She stepped back out onto Shakespeare Road with her bag and her chess set and she really didn’t know what to do. ere were tingles through her body. Not quite pins and needles. More that strange, fuzzy static feeling she had felt before when she was nearing the end of a particular existence.
Trying to ignore the feeling in her body, she headed in the vague direction of the car park. She passed her old garden flat at 33A Bancro Avenue. A man she had never seen before was taking a box of recycling out. She thought of the lovely house in Cambridge she now had and couldn’t help but compare it to this shabby flat on a litter-strewn street. e tingles subsided a little. She passed Mr Banerjee’s house, or what had been Mr Banerjee’s house, and saw the only owned house on the street that hadn’t been divided into flats, though now it looked very different. e small front lawn was overgrown, and there was no sign of the clematis or busy lizzies in pots that Nora had watered for him last summer when he’d been recovering from his hip surgery.
On the pavement she noticed a couple of crumpled lager cans.
She saw a woman with a blonde bob and tanned skin walking towards her on the pavement with two small children in a double pushchair. She looked exhausted. It was the woman she had spoken to in the newsagent’s the day she had decided to die. e one who had seemed happy and relaxed. Kerry-Anne. She hadn’t noticed Nora because one child was wailing and she was trying to pacify the distressed, red-cheeked boy by waving a plastic dinosaur in front of him.
Me and Jake were like rabbits but we got there. Two little terrors. But worth it, y’know? I just feel complete. I could show you some pictures . . .
en Kerry-Anne looked up and saw Nora. ‘I know you, don’t I? Is it Nora?’
‘Yes.’
‘Hi Nora.’
‘Hi Kerry-Anne.’
‘You remember my name? Oh wow. I was in awe of you in school. You seemed to have it all. Did you ever make the Olympics?’
‘Yes, actually. Kind of. One me did. But it wasn’t what I wanted it to be.
But then, what is? Right?’
Kerry-Anne seemed momentarily confused. And then her son threw the dinosaur onto the pavement and it landed next to one of the crumpled cans. ‘Right.’
Nora picked up the dinosaur – a stegosaurus, on close inspection – and handed it to Kerry-Anne, who smiled her gratitude and headed into the house that should have belonged to Mr Banerjee, just as the boy descended into a full tantrum.
‘Bye,’ said Nora. ‘Yeah. Bye.’
And Nora wondered what the difference had been. What had forced Mr Banerjee to go to the care home he’d been determined not to go to? She was the only difference between the two Mr Banerjees but what was that difference? What had she done? Set up an online shop? Picked up his prescription a few times?
Never underestimate the big importance of small things, Mrs Elm had said.
You must always remember that.
She stared at her own window. She thought of herself in her root life, hovering between life and death in her bedroom – equidistant, as it were. And, for the first time, Nora worried about herself as if she was actually someone else. Not just another version of her, but a different actual person. As though finally, through all the experiences of life she now had, she had become someone who pitied her former self. Not in self-pity, because she was a different self now.
en someone appeared at her own window. A woman who wasn’t her, holding a cat that wasn’t Voltaire.
is was her hope, anyway, even as she began to feel faint and fuzzy again. She headed into town. Walked down the high street.
Yes, she was different now. She was stronger. She had untapped things inside her. ings she might never have known about if she’d never sung in an arena or fought off a polar bear or felt so much love and fear and courage.
ere was a commotion outside Boots. Two boys were being arrested by police officers as a nearby store detective spoke into a walkie-talkie.
She recognised one of the boys and went up to him. ‘Leo?’
A police officer motioned for her to back away. ‘Who are you?’ Leo asked.
‘I—’ Nora realised she couldn’t say ‘your piano teacher’. And she realised how mad it was, given the fraught context, to say what she was about to say. But still, she said it. ‘Do you have music lessons?’
Leo looked down as the handcuffs were put on him. ‘I ain’t done no music lessons . . .’
His voice had lost its bravado.
e police officer was frustrated now. ‘Please, miss, leave this to us.’ ‘He’s a good kid,’ Nora told him. ‘Please don’t be too hard on him.’
‘Well, this good kid just stole two hundred quid’s worth from there. And has also just been found to be in possession of a concealed weapon.’
‘Weapon?’
‘A knife.’
‘No. ere must be some mix-up. He’s not that sort of kid.’
‘Hear that,’ the police officer said to his colleague. ‘Lady here thinks our friend Leo ompson isn’t the kind of kid to get into trouble.’
e other police officer laughed. ‘He’s always in and out of bother, this one.’
‘Now, please,’ the first police officer said, ‘let us do our jobs here . . .’ ‘Of course,’ said Nora, ‘of course. Do everything they say, Leo . . .’ He looked at her as if she’d been sent as a practical joke.
A few years ago his mum Doreen had come into String eory to buy her son a cheap keyboard. She’d been worried about his behaviour at school and he’d expressed an interest in music and so she wanted to get him piano lessons. Nora explained she had an electric piano, and could play, but had no formal teacher training. Doreen had explained she didn’t have much money but they struck a deal, and Nora had enjoyed her Tuesday evenings teaching
Leo the difference between major and minor seventh chords and thought he was a great boy, eager to learn.
Doreen had seen Leo was ‘getting caught up in the wrong set’, but when he got into music he started doing well in other things too. And suddenly he wasn’t getting into trouble with teachers any more, and he’d play everything from Chopin through Scott Joplin to Frank Ocean and John Legend and Rex Orange County with the same care and commitment.
Something Mrs Elm had said on an early visit to the Midnight Library came to her.
Every life contains many millions of decisions. Some big, some small. But every time one decision is taken over another, the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs, which in turn leads to further variations . . .
In this timeline right now, the one where she had studied a Master’s at Cambridge, and married Ash and had a baby, she hadn’t been in String
eory on the day four years ago when Doreen and Leo came by. In this timeline, Doreen never found a music teacher who was cheap enough, and so Leo never persisted with music for long enough to realise he had a talent. He never sat there, side-by-side with Nora on a Tuesday evening, pursuing a passion that he extended at home, producing his own tunes.
Nora felt herself weaken. Not just tingles and fuzziness but something stronger, a sense of plunging into nothingness, accompanied by a brief darkening of her vision. A feeling of another Nora right there in the wings, ready to pick up where this one le off. Her brain ready to fill in the gaps and have a perfectly legitimate reason to be on a day trip to Bedford, and to fill in every absence as if she was here the whole time.
Worried she knew what it meant, she turned away from Leo and his friend as they were escorted away to the police car, the eyes of the whole of Bedford high street upon them, and she started to quicken her pace towards the car park.
is is a good life . . . is is a good life . . . is is a good life . . .
