As she remembered this, the corridor at the end of the aisle in the library 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 library and half inside the memory.

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.

Equidistance

The river was cold, and the current strong.

She remembered, as she watched herself, the aches in her shoulders and arms. The stiff heaviness of them, as if she’d been wearing armour. She remembered not understanding why, for all that effort, the silhouette of the sycamore trees stubbornly stayed the same size, just as the bank stayed exactly the same distance away. She remembered swallowing some of the dirty water. And looking around at the other bank, the bank from where she had come and the place where she was kind of now standing, watching, along with that younger version of her brother and his friends, beside her, oblivious to her present self, and to the bookshelves on either side of them.

She remembered how, in her delirium, she had thought of the word ‘equidistant’. A word that belonged in the clinical safety of a classroom. Equidistant. Such a neutral, mathematical kind of word, and one that became a stuck thought, repeating itself like a manic meditation as she used the last of her strength to stay almost exactly where she was. Equidistant. Equidistant. Equidistant. Not aligned to one bank or the other.

That was how she had felt most of her life.

Caught in the middle. Struggling, flailing, just trying to survive while not knowing which way to go. Which path to commit to without regret.

She looked at the bank on the other side – now with added bookshelves, but still with the large silhouette of a sycamore tree leaning over the water like a worried parent, the wind shushing through its leaves.

‘But you did commit,’ said Mrs Elm, evidently having heard Nora’s thoughts. ‘And you survived.’

Someone Else’s Dream

‘Life is always an act,’ Mrs Elm said, as they watched her brother being pulled back from the water’s edge by his friends. As he then watched a girl whose name she’d long forgotten make an emergency call. ‘And you acted when it counted. You swam to that bank. You clawed yourself out. You coughed your guts out and had hypothermia but you crossed the river, against incredible odds. You found something inside you.’

‘Yes. Bacteria. I was ill for weeks. I swallowed so much of that shitty water.’

‘But you lived. You had hope.’

‘Yeah, well, I was losing it by the day.’

She stared down, to see the grass shrink back into the stone, and looked back to catch the last sight of the water before it shimmered away and the sycamore tree dissolved into air along with her brother and his friends and her own young self.

The library looked exactly like the library again. But now the books were all back on the shelves and the lights had stopped flickering.

‘I was so stupid, doing that swim, just trying to impress people. I always thought Joe was better than me. I wanted him to like me.’

‘Why did you think he was better than you? Because your parents did?’

Nora felt angry at Mrs Elm’s directness. But maybe she had a point. ‘I always had to do what they wanted me to do in order to impress them. Joe had his issues, obviously. And I didn’t really understand those issues until I knew he was gay, but they say sibling rivalry isn’t about siblings but parents, and I always felt my parents just encouraged his dreams a bit more.’

‘Like music?’

‘Yeah.’

‘When he and Ravi decided they wanted to be rock stars, Mum and Dad bought Joe a guitar and then an electric piano.’

‘How did that go?’

‘The guitar bit went well. He could play “Smoke On The Water” within a week of getting it, but he wasn’t into the piano and decided he didn’t want it cluttering up his room.’

‘And that’s when you got it.’ Mrs Elm said this as a statement rather than a question. She knew. Of course she knew.

‘Yeah.’

‘It was moved into your room, and you welcomed it like a friend, and started learning to play it with steadfast determination. You spent your pocket money on piano-teaching guides and Mozart for Beginners and The Beatles for Piano. Because you liked it. But also because you wanted to impress your older brother.’

‘I never told you all this.’

A wry smile. ‘Don’t worry. I read the book.’

‘Right. Course. Yeah. Got you.’

‘You might need to stop worrying about other people’s approval, Nora,’ Mrs Elm said in a whisper, for added power and intimacy. ‘You don’t need a permission slip to be your—’

‘Yes. I get it.’

And she did get it.

Every life she had tried so far since entering the library had really been someone else’s dream. The married life in the pub had been Dan’s dream. The trip to Australia had been Izzy’s dream, and her regret about not going had been a guilt for her best friend more than a sorrow for herself. The dream of her becoming a swimming champion belonged to her father. And okay, so it was true that she had been interested in the Arctic and being a glaciologist when she was younger, but that had been steered quite significantly by her chats with Mrs Elm herself, back in the school library. And The Labyrinths, well, that had always been her brother’s dream.