بخش 21

The Other Side of Despair

‘Life begins,’ Sartre once wrote, ‘on the other side of despair.’

It wasn’t raining any more.

She was inside and sitting in a hospital bed. She had been put on a ward and had eaten and was feeling a lot better. The medical staff were pleased, following her physical examination. The tender abdomen was to be expected, apparently. She tried to impress the doctor by telling her a fact Ash had told her, about a stomach lining renewing itself every few days.

Then a nurse came and sat on her bed with a clipboard and went through reams of questions relating to her state of mind. Nora decided to keep her experience of the Midnight Library to herself because she imagined that it wouldn’t go down too well on a psychiatric evaluation form. It was safe to surmise the little-known realities of the multiverse probably weren’t yet incorporated within the care plans of the National Health Service.

The questions and answers continued for what felt like an hour. They covered medication, her mother’s death, Volts, losing her job, money worries, the diagnosis of situational depression.

‘Have you ever tried anything like this before?’ the nurse asked.

‘Not in this life.’

‘And how do you feel right now?’

‘I don’t know. A bit strange. But I don’t want to die any more.’

And the nurse scribbled on the form.

Through the window, after the nurse had gone, she watched the trees’ gentle movements in the afternoon breeze and distant rush-hour traffic shunt slowly along Bedford ring road. It was nothing but trees and traffic and mediocre architecture, but it was also everything.

It was life.

A little later she deleted her suicidal social media posts, and – in a moment of sincere sentimentality – she wrote something else instead. She titled it ‘A Thing I Have Learned (Written By A Nobody Who Has Been Everybody)’.

A Thing I Have Learned

(Written By A Nobody Who Has Been Everybody)

It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.

It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.

But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.

We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.

Of course, we can’t visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we’d feel in any life is still available. We don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don’t have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don’t have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies.

We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.

We only need to be one person.

We only need to feel one existence.

We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.

So let’s be kind to the people in our own existence. Let’s occasionally look up from the spot in which we are because, wherever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on for ever.

Yesterday I knew I had no future, and that it was impossible for me to accept my life as it is now. And yet today, that same messy life seems full of hope. Potential.

The impossible, I suppose, happens via living.

Will my life be miraculously free from pain, despair, grief, heartbreak, hardship, loneliness, depression? No.

But do I want to live?

Yes. Yes.

A thousand times, yes.

Living Versus Understanding

A few minutes later her brother came to see her. He’d heard the voicemail she’d sent him and had responded by text at seven minutes after midnight. ‘You okay, sis?’ Then, when the hospital contacted him, he’d caught the first train from London. He’d bought the latest issue of National Geographic for her while waiting at St Pancras station.

‘You used to love it,’ he told her, as he placed the magazine beside the hospital bed.

‘I still do.’

It was good to see him. His thick eyebrows and reluctant smile still intact. He walked in a little awkward, head cowed, hair longer than it had been in the last two lives in which she had seen him.

‘I’m sorry I’ve been incommunicado recently,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t about what Ravi said it was about. I don’t even think about The Labyrinths any more. I was just in a weird place. After Mum died I was seeing this guy and we had a very messy break-up and I just didn’t want to have to talk to you or, recently, to anyone about it. I just wanted to drink. And I was drinking too much. It was a real problem. But I’ve started getting help for it. I haven’t had a drink for weeks. I go to the gym and everything now. I’ve started a cross-training class.’ ‘Oh Joe, poor you. I’m sorry about the break-up. And everything else.’ ‘You’re all I’ve got, sis,’ he said, his voice cracking a little. ‘I know I haven’t valued you. I know I wasn’t always the best, growing up. But I had my own shit going on. Having to be a certain way because of Dad. Hiding my sexuality. I know it wasn’t easy for you but it wasn’t easy for me either. You were good at everything. School, swimming, music. I couldn’t compete . . . Plus Dad was Dad and I had to be this fake vision of whatever he thought a man was.’ He sighed. ‘It’s weird. We both probably remember it in different ways. But don’t leave me, okay? Leaving the band was one thing. But don’t leave existence. I couldn’t cope with that.’ ‘I won’t if you won’t,’ she said.

