Contents
A Conversation About Rain
Nineteen Years Later
The Man at the Door
String Theory
To Live Is to Suffer
Doors
How to Be a Black Hole
Antimatter
00:00:00
The Librarian
The Midnight Library
The Moving Shelves
The Book of Regrets
Regret Overload
Every Life Begins Now
The Three Horseshoes
The Penultimate Update Nora Had Posted Before She Found Herself Between Life and Death
The Chessboard
The Only Way to Learn Is to Live
Fire
Fish Tank
The Last Update That Nora Had Posted Before She Found Herself Between Life and Death
The Successful Life
Peppermint Tea
The Tree That Is Our Life
System Error
Svalbard
Hugo Lefèvre
Walking in Circles
A Moment of Extreme Crisis in the Middle of Nowhere
The Frustration of Not Finding a Library When You Really Need One
Island
Permafrost
One Night in Longyearbyen
Expectation
Life and Death and the Quantum Wave Function
If Something Is Happening to Me, I Want to Be There
God and Other Librarians
Fame
Milky Way
Wild and Free
Ryan Bailey
A Silver Tray of Honey Cakes
The Podcast of Revelations
‘Howl’
Love and Pain
Equidistance
Someone Else’s Dream
A Gentle Life
Why Want Another Universe If This One Has Dogs?
Dinner with Dylan
Last Chance Saloon
Buena Vista Vineyard
The Many Lives of Nora Seed
Lost in the Library
A Pearl in the Shell
The Game
The Perfect Life
A Spiritual Quest for a Deeper Connection with the Universe
Hammersmith
Tricycle
No Longer Here
An Incident With the Police
A New Way of Seeing
The Flowers Have Water
Nowhere to Land
Don’t You Dare Give Up, Nora Seed!
Awakening
The Other Side of Despair
A Thing I Have Learned
Living Versus Understanding
The Volcano
How It Ends
A Conversation About Rain
Nineteen years before she decided to die, Nora Seed sat in the warmth of the small library at Hazeldene School in the town of Bedford. She sat at a low table staring at a chess board.
‘Nora dear, it’s natural to worry about your future,’ said the librarian, Mrs Elm, her eyes twinkling.
Mrs Elm made her first move. A knight hopping over the neat row of white pawns. ‘Of course, you’re going to be worried about the exams. But you could be anything you want to be, Nora. Think of all that possibility. It’s exciting.’
‘Yes. I suppose it is.’
‘A whole life in front of you.’
‘A whole life.’
‘You could do anything, live anywhere. Somewhere a bit less cold and wet.’
Nora pushed a pawn forward two spaces.
It was hard not to compare Mrs Elm to her mother, who treated Nora like a mistake in need of correction. For instance, when she was a baby her mother had been so worried Nora’s left ear stuck out more than her right that she’d used sticky tape to address the situation, then disguised it beneath a woollen bonnet.
‘I hate the cold and wet,’ added Mrs Elm, for emphasis.
Mrs Elm had short grey hair and a kind and mildly crinkled oval face sitting pale above her turtle-green polo neck. She was quite old. But she was also the person most on Nora’s wavelength in the entire school, and even on days when it wasn’t raining she would spend her afternoon break in the small library.
‘Coldness and wetness don’t always go together,’ Nora told her. ‘Antarctica is the driest continent on Earth. Technically, it’s a desert.’
‘Well, that sounds up your street.’
‘I don’t think it’s far enough away.’
‘Well, maybe you should be an astronaut. Travel the galaxy.’
Nora smiled. ‘The rain is even worse on other planets.’
‘Worse than Bedfordshire?’
‘On Venus it is pure acid.’
Mrs Elm pulled a paper tissue from her sleeve and delicately blew her nose. ‘See? With a brain like yours you can do anything.’
A blond boy Nora recognised from a couple of years below her ran past outside the rain-speckled window. Either chasing someone or being chased. Since her brother had left, she’d felt a bit unguarded out there. The library was a little shelter of civilisation.
‘Dad thinks I’ve thrown everything away. Now I’ve stopped swimming.’
‘Well, far be it from me to say, but there is more to this world than swimming really fast. There are many different possible lives ahead of you. Like I said last week, you could be a glaciologist. I’ve been researching and the—’
And it was then that the phone rang.
‘One minute,’ said Mrs Elm, softly. ‘I’d better get that.’
A moment later, Nora watched Mrs Elm on the phone. ‘Yes. She’s here now.’ The librarian’s face fell in shock. She turned away from Nora, but her words were audible across the hushed room: ‘Oh no. No. Oh my God. Of course . . .’
Nineteen Years Later
The Man at the Door
Twenty-seven hours before she decided to die, Nora Seed sat on her dilapidated sofa scrolling through other people’s happy lives, waiting for something to happen. And then, out of nowhere, something actually did.
Someone, for whatever peculiar reason, rang her doorbell.
She wondered for a moment if she shouldn’t get the door at all. She was, after all, already in her night clothes even though it was only nine p.m. She felt self-conscious about her over-sized ECO WORRIER T-shirt and her tartan pyjama bottoms.
She put on her slippers, to be slightly more civilised, and discovered that the person at the door was a man, and one she recognised.
He was tall and gangly and boyish, with a kind face, but his eyes were sharp and bright, like they could see through things.
It was good to see him, if a little surprising, especially as he was wearing sports gear and he looked hot and sweaty despite the cold, rainy weather. The juxtaposition between them made her feel even more slovenly than she had done five seconds earlier.
But she’d been feeling lonely. And though she’d studied enough existential philosophy to believe loneliness was a fundamental part of being a human in an essentially meaningless universe, it was good to see him.
‘Ash,’ she said, smiling. ‘It’s Ash, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. It is.’
‘What are you doing here? It’s good to see you.’
A few weeks ago she’d been sat playing her electric piano and he’d run down Bancroft Avenue and had seen her in the window here at 33A and given her a little wave. He had once – years ago – asked her out for a coffee. Maybe he was about to do that again.
‘It’s good to see you too,’ he said, but his tense forehead didn’t show it.
When she’d spoken to him in the shop, he’d always sounded breezy, but now his voice contained something heavy. He scratched his brow. Made another sound but didn’t quite manage a full word.