Page 88 - The Midnight Library

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She won races in local and then national compet itions, but as she reached

fieen it became too much. e daily swims, length aer length aer length.
‘I had to quit.’
Mrs Elm nodded. ‘And the bond you’d developed with your dad frayed
and almost snapped completely.’

‘Pretty much.’
She pictured her father’s face, in the car, on a drizzle-scratched Sunday
morning outside Bedford Leisure Centre, as she told him she didn’t want to
swim in competitions any more. at look of disappointment and profound

frustration.
‘But you could make a success of your life,’ he had said. Yes. She
remembered it now. ‘You’re never going to be a pop star, but this is
something real. It’s right in front of you. If you keep training, you’ll end up at

the Olympics. I know it.’
She had been cross with him saying that. As if there was a ver y thin path
to a happy life and it was the path he had decided for her. As if her own
agency in her own life was automatically wrong. But what she didn’t fully

appreciate at fieen years of age was just how bad regret could feel, and how
much her father had felt that pain of being so near to the realisation of a
dream he could almost touch it.
Nora’s father, it was true, had been a difficult man.

As well as being highly critical of ever ything Nora did, and ever ything
Nora wanted and ever ything Nora believed, unless it was related to
swimming, Nora had also felt that simply to be in his presence was to
commit some kind of invisible crime. Ever since the ligament injur y that

thwarted his rugby career, he’d had a sincere conviction that the universe
was against him. And Nora was, at least she felt, considered by him as part of
that same universal plan. From that moment in that car park she had felt she
was really just an extension of the pain in his le knee. A walking wound.

But maybe he had known what would happen. Maybe he could foresee
the way one regret would lead to another, until suddenly that was all she
was. A whole book of regrets.
‘Okay, Mrs Elm. I want to know what happened in the life where I did

what my father wanted. Where I trained as hard as I possibly could. Where I
never moaned about a five a.m. start or a nine p.m. finish. Where I swam
ever y day and never thought about quitting. Where I didn’t get sidelined by