‘Trust me, I’m not going anywhere.’

She thought of the grief that had floored her when she had heard about Joe’s death by overdose in São Paulo, and she asked him to hug her, and he obliged, delicately, and she felt the living warmth of him.

‘Thanks for trying to jump in the river for me,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘I always thought you didn’t. But you tried. They pulled you back. Thank you.’ He suddenly knew what she was talking about. And maybe more than a little confused about how she knew this, when she had been swimming away from him. ‘Ah, sis. I love you. We were young fools.’ Joe nipped out for an hour. Picked up the keys from her landlord, collected his sister’s clothes and phone.

She saw that Izzy had texted. Sorry I didn’t get back last night/this morning. I wanted a proper discussion! Thesis antithesis synthesis. The whole works. How are you? I miss you. Oh, and guess what? I’m thinking of coming back to the UK in June. For good. Miss you, my friend. Also, have a TON of humpback pics coming your way. xxx Nora made a slight noise of involuntary joy at the back of her throat.

She texted back. It was interesting, she mused to herself, how life sometimes simply gave you a whole new perspective by waiting around long enough for you to see it.

She went on the Facebook page of the International Polar Research Institute. There was a photograph of the woman she had shared a cabin with – Ingrid – standing with the field leader Peter, using a thin measuring drill to gauge the thickness of sea ice, and a link to an article headlined ‘IPRI research confirms last decade warmest on record for Arctic region’. She shared the link. And posted a comment: ‘Keep up the great work!’ And decided that when she earned some money, she would donate.

It was agreed that Nora could go home. Her brother ordered an Uber. As they were pulling out of the car park Nora saw Ash driving into the hospital. He must have been on a late shift. He had a different car in this life. He didn’t see her, despite her smile, and she hoped he was happy. She hoped he only had an easy shift of gall bladders ahead of him. Maybe she would go along and watch him in the Bedford half-marathon on Sunday. Maybe she would ask him out for a coffee.

Maybe.

In the back of the car, her brother told her he was looking for some freelance session work.

‘I’m thinking of becoming a sound engineer,’ he said. ‘Vaguely, anyway.’ Nora was happy to hear this. ‘Well, I think you should do it. I think you’d like it. I don’t know why. I’ve just got a feeling.’ ‘Okay.’

‘I mean, it might not be as glamorous as being an international rock star, but it might be . . . safer. Maybe even happier.’ That was a tough sell, and Joe wasn’t entirely buying it. But he smiled and nodded to himself. ‘Actually, there’s a studio in Hammersmith and they’re looking for sound engineers. It’s only five minutes from me. I could walk it.’ ‘Hammersmith? Yes. That’s the one.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, I just think it sounds good. Hammersmith, sound engineer. It sounds like you’d be happy.’ He laughed at her. ‘Okay, Nora. Okay. And that gym I was telling you about? It’s right next door to the place.’ ‘Ah, cool. Any nice guys there?’

‘Actually, yes, there is one. He’s called Ewan. He’s a doctor. He goes to cross-training.’ ‘Ewan! Yes!’

‘Who?’

‘You should ask him out.’

Joe laughed, thinking Nora was just being playful. ‘I’m not even one hundred per cent sure he’s gay.’ ‘He is! He’s gay. He is one hundred per cent gay. And one hundred per cent into you. Dr Ewan Langford. Ask him out. You have to trust me! It will be the best thing you ever do . . .’ Her brother laughed as the car pulled up at 33A Bancroft Avenue. He paid, on account of Nora still having no money and no wallet.

Mr Banerjee sat at his window, reading.

Out on the street, Nora saw her brother staring in astonishment down at his phone.

