by Matt Haig
From all she knows
The pressure rises to the top
The pressure rises (it won’t stop)
They want your body
They want your soul
They want fake smiles
That’s rock and roll
The wolves surround you
A fever dream
The wolves surround you
So start the scream
Howl, into the night,
Howl, until the light,
Howl, your turn to fight,
Howl, just make it right
Howl howl howl howl
(Motherfucker)
You can’t fight for ever
You have to comply
If your life isn’t working
You have to ask why
(Spoken)
Remember
When we were young enough
Not to fear tomorrow
Or mourn yesterday
And we were just
Us
And time was just
Now
And we were in
Life
Not rising through
Like arms in a sleeve
Because we had time
We had time to breathe
The bad times are here
The bad times have come
But life can’t be over
When it hasn’t begun
The lake shines and the water’s cold
All that glitters can turn to gold
Silence the music to improve the tune
Stop the fake smiles and howl at the moon
Howl, into the night,
Howl, until the light,
Howl, your turn to fight,
Howl, just make it right
Howl howl howl howl
(Repeat to fade)
Love and Pain
‘I hate this . . . process,’ Nora told Mrs Elm, with real force in her voice. ‘I want it to STOP!’
‘Please be quiet,’ said Mrs Elm, with a white knight in her hand, concentrating on her move. ‘This is a library.’
‘We’re the only two people here!’
‘That’s not the point. It is still a library. If you are in a cathedral, you are quiet because you are in a cathedral, not because other people are there. It’s the same with a library.’
‘Okay,’ Nora said, in a lower voice. ‘I don’t like this. I want it to stop. I want to cancel my membership of the library. I would like to hand in my library card.’
‘You are the library card.’
Nora returned to her original point. ‘I want it to stop.’
‘No you don’t.’
‘Yes I do.’
‘Then why are you still here?’
‘Because I have no choice.’
‘Trust me, Nora. If you really didn’t want to be here, you wouldn’t be here. I told you this right at the start.’
‘I don’t like it.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it is too painful.’
‘Why is it painful?’
‘Because it’s real. In one life, my brother is dead.’
The librarian’s face became stern again. ‘And in one life – one of his lives – you are dead. Will that be painful for him?’
‘I doubt it. He doesn’t want anything to do with me these days. He has his own life and he blames me that it is unfulfilled.’
‘So, this is all about your brother?’
‘No. It’s about everything. It seems impossible to live without hurting people.’
‘That’s because it is.’
‘So why live at all?’
‘Well, in fairness, dying hurts people too. Now, what life do you want to choose next?’
‘I don’t.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t want another book. I don’t want another life.’
Mrs Elm’s face went pale, like it had done all those years ago when she’d got the call about Nora’s dad.
Nora felt a trembling beneath her feet. A minor earthquake. She and Mrs Elm held onto the shelves as books fell to the floor. The lights flickered and then went dark completely. The chessboard and table tipped over.
‘Oh no,’ said Mrs Elm. ‘Not again.’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘You know what the matter is. This whole place exists because of you. You are the power source. When there is a severe disruption in that power source the library is in jeopardy. It’s you, Nora. You are giving up at the worst possible moment. You can’t give up, Nora. You have more to offer. More opportunities to have. There are so many versions of you out there. Remember how you felt after the polar bear. Remember how much you wanted life.’
The polar bear.
The polar bear.
‘Even these bad experiences are serving a purpose, don’t you see?’
She saw. The regrets she had been living with most of her life were wasted ones.
‘Yes.’
The minor earthquake subsided.
But there were books scattered everywhere, all over the floor.
The lights had come back on, but still flickered.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Nora. She started trying to pick up the books and put them back in place.
‘No,’ snapped Mrs Elm. ‘Don’t touch them. Put them down.’
‘Sorry.’
‘And stop saying sorry. Now, you can help me with this. This is safer.’
She helped Mrs Elm pick up the chess pieces and set up the board for a new game, putting the table back in place too.
‘What about all the books on the floor? Are we just going to leave them?’
‘Why do you care? I thought you wanted them to disappear completely?’
Mrs Elm may well have just been a mechanism that existed in order to simplify the intricate complexity of the quantum universe, but right now – sitting down between the half-empty bookshelves near her chessboard, set up for a new game – she looked sad and wise and infinitely human.
‘I didn’t mean to be so harsh,’ Mrs Elm managed, eventually.
‘That’s okay.’
‘I remember when we started playing chess in the school library, you used to lose your best players straight away,’ she said. ‘You’d go and get the queen or the rooks right out there, and they’d be gone. And then you would act like the game was lost because you were just left with pawns and a knight or two.’
‘Why are you mentioning this now?’
Mrs Elm saw a loose thread on her cardigan and tucked it inside her sleeve, then decided against it and let it loose again.
