by Matt Haig
I have a therapist.
‘Sorry, Dad.’
‘That’s all right.’
‘I just want to know that you’re happy.’
‘’Course I am. I’ve got an Olympic champion for a daughter and have finally found the love of my life. And you’re getting back on your feet again. Mentally, I mean. After Portugal.’
Nora wanted to know what had happened in Portugal but she had another question to ask first.
‘What about Mum? Wasn’t she the love of your life?’
‘Once upon a time she was. But things change, Nora. Come on, you’re a grown-up.’
‘I . . .’
Nora put her dad on speaker. Clicked back to her own Wikipedia page. Sure enough, her parents had divorced after her father had an affair with Nadia Vanko, mother of a Ukrainian male swimmer, Yegor Vanko. And in this timeline her mother had died way back in 2011.
And all this because Nora had never sat in that car park in Bedford and told her dad that she didn’t want to be a competitive swimmer.
She felt that feeling again. Like she was fading away. That she had worked out that this life wasn’t for her and was disappearing back to the library. But she stayed where she was. She said goodbye to her dad, ended the phone call and continued to read up on herself.
She was single, though had been in a relationship with the American Olympic medal-winning diver Scott Richards for three years, and briefly lived with him in California, where they resided in La Jolla, San Diego. She now lived in West London.
Having read the entire page she put the phone down and decided to go find out if there was a pool. She wanted to do what she would be doing in this life, and what she would be doing was swimming. And maybe the water would help her think of what she could say.
It was an exceptional swim, even if it gave her little creative inspiration, and it calmed her after the experience of having a conversation with her dead father. She had the pool to herself and glided through length after length of breaststroke without having to think about it. It felt so empowering, to be that fit and strong and to have such mastery of the water, that she momentarily stopped worrying about her father and having to give a speech she really wasn’t prepared for.
But as she swam her mood changed. She thought of those years her dad had gained and her mother had lost, and as she thought she became angrier and angrier at her father, which fuelled her to swim even faster. She had always imagined her parents were too proud to get divorced, so instead let their resentments fester inside, projecting them onto their children, and Nora in particular. And swimming had been her only ticket to approval.
Here, in this life she was in now, she had pursued a career to keep him happy, while sacrificing her own relationships, her own love of music, her own dreams beyond anything that didn’t involve a medal, her own life. And her father had paid this back by having an affair with this Nadia person and leaving her mother and he still got terse with her. After all that.
Screw him. Or at least this version of him.
As she switched to freestyle she realised it wasn’t her fault that her parents had never been able to love her the way parents were meant to: without condition. It wasn’t her fault her mother focused on her every flaw, starting with the asymmetry of her ears. No. It went back even earlier than that. The first problem had been that Nora had dared, somehow, to arrive into existence at a time when her parents’ marriage was relatively fragile. Her mother fell into depression and her father turned to tumblers of single malt.
She did thirty more lengths, and her mind calmed and she started to feel free, just her and the water.
But when she eventually got out of the pool and went back to her room she dressed in the only clean clothes in her hotel room (smart navy trouser suit) and stared at the inside of her suitcase. She felt the profound loneliness emanating from it. There was a copy of her own book. She was staring out from the cover with steely-eyed determination and wearing a Team GB swimsuit. She picked it up and saw, in small print, that it was ‘co-written with Amanda Sands’.
Amanda Sands, the internet told her, was ‘ghost-writer to a whole host of sporting celebrities’.
Then she looked at her watch. It was time to head to the lobby.
Standing waiting for her were two smartly dressed people she didn’t recognise and one she most definitely did. He was wearing a suit and was clean-shaven in this life, his hair side-parted and business-like, but he was the same Joe. His dark eyebrows as bushy as ever – ‘That’s the Italian in you,’ as their mother used to say.
‘Joe?’
What’s more, he was smiling at her. A big, brotherly, uncomplicated smile.
