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There was on existence where Nora had kept up the fiction writing she had occasionally toyed with at university and was now a published author. Her novel The Shape of Regret received 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.
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