The Midnight Library - Matt Haig Page 0,27

to Australia with Izzy.’

Nora nodded. Mrs Elm had a point.

She thought of swimming in the pool at Bronte Beach. How good that had felt, in its strange familiarity.

‘From an early age you were encouraged to swim,’ said Mrs Elm.

‘Yes.’

‘Your dad was always happy to take you to the pool.’

‘It was one of the few things that had made him happy,’ Nora mused.

She had associated swimming with her father’s approval and enjoyed the wordlessness of being in the water because it was the opposite of her parents screaming at each other.

‘Why did you quit?’ asked Mrs Elm.

‘As soon as I started winning swimming races, I became seen and I didn’t want to be seen. And not only seen but seen in a swimsuit at the exact age you are self-obsessing about your body. Someone said I had boy’s shoulders. It was a stupid thing but there were lots of stupid things and you feel them all at that age. As a teenager I’d have happily been invisible. People called me “The Fish”. They didn’t mean it as a compliment. I was shy. It was one of the reasons why I preferred the library to the playing field. It seems a small thing, but it really helped, having that space.’

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

Nora thought back. Her teenage combination of shyness and visibility had been a problematic mix, but she was never bullied, as such, probably because everyone knew her brother. And Joe, while never exactly tough, was always considered cool and popular enough for his most immediate blood relation to be immune to schoolyard tyranny.

She won races in local and then national competitions, but as she reached fifteen it became too much. The daily swims, length after length after length.

‘I had to quit.’

Mrs Elm nodded. ‘And the bond you’d developed with your dad frayed and almost snapped completely.’

‘Pretty much.’

She pictured her father’s face, in the car, on a drizzle-scratched Sunday morning outside Bedford Leisure Centre, as she told him she didn’t want to swim in competitions any more. That look of disappointment and profound frustration.

‘But you could make a success of your life,’ he had said. Yes. She remembered it now. ‘You’re never going to be a pop star, but this is something real. It’s right in front of you. If you keep training, you’ll end up at the Olympics. I know it.’

She had been cross with him saying that. As if there was a very thin path to a happy life and it was the path he had decided for her. As if her own agency in her own life was automatically wrong. But what she didn’t fully appreciate at fifteen years of age was just how bad regret could feel, and how much her father had felt that pain of being so near to the realisation of a dream he could almost touch it.

Nora’s father, it was true, had been a difficult man.

As well as being highly critical of everything Nora did, and everything Nora wanted and everything Nora believed, unless it was related to swimming, Nora had also felt that simply to be in his presence was to commit some kind of invisible crime. Ever since the ligament injury that thwarted his rugby career, he’d had a sincere conviction that the universe was against him. And Nora was, at least she felt, considered by him as part of that same universal plan. From that moment in that car park she had felt she was really just an extension of the pain in his left knee. A walking wound.

But maybe he had known what would happen. Maybe he could foresee the way one regret would lead to another, until suddenly that was all she was. A whole book of regrets.

‘Okay, Mrs Elm. I want to know what happened in the life where I did what my father wanted. Where I trained as hard as I possibly could. Where I never moaned about a five a.m. start or a nine p.m. finish. Where I swam every day and never thought about quitting. Where I didn’t get sidelined by music or writing unfinished novels. Where I sacrificed everything else on the altar of freestyle. Where I didn’t give up. Where I did everything right in order to reach the Olympics. Take me to where I am in that life.’

For a moment it seemed as though Mrs Elm hadn’t been taking any notice of Nora’s mini-speech, as she kept frowning at