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

you’d try and find me, so I thought I’d save you the trouble.” He rolls his sleeve back and checks his watch. “I’m on a tight schedule, I’m afraid, but I have time for a quick chat. There’s a conservatory café attached to this place that does some splendid scones. The scones themselves are a little dry and floury, and the butter comes in those dreadful pre-packed oblongs, but the jam is excellent and they are quite generous with it.”

Adam replaces his shovels. “You make it sound like you’ve tried every café in Scotland.”

“Most of them,” he concedes.

The conservatory is warm and bustling with calmer shoppers. It is pleasant to walk among the out-of-season plants, Adam thinks, no matter how strange it is to have flowers blooming so late in the year. The vivid colours of them are soothing. The café is positioned between trellises covered in varieties of ivy so thick that they almost completely engulf the glass walls, and the tables are of an awkward white metal designed for outdoor use, impractical for balancing cups and saucers upon. Adam’s chair is uncomfortable, no matter which position he takes on it.

Magpie returns from the counter with a tray of tea and a stack of scones. “The jam is homemade, apparently, but the lady behind the counter won’t tell me her recipe. Credit to her, I suppose. It keeps me coming back.” He cracks open a scone, smears it with a thin layer of butter, and pours jam onto it straight from the jar. When he bites into it, jam oozes from the corner of his mouth and drips onto his plate, and when he grins there are tiny red seeds clinging to his pearly teeth. “Marvellous,” he says. “Simply marvellous.”

Adam tries a scone. The jam is good, he thinks. “I buried Pig beneath the cherry tree,” he says.

Magpie’s smile softens. The cheerful noise filling the conservatory seems to lull, fading with his smile, until Adam can hear the gentle clinking of the wind-chimes for sale outside. When all trace of his teeth has gone, and his expression has settled into something sombre, the network of scars across Magpie’s face became so much more apparent. They are the silver of spider silk, Adam thinks.

“Do you remember,” says Magpie, gently, and his eyes follow the stir of his spoon as it swirls his tea, “the time we went to the Alps together?”

Adam thinks he remembers the sky – an unbroken white the same colour as the snow. “We went in winter.”

“That’s right. You read about skiing in an almanac and wanted to give it a go, but you were no good at it. We spent a good few months up there in a cabin. Every day you’d go out and sink into the snow, and every night you’d go into the forest and find dead boughs to cut down so we had something for the fire. Do you remember the day I brought peaches back from the village?”

“Peaches?”

“Yes. I was traipsing around the market, miserable as anything, filling a pack with all kinds of salted meats and scraggly dried vegetables, when I came across a stall selling peaches. They were completely out of place. The colour, the freshness, the size of them. It was the middle of winter, and there were peaches. Of course I bought them all, and dragged them back up the mountain, and puzzled over them for days, poring over them while you were out struggling with your skis. The thing about them, beside the fact that they were completely out of season, was that the taste of them was so damn familiar, but I couldn’t for the life of me work out why.

“Then, one clear day, I went out and stretched my wings for a while, circling the big white frozen sky until the tips of my wings went numb. When I came back, starving hungry, I decided to peck at a peach. And that’s when it came back to me. That’s when I realised that I had tasted these peaches before, all the way back in the garden. It was a revelation, of course. The existence of the peaches meant that the peach tree had survived, just like we had. And if the peach tree had survived, well… what else might have? How much of Eden was still out there?

“The next day I went back down to the village and found the stall that had sold me the peaches. It was run by this fair young man by the name of Matteo, and I flattered him into showing me his farm. We traipsed all the miles down to it together, and he introduced me to his father and his mother, who were both pleased to show me their humble orchards in return for a generous purse. Those orchards were half buried in snow, each tree leafless and hibernating through the winter. Except, of course, for a single peach tree, settled on a low rise, still clothed in green, with pink and orange peaches dangling engorged from its branches. It was wonderful to behold.”

“Did you steal it?”

Magpie sips at his tea. “No,” he says, and his smile slowly returns. “I married Matteo.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“By the time of the wedding, you were long gone. Through to Constantinople, I think. But yes: I married Matteo in a tiny little private ceremony. Just the two of us, and the promises between us. And I lived on his farm with him until he died. We were together for the better half of a century before I inherited the farm from him, peach tree and all.” Magpie’s eyes are agleam with his recollection. “It never mattered to him that I was a bird. He loved to watch me fly. I mourned for him a long time after he was gone. I still mourn for him today. A few months after he passed, I decided to see just how many pieces of Eden were still out there.”

“A lot.”

“More than I had imagined.”