Page 81 - The Midnight Library

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was probably a perfectly decent person but she was not anyone Nora had

ever seen in her life. She smiled.
‘Hey. How’s that new poem coming along?’
‘Oh. Yeah. It’s coming along really well. anks.’
Nora walked around the flat in a bit of a daze. She opened a door at

random and realised it was the bathroom. She didn’t need the toilet , but she
needed a second to think. So she shut the door and washed her hands and
stared at the water spiral down the plughole the wrong way.
She glanced at the shower. e dull yellow curtain was dirty in a vague

student-house kind of way. at’s what this place reminded her of. A student
house. She was thirty-five and, in this life, living like a student. She saw some
anti-depressants – fluoxetine – beside the basin, and picked up the box. She
read Prescription for N. Seed at the top of the label. She looked down at her

arm and saw the scars again. It was weird, to have your own body offer clues
to a myster y.
ere was a magazine on the floor next to the bin, National Geographic.
e one with the black hole on its cover that she had been reading in

another life, on the other side of the world, only yesterday. She sensed it was
her magazine, given she had always liked reading it, and had been known –
even in recent times – to buy it on the occasional spontaneous whim as no
online version ever did the photos justice.

She remembered being eleven years old and looking at the photos of
Svalbard, the Nor wegian archipelago in the Arctic, in her dad’s copy. It had
looked so vast and desolate and powerful and she had wondered what it
would have been like to be among it, like the scientist-explorers in the

article, spending their summer doing some kind of geological research. She
cut out the pictures and they ended up on the pinboard in her bedroom.
And for many years, at school, she had tried hard at science and geography
just so she could be like the scientists in the article and spend her summers

among frozen mountains and ords, as puffins flew overhead.
But aer her dad died, and aer reading Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and
Evil, she decided that a) Philosophy seemed to be the only subject that
matched her sudden inward intensity and b) she wanted to be a rock star

more than a scientist anyway.

Aer leaving the bathroom, she returned to her mysterious flatmate.