‘What’s up, Joe?’

He could hardly speak. ‘Langford . . .’

‘Sorry?’

‘Dr Ewan Langford. I didn’t even know his surname was Langford but that’s him.’ Nora shrugged. ‘Sibling intuition. Add him. Follow him. DM him. Whatever you have to do. Well, no unsolicited nude pics. But he’s the one, I’m telling you. He’s the one.’ ‘But how did you know it was him?’

She took her brother by the arm, and knew there was no explanation she could possibly give. ‘Listen to me, Joe.’ She remembered the anti-philosophy of Mrs Elm in the Midnight Library. ‘You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.’ As her brother headed towards the door of 33A Bancroft Avenue, Nora looked around at all the terraced houses and all the lampposts and trees under the sky, and she felt her lungs inflate at the wonder of being there, witnessing it all as if for the first time. Maybe in one of those houses was another slider, someone on their third or seventeenth or final version of themselves. She would look out for them.

She looked at number 31.

Through his window Mr Banerjee’s face slowly lit up as he saw Nora safe and sound. He smiled and mouthed a ‘thank you’, as if simply her act of living was something he should be grateful for. Tomorrow, she would find some money and go to the garden centre and buy him a plant for his flowerbed. Foxgloves, maybe. She was sure he liked foxgloves.

‘No,’ she called back, blowing him a friendly kiss. ‘Thank you, Mr Banerjee! Thank you for everything!’ And he smiled broader, and his eyes were full of kindness and concern, and Nora remembered what it was to care and be cared for. She followed her brother inside her flat to start tidying up, catching a glimpse of the clusters of irises in Mr Banerjee’s garden as she went. Flowers she hadn’t appreciated before, but which now mesmerised her with the most exquisite purple she had ever seen. As though the flowers weren’t just colours but part of a language, notes in a glorious floral melody, as powerful as Chopin, silently communicating the breathtaking majesty of life itself.

The Volcano

It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective. And the most peculiar discovery Nora made was that, of all the extremely divergent variations of herself she had experienced, the most radical sense of change happened within the exact same life. The one she began and ended with.

This biggest and most profound shift happened not by becoming richer or more successful or more famous or by being amid the glaciers and polar bears of Svalbard. It happened by waking up in the exact same bed, in the same grotty damp apartment with its dilapidated sofa and yucca plant and tiny potted cacti and bookshelves and untried yoga manuals.

There was the same electric piano and books. There was the same sad absence of a feline and lack of a job. There was still the same unknowability about her life ahead.

And yet, everything was different.

And it was different because she no longer felt she was there simply to serve the dreams of other people. She no longer felt like she had to find sole fulfilment as some imaginary perfect daughter or sister or partner or wife or mother or employee or anything other than a human being, orbiting her own purpose, and answerable to herself.

And it was different because she was alive, when she had so nearly been dead. And because that had been her choice. A choice to live. Because she had touched the vastness of life and within that vastness she had seen the possibility not only of what she could do, but also feel. There were other scales and other tunes. There was more to her than a flat line of mild to moderate depression, spiced up with occasional flourishes of despair. And that gave her hope, and even the sheer sentimental gratitude of being able to be here, knowing she had the potential to enjoy watching radiant skies and mediocre Ryan Bailey comedies and be happy listening to music and conversation and the beat of her own heart.

And it was different because, above all other things, that heavy and painful Book of Regrets had been successfully burnt to dust.

‘Hi Nora. It’s me, Doreen.’

Nora was excited to hear from her, as she had been in the middle of neatly writing a notice advertising piano lessons. ‘Oh Doreen! Can I just apologise about missing the lesson the other day?’ ‘Water under the bridge.’

