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

pack open, revealing a large chunk of veined white marble, carved with curls. “Been working as a mason these past few decades. Client in Sheffield looking for someone to carve him a marble fireplace, wanted to see a sample up close. What you headed to Brighton for?”

Adam reveals the contents of his satchel. “Getting my guns fixed.”

Crab’s stormy brows rise. “Well, now. Last time I saw you wearing these, you were heading to France, coat covered in shiny brass buttons. War with Napoleon,” he rumbles, thoughtfully. “Half a century of death and gunpowder. And now there’s a bloody great tunnel, and you can hop on a train and be in Paris in a couple of hours.” Reaching into the satchel, Crab turns the first gun over in his hands. “Funny how things turn out, ain’t it?”

Adam admires the sleek trains, idling on their platforms.

“What do you need your guns for?” asks Crab.

Adam considers the question, but he’s not entirely sure how to answer. He settles on: “I’ve been doing some gardening, and I’ve run into something of a pest problem.”

Crab raises a brow. “Must be a hell of a pest.”

“It’s an invasive species.”

Crab chuckles, which makes him sound as if he’s gargling marbles. “Tell you what, lad,” he says. “I’ll save you a trip. You just leave these with me and I’ll restore ’em. I worked for the Queen’s own armoury while you were away fighting the French. There ain’t no powder pistol in Britain I couldn’t improve.” Replacing the gun in Adam’s pack, Crab takes it and hauls it over his free shoulder. “So long as you ain’t in a hurry? Might take me a few days.”

“No hurry.”

“Grand.” Crab slaps Adam’s arm. “Got a workshop in Lambeth, down by the canal. Come visit me next week and I’ll have some old vases we can test ’em on.”

Together, they wander out of the station and back into the bright light of King’s Cross.

“Thanks, Crab,” says Adam.

“It’s a pleasure, lad. Good to see you.”

“Good to see you, too.”

As Crab departs, a broad shape shuffling through the crowds that swirl between St Pancras and King’s Cross, Adam pauses, noticing the rainbows. There appears to be an awful lot of rainbows in London, today. Everyone is wearing bright colours, and the coffee shops are advertising rainbow-themed drinks, and every visible flagpole has a rainbow flag hanging from it. There are more rainbows in the haze left by the street cleaners, and in the oil slick oozing into the drains, and in the chrome exhausts of the cars that idle along the busy road. Only the open blue sky lacks rainbows, though Adam is careful to search every corner of it. As he starts walking back to Piccadilly, he wonders what they’re all for.

* * *

Adam pauses outside the British Museum. He has some time to kill and figures it might be nice to look at some relics and reminisce of Londons past. Today, there’s a queue of people lining up to go through a security checkpoint at the gates – they are searching bags, and running metal detectors over everyone, before allowing them inside. There doesn’t seem to be any particular reason for all the heightened security, but then, there are extra layers of security everywhere, these days: the product of a paranoid age, Adam thinks. He also thinks that all the bits of metal embedded in him would undoubtedly set off those metal detectors, so he goes to a bookshop instead.

In the front window is a display for a book called My Friend the Murderer by Cassandra Coleman, and the cover is a highly embellished version of Adam’s mugshot. It doesn’t look much like him any more, he thinks – the artist has drawn so much attention to the scars across his face that he looks like a patchwork of different people. He steps inside and flicks through a copy, only to find a complete stranger described in the pages. The book claims that Adam was often violent, involved with the cartels, and ran a dog-fighting ring out of his own backyard. Adam is depicted as a villain, and Cassandra is depicted as a survivor. Adam places it back on the shelf and wonders how many other books he appears in – how many fictional versions of himself exist. Quite a few, he imagines, some of which are being sold here. There is a whole rack of Bibles in the Religion section, and he knows that the version of him contained in them varies quite heavily from translation to translation.

The bookshop is large, and well stocked. Adam considers his options and, inspired by the museum, wanders over to the History section. Adam has something of a strange relationship with history books. The problem is that he’s lived through a lot of the history being described, and whenever an obvious inaccuracy occurs, he finds it jarring. Nevertheless, he settles on an ethnography of the villages of West India, and finds a comfortable chair to sit in, flicking through and letting the words pass into him. The ethnography is dry, and describes everyday village life in exhausting detail, but in that detail Adam recognises echoes of Indias past.

The shelves of books around him, and the gentle muttering of the shoppers, and the repetitive, formal language of the ethnography bring Adam back to a time he had almost forgotten, when he and Eve lived at the Mahavihara in Nalanda. The Mahavihara’s library was enormous, and required a lot of maintenance, which Eve was happy to help supply while Adam worked on the gardens outside. In the evenings, he would go among the books and read and read until darkness gripped the library, and there he would sleep until dawn, and continue reading by that first light. He remembers the shuffling of the scholars among the shelves, and the distant mutterings of the Buddhist temples, and the rich parchment smell of all those books.

Whenever a monk or a teacher or a visiting scholar died, it was