Page 180 - The Midnight Library

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‘I am saying that the thing that looks the most ordinar y might end up

being the thing that leads you to victor y. You have to keep going. Like that
day in the river. Do you remember?’
Of course she remembered.
How old had she been? Must have been seventeen, as she was no longer

swimming in competitions. It was a fraught period in which her dad was
cross with her all the time and her mum was going through one of her near-
mute depression patches. Her brother was back from art college for the
weekend with Ravi. Showing his friend the sights of glorious Bedford. Joe

had arranged an impromptu party by the river, with music and beer and a
ton of weed and girls who were frustrated Joe wasn’t interested in them.
Nora had been invited and drank too much and somehow got talking to
Ravi about swimming.

‘So, could you swim the river?’ he asked her.
‘Sure.’
‘No you couldn’t,’ someone else had said.
And so, in a moment of idiocy, she had decided to prove them wrong.

And by the time her stoned and heavily inebriated older brother realised
what she was doing, it was too late. e swim was well under way.
As she remembered this, the corridor at the end of the aisle in the librar y
turned from stone to flowing water. And even as the shelves around her

stayed where they were, the tiles beneath her feet now sprouted grass and
the ceiling above her became sky. But unlike when she disappeared into
another version of the present, Mrs Elm and the books remained. She was
half in the librar y and half inside the memor y.

She was staring at someone in the corridor-river. It was her younger self
in the water, as the last of the summer light dissolved towards dark.