‘Morning, sis,’ he said, surprised by and a little awkward from the length of the hug she was giving him.
When the hug was over, he introduced the other two people he was standing with.
‘This is Priya from Gulliver Research, the people organising the conference obviously, and this is Rory, obviously, from Celebrity Speakers.’
‘Hi Priya!’ said Nora. ‘Hi Rory. So nice to meet you.’
‘Yes, it is,’ said Priya, smiling. ‘We’re so pleased to have you.’
‘You say that like we’ve never met before!’ said Rory, with a booming laugh.
Nora backtracked. ‘Yes, I know we’ve met, Rory. Just my little joke. You know my sense of humour.’
‘You have a sense of humour?’
‘Good one, Rory!’
‘Okay,’ her brother said, looking at her and smiling. ‘Do you want to see the space?’
She couldn’t stop smiling. Here was her brother. Her brother, whom she hadn’t seen in two years and hadn’t had any semblance of a good relationship with in far longer, looking healthy and happy and like he actually liked her. ‘The space?’
‘Yeah. The hall. Where you’re doing the talk.’
‘It’s all set up,’ Priya added, helpfully.
‘Bloody big room,’ said Rory approvingly, as he cradled a paper cup of coffee.
So, Nora agreed and was led into a vast blue conference room with a wide stage and around a thousand empty chairs. A technician in black came up and asked her: ‘What do you fancy? Lapel or headset or handheld?’
‘Sorry?’
‘What kind of mic will you want up there?’
‘Oh!’
‘Headset,’ her brother interjected on Nora’s behalf.
‘Yeah. Headset,’ said Nora.
‘I was just thinking,’ her brother said, ‘after that nightmare we had with the microphone in Cardiff.’
‘Yeah, totally. What a nightmare.’
Priya was smiling at her, wanting to ask something. ‘Am I right in thinking you’ve got no multimedia stuff? No slides or anything?’
‘Um, I—’
Her brother and Rory were looking at her, a little concerned. This was clearly a question she should know the answer to and didn’t.
‘Yes,’ she said, then saw her brother’s expression, ‘I . . . don’t. Yes, I don’t. I don’t have any multimedia stuff.’
And they all looked at her like she was not quite right but she smiled through it.
Peppermint Tea
Ten minutes later she was sitting on her own with her brother in something called the ‘VIP Business Lounge’, which was just a small, airless room with some chairs and a table offering a selection of today’s newspapers. A couple of middle-aged men in suits were typing things into laptops.
By this point she had worked out that her brother was her manager. And that he’d been her manager for seven years, since she’d given up professional swimming.
‘Are you okay about all this?’ her brother asked, having just got two drinks from the coffee machine. He tore a sachet to release a teabag. Peppermint. He placed it into the cup of hot water he’d taken from the coffee machine.
Then he handed it to Nora.
She had never drunk peppermint tea in her life. ‘That’s for me?’
‘Well, yeah. It wa
s the only herbal they had.’
He had a coffee for himself that Nora secretly craved. Maybe in this life she didn’t drink caffeine.
Are you okay about all this?
‘Okay about all what?’ Nora wondered.
‘The talk, today.’
‘Oh, um, yeah. How long is it again?’
‘Forty minutes.’
‘Sure.’
‘It’s a lot of money. I upped it from ten.’
‘That’s very good of you.’
‘Well, I still get my twenty per cent. Hardly a sacrifice.’
Nora tried to think how she could unlock their shared history. How she could find out why, in this life, they were sitting together and getting along. It might have been money, but her brother had never been particularly money-motivated. And yes, sure, he’d obviously been upset when Nora walked away from the deal with the record company but that had been because he wanted to play guitar in The Labyrinths for the rest of his life and be a rock star.
After dipping it a few times Nora let the teabag free in the water. ‘Do you ever think of how our lives could have been different? You know, like if I had never stuck with swimming?’
‘Not really.’
‘I mean, what do you think you’d be doing if you weren’t my manager?’
