The Midnight Library (27 page)

She told him who she was and that she had phoned earlier.

He was a little confused at first.

‘And you say you left a message?’

He hummed a quiet tune as he searched for her email.

‘Yes, but on the phone. I was trying for ages to get through and I couldn’t so I eventually left a message. I emailed as well.’

‘Ah, right, I see. Well, I’m sorry about that. Are you here to see a family member?’

‘No,’ Nora explained. ‘I am not family. I am just someone who used to know her. She’d know me, though. Her name is Mrs Elm.’ Nora tried to remember the full name. ‘Sorry. It’s Louise Elm. If you told her my name, Nora. Nora Seed. She used to be my . . . She was the school librarian, at Hazeldene. I just thought she might like some company.’

The man stopped looking at his computer and stared up at Nora with barely suppressed surprise. At first Nora thought that she had got it wrong. Or Dylan had got it wrong, that evening at La Cantina. Or maybe the Mrs Elm in that life had experienced a different fate in this life. Though Nora didn’t quite know how her own decision to work in an animal shelter would have led to a different outcome for Mrs Elm in this life. But that made no sense. As in neither life had she been in touch with the librarian since school.

‘What’s the matter?’ Nora asked the receptionist.

‘I’m ever so sorry to tell you this, but Louise Elm is no longer here.’

‘Where is she?’

‘She . . . actually, she died three weeks ago.’

At first she thought it must be an admin error. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes. I’m afraid I am very sure.’

‘Oh,’ said Nora. She didn’t really know what to say, or to feel. She looked down at her tote bag that had sat beside her in the car. A bag containing the chess set she had brought to play a game with her, and to keep her company. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I didn’t . . . You see, I haven’t seen her for years. Years and years. But I heard from someone who said that she was here . . .’

‘So sorry,’ the receptionist said.

‘No. No worries. I just wanted to thank her. For being so kind to me.’

‘She died very peacefully,’ he said, ‘literally in her sleep.’

And Nora smiled and retreated politely away. ‘That’s good. Thank you. Thank you for looking after her. I’ll just go now. Bye . . .’

An Incident With the Police

She stepped back out onto Shakespeare Road with her bag and her chess set and she really didn’t know what to do. There were tingles through her body. Not quite pins and needles. More that strange, fuzzy static feeling she had felt before when she was nearing the end of a particular existence.

Trying to ignore the feeling in her body, she headed in the vague direction of the car park. She passed her old garden flat at 33A Bancroft Avenue. A man she had never seen before was taking a box of recycling out. She thought of the lovely house in Cambridge she now had and couldn’t help but compare it to this shabby flat on a litter-strewn street. The tingles subsided a little. She passed Mr Banerjee’s house, or what had been Mr Banerjee’s house, and saw the only owned house on the street that hadn’t been divided into flats, though now it looked very different. The small front lawn was overgrown, and there was no sign of the clematis or busy lizzies in pots that Nora had watered for him last summer when he’d been recovering from his hip surgery.

On the pavement she noticed a couple of crumpled lager cans.

She saw a woman with a blonde bob and tanned skin walking towards her on the pavement with two small children in a double pushchair. She looked exhausted. It was the woman she had spoken to in the newsagent’s the day she had decided to die. The one who had seemed happy and relaxed. Kerry-Anne. She hadn’t noticed Nora because one child was wailing and she was trying to pacify the distressed, red-cheeked boy by waving a plastic dinosaur in front of him.

Me and Jake were like rabbits but we got there. Two little terrors. But worth it, y’know? I just feel complete. I could show you some pictures . . 
.

Then Kerry-Anne looked up and saw Nora.

‘I know you, don’t I? Is it Nora?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hi Nora.’

‘Hi Kerry-Anne.’

‘You remember my name? Oh wow. I was in
awe
of you in school. You seemed to have it all. Did you ever make the Olympics?’

‘Yes, actually. Kind of. One me did. But it wasn’t what I wanted it to be. But then, what is? Right?’

