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

“You got new teeth.”

“I got new teeth a couple of days ago.”

“Oh,” says Adam, rubbing at the back of his head. “Sorry. I didn’t notice. I think I’ve been pretty distracted.”

They watch the ball as it rushes through the grass, propelled from one end of the uneven field to the other. At one point it goes wide and rolls into the canal, and one of the children splashes across to reclaim it from the reeds. Adam hasn’t been keeping track of the score, but neither have the children. It doesn’t seem to matter.

“Ready to go yet?” asks Magpie.

Adam realises that he had assumed this place was an ending of some kind. As if he might just be able to stay here and put down roots, like one of the trees. The idea that there is even a world outside the stadium bothers him; he’s not sure he wants to experience it again. He imagines it will be like going back to watching television on a black-and-white set after experiencing full colour high definition. “Go where?” he asks.

“First, we need to do a bit of shopping. Then, we’re going to Crow’s funeral.”

* * *

Central Manchester is bustling with people. Magpie queues for coffee and orders one for Adam, who sips at it reluctantly. Wherever Adam looks – sky, building or pavement – the world seems dull, as if someone’s turned the colour saturation down. Slowly, though, and with the help of the coffee, he begins to feel himself waking from the dream of Magpie’s stadium garden. People rush around him, and it’s there that he notices the bright colours he thought were missing: a purple mackintosh coat; a sunshine yellow baseball cap; the neon whirling of phone screens and billboard advertisements. There are pigeons among the people, and flecked in their grey feathers are iridescent blues and purples and aquamarines.

Beyond wire railings, and between high buildings that reflect the grey sky, waits the canal, and Magpie navigates the thin walkways around it, through private courtyards and empty brick alleyways. Here, Manchester is intermittently bright and dark, following no pattern, so that Adam finds himself dazzled by the constant shifting. The people they pass are hurried men and women with grey faces and stern expressions.

Up a spiral of wooden steps they emerge into a bustling open-air market, where the coarse voices of the sellers mingle with the coarse voices of the crows that hop among the litter. Adam steps around discarded banana peels and plastic bags, through corridors of tents, from which a melee of scents, sweet and sour, contend for his attention. The sky here is blue and grey in patches, and Adam tries to focus on it, ignoring the calls from the vendors trying to sell him phone cases, and imitation watches, and discount cabbages.

At a tall tent filled from top to bottom with threadbare T-shirts and trousers, Magpie enquires after their largest sizes and manages to find a few specimens that might actually fit Adam. And at a bench beside a stall selling fruit, from which the vendor’s voice is a constant stream of wordless noise that Adam is unable to interpret, Magpie tries on a pair of the trousers for fun, pulling them up around his skinny legs and strutting to and fro. He laughs so hard that Adam thinks it’s a wonder his crowns don’t come spilling out of his mouth.

“What do I need these for, anyway?” Adam asks.

“You smell like a man who’s spent a week sleeping under a tree.”

Further along, there is a stall selling particularly ripe looking fruits individually wrapped in vacuum-sealed plastic. Magpie hands an envelope brimming with cash to the grey-haired saleswoman, who loads a plastic bag with a choice of fruits from all across her selection – pears, and strawberries, and peaches. The worst are the bananas and the oranges, Adam thinks: the way that the plastic oozes around them like a second superfluous skin.

They stop for lunch at a stall selling steaming noodles. Adam devours his, surprised at his hunger, but then, he can’t remember the last time he ate. Maybe he really has spent the last week in Magpie’s stadium. Noodles squirm around Magpie’s chopsticks, and when he slurps at them Adam thinks they look like worms wriggling between his lips.

“Tell me what you think of these,” says Magpie, between mouthfuls. He pushes the bag of fruit across, so that it spills its contents. One of the bananas falls from the edge of the table, and when Adam reaches down to recover it he notices the bruise now marking it despite its protective packaging. There’s something uncomfortable about handling the plastic-wrapped fruits; the textures are all wrong, and lights gleams across them in strange ways.

“Open one,” says Magpie.

Setting the rest aside, Adam unwraps an orange. The plastic comes free easily. He continues to unwrap it, peeling apart its skin with his fingers, and then parting its segments. The sharp sting of citrus rises from the fruit, and he plucks the seeds from its flesh, weighing them in his hand. There doesn’t seem to be anything special about the orange. “It’s an orange,” he says.

Magpie laughs. “It is an orange. But it’s an orange that costs twice as much as any other orange here. It comes from a special farm, where oranges are grown all year round and wrapped in their own little packages. Of course, you and I know that the packaging does nothing. It’s all an aesthetic to say: look at how much we care about our fruits. The superior quality of them is evident in the way we protect them, each in their own sheath. They must taste better than any of our rivals’ fruits. Devilish, really.”

“It’s just an orange, though.”

“Exactly. That’s what makes it so brilliant.”

“Why did you buy these?”

Magpie shrugs. “Know thy enemy. These are from the Sinclairs’ orchards. From what I can gather, Frank Sinclair still has at least one more piece of Eden. And once we’re done at Crow’s