According to her flatmate, Nora Seed, Isabel had been driving from Sydney back to Byron Bay, to attend Nora’s birthday party. Isabel had recently started working for Byron Bay Whale Watching Tours.
‘I am totally devastated,’ Nora said. ‘We travelled to Australia together only a month ago and Izzy had planned to stay here for as long as possible. She was such a force of life that it feels impossible to imagine the world without her in it. She was so excited about her new job. It is so unbearably sad and hard to comprehend.’
The passengers of the other car all suffered injuries, and the driver – Chris Dale – had to be airlifted to the hospital at Baringa.
New South Wales Police are asking anyone who witnessed the collision to come forward to help with their enquiries.
‘Oh my God,’ she whispered to herself, feeling faint. ‘Oh, Izzy.’
She knew that Izzy wasn’t dead in all her lives. Or even most of them. But in this one it was real, and the grief Nora felt felt real too. The grief was familiar and terrifying and laced with guilt.
Before she could properly process anything, the mobile rang. It said ‘Work’.
A man’s voice. A slow drawl. ‘Where are you?’
‘What?’
‘You were meant to be here half an hour ago.’
‘Where?’
‘The ferry terminal. You’re selling tickets. I’ve got the correct number, right? This is Nora Seed I’m talking to?’
‘It’s one of them,’ sighed Nora, as she gently faded away.
Fish Tank
The shrewd-eyed librarian was back at her chessboard and hardly looked up as Nora arrived back.
‘Well, that was terrible.’
Mrs Elm smiled, wryly. ‘It just shows you, doesn’t it?’
‘Shows me what?’
‘Well, that you can choose choices but not outcomes. But I stand by what I said. It was a good choice. It just wasn’t a desired outcome.’
Nora studied Mrs Elm’s face. Was sheenjoyingthis?
‘Why did I stay?’ Nora asked. ‘Why didn’t I just come home, after she died?’
Mrs Elm shrugged. ‘You got stuck. You were grieving. You were depressed. You know what depression is like.’
Nora understood this. She thought of a study she had read about somewhere, about fish. Fish were more like humans than most people think.
Fish get depression. They had done tests with zebrafish. They had a fish tank and they drew a horizontal line on the side of it, halfway down, in marker pen. Depressed fish stayed below the line. But give those same fish Prozac and they go above the line, to the top of their tanks, darting about like new.
Fish get depressed when they have a lack of stimulation. A lack ofeverything. When they are just there, floating in a tank that resembles nothing at all.
Maybe Australia had been her empty fish tank, once Izzy had gone. Maybe she just had no incentive to swim above the line. And maybe even Prozac – or fluoxetine – wasn’t enough to help her rise up. So she was just going to stay there in that flat, with Jojo, and never move until she was made to leave the country.
Maybe even suicide would have been tooactive. Maybe in some lives you just float around and expect nothing else and don’t even try to change. Maybe that was most lives.
‘Yes,’ said Nora, aloud now. ‘Maybe I got stuck. Maybe in every life I am stuck. I mean, maybe that’s just who I am. A starfish in every life is still a starfish. There isn’t a life where a starfish is a professor of aerospace engineering. And maybe there isn’t a life where I’m not stuck.’
‘Well, I think you are wrong.’
‘Okay, then. I would like to try the life where I am not stuck. What life would that be?’
