The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig

‘Where is Joe?’ she asked, almost as a shout.

  Ravi looked momentarily confused, or scared, and Nora braced herself for some terrible truth. But none came.

  ‘The usual, I reckon. Schmoozing it up with the foreign press.’

  Nora had no idea what was going on. He seemed to be still part of the band, but also not in the band enough to be performing on stage with them. And if he wasn’t in the band, then whatever had caused him to leave the band hadn’t caused him to disappear completely. From what Ravi said, and the way he said it, Joe was still very much part of the team. Ella wasn’t there, though. On bass was a large muscly man with a shaved head and tattoos. She wanted to know more, but now was clearly not the time.

  Ravi swept his hand through the air, gesturing towards what Nora could now see was a very large stage.

  She was overwhelmed. She didn’t know what to feel.

  ‘Encore time,’ said Ravi.

  Nora tried to think. It had been a long time since she had performed anything. And even then it was only in front of a crowd of about twelve uninterested people in a pub basement.

  Ravi leaned in. ‘You okay, Nora?’

  It seemed a bit brittle. The way he said her name seemed to contain the same kind of resentment she’d heard when she’d bumped into him yesterday, in that very different life.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, full shouting now. ‘Of course. It’s just . . . I have no idea what we should do for the encore.’

  Ravi shrugged. ‘Same as always.’

  ‘Hmm. Yeah. Right.’ Nora tried to think. She looked out at the stage. She saw a giant video screen with the words THE LABYRINTHS flashing and rotating out to the roaring crowd. Wow, she thought. We’re big. Proper, stadium-level big. She saw a keyboard and the stool she had been sitting at. Her bandmates whose names she didn’t know were about to walk back on stage.

  ‘Where are we again?’ she asked, above the crowd noise. ‘I’ve gone blank.’

  The big shaven-headed guy holding the bass told her: ‘São Paulo.’

  ‘We’re in Brazil?’

  They looked at her as if she was mad.

  ‘Where have you been the last four days?’

  ‘“Beautiful Sky”,’ said Nora, realising she could probably still remember most of the words. ‘Let’s do that.’

  ‘Again?’ Ravi laughed, his face shining with sweat. ‘We did it ten minutes ago.’

  ‘Okay. Listen,’ said Nora, her voice now a shout over the crowd demanding an encore. ‘I was thinking we do something different. Mix it up. I wondered if we could do a different song to usual.’

  ‘We have to do “Howl”,’ said the other band member. A turquoise lead guitar strapped around her. ‘We always do “Howl”.’

  Nora had never heard of ‘Howl’ in her life.

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ she bluffed, ‘but let’s mix it up. Let’s do something they aren’t expecting. Let’s surprise them.’

  ‘You’re overthinking this, Nora,’ said Ravi.

  ‘I have no other type of thinking available.’

  Ravi shrugged. ‘So, what should we do?’

  Nora struggled to think. She thought of Ash – with his Simon & Garfunkel guitar songbook. ‘Let’s do “Bridge Over Troubled Water”.’

  Ravi was incredulous. ‘What?’

  ‘I think we should do that. It will surprise people.’

  ‘I love that song,’ said the female bandmate. ‘And I know it.’

  ‘Everyone knows it, Imani,’ Ravi said, dismissively.

  ‘Exactly,’ Nora said, trying her hardest to sound like a rock star, ‘let’s do it.’

  Milky Way

  Nora walked onto the stage.

  At first she couldn’t see the faces, because the lights were pointing towards her, and beyond that glare everything seemed like darkness. Except for a mesmerising milky way of camera flashes and phone torches.

  She could hear them, though.

  Human beings when there’s enough of them together acting in total unison become something else. The collective roar made her think of another kind of animal entirely. It was at first kind of threatening, as if she was Hercules facing the many-headed Hydra who wanted to kill him, but this was a roar of total support, and the power of it gave her a kind of strength.

  She realised, in that moment, that she was capable of a lot more than she had known.

  Wild and Free

  She reached the keyboard, sat down on the stool and brought the microphone a little closer.

