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

funeral, we’re going to take it from him. How does that sound?”

Adam munches at a segment of orange. “I’ve been thinking,” he says.

“Have you, now?”

“Your collection. What’s it for?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean – the stadium. The garden. What are you gonna do with it once you’ve finished gathering up all the bits?”

Magpie shrugs. “I haven’t really thought that far ahead.”

“Seriously?”

“I am but a humble curator, Adam. It’s not my place to assign meaning to the art.”

“Sure.” Adam pops another segment into his mouth.

“Tell me, then.”

“Tell you what?”

“Your idea. There’s obviously something happening in that big skull of yours.”

“I mean…” Adam pauses, before eating another piece of orange. He turns the segment over in his hand, studying the network of veins through it; they resemble the lines of his palm, he thinks. The last time he ate an orange, he was in jail, and that feels like whole lifetimes ago. “So many are dead.”

“You’re going to have to elaborate for me.”

“Fox, I mean. And Pike. And Tiger.”

“And all the rest. Yes, Adam. I know how many are dead. I helped Rook build his firm, remember. I’ve seen the files.”

“Well. What if there was a safe place for them? Those still alive, I mean.”

“You want to offer them my stadium?”

Adam shrugs. “Why not?”

Magpie’s face is perfectly expressionless for a moment. Then his smile emerges, slow as sunrise. “Tell you what,” he says. “You agree to help me rid Frank Sinclair of his last pieces of paradise, and we can present your idea to Rook. He’ll be at the funeral.”

There’s a warm glow in Adam’s stomach that might be the orange, or maybe something else. “That sounds good,” he says.

After lunch they head deeper into the market, to the indoor section, where the roof closes in on them and the noise becomes an echoing crescendo. There is no escape from the stalls and scents in here, and all the flashing lights, and the bloodshot whites of wide eyes, leave Adam feeling claustrophobic. At a stall selling war memorabilia, Magpie hands another enormous envelope to the vendor, while Adam glances through the medals in the display cabinet. He recognises some of those symbols, and he wonders if he ever earned any of them for himself. The vendor rolls a large, sealed barrel out from under his table, and he and Magpie shake hands. “There you are,” says Magpie to Adam, rapping his knuckles across the waxed wood.

“What is it?”

“Gunpowder.”

“You bought a barrel of gunpowder?”

“I promised I would. For your guns. You’re going to have to carry it, though.”

Adam crouches beside it and checks the seals. The barrel seems watertight. He’s still hesitant about hauling a barrel filled with explosive powder through a busy city centre, though. “This is a bad idea.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll be fine.”

“Where are we taking it?”

“There’s a gym a few streets over.”

“Why are we taking a barrel of gunpowder to a gym?”

“So you can have a shower, Adam. You stink.”

The barrel is heavy, and has the acrid, metallic smell of explosives that Adam hates. It conjures dark images in his thoughts: images of the dead and dying, lying across bloodied fields, and all the birds landing and feasting on them, their wings disturbing the haze left by the guns and cannons. The whimpering and weeping and wordless crying out of the dying never affected him, he knows; the worst was always the screaming of the horses. It’s strange, he thinks, the way that he doesn’t mind thousands of his own children going to war, but the thought of a single horse dying on a battlefield affects him so much: the rolling eyes, the frothing at the mouth, and the simple, clear pain, felt without understanding. There was a time, Adam remembers, that he did care about his children, but he’s not sure when or why that changed. The answer lies somewhere in depths of the thorns wreathed around the inside of his skull: some forgotten memory at root of his grief.

“Here,” says Magpie, handing Adam a white plastic card.

“You have a gym membership?”

“Of course I have a gym membership.”

Magpie has a stick-figure body, Adam observes. “Why do you have a gym membership?”

“It’s a bit like a zoo, don’t you think?” Magpie grins. “Leave the barrel with me.”

The showers are too hot, but Adam doesn’t mind. He bows his head and lets the water cascade over him, pooling in his scars and running like rivers down his bare flesh. The clods of earth clinging to him are washed away, revealing yet more scars. Around him, men with red faces and muscles like slabs tremble in the heat, washing away sweat and exchanging envious glances with each other. Adam closes his eyes and idly traces his scars – all those slashes and swirls marking his skin – until his hands reach the heart beating in his chest, and there they pause, feeling the steady thump of it against his ribs. It’s Eve’s heart, and he spends a while listening to it, hidden there so deep inside him, safe beneath all his layers of flesh and muscle and bone. His body is its armour, he thinks – dented, and worn, and bashed, but still strong enough to protect it, even after all this time.

Once Magpie’s garden is complete, he will show it to Eve, he thinks, and maybe they could stay there for a while, and remember how things were together.

“You all right, there?” A man has been trying to speak to Adam for a while, it seems. This man has particularly bulbous muscles, and his thighs are so broad that they chafe as he wanders across, clenching and unclenching his swollen fists so that his biceps flex. “I was just asking, how much do you bench?”

“Sorry?”

“Bench. How much do you bench? You must dead-lift, right?”

“No, sorry.”

“Look, mate. Between you and me. What are you taking, for results like that?”

“Taking?”

“You need to put me in touch with your trainer. With your dealer.”

“You’ve lost me.”

The man draws himself up close. “Steroids,” he hisses. “What