Birds of Paradise by Oliver Langmead (read any book .TXT) 📗

Adam. Then he retrieves the fur shawl, running his fingers through it before handing it across. “I had it cleaned,” he says. “There was a lot of blood on it.”

The shawl is brighter in daylight. The grey sun brings out even more colours in it.

Together, they haul open the rusted doors leading inside.

There’s an enormous trophy case in the dripping hallway, shadowed by the drooping, damp ceiling. At the very centre of the case is a tiny trophy, and Adam has to crouch down and squint to make out the writing engraved in it.

“FA Cup Participants,” he reads.

“At least they tried.”

Adam follows Magpie towards the bright white square of daylight at the end of the hall. The rose is light beneath his arm, but the fur shawl feels heavy, and when he looks at it, he can feel one of the thorns in his tangle of memories scratching at him. He realises it is a thorn of grief. So too was the thorn for his memory of Pike. Which means, conceivably, that every single thorn on every single branch twisted and knotted around in his skull is a single instance of grief.

How many has he mourned? How many are dead?

Adam clutches Fox’s coat to his chest.

The stadium is full of life.

Everywhere Adam looks, something is growing. The pitch looks as if it’s burst free, rolled over to the stands and devoured them completely, giving the effect of a broad, regular valley, all the way up to the distant heights of the stands. There are trees, and small fields of grass, and wild bushes, and patches of fungi, and even flowers. Protected on every side from the wind, the sight is tranquil, and the only movement is the burbling stream running in a channel through the centre of the stadium, and the hopping and gliding of the birds as they dart from tree to decaying wooden bench. The sight of the stadium is dazzling.

This is a good place, Adam thinks. A good place to lay Fox to rest.

“You find somewhere for the rose,” says Magpie, hauling a bag of compost from a stack. “I’ll find somewhere for Fox.

Together, they move through the huge garden, crunching across frosted swathes of grass.

Near a beech tree, Adam spies a place where the rose will be in light most of the day in summer. There’s a patch of empty soil not taken up by grass, so he kneels down and scoops out a deep enough hole. Then he carefully lifts the glass bell jar, and gently removes the rose from its temporary prison. The thorns of it snag at his fingers as he dusts down its exposed roots. Placing it reverently in the ditch, he takes handfuls of compost and, filling it in, pats it down. Magpie hands over a watering can, and Adam sprinkles a little across it. Satisfied, he sits back on the grass and rubs his hands together to remove the dirt. He’s surprised to find red among the bits of soil; there are small cuts in his fingers. The rose’s thorns are sharp enough to pierce his skin – sharp enough that its roots will taste his blood.

Magpie, meanwhile, has been digging at the roots of an alder tree with a shovel. It’s a well-chosen place, Adam thinks – the hole Magpie excavates resembles the entrance to a burrow. When enough earth has been cleared, he reverently places the shawl inside. Then, he carefully closes it up. Adam wanders across, and he and Magpie spend a few moments in quiet contemplation, listening to the light breeze rustle the trees.

Fox, in the snow.

The earth is white and the sky is white and everything in between is white – trees and river and breeze, snowflakes tumbling – but there are all the colours of Eden’s twilight, captured in her coat. She waits in the shadow of a branch, where her eyes gleam like the first stars of evening, fixed on the hare in the clearing. And when she leaps, the movement is fluid and silent, eclipsing the hare in her shadow.

“So what do you think?” Magpie asks.

“What do I think about what?”

“About all this.”

“The stadium? I like it.”

Magpie chuckles. “You haven’t worked it out yet, have you?”

“Worked what out?”

“Tell me what’s wrong with my garden.”

Emerging from his reminiscences, Adam examines the stadium. It’s a stunning array of species – not exactly exotic, but not mundane either. It’s the kind of thing he’d expect from a city’s botanic gardens. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with it. If Adam had any criticism, it would be that the garden’s contents don’t quite seem to fit together. It’s like Magpie’s tried to put together a jigsaw puzzle by cramming the pieces in any old way. There are exposed bits of soil here and there, and no real paths leading through it, so that the whole thing feels patchwork. It’s no crime, though; it’s just the telltale mark of an inexperienced gardener. With time, Adam thinks he could make this garden really something to behold. For a start, he’d do something about the arrangement of the flowers.

The flowers…

Beneath the stadium’s broken-glass boxes, there’s a single sunflower, still in bloom, which doesn’t make any sense. In fact, there are flowers here, there and everywhere, arranged erratically. The problem is that this is late autumn, and there shouldn’t be any flowers. In fact, the leaves on the trees shouldn’t be green. And neither should the trees be fruiting. Over among a set of benches, there’s a tree still blossoming, and only a few steps away from Adam is a chilli plant, bright red chillies dangling beneath its rich green leaves. There’s an apple tree with fresh, rosy apples hanging from its branches, and a pear tree, burdened by the weight of its fruit, and everything here is so superbly, ridiculously healthy, as if the season here is the perfect season for each individual plant.

Everything here is like the rose: a super-real specimen. Of course, he should have noticed