  ‘Thank you, São Paulo,’ she said. ‘We love you.’

  And Brazil roared back.

  This, it seemed, was power. The power of fame. Like those pop icons she had seen on social media, who could say a single word and get a million likes and shares. Total fame was when you reached the point where looking like a hero, or genius, or god, required minimal effort. But the flipside was that it was precarious. It could be equally easy to fall and look like a devil or a villain, or just an arse.

  Her heart raced, as if she were about to set foot on a tight-rope.

  She could see some of the faces in the crowd now, thousands of them, emerging from the dark. Tiny and strange, the clothed bodies almost invisible. She was staring out at twenty thousand disembodied heads.

  Her mouth was dry. She could hardly speak, so wondered how she was going to sing. She remembered Dan mock-wincing as she’d sung for him.

  The noise of the crowd subsided.

  It was time.

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Here is a song you might have heard before.’

  This was a stupid thing to say, she realised. They had all paid tickets for this concert presumably because they had heard a lot of these songs before.

  ‘It’s a song that means a lot to me and my brother.’

  Already the place was erupting. They screamed and roared and clapped and chanted. The response was phenomenal. She felt, momentarily, like Cleopatra. An utterly terrified Cleopatra.

  Adjusting her hands into position for E-flat major, she was momentarily distracted by a tattoo on her weirdly hairless forearm, written in beautifully angled calligraphic letters. It was a quote from Henry David Thoreau. All good things are wild and free. She closed her eyes and vowed not to open them until she had finished the song.

  She understood why Chopin had liked playing in the dark so much. It was so much easier that way.

  Wild, she thought to herself. Free.

  As she sang, she felt alive. Even more alive than she had felt swimming in her Olympic-champion body.

  She wondered why she had been so scared of this, of singing to a crowd. It was a great feeling.

  Ravi came over to her at the end of the song, while they were still on stage. ‘That was fucking special, man,’ he shouted in her ear.

  ‘Oh good,’ she said.

  ‘Now let’s kill this and do “Howl”.’

  She shook her head, then spoke into the microphone, hurriedly, before anyone else had a chance to. ‘Thank you for coming, everybody! I really hope you all had a nice evening. Get home safely.’

  ‘Get home safely?’ Ravi said in the coach on the way back to the hotel. She hadn’t remembered him being such an arse. He seemed unhappy.

  ‘What was wrong with that?’ she wondered out loud.

  ‘Hardly your normal style.’

  ‘Wasn’t it?’

  ‘Well, bit of a contrast to Chicago.’

  ‘Why? What did I do in Chicago?’

  Ravi laughed. ‘Have you been lobotomised?’

  She looked at her phone. In this life she had the latest model.

  A message from Izzy.

  It was the same message she’d had in her life with Dan, in the pub. Not a message at all but a photo of a whale. Actually, it might have been a slightly different photo of a whale. That was interesting. Why was she still friends with Izzy in this life and not in her root life? After all, she was pretty sure she wasn’t married to Dan in this life. She checked her hand and was relieved to see a totally naked
ring finger.

  Nora supposed it was because she had already been super-famous with The Labyrinths before Izzy decided to go to Australia, so Nora’s decision not to go may have been more understandable. Or maybe Izzy just liked the idea of a famous friend.

  Izzy wrote something under the picture of the whale.

  All good things are wild and free.

  She must have known about the tattoo.

  Another message came through now from her.

  ‘Hope Brazil was a blast. Am sure you rocked it! And thanks ten million for sorting out the tix for Brisbane. Am totally stoked. As we Gold Coasters say.’

  There were a few emojis of whales and hearts and thanking hands and a microphone and some musical notes.

  Nora checked her Instagram. In this life she had 11.3 million followers.

  And bloody hell, she looked amazing. Her naturally black hair had a kind of white stripe in it. Vampiric make-up. And a lip piercing. She did look tired but she supposed that was just a result of living on tour. It was a glamorous kind of tired. Like Billie Eilish’s cool aunt.

