بخش 13

If Something Is Happening to Me, I Want to Be There

It was a very pleasant sensation. Both the kiss, and the knowledge she could be this forward. Being aware that everything that could possibly happen happened to her somewhere, in some life, kind of absolved her a little from decisions. That was just the reality of the universal wave function. Whatever was happening could – she reasoned – be put down to quantum physics.

‘I don’t share a room,’ he said.

She stared at him fearlessly now, as if facing down a polar bear had given her a certain capacity for dominance she’d never been aware of. ‘Well, Hugo, maybe you could break the habit.’ But the sex turned out to be a disappointment. A Camus quote came to her, right in the middle of it.

I may have not been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.

It probably wasn’t the best sign of how their nocturnal encounter was going, that she was thinking of Existential philosophy, or that this quote in particular was the one that appeared in her mind. But hadn’t Camus also said, ‘If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there’?

Hugo, she concluded, was a strange person. For a man who had been so intimate and deep in his conversation, he was very detached from the moment. Maybe if you lived as many lives as he had, the only person you really had any kind of intimate relationship with was yourself. She felt like she might not have been there at all.

And in a few moments, she wasn’t.

God and Other Librarians

‘Who are you?’

‘You know my name. I am Mrs Elm. Louise Isabel Elm.’

‘Are you God?’

She smiled. ‘I am who I am.’

‘And who is that?’

‘The librarian.’

‘But you aren’t a real person. You’re just a . . . mechanism.’

‘Aren’t we all?’

‘Not like that. You are the product of some strange interaction between my mind and the multiverse, some simplification of the quantum wave function or whatever it is.’ Mrs Elm looked perturbed by the suggestion. ‘What is the matter?’

Nora thought of the polar bear as she stared down at the yellow-brown stone floor. ‘I nearly died.’ ‘And remember, if you die in a life, there is no way back here.’

‘That’s not fair.’

‘The library has strict rules. Books are precious. You have to treat them carefully.’ ‘But these are other lives. Other variants of me. Not me me.’

‘Yes, but while you are experiencing them, it is you who has to pay the consequences.’ ‘Well, I think that stinks, to be perfectly honest.’

The librarian’s smile curled at its edges, like a fallen leaf. ‘Well, this is interesting.’ ‘What is interesting?’

‘The fact that you have so thoroughly changed your attitude towards dying.’ ‘What?’

‘You wanted to die and now you don’t.’

It dawned on Nora that Mrs Elm might be close to having a point, although not quite the whole point. ‘Well, I still think my actual life isn’t worth living. In fact, this experience has just managed to confirm that.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t think you think that.’

‘I do think that. That’s why I said it.’

‘No. The Book of Regrets is getting lighter. There’s a lot of white space in there now . . . It seems that you have spent all your life saying things that you aren’t really thinking. This is one of your barriers.’ ‘Barriers?’

‘Yes. You have a lot of them. They stop you from seeing the truth.’

‘About what?’

‘About yourself. And you really need to start trying. To see the truth. Because this matters.’ ‘I thought there were an infinite number of lives to choose from.’

‘You need to pick the life you’d be most happy inside. Or soon there won’t be a choice at all.’ ‘I met someone who has been doing this for a long time and he still hasn’t found a life that he is satisfied with . . .’ ‘Well, Hugo’s is a privilege you might not have.’

‘Hugo? How do you—’

But then she remembered Mrs Elm knew a lot more than she should.

‘You need to choose carefully,’ continued the librarian. ‘One day the library may not be here and you’ll be gone for ever.’ ‘How many lives do I have?’

‘This isn’t a magic lamp and I am no genie. There is no set number. It could be one. It could be a hundred. But you only have an infinite number of lives to choose from so long as the time in the Midnight Library stays, well, at midnight. Because while it stays at midnight, your life – your root life – is somewhere between life and death. If time moves here, that means something very . . .’ She searched for a delicate word. ‘. . . decisive has happened. Something that razes the Midnight Library to the ground, and takes us with it. And so I would err on the side of caution. I would try to think very keenly about where you want to be. You have clearly made some progress, I can tell. You seem to realise that life could be worth living, if only you found the right one to exist inside. But you don’t want that gate to close before you get a chance to go through it.’ They both were silent for a very long time, as Nora observed all the books all around her. All the possibilities. Calmly and slowly, she walked along the aisle, wondering what lay beyond the covers of each book, and wishing the green spines would offer some kind of clue.

‘Now, which book do you fancy?’ came Mrs Elm’s words behind her.

Nora remembered Hugo’s words in the kitchen.

Dream big.

The librarian had a penetrating gaze. ‘Who is Nora Seed? And what does she want?’ When Nora thought of her closest access to happiness, it was music. Yes, she still played the piano and keyboard sometimes, but she had given up creating. She had given up singing. She thought of those happy early pub gigs playing ‘Beautiful Sky’. She thought of her brother larking about on stage with her and Ravi and Ella.

So now she knew precisely which book to ask for.

Fame

She was sweating. That was the first observation. Her body was coursing with adrenaline and her clothes were clinging to her. There were people around her, a couple of whom had guitars. She could hear noise. Vast, powerful human noise – a roar of life slowly finding rhythm and shape. Becoming a chant.

There was a woman in front of her, towelling her face.

‘Thanks,’ Nora said, smiling.

The woman looked startled, as if she’d just been spoken to by a god.

She recognised a man holding drumsticks. It was Ravi. His hair was dyed white-blonde and he was dressed in a sharp-cut indigo suit with a bare chest where his shirt should have been. He looked an entirely different person to the one who had been looking at the music magazines in the newsagent’s in Bedford only yesterday, or the corporate-looking guy in the blue shirt who had sat watching her do her catastrophic talk in the InterContinental Hotel.

‘Ravi,’ she said, ‘you look amazing!’

‘What?’

He hadn’t heard her over the noise, but now she had a different question.

‘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.’