to tonight?’
‘Am I going to be beaten up for ever about one stupid drunken moment?’
On the street outside, the wind was picking up, howling through trees as if attempting a language.
This was the life she had been in mourning for. This was the life she had beaten herself up for not living. This was the timeline she thought she had regretted not existing in.
‘One stupid mistake?’ she echoed.
‘Okay, two.’
It was multiplying.
‘Two?’
‘I was in a state. You know, the pressure. Of this place. And I was very drunk.’
‘You had sex with someone else and it doesn’t seem you have been seeking much . . . atonement.’
‘Seriously, why drag all this up? We’ve been through this. Remember what the counsellor said. About focusing on where we want to go rather than where we have been.’
‘Do you ever think that maybe we just aren’t right for each other?’
‘What?’
‘I love you, Dan. And you can be a very kind person. And you were great with my mum. And we used to – I mean, we have great conversations. But do you ever feel that we passed where we were meant to be? That we changed?’
She sat down on the edge of the bed. The furthest corner away from him.
‘Do you ever feel lucky to have me? Do you realise how close I was to leaving you, two days before the wedding? Do you know how messed up you would have been if I hadn’t turned up at the wedding?’
‘Wow. Really? You have yourself in quite high esteem there, Nora.’
‘Shouldn’t I? I mean, shouldn’t everyone? What’s wrong with self-esteem? And besides, it’s true. There’s another universe where you send me WhatsApp messages about how messed up you are without me. How you turn to alcohol, although it seems like you turn to alcohol with me too. You send me texts saying you miss my voice.’
He made a dismissive noise, somewhere between a laugh and a grunt. ‘Well, right now, I am most definitely not missing your voice.’
She couldn’t get beyond her shoes. She found it hard – maybe impossible – to take off another item of clothing in front of him.
‘And stop going on about my drinking.’
‘If you are using drink as an excuse for screwing someone else, I can go on about your drinking.’
‘I am a country landlord,’ scoffed Dan. ‘It’s what country landlords do. Be jovial and merry and willing to partake in the many and manifold beverages we sell. Jeez.’
Since when did he speak like this? Did he always speak like this?
‘Bloody hell, Dan. ‘
He didn’t even seem bothered. To seem grateful in any way for the universe he was in. The universe she had felt so guilty for not allowing to happen. He reached for his phone, still with his laptop on the duvet. Nora watched him as he scrolled.
‘Is this what you imagined? Is the dream working out?’
‘Nora, let’s not do this heavy shit. Just get to bloody bed.’
‘Are you happy, Dan?’
‘No one’s happy, Nora.’
‘Some people are. You used to be. You used to light up when you talked about this. You know, the pub. Before you had it. This is the life you dreamed of. You wanted me and you wanted this and yet you’ve been unfaithful and you drink like a fish and I think you only appreciate me when you don’t have me, which is not a great trait to have. What about my dreams?’
He was hardly listening. Or trying to look like he wasn’t.
‘Big fires in California,’ he said, almost to himself.
‘Well, at least we’re not there.’
He put the phone down. Folded his laptop. ‘You coming to bed or what?’
She had shrunk for him, but he still hadn’t found the space he needed. No more.
‘Icosagon,’ she told him.
‘What?’
‘The quiz. Earlier. The twenty-sided polygon. Well, a twenty-sided polygon is called an icosagon. I knew the answer but didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to mock me. And now I don’t really care because I don’t think me knowing some things that you don’t should bother you. And also, I am going to go to the bathroom.’
And she left Dan, with his mouth open, and trod gently on the wide floorboards, out of the room.
She reached the bathroom. Switched a light on. There were tingles in her arms and legs and torso. Like electric static in search of a station. She was fading out, she was sure. There wasn’t long left here. The disappointment
was complete.
It was an impressive bathroom. There was a mirror. She gasped at her reflection. She looked healthier but also older. Her hair made her look like a stranger.
This was not the life she imagined it to be.
And Nora wished the self in the mirror ‘Good luck’.
And the moment after that she was back, somewhere inside the Midnight Library, and Mrs Elm was staring at her from a small distance away with a curious smile.
‘Well, how did that go?’
The Penultimate Update Nora Had Posted Before She Found Herself Between Life and Death
Do you ever think ‘how did I end up here?’ Like you are in a maze and totally lost and it’s all your fault because you were the one who made every turn? And you know that there are many routes that could have helped you out, because you hear all the people on the outside of the maze who made it through, and they are laughing and smiling. And sometimes you get a glimpse of them through the hedge. A fleeting shape through the leaves. And they seem so damn happy to have made it and you don’t resent them, but you do resent yourself for not having their ability to work it all out. Do you? Or is this maze just for me?
Ps. My cat died.
The Chessboard
The shelves of the Midnight Library were quite still again, as if their movement had never even been a possibility.
Nora sensed they were in a different portion of the library now – not a different room as such, as there seemed to be only one infinitely vast room. It was difficult to tell if she really was in a different part of the library as the books were still green, though she seemed closer to a corridor than where she had been. And from here she could see a glimpse of something new through one of the stacks – an office desk and computer, like a basic makeshift open-plan office positioned in the corridor between the aisles.
Mrs Elm wasn’t at the office desk. She was sat at a low wooden table right there in front of Nora, and she was playing chess.
‘It was different to how I imagined,’ said Nora.
Mrs Elm looked like she was halfway through a game.
‘It’s hard to predict, isn’t it?’ she asked, looking blankly in front of her as she moved a black bishop across the board to take a white pawn. ‘The things that will make us happy.’