‘You need to realise something if you are ever to succeed at chess,’ she said, as if Nora had nothing bigger to think about. ‘And the thing you need to realise is this: the game is never over until it is over. It isn’t over if there is a single pawn still on the board. If one side is down to a pawn and a king, and the other side has every player, there is still a game. And even if you were a pawn – maybe we all are – then you should remember that a pawn is the most magical piece of all. It might look small and ordinary but it isn’t. Because a pawn is never just a pawn. A pawn is a queen-in-waiting. All you need to do is find a way to keep moving forward. One square after another. And you can get to the other side and unlock all kinds of power.’
Nora stared at the books around her. ‘So, are you saying I only have pawns to play with?’
‘I am saying that the thing that looks the most ordinary might end up being the thing that leads you to victory. You have to keep going. Like that day in the river. Do you remember?’
Of course she remembered.
How old had she been? Must have been seventeen, as she was no longer swimming in competitions. It was a fraught period in which her dad was cross with her all the time and her mum was going through one of her near-mute depression patches. Her brother was back from art college for the weekend with Ravi. Showing his friend the sights of glorious Bedford. Joe had arranged an impromptu party by the river, with music and beer and a ton of w
eed and girls who were frustrated Joe wasn’t interested in them. Nora had been invited and drank too much and somehow got talking to Ravi about swimming.
‘So, could you swim the river?’ he asked her.
‘Sure.’
‘No you couldn’t,’ someone else had said.
And so, in a moment of idiocy, she had decided to prove them wrong. And by the time her stoned and heavily inebriated older brother realised what she was doing, it was too late. The swim was well under way.
As she remembered this, the corridor at the end of the aisle in the library turned from stone to flowing water. And even as the shelves around her stayed where they were, the tiles beneath her feet now sprouted grass and the ceiling above her became sky. But unlike when she disappeared into another version of the present, Mrs Elm and the books remained. She was half in the library and half inside the memory.
She was staring at someone in the corridor-river. It was her younger self in the water, as the last of the summer light dissolved towards dark.
Equidistance
The river was cold, and the current strong.
She remembered, as she watched herself, the aches in her shoulders and arms. The stiff heaviness of them, as if she’d been wearing armour. She remembered not understanding why, for all that effort, the silhouette of the sycamore trees stubbornly stayed the same size, just as the bank stayed exactly the same distance away. She remembered swallowing some of the dirty water. And looking around at the other bank, the bank from where she had come and the place where she was kind of now standing, watching, along with that younger version of her brother and his friends, beside her, oblivious to her present self, and to the bookshelves on either side of them.
She remembered how, in her delirium, she had thought of the word ‘equidistant’. A word that belonged in the clinical safety of a classroom. Equidistant. Such a neutral, mathematical kind of word, and one that became a stuck thought, repeating itself like a manic meditation as she used the last of her strength to stay almost exactly where she was. Equidistant. Equidistant. Equidistant. Not aligned to one bank or the other.
That was how she had felt most of her life.
Caught in the middle. Struggling, flailing, just trying to survive while not knowing which way to go. Which path to commit to without regret.
She looked at the bank on the other side – now with added bookshelves, but still with the large silhouette of a sycamore tree leaning over the water like a worried parent, the wind shushing through its leaves.
‘But you did commit,’ said Mrs Elm, evidently having heard Nora’s thoughts. ‘And you survived.’
Someone Else’s Dream
‘Life is always an act,’ Mrs Elm said, as they watched her brother being pulled back from the water’s edge by his friends. As he then watched a girl whose name she’d long forgotten make an emergency call. ‘And you acted when it counted. You swam to that bank. You clawed yourself out. You coughed your guts out and had hypothermia but you crossed the river, against incredible odds. You found something inside you.’
‘Yes. Bacteria. I was ill for weeks. I swallowed so much of that shitty water.’
‘But you lived. You had hope.’
‘Yeah, well, I was losing it by the day.’
She stared down, to see the grass shrink back into the stone, and looked back to catch the last sight of the water before it shimmered away and the sycamore tree dissolved into air along with her brother and his friends and her own young self.
The library looked exactly like the library again. But now the books were all back on the shelves and the lights had stopped flickering.
‘I was so stupid, doing that swim, just trying to impress people. I always thought Joe was better than me. I wanted him to like me.’
‘Why did you think he was better than you? Because your parents did?’
Nora felt angry at Mrs Elm’s directness. But maybe she had a point. ‘I always had to do what they wanted me to do in order to impress them. Joe had his issues, obviously. And I didn’t really understand those issues until I knew he was gay, but they say sibling rivalry isn’t about siblings but parents, and I always felt my parents just encouraged his dreams a bit more.’
‘Like music?’
‘Yeah.’
