The Midnight Library - Matt Haig Page 0,33
much I loved it up there. At uni.’
It was really hard not to look surprised at any of this, at the fact that this brother she was getting on with, and working with, was also someone who went to university. In her root life her brother did A-levels and applied to go to Manchester to do History, but he never got the grades he needed, probably because he was too busy getting stoned with Ravi every night. And then decided he didn’t want to go to uni at all.
They chatted a bit more.
At one point he became distracted by his phone.
Nora noticed his screensaver was of a radiant, handsome, smiling man she had never seen before. She noticed her brother’s wedding ring and feigned a neutral expression.
‘So, how’s married life?’
Joe smiled. It was a genuinely happy smile. She hadn’t seen him smile like that for years. In her root life, Joe had always been unlucky in love. Although she had known her brother was gay since he was a teenager, he hadn’t officially come out until he was twenty-two. And he’d never had a happy or long-term relationship. She felt guilt, that her life had the power to shape her brother’s life in such meaningful ways.
‘Oh, you know Ewan. Ewan’s Ewan.’
Nora smiled back as if she knew who Ewan was and exactly what he was like. ‘Yeah. He’s great. I’m so happy for you both.’
He laughed. ‘We’ve been married five years now. You’re talking as if me and him have just got together.’
‘No, I’m just, you know, I sometimes think that you’re lucky. So in love. And happy.’
‘He wants a dog.’ He smiled. ‘That’s our current debate. I mean, I wouldn’t mind a dog. But I’d want a rescue. And I wouldn’t want a bloody Maltipoo or a Bichon. I’d want a wolf. You know, a proper dog.’
Nora thought of Voltaire. ‘Animals are good company . . .’
‘Yeah. You still want a dog?’
‘I do. Or a cat.’
‘Cats are too disobedient,’ he said, sounding like the brother she remembered. ‘Dogs know their place.’
‘Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.’
He looked perplexed. ‘Where did that come from? Is that a quote?’
‘Yeah. Henry David Thoreau. You know, my fave philosopher.’
‘Since when were you into philosophy?’
Of course. In this life she’d never have done a Philosophy degree. While her root self had been reading the works of Thoreau and Lao Tzu and Sartre in a stinky student flat in Bristol, her current self had been standing on Olympic podiums in Beijing. Weirdly, she felt just as sad for the version of her who had never fallen in love with the simple beauty of Thoreau’s Walden, or the stoical Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, as she had felt sympathy for the version of her who never fulfilled her Olympic potential.
‘Oh, I don’t know . . . I just came across some of his stuff on the internet.’
‘Ah. Cool. Will check him out. You could drop some of that into your speech.’
Nora felt herself go pale. ‘Um, I’m thinking of maybe doing something a little different today. I might, um, improvise a little.’
Improvising was, after all, a skill she’d been practising.
‘I saw this great documentary about Greenland the other night. Made me remember when you were obsessed with the Arctic and you cut out all those pictures of polar bears and stuff.’
‘Yeah. Mrs Elm said the best way to be an arctic explorer was to be a glaciologist. So that’s what I wanted to be.’
‘Mrs Elm,’ he whispered. ‘That rings a bell.’
‘School librarian.’
‘That was it. You used to live in that library, didn’t you?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘Just think, if you hadn’t stuck with swimming, you’d be in Greenland right now.’
‘Svalbard,’ she said.
‘Sorry?’
‘It’s a Norwegian archipelago. Way up in the Arctic Ocean.’
‘Okay, Norway then. You’d be there.’
‘Maybe. Or maybe I’d just still be in Bedford. Moping around. Unemployed. Struggling to pay the rent.’
‘Don’t be daft. You’d have always done something big.’
She smiled at her elder brother’s innocence. ‘In some lives me and you might not even get on.’
‘Nonsense.’
‘I hope so.’
Joe seemed a bit uncomfortable, and clearly wanted to change the topic.
‘Hey, guess who I saw the other day?’
Nora shrugged, hoping it was going to be someone she’d heard of.
‘Ravi. Do you remember Ravi?’
She thought of Ravi, telling her off in the newsagent’s only yesterday. ‘Oh yeah. Ravi.’
‘Well, I bumped into him.’
‘In Bedford?’
‘Ha! God, no. Haven’t been there for years. No. It was at Blackfriars station. Totally random. Like, I haven’t seen him in over a