Kerry-Anne seemed momentarily confused. And then her son threw the dinosaur onto the pavement and it landed next to one of the crumpled cans. ‘Right.’

Nora picked up the dinosaur – a stegosaurus, on close inspection – and handed it to Kerry-Anne, who smiled her gratitude and headed into the house that should have belonged to Mr Banerjee, just as the boy descended into a full tantrum.

‘Bye,’ said Nora.

‘Yeah. Bye.’

And Nora wondered what the difference had been. What had forced Mr Banerjee to go to the care home he’d been determined not to go to? She was the only difference between the two Mr Banerjees but what
was
that difference? What had she done? Set up an online shop? Picked up his prescription a few times?

Never underestimate the big importance of small things
, Mrs Elm had said.
You must always remember that
.

She stared at her own window. She thought of herself in her root life, hovering between life and death in her bedroom – equidistant, as it were. And, for the first time, Nora worried about herself as if she was actually someone else. Not just another version of her, but a different actual person. As though finally, through all
the experiences of life she now had, she had become someone who pitied her former self. Not in self-pity, because she was a different self now.

Then someone appeared at her own window. A woman who wasn’t her, holding a cat that wasn’t Voltaire.

This was her hope, anyway, even as she began to feel faint and fuzzy again.

She headed into town. Walked down the high street.

Yes, she was different now. She was stronger. She had untapped things inside her. Things she might never have known about if she’d never sung in an arena or fought off a polar bear or felt so much love and fear and courage.

There was a commotion outside Boots. Two boys were being arrested by police officers as a nearby store detective spoke into a walkie-talkie.

She recognised one of the boys and went up to him.

‘Leo?’

A police officer motioned for her to back away.

‘Who are you?’ Leo asked.

‘I—’ Nora realised she couldn’t say ‘your piano teacher’. And she realised how mad it was, given the fraught context, to say what she was about to say. But still, she said it. ‘Do you have music lessons?’

Leo looked down as the handcuffs were put on him. ‘I ain’t done no music lessons . . .’

His voice had lost its bravado.

The police officer was frustrated now. ‘Please, miss, leave this to us.’

‘He’s a good kid,’ Nora told him. ‘Please don’t be too hard on him.’

‘Well, this good kid just stole two hundred quid’s worth from there. And has also just been found to be in possession of a concealed weapon.’

‘Weapon?’

‘A knife.’

‘No. There must be some mix-up. He’s not that sort of kid.’

‘Hear that,’ the police officer said to his colleague. ‘Lady here thinks our friend Leo Thompson isn’t the kind of kid to get into trouble.’

The other police officer laughed. ‘He’s always in and out of bother, this one.’

‘Now, please,’ the first police officer said, ‘let us do our jobs here . . .’

‘Of course,’ said Nora, ‘of course. Do everything they say, Leo . . .’

He looked at her as if she’d been sent as a practical joke.

A few years ago his mum Doreen had come into String Theory to buy her son a cheap keyboard. She’d been worried about his behaviour at school and he’d expressed an interest in music and so she wanted to get him piano lessons. Nora explained she had an electric piano, and could play, but had no formal teacher training. Doreen had explained she didn’t have much money but they struck a deal, and Nora had enjoyed her Tuesday evenings teaching Leo the difference between major and minor seventh chords and thought he was a great boy, eager to learn.

Doreen had seen Leo was ‘getting caught up in the wrong set’, but when he got into music he started doing well in other things too. And suddenly he wasn’t getting into trouble with teachers any more, and he’d play everything from Chopin through Scott Joplin to Frank Ocean and John Legend and Rex Orange County with the same care and commitment.

Something Mrs Elm had said on an early visit to the Midnight Library came to her.

Every life contains many millions of decisions. Some big, some small. But every time one decision is taken over another, the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs, which in turn leads to further variations . . 
.

In this timeline right now, the one where she had studied a
Master’s at Cambridge, and married Ash and had a baby, she hadn’t been in String Theory on the day four years ago when Doreen and Leo came by. In this timeline, Doreen never found a music teacher who was cheap enough, and so Leo never persisted with music for long enough to realise he had a talent. He never sat there, side-by-side with Nora on a Tuesday evening, pursuing a passion that he extended at home, producing his own tunes.

