The Midnight Library (20 page)

‘Why would it be hard?’

Joanna gave her a curious glance from above her cocktail.

Marcelo looked at her with sentimental fondness. His eyes seemed glazed. ‘I mean,’ he went on, after a delicate sip of beer, ‘your brother was such a big part of your life, such a big part of the band . . .’

Was
.

So much dread in such a small word. Like a stone falling through water.

She remembered asking Ravi about her brother before the encore. She remembered the crowd’s reaction when she had mentioned her brother on stage.

‘He’s still around. He was here tonight.’

‘She means she feels him,’ said Joanna. ‘They all feel him. He was such a strong spirit. Troubled, but strong . . . It was a tragedy how the drink and drugs and the whole life got to him in the end . . .’

‘What are you talking about?’ Nora asked. She was no longer acting a life. She genuinely needed to know.

Marcelo looked sad for her. ‘You know, it’s only been two years since his death . . . his overdose . . .’

Nora gasped.

She didn’t arrive back in the library instantly because she hadn’t absorbed it. She stood up, dazed, and staggered out of the suite.

‘Nora?’ laughed Joanna, nervously. ‘Nora?’

She got in the lift and went down to the bar. To Ravi.

‘You said Joe was schmoozing the media.’

‘What?’

‘You said. I asked you what Joe was doing and you said, “schmoozing the media”.’

He put his beer down and stared at her like a riddle. ‘And I was right. She was schmoozing the media.’

‘She?’

He pointed over to Joanna, who was looking aghast as she headed over from the lifts in the lobby.

‘Yeah. Jo. She was with the press.’

And Nora felt the sadness like a punch.

‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘Oh Joe . . . oh Joe . . . oh . . .’

And the grand hotel bar disappeared. The table, the drinks, Joanna, Marcelo, the sound guy, the hotel guests, Ravi, the others, the marble floor, the barman, the waiters, the chandeliers, the flowers, all became nothing at all.

‘Howl’

To the winter forest

And nowhere to go

This girl runs

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 weed 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.’