  She took a selfie and saw that while she didn’t look exactly like the excessively styled and filtered photos on her feed, which had been for magazine shoots, she did look cooler than she ever imagined she could look. As with her Australian life, she also put poems up online. The difference with this life, though, was that each poem had about half a million likes. One of the poems was even called ‘Fire’ but it was different to the other one.

  She had a fire inside her.

  She wondered if the fire was to warm her or destroy her.

  Then she realised.

  A fire had no motive.

  Only she could have that.

  The power was hers.

  A woman sat next to her. This woman wasn’t in the band, but she exuded importance. She was about fifty years old. Maybe she was the manager. Maybe she worked for the record company. She had the air of a strict mum about her. But she began with a smile.

  ‘Stroke of genius,’ she said. ‘The Simon & Garfunkel thing. You’re trending across South America.’

  ‘Cool.’

  ‘Have posted about it from your accounts.’

  She’d said this like it was a perfectly normal thing. ‘Oh. Right. Okay.’

  ‘There’s a couple of last-minute press things tonight at the hotel. Then tomorrow it’s an early start . . . We fly to Rio first thing, then eight hours of press. All at the hotel.’

  ‘Rio?’

  ‘You’re up to speed with this week’s tour schedule, right?’

  ‘Um, kind of. Could you just remind me again?’

  She sighed, with good humour, as if Nora not knowing the tour schedule was totally in character. ‘Sure. Rio tomorrow. Two nights. Then the final night in Brazil – Porto Alegre – then Santiago, Chile, Buenos Aires, then Lima. And that’s the last leg of South America. Then next week it’s the start of the Asia leg – Japan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Taiwan.’

  ‘Peru? We’re famous in Peru?’

  ‘Nora, you’ve been to Peru before, remember? Last year. They went out of their minds. All fifteen thousand of them. It’s at the same place. The racecourse.’

  ‘The racecourse. Sure. Yeah. I remember. Was a good night. Really . . . good.’

  That’s what this life probably felt like, she realised. One big racecourse. But she had no idea if she was the horse or the jockey in that analogy.

  Ravi tapped the woman on the shoulder. ‘Joanna, what time’s that podcast tomorrow?’

  ‘Oh damn. Actually, it’s tonight now. Timings. Sorry. Forgot to say. But they only really have to speak to Nora. So you can get an early night if you want.’

  Ravi shrugged, dejected. ‘Sure. Yeah.’

  Joanna sighed. ‘Don’t shoot the messenger. Though it’s never stopped you before.’

  Nora wondered again where her brother was, but the tension between Joanna and Ravi made it feel wrong to ask something she should so obviously know. So she stared out of the window as the coach drove along the four-lane highway. The glowing tail-lights of cars and lorries and motorbikes in the dark, like red and watching eyes. Distant skyscrapers with a few tiny squares of light against a humid backdrop of dark sky and darker clouds. A shadowy army of trees lined the sides and middle of the highway, splitting the traffic into two directions.

  If she was still in this life tomorrow evening, she would be expected to perform an entire concert’s worth of songs, most of which she didn’t actually know. She wondered how quickly she could learn the set list.

  Her phone rang. A video call. The caller was ‘Ryan’.

  Joanna saw the name and smirked a little. ‘You’d better get that.’

  So she did, even though she had no idea who this Ryan was, and the image on the screen seemed too blurry to recognise.

  But then he was there. A face she had seen, in movies and imaginings, many times.

  ‘Hey, babe. Just checking in with a friend. We’re still friends, right?’

  She knew the voice too.

  American, rugged, charming. Famous.

  She heard Joanna whispering to someone else on the coach: ‘She’s on the phone to Ryan Bailey.’

  Ryan Bailey

  Ryan Bailey.

  As in the Ryan Bailey. As in the Ryan Bailey of her fantasies, where they talked about Plato and Heidegger through a veil of steam in his West Hollywood hot tub.

  ‘Nora? You there? You look scared.’

  ‘Um, yeah. I’m . . . yeah . . . I’m . . . I’ve just . . . I’m here . . . On a bus . . . A big . . . touring . . . yeah . . . Hi.’

  ‘Guess where I am?’