‘When he and Ravi decided they wanted to be rock stars, Mum and Dad bought Joe a guitar and then an electric piano.’
‘How did that go?’
‘The guitar bit went well. He could play “Smoke On The Water” within a week of getting it, but he wasn’t into the piano and decided he didn’t want it cluttering up his room.’
‘And that’s when you got it.’ Mrs Elm said this as a statement rather than a question. She knew. Of course she knew.
‘Yeah.’
‘It was moved into your room, and you welcomed it like a friend, and started learning to play it with steadfast determination. You spent your pocket money on piano-teaching guides and Mozart for Beginners and The Beatles for Piano. Because you liked it. But also because you wanted to impress your older brother.’
‘I never told you all this.’
A wry smile. ‘Don’t worry. I read the book.’
‘Right. Course. Yeah. Got you.’
‘You might need to stop worrying about other people’s approval, Nora,’ Mrs Elm said in a whisper, for added power and intimacy. ‘You don’t need a permission slip to be your—’
‘Yes. I get it.’
And she did get it.
Every life she had tried so far since entering the library had really been someone else’s dream. The married life in the pub had been Dan’s dream. The trip to Australia had been Izzy’s dream, and her regret about not going had been a guilt for her best friend more than a sorrow for herself. The dream of her becoming a swimming champion belonged to her father. And okay, so it was true that she had been interested in the Arctic and being a glaciologist when she was younger, but that had been steered quite significantly by her chats with Mrs Elm herself, back in the school library. And The Labyrinths, well, that had always been her brother’s dream.
Maybe there was no perfect life for her, but somewhere, surely, there was a life worth living. And if she was to find a life truly worth living, she realised she would have to cast a wider net.
Mrs Elm was right. The game wasn’t over. No player should give up if there were pieces still left on the board.
She straightened her back and stood up tall.
‘You need to choose more lives from the bottom or top shelves. You have been seeking to undo your most obvious regrets. The books on the higher and lower shelves are the lives a little bit further removed. Lives you are still living in one universe or another but not ones you have been imagining or mourning or thinking about. They are lives you could live but never dreamed of.’
‘So they’re unhappy lives?’
‘Some will be, some won’t be. It’s just they are not the most obvious lives. They are ones which might require a little imagination to reach. But I am sure you can get there . . .’
‘Can’t you guide me?’
Mrs Elm smiled. ‘I could read you a poem. Librarians like poems.’ And then she quoted Robert Frost. ‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – / I took the one less travelled by, / And that has made all the difference . . .’
‘What if there are more than two roads diverging in the wood? What if there are more roads than trees? What if there is no end to the choices you could make? What would Robert Frost do then?’
She remembered studying Aristotle as a first-year Philosophy student. And being a bit depressed by his idea that excellence was never an accident. That excellent outcomes were the result of ‘the wise choice of many alternatives’. And here she was, in the privileged position of being able to sample these many alternatives. It was a shortcut to wisdom and maybe a shortcut to happiness too. She saw it now not as a burden but a gift to be cherished.
‘Look at that chessboard we put back in place,’ said Mrs Elm, softly. ‘Look
at how ordered and safe and peaceful it looks now, before a game starts. It’s a beautiful thing. But it is boring. It is dead. And yet the moment you make a move on that board, things change. Things begin to get more chaotic. And that chaos builds with every single move you make.’
She took a seat at the chess table, opposite Mrs Elm. She stared down at the board and moved a pawn two spaces forward.
Mrs Elm mirrored the move on her side of the board.
‘It’s an easy game to play,’ she told Nora. ‘But a hard one to master. Every move you make opens a whole new world of possibility.’
Nora moved one of her knights. They progressed like this for a little while.
Mrs Elm provided a commentary. ‘At the beginning of a game, there are no variations. There is only one way to set up a board. There are nine million variations after the first six moves. And after eight moves there are two hundred and eighty-eight billion different positions. And those possibilities keep growing. There are more possible ways to play a game of chess than the amount of atoms in the observable universe. So it gets very messy. And there is no right way to play; there are many ways. In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living.’
Eventually, Nora won the game. She had a sneaky suspicion that Mrs Elm had let her, but still she was feeling a bit better.
‘Okey-dokey,’ said Mrs Elm. ‘Now, time for a book, I reckon. What do you say?’
Nora gazed along the bookshelves. If only they had more specific titles. If only there was one that said Perfect Life Right Here.
Her initial instinct had been to ignore Mrs Elm’s question. But where there were books, there was always the temptation to open them. And she realised it was the same with lives.
Mrs Elm repeated something she said earlier.
‘Never underestimate the big importance of small things.’
This was useful, as it turned out.
‘I want,’ she said, ‘a gentle life. The life where I worked with animals. Where I chose the animal shelter job – where I did my work experience at school – over the one at String Theory. Yes. Give me that one, please.’