She stepped out with her glass of wine and walked among the moonlit vines.
She stared at the clear sky full of stars.
There was absolutely nothing wrong with this life, but she felt inside her a craving for other things, other lives, other possibilities. She felt like she was still in the air, not ready to land. Maybe she was more like Hugo Lefèvre than she had realised. Maybe she could flick through lives as easily as flicking pages.
She gulped the rest of the wine, knowing there would be no hangover. ‘Earth and wood,’ she said to herself. She closed her eyes.
It wasn’t long now.
Not long at all.
She just stood there and waited to disappear.
The Many Lives of Nora Seed
Nora came to understand something. Something Hugo had never fully explained to her in that kitchen in Svalbard. You didn’t have to enjoy every aspect of each life to keep having the option of experiencing them. You just had to never give up on the idea that there would be a life somewhere that could be enjoyed. Equally, enjoying a life didn’t mean you stayed in that life. You only stayed in a life for ever if you couldn’t imagine a better one, and yet, paradoxically, the more lives you tried the easier it became to think of something better, as the imagination broadened a bit more with every new life she sampled.
So, in time, and with Mrs Elm’s assistance, Nora took lots of books from the shelves, and ended up having a taste of lots of different lives in her search for the right one. She learned that undoing regrets was really a way of making wishes come true. There was almostanylife she was living in one universe, after all.
In one life she had quite a solitary time in Paris, and taught English at a college in Montparnasse and cycled by the Seine and read lots of books on park benches. In another, she was a yoga teacher with the neck mobility of an owl.
In one life she had kept up swimming but had never tried to pursue the Olympics. She just did it for fun. In that life she was a lifeguard in the beach resort of Sitges, near Barcelona, was fluent in both Catalan and Spanish, and had a hilarious best friend called Gabriela who taught her how to surf, and who she shared an apartment with, five minutes from the beach.
There was one existence where Nora had kept up the fiction writing she had occasionally toyed with at university and was now a published author. Her novelThe Shape of Regretreceived rave reviews and was shortlisted for a major literary award. In that life she had lunch in a disappointingly banal Soho members’ club with two affable, easy-going producers from Magic Lantern Productions, who wanted to option it for film. She ended up choking on a piece of flatbread and knocking her red wine over one of the producer’s trousers and messing up the whole meeting.
In one life she had a teenage son called Henry, who she never met properly because he kept slamming doors in her face.
In one life she was a concert pianist, currently on tour in Scandinavia, playing night after night to besotted crowds (and fading into the Midnight Library during one disastrous rendition of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 at the Finlandia Hall in Helsinki).
In one life she only ate toast.
In one life she went to Oxford and became a lecturer in Philosophy at St Catherine’s College and lived by herself in a fine Georgian townhouse in a genteel row, amid an environment of respectable calm.
In another life Nora was a sea of emotion. She felt everything deeply and directly. Every joy and every sorrow. A single moment could contain both intense pleasure and intense pain, as if both were dependent on each other, like a pendulum in motion. A simple walk outside and she could feel a heavy sadness simply because the sun had slipped behind a cloud. Yet, conversely, meeting a dog who was clearly grateful for her attention caused her to feel so exultant that she felt she could melt into the pavement with sheer bliss. In that life she had a book of Emily Dickinson poems beside her bed and she had a playlist called ‘Extreme States of Euphoria’ and another one called ‘The Glue to Fix Me When I Am Broken’.
In one life she was a travel vlogger who had 1,750,000 YouTube subscribers and almost as many people following her on Instagram, and her most popular video was one where she fell off a gondola in Venice. She also had one about Rome called ‘A Roma Therapy’.
In one life she was a single parent to a baby that literally wouldn’t sleep.
In one life she ran the showbiz column in a tabloid newspaper and did stories about Ryan Bailey’s relationships.
In one life she was the picture editor at theNational Geographic.
In one life she was a successful eco-architect who lived a carbon-neutral existence in a self-designed bungalow that harvested rain-water and ran on solar power.
In one life she was an aid worker in Botswana.
In one life a cat-sitter.
In one life a volunteer in a homeless shelter.
In one life she was sleeping on her only friend’s sofa.
In one life she taught music in Montreal.
In one life she spent all day arguing with people she didn’t know on Twitter and ended a fair proportion of her tweets by saying ‘Do better’ while secretly realising she was telling herself to do that.
In one life she had no social media accounts.