  She had no idea what to say. ‘Hot tub’ seemed entirely inappropriate as an answer. ‘I honestly don’t know.’

  He panned the phone around a vast and opulent-looking villa, complete with bright furnishings and terracotta tiles and a four-poster double bed veiled in a mosquito net.

  ‘Nayarit, Mexico.’ He pronounced Mexico in a parody of Spanish, with the x as an h. He looked and sounded slightly different to the Ryan Bailey in the movies. A bit puffier. A bit more slurred. Drunker, perhaps. ‘On location. They got me shooting Saloon 2.’

  ‘Last Chance Saloon 2? Oh, I so want to see the first one.’

  He laughed as if she had told the most hilarious joke.

  ‘Still dry as ever, Nono.’

  Nono?

  ‘Staying at the Casa de Míta,’ he went on. ‘Remember? The weekend we had there? They’ve put me in the exact same villa. You remember? I’m having a mezcal margarita in your honour. Where are you?’

  ‘Brazil. We were just doing a concert in São Paulo.’

  ‘Wow. Same landmass. That’s cool. That’s, yeah, cool.’

  ‘It was really good,’ she said.

  ‘You’re sounding very formal.’

  Nora was aware half of the bus was listening in. Ravi was staring at her as he drank a bottle of beer.

  ‘I’m just . . . you know . . . on the bus . . . There are people around.’

  ‘People,’ he sighed, as if it was a swear word. ‘There are always people. That’s the fucking problem. But hey, I’ve been thinking a lot recently. About what you said on Jimmy Fallon . . .’

  Nora tried to act as if every sentence he said wasn’t an animal running into the road.

  ‘What did I say?’

  ‘You know, about how it just ran its course. Me and you. How there were no hard feelings. I just want to thank you for saying that. Because I know I am a difficult fucking person. I know that. But I’m getting work for that. The therapist I’m seeing is really fucking good.’

  ‘That’s . . . great.’

  ‘I miss you, Nora. We had great times. But there is more to life than fantastic sex.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nora, trying to keep her imagination in check. ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘We had all kinds of great. But you were right to finish it. You did the right thing, in the cosmic order of things. There is no reject
ion, there is only redirection. You know, I’ve been thinking a lot. About the cosmos. I’ve been tuning in. And the cosmos has been telling me I need to get my shit together. It’s balance, man. What we had was too intense and our lives are too intense and it’s like Darwin’s third law of motion. About an action leading to a reaction. Something had to give. And you were the one who saw that and now we are just particles floating in the universe that may reconnect one day at the Chateau Marmont . . .’

  She had no idea what to say. ‘I think that was Newton.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The third law of motion.’

  He tilted his head, like a confused dog. ‘What?’

  ‘Never mind. It doesn’t matter.’

  He sighed.

  ‘Anyway, I’m going to finish this margarita. Because I’ve got an early training session. Mezcal, you see. Not tequila. Got to keep pure. Got this new trainer. This MMA guy. He’s intense.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘And Nono . . .’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Can you just call me your special name for me again?’

  ‘Um—’

  ‘You know the one.’

  ‘Obviously. Yeah. Course.’ She tried to think what it could be. Ry-ry? Rye bread? Plato?

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘People?’

  She made a show of looking around. ‘Exactly. People. And you know, now that we’ve moved on with our lives, it seems a bit . . . inappropriate.’

  He smiled a melancholy smile. ‘Listen. I’ll be there for the final LA show. Front row. Staples Center. You won’t be able to stop me, got it?’

  ‘That’s so sweet.’

  ‘Friends for ever?’

  ‘Friends for ever.’

  Sensing they were nearing the end of the conversation, Nora suddenly had something to ask.

  ‘Were you really into philosophy?’

  He burped. It was strange how shocking it was to realise that Ryan Bailey was a human being in a human body that generated gas.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Philosophy. Years ago, when you were playing Plato in The Athenians you gave an interview and you said you read a lot of philosophy.’

  ‘I read life. And life is a philosophy.’

  Nora had no idea what he meant, but deep down she was proud of this other version of her for dumping an A-list movie star.