Nora felt herself weaken. Not just tingles and fuzziness but something stronger, a sense of plunging into nothingness, accompanied by a brief darkening of her vision. A feeling of another Nora right there in the wings, ready to pick up where this one left off. Her brain ready to fill in the gaps and have a perfectly legitimate reason to be on a day trip to Bedford, and to fill in every absence as if she was here the whole time.

Worried she knew what it meant, she turned away from Leo and his friend as they were escorted away to the police car, the eyes of the whole of Bedford high street upon them, and she started to quicken her pace towards the car park.

This is a good life . . . This is a good life . . . This is a good life . . 
.

A New Way of Seeing

She got closer to the station, passing the garish red-and-yellow zigzags of La Cantina, like a Mexican migraine, with a waiter inside taking chairs off tables. And String Theory too, closed, with a handwritten notice on the door:

It was the exact same note she had seen with Dylan. Judging by the date, written in small felt-tip letters from Neil’s hand, it was from nearly three months ago.

She felt sad, because String Theory had meant a lot to people. Yet Nora hadn’t been working at String Theory when it got into trouble.

Well
.
I suppose I did sell a lot of electric pianos. And some rather nice guitars too
.

Growing up, she and Joe had always joked about their hometown, the way teenagers do, and used to say that HMP Bedford was the inner prison and the rest of the town was just the outer prison, and any chance you had to escape you should take it.

But the sun was out now, as she neared the station, and it seemed that she had been looking at the place wrong all these years. As
she passed the statue of prison reformer John Howard in St Paul’s Square, with the trees all around and the river just behind, refracting light, she marvelled at it as if she were seeing it for the first time.
It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see
.

Driving back to Cambridge cocooned in her expensive Audi, smelling almost nauseatingly of vinyl and plastic and other synthetic materials, weaving through busy traffic, the cars sliding by like forgotten lives, she was deeply wishing she had been able to see Mrs Elm, the real one, before she had died. It would have been good to have one last game of chess with her before she passed away. And she thought of poor Leo, sat in a small windowless cell at a Bedford police station, waiting for Doreen to come and collect him.

‘This is the best life,’ she told herself, a little desperately now. ‘This is the best life. I am staying here. This is the life for me. This is the best life.
This
is the best life.’

But she knew she didn’t have long.

The Flowers Have Water

She pulled up at the house and ran inside, as Plato padded happily to greet her.

‘Hello?’ she asked, desperately. ‘Ash? Molly?’

She needed to see them. She knew she didn’t have long. She could feel the Midnight Library waiting for her.

‘Outside!’ said Ash, chirpily, from the back garden.

And so Nora went through to find Molly on her tricycle again, unfazed by her previous accident, while Ash was tending to a flower-bed.

‘How was your trip?’

Molly climbed off her tricycle and ran over. ‘Mummy! I missed you! I’m really good at biking now!’

‘Are you, darling?’

She hugged her daughter close and closed her eyes and inhaled the scent of her hair and the dog and fabric conditioner and childhood, and she hoped the wonder of it would help keep her there. ‘I love you, Molly, I want you to know that. For ever and ever, do you understand?’

‘Yes, Mummy. Of course.’

‘And I love your daddy too. And everything will be okay because whatever happens you will always have Daddy and you will have Mummy too, it’s just I might not be here in the exact same way. I’ll be here, but . . .’ She realised Molly needed to know nothing else except one truth. ‘I love you.’

Molly looked concerned. ‘You forgot Plato!’

‘Well,
obviously
I love Plato . . . How could I forget Plato? Plato knows I love him, don’t you, Plato? Plato, I love you.’

Nora tried to compose herself.

Whatever happens, they will be looked after. They will be loved. And they have each other and they will be happy
.

Then Ash came over, with his gardening gloves on. ‘You okay, Nor? You seem a bit pale. Did anything happen?’