Never underestimate the big importance of small things, Mrs Elm had said.You must always remember that.
She stared at her own window. She thought of herself in her root life, hovering between life and death in her bedroom – equidistant, as it were. And, for the first time, Nora worried about herself as if she was actually someone else. Not just another version of her, but a different actual person. As though finally, through all the experiences of life she now had, she had become someone who pitied her former self. Not in self-pity, because she was a different self now.
Then someone appeared at her own window. A woman who wasn’t her, holding a cat that wasn’t Voltaire.
This was her hope, anyway, even as she began to feel faint and fuzzy again.
She headed into town. Walked down the high street.
Yes, she was different now. She was stronger. She had untapped things inside her. Things she might never have known about if she’d never sung in an arena or fought off a polar bear or felt so much love and fear and courage.
There was a commotion outside Boots. Two boys were being arrested by police officers as a nearby store detective spoke into a walkie-talkie.
She recognised one of the boys and went up to him.
‘Leo?’
A police officer motioned for her to back away.
‘Who are you?’ Leo asked.
‘I—’ Nora realised she couldn’t say ‘your piano teacher’. And she realised how mad it was, given the fraught context, to say what she was about to say. But still, she said it. ‘Do you have music lessons?’
Leo looked down as the handcuffs were put on him. ‘I ain’t done no music lessons ...’
His voice had lost its bravado.
The police officer was frustrated now. ‘Please, miss, leave this to us.’
‘He’s a good kid,’ Nora told him. ‘Please don’t be too hard on him.’
‘Well, this good kid just stole two hundred quid’s worth from there. And has also just been found to be in possession of a concealed weapon.’
‘Weapon?’
‘A knife.’
‘No. There must be some mix-up. He’s not that sort of kid.’
‘Hear that,’ the police officer said to his colleague. ‘Lady here thinks our friend Leo Thompson isn’t the kind of kid to get into trouble.’
The other police officer laughed. ‘He’s always in and out of bother, this one.’
‘Now, please,’ the first police officer said, ‘let us do our jobs here ...’
‘Of course,’ said Nora, ‘of course. Do everything they say, Leo ...’
He looked at her as if she’d been sent as a practical joke.
A few years ago his mum Doreen had come into String Theory to buy her son a cheap keyboard. She’d been worried about his behaviour at school and he’d expressed an interest in music and so she wanted to get him piano lessons. Nora explained she had an electric piano, and could play, but had no formal teacher training. Doreen had explained she didn’t have much money but they struck a deal, and Nora had enjoyed her Tuesday evenings teaching Leo the difference between major and minor seventh chords and thought he was a great boy, eager to learn.
Doreen had seen Leo was ‘getting caught up in the wrong set’, but when he got into music he started doing well in other things too. And suddenly he wasn’t getting into trouble with teachers any more, and he’d play everything from Chopin through Scott Joplin to Frank Ocean and John Legend and Rex Orange County with the same care and commitment.
Something Mrs Elm had said on an early visit to the Midnight Library came to her.
Every life contains many millions of decisions. Some big, some small. But every time one decision is taken over another, the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs, which in turn leads to further variations ...
In this timeline right now, the one where she had studied a Master’s at Cambridge, and married Ash and had a baby, she hadn’t been in String Theory on the day four years ago when Doreen and Leo came by. In this timeline, Doreen never found a music teacher who was cheap enough, and so Leo never persisted with music for long enough to realise he had a talent. He never sat there, side-by-side with Nora on a Tuesday evening, pursuing a passion that he extended at home, producing his own tunes.