‘I manage other people too, you know.’
‘Well, yeah, of course I know that. Obviously.’
‘I suppose I probably wouldn’t be managing anyone without you. I mean, you were the first. And you introduced me to Kai and then Natalie. And then Eli, so . . .’
She nodded, as if she had any idea who Kai and Natalie and Eli were. ‘True, but maybe you’d have found some other way.’
‘Who knows? Or maybe I’d still be in Manchester, I don’t know.’
‘Manchester?’
‘Yeah. You remember how much I loved it up there. At uni.’
It was really hard not to look surprised at any of this, at the fact that this brother she was getting on with, and working with, was also someone who went to university. In her root life her brother did A-levels and applied to go to Manchester to do History, but he never got the grades he needed, probably because he was too busy getting stoned with Ravi every night. And then decided he didn’t want to go to uni at all.
They chatted a bit more.
At one point he became distracted by his phone.
Nora noticed his screensaver was of a radiant, handsome, smiling man she had never seen before. She noticed her brother’s wedding ring and feigned a neutral expression.
‘So, how’s married life?’
Joe smiled. It was a genuinely happy smile. She hadn’t seen him smile like that for years. In her root life, Joe had always been unlucky in love. Although she had known her brother was gay since he was a teenager, he hadn’t officially come out until he was twenty-two. And he’d never had a happy or long-term relationship. She felt guilt, that her life had the power to shape her brother’s life in such meaningful ways.
‘Oh, you know Ewan. Ewan’s Ewan.’
Nora smiled back as if she knew who Ewan was and exactly what he was like. ‘Yeah. He’s great. I’m so happy for you both.’
He laughed. ‘We’ve been married five years now. You’re talking as if me and him have just got together.’
‘No, I’m just, you know, I sometimes think that you’re lucky. So in love. And happy.’
‘He wants a dog.’ He smiled. ‘That’s our current debate. I mean, I wouldn’t mind a dog. But I’d want a rescue. And I wouldn’t want a bloody Maltipoo or a Bichon. I’d want a wolf. You know, a proper dog.’
Nora thought of Voltaire. ‘Animals are good company . . .’
‘Yeah. You still want a dog?’
‘I do. Or a cat.’
‘Cats are too disobedient,’ he said, sounding like the brother she remembered. ‘Dogs know their place.’
‘Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.’
He looked perplexed. ‘Where did that come from? Is that a quote?’
‘Yeah. Henry David Thoreau. You know, my fave philosopher.’
‘Since when were you into philosophy?’
Of course. In this life she’d never have done a Philosophy degree. While her root self had been reading the works of Thoreau and Lao Tzu and Sartre in a stinky student flat in Bristol, her current self had been standing on Olympic podiums in Beijing. Weirdly, she felt just as sad for the version of her who had never fallen in love with the simple beauty of Thoreau’s Walden, or the stoical Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, as she had felt sympathy for the version of her who never fulfilled her Olympic potential.
‘Oh, I don’t know . . . I just came across some of his stuff on the internet.’
‘Ah. Cool. Will check him out. You could drop some of that into your speech.’
Nora felt herself go pale. ‘Um, I’m thinking of maybe doing something a little different today. I might, um, improvise a little.’
Improvising was, after all, a skill she’d been practising.
‘I saw this great documentary about Greenland the other night. Made me remember when you were obsessed with the Arctic and you cut out all those pictures of polar bears and stuff.’
‘Yeah. Mrs Elm said the best way to be an arctic explorer was to be a glaciologist. So that’s what I wanted to be.’
‘Mrs Elm,’ he whispered. ‘That rings a bell.’
‘School librarian.’
‘That was it. You used to live in that library, didn’t you?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘Just think, if you hadn’t stuck with swimming, you’d be in Greenland right now.’
‘Svalbard,’ she said.
‘Sorry?’
‘It’s a Norwegian archipelago. Way up in the Arctic Ocean.’