‘Well, I’m not going to go into all the reasons,’ Nora continued, breathlessly. ‘But I will just say that I will never be in that situation again. I promise, in future, should you want to continue with Leo’s piano lessons, I will be where I am meant to be. I won’t let you down. Now, I totally understand if you don’t want me to be Leo’s piano teacher any more. But I want you to know that Leo is an exceptional talent. He has a feel for the piano. He could end up making a career of it. He could end up at the Royal College of Music. So, I would just like to say if he doesn’t continue his lessons with me, I want you to know that I feel he should continue them somewhere. That’s all.’ There was a long pause. Nothing but the fuzzy static of phone-breath. Then: ‘Nora, love, it’s okay, I don’t need a monologue. The truth is we were in town yesterday, the two of us. I was buying him some facewash and he said, “I’m still going to do piano, right?” Right there in Boots. Shall we just kick off where we left off next week?’ ‘Seriously? That’s amazing. Yes, next week then.’

And the moment Nora came off the phone she sat at the piano and played a tune that had never been played before. She liked what she was playing, and vowed to remember it and put some words to it. Maybe she could turn it into a proper song and put it out there online. Maybe she would write more songs. Or maybe she would save up and apply for a Master’s. Or maybe she would do both. Who knew? As she played, she glanced over and saw her magazine – the one Joe had bought her – open at a picture of the Krakatoa volcano in Indonesia.

The paradox of volcanoes was that they were symbols of destruction but also life. Once the lava slows and cools, it solidifies and then breaks down over time to become soil – rich, fertile soil.

She wasn’t a black hole, she decided. She was a volcano. And like a volcano she couldn’t run away from herself. She’d have to stay there and tend to that wasteland.

She could plant a forest inside herself.

How It Ends

Mrs Elm looked a lot older than she had done at the Midnight Library. Her formerly grey hair was now white and thin, her face tired and lined as a map, hands spotted with age, but she was as adept at chess as she had been years ago in the Hazeldene school library.

Oak Leaf Care Home had its own chessboard, but it had needed a dust down.

‘No one plays here,’ she told Nora. ‘I’m so pleased you came to see me. It was such a surprise.’ ‘Well, I can come every day if you want, Mrs Elm?’

‘Louise, please call me Louise. And don’t you have work to do?’

Nora smiled. Even though it had only been twenty-four hours since she had asked Neil to put up her poster in String Theory, she was already inundated with people wanting lessons. ‘I teach piano lessons. And I help out at the homeless shelter every other Tuesday. But I will always have an hour . . . And to be honest, I have no one to play chess with either.’ A tired smile spread across Mrs Elm’s face. ‘Well, that would be lovely.’ She stared out of the little window in her room and Nora followed her gaze. There was a human and a dog Nora recognised. It was Dylan, walking Sally the bullmastiff. The nervous one with the cigarette burns who had taken a shine to her. She wondered, vaguely, if her landlord would allow her to get a dog. He’d allowed a cat, after all. But she’d have to wait until she’d caught up with the rent.

‘It can be lonely,’ Mrs Elm said. ‘Being here. Just sitting. I felt like the game was up. Like a lonely king on a board. You see, I don’t know how you remember me, but outside of school I wasn’t always the—’ She hesitated. ‘I’ve let people down. I haven’t always been easy. I’ve done things I regret. I was a bad wife. Not always a good mother, either. People have given up a little on me, and I don’t entirely blame them.’ ‘Well, you were kind to me, Mrs . . . Louise. When I had a hard time at school, you always knew what to say.’ Mrs Elm steadied her breath. ‘Thank you, Nora.’

‘And you’re not alone on the board now. A pawn has come and joined you.’ ‘You were never a pawn.’

She made her move. A bishop sweeping into a strong position. A slight smile tugged at the corners of her mouth.

‘You’re going to win this,’ Nora observed.

Mrs Elm’s eyes sparkled with sudden life. ‘Well, that’s the beauty, isn’t it? You just never know how it ends.’ And Nora smiled as she stared at all the pieces she still had left in play, thinking about her next move.