The Midnight Library - Matt Haig Page 0,52

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