‘I just never really liked him.’

Joe frowned. ‘Really? I can’t remember you saying that . . . He’s okay. A good guy. Bit of a waster, maybe, back in the day, but he seems to have got his act together a bit . . .’

Nora was unsettled. ‘Joe?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You know when Mum died?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Where was I?’

‘What do you mean? Are you okay today, sis? Are the new tablets working?’

‘Tablets?’

She checked in her bag and started to rummage. Saw a small box of anti-depressants in her bag. Her heart sank.

‘I just wanted to know. Did I see much of Mum before she died?’

Joe frowned. He was still the same Joe. Still unable to read his sister. Still wanting to escape reality. ‘You know we weren’t there. It happened so fast. She didn’t tell us how ill she was. To protect us. Or maybe because she didn’t want us to tell her to stop drinking.’

‘Drinking? Mum was drinking?’

Joe’s worry increased. ‘Sis, have you got amnesia? She was on a bottle of gin every day since Nadia came onto the scene.’

‘Yeah. Course. I remember.’

‘Plus you had the European Championships coming up and she didn’t want to interfere with that . . .’

‘Jesus. I should have been there. One of us should have been there, Joe. We both—’

His expression frosted suddenly. ‘You were never that close to Mum, were you? Why this sudden—’

‘I got closer to her. I mean, I would have. I—’

‘You’re freaking me out. You’re acting not quite yourself.’

Nora nodded. ‘Yes, I . . . I just . . . yes, I think you’re right . . . I think it’s just the tablets . . .’

She remembered her mother, in her final months, saying: ‘I don’t know what I would have done without you.’ She’d probably said it to Joe too. But in this life, she’d had neither of them.

Then Priya arrived into the room. Grinning, clutching her phone and some kind of a clipboard.

‘It’s time,’ she said.

The Tree That Is Our Life

Five minutes later Nora was back in the hotel’s vast conference room. At least a thousand people were watching the first speaker conclude her presentation. The author of Zero to Hero. The book Dan had beside his bed in another life. But Nora wasn’t really listening, as she sat in her reserved seat in the front row. She was too upset about her mother, too nervous about the speech, so she just picked up the odd word or phrase that floated into her mind like croutons in minestrone. ‘Little-known fact’, ‘ambition’, ‘what you may be surprised to hear is that’, ‘if I can do it’, ‘hard knocks’.

It was hard to breathe in this room. It smelled of musky perfume and new carpet.

She tried to stay calm.

Leaning into her brother, she whispered, ‘I don’t think I can do this.’

‘What?’

‘I think I’m having a panic attack.’

He looked at her, smiling, but with a toughness in his eyes she remembered from a different life, when she’d had a panic attack before one of their early gigs with The Labyrinths at a pub in Bedford. ‘You’ll be fine.’

‘I don’t know if I can do this. I’ve gone blank.’

‘You’re overthinking it.’

‘I have anxiety. I have no other type of thinking available.’

‘Come on. Don’t let us down.’

Don’t let us down.

‘But—’

She tried to think of music.

Thinking of music had always calmed her down.

A tune came to her. She was slightly embarrassed, even within herself, to realise the song in her head was ‘Beautiful Sky’. A happy, hopeful song that she hadn’t sung in a long time. The sky grows dark The black over blue Yet the stars still dare / To shine for— But then the person Nora was sitting next to – a smartly dressed business woman in her fifties, and the source of the musky perfume smell – leaned in and whispered, ‘I’m so sorry about what happened to you. You know, the stuff in Portugal . . .’

‘What stuff?’

The woman’s reply was drowned out as the audience erupted into applause at that moment.

‘What?’ she asked again.

But it was too late. Nora was being beckoned towards the stage and her brother was elbowing her.

Her brother’s voice, bellowing almost: ‘They want you. Off you go.’

She headed tentatively towards the lectern on the stage, towards her own huge face smiling out triumphantly, golden medal around her neck, projected on the screen behind her.

She had always hated being watched.

‘Hello,’ she said nervously, into the microphone. ‘It is very nice to be here today . . .’

A thousand or so faces stared, waiting.

She had never spoken to so many people simultaneously. Even when she had been in The Labyrinths, they had never played a gig for more than a hundred people, and back then she kept the talking between the songs as minimal as possible. Working at String Theory, although she was perfectly okay talking with customers, she rarely spoke up in staff meetings, even though there had never been more than five people in the room. Back at university, while Izzy always breezed through presentations Nora would worry about them for weeks in advance.

Joe and Rory were staring at her with baffled expressions.

The Nora she had seen in the TED talk was not this Nora, and she doubted she could ever become that person. Not without having done all that she had done.

‘Hello. My name is Nora Seed.’

She hadn’t meant it to be funny but the whole room laughed at this. There had clearly been no need to introduce herself.

‘Life is strange,’ she said. ‘How we live it all at once. In a straight line. But really that’s not the whole picture. Because life isn’t simply made of the things we do, but the things we don’t do too. And every moment of our life is a . . . kind of turning.’

Still nothing.

‘Think about it. Think about how we start off . . . as this set thing. Like the seed of a tree planted in the ground. And then we . . . we grow . . . we grow . . . and at first we are a trunk . . .’

Absolutely nothing.

‘But then the tree – the tree that is our life – develops branches. And think of all those branches, departing from the trunk at different heights. And think of all those branches, branching off again, heading in often opposing directions. Think of those branches becoming other branches, and those becoming twigs. And think of the end of each of those twigs, all in different places, having started from the same one. A life is like that, but on a bigger scale. New branches are formed every second of every day. And from our perspective – from everyone’s perspective – it feels like a . . . like a continuum. Each twig has travelled only one journey. But there are still other twigs. And there are also other todays. Other lives that would have been different if you’d taken different directions earlier in your life. This is a tree of life. Lots of religions and mythologies have talked about the tree of life. It’s there in Buddhism, Judaism and Christianity. Lots of philosophers and writers have talked about tree metaphors too. For Sylvia Plath, existence was a fig tree and each possible life she could live – the happily-married one, the successful-poet one – was this sweet juicy fig, but she couldn’t get to taste the sweet juicy figs and so they just rotted right in front of her. It can drive you insane, thinking of all the other lives we don’t live.

‘For instance, in most of my lives I am not standing at this podium talking to you about success . . . In most lives I am not an Olympic gold medallist.’ She remembered something Mrs Elm had told her in the Midnight Library. ‘You see, doing one thing differently is very often the same as doing everything differently. Actions can’t be reversed within a lifetime, however much we try . . .’

People were listening now. They clearly needed a Mrs Elm in their lives.

‘The only way to learn is to live.’

And she went on in this manner for another twenty minutes, remembering as much as possible of what Mrs Elm had told her, and then she looked down at her hands, glowing white from the light of the lectern.

As she absorbed the sight of a raised, thin pink line of flesh, she knew the scar was self-inflicted, and it put her off her flow. Or rather, put her into a new one.