‘Okay, Norway then. You’d be there.’
‘Maybe. Or maybe I’d just still be in Bedford. Moping around. Unemployed. Struggling to pay the rent.’
‘Don’t be daft. You’d have always done something big.’
She smiled at her elder brother’s innocence. ‘In some lives me and you might not even get on.’
‘Nonsense.’
‘I hope so.’
Joe seemed a bit uncomfortable, and clearly wanted to change the topic.
‘Hey, guess who I saw the other day?’
Nora shrugged, hoping it was going to be someone she’d heard of.
‘Ravi. Do you remember Ravi?’
She thought of Ravi, telling her off in the newsagent’s only yesterday. ‘Oh yeah. Ravi.’
‘Well, I bumped into him.’
‘In Bedford?’
‘Ha! God, no. Haven’t been there for years. No. It was at Blackfriars station. Totally random. Like, I haven’t seen him in over a decade. At least. He wanted to go to the pub. So, I explained I was teetotal now, and then I got into having to explain I’d been an alcoholic. And all of that. That I hadn’t had a glass of wine or a puff on a joint in years.’ Nora nodded as if this wasn’t a bomb-shell. ‘Since I got into a mess after Mum died. I think he was like, “Who is this guy?” But he was fine. He was cool. He’s working as a cameraman now. Still doing some music on the side. Not rock stuff. DJ-ing apparently. Remember that band me and him had, years ago. The Labyrinths?’
It was becoming easier to fake vagueness. ‘Oh yeah. The Labyrinths. Course. That’s a blast from the past.’
‘Yeah. Got the sense he pines for those days. Even though we were crap and I couldn’t sing.’
‘What about you? Do you ever think about what could have been if The Labyrinths had made it big?’
He laughed, a little sadly. ‘I don’t know if anything could have been.’
‘Maybe you needed an extra person. I used to play those keyboards Mum and Dad got you.’
‘Did you? When did you have time for that?’
A life without music. A life without reading the books she had loved.
But also: a life where she
got on with her brother. A life where she hadn’t had to let him down.
‘Anyway, Ravi wanted to say hi. And wanted a catch-up. He only works one tube stop away. So he’s going to try and come to the talk.’
‘What? Oh. That’s . . . I wish he wouldn’t.’
‘Why?’
‘I just never really liked him.’
Joe frowned. ‘Really? I can’t remember you saying that . . . He’s okay. A good guy. Bit of a waster, maybe, back in the day, but he seems to have got his act together a bit . . .’
Nora was unsettled. ‘Joe?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You know when Mum died?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Where was I?’
‘What do you mean? Are you okay today, sis? Are the new tablets working?’
‘Tablets?’
She checked in her bag and started to rummage. Saw a small box of anti-depressants in her bag. Her heart sank.
‘I just wanted to know. Did I see much of Mum before she died?’
Joe frowned. He was still the same Joe. Still unable to read his sister. Still wanting to escape reality. ‘You know we weren’t there. It happened so fast. She didn’t tell us how ill she was. To protect us. Or maybe because she didn’t want us to tell her to stop drinking.’
‘Drinking? Mum was drinking?’
Joe’s worry increased. ‘Sis, have you got amnesia? She was on a bottle of gin every day since Nadia came onto the scene.’
‘Yeah. Course. I remember.’
‘Plus you had the European Championships coming up and she didn’t want to interfere with that . . .’
‘Jesus. I should have been there. One of us should have been there, Joe. We both—’
His expression frosted suddenly. ‘You were never that close to Mum, were you? Why this sudden—’
‘I got closer to her. I mean, I would have. I—’
‘You’re freaking me out. You’re acting not quite yourself.’
Nora nodded. ‘Yes, I . . . I just . . . yes, I think you’re right . . . I think it’s just the tablets . . .’
She remembered her mother, in her final months, saying: ‘I don’t know what I would have done without you.’ She’d probably said it to Joe too. But in this life, she’d had neither of them.