Page 104 - The Midnight Library

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Improvising was, aer all, a skill she’d been practising.

‘I saw this great documentar y 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. ‘ at rings a bell.’
‘School librarian.’
‘ at was it. You used to live in that librar y, didn’t you?’

‘Pretty much.’
‘Just think, if you hadn’t stuck with swimming, you’d be in Greenland
right now.’
‘Svalbard,’ she said.

‘Sorr y?’
‘It’s a Nor wegian archipelago. Way up in the Arctic Ocean.’
‘Okay, Nor way 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 da. 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 decade. At least.

He wanted to go to the pub. So, I explained I was teetotal now, and then I got
into having to explain I’d been an alcoholic. And all of that. at I hadn’t had
a glass of wine or a puff on a joint in years.’ Nora nodded as if this wasn’t a