‘No,’ he said, defensively. ‘This place used to just be guitars. String Theory, get it? I diversified. Made this work. It’s just that when times are tough I can’t pay you to put off customers with your face looking like a wet weekend.’
‘What?’
‘I’m afraid, Nora’ – he paused for a moment, about the time it takes to lift an axe into the air– ‘I’m going to have to let you go.’
To Live Is to Suffer
Nine hours before she decided to die, Nora wandered around Bedford aimlessly. The town was a conveyor belt of despair. The pebble-dashed sports centre where her dead dad once watched her swim lengths of the pool, the Mexican restaurant where she’d taken Dan for fajitas, the hospital where her mum had her treatment.
Dan had texted her yesterday.
Nora, I miss your voice. Can we talk? D x
She’d said she wasstupidly hectic(big lol). Yet it was impossible to text anything else. Not because she didn’t still feel for him, but because she did. And couldn’t risk hurting him again. She’d ruined his life.My life is chaos, he’d told her, via drunk texts, shortly after the would-be wedding she’d pulled out of two days before.
The universe tended towards chaos and entropy. That was basic thermodynamics. Maybe it was basic existence too.
You lose your job, then more shit happens.
The wind whispered through the trees.
It began to rain.
She headed towards the shelter of a newsagent’s, with the deep – and, as it happened,correct –sense that things were about to get worse.
Doors
Eight hours before she decided to die, Nora entered the newsagent’s.
‘Sheltering from the rain?’ the woman behind the counter asked.
‘Yes.’ Nora kept her head down. Her despair growing like a weight she couldn’t carry.
ANational Geographicwas on display.
As she stared now at the magazine cover – an image of a black hole – she realised that’s what she was. A black hole. A dying star, collapsing in on itself.
Her dad used to subscribe. She remembered being enthralled by an article about Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. She’d never seen a place that looked sofar away. She’d read about scientists doing research among glaciers and frozen fjords and puffins. Then, prompted by Mrs Elm, she’d decided she wanted to be a glaciologist.
She saw the scruffy, hunched form of her brother’s friend – and their own former bandmate – Ravi by the music mags, engrossed in an article. She stood there for a fraction too long, because when she walked away she heard him say, ‘Nora?’
‘Ravi, hi. I hear Joe was in Bedford the other day?’
A small nod. ‘Yeah.’
‘Did he, um, did you see him?’
‘I did actually.’
A silence Nora felt as pain. ‘He didn’t tell me he was coming.’
‘Was just a fly-by.’
‘Is he okay?’
Ravi paused. Nora had once liked him, and he’d been a loyal friend to her brother. But, as with Joe, there was a barrier between them. They hadn’t parted on the best of terms. (He’d thrown his drumsticks on the floor of a rehearsal room and stropped out when Nora told him she was out of the band.) ‘I think he’s depressed.’
Nora’s mind grew heavier at the idea her brother might feel like she did.
