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

Magpie checks his watch again. “Anyway. I can’t stay. I need to catch a train down to London, so I can take the Eurostar through to Belgium. There are rumours that a convent of nuns outside Antwerp have in their possession an undying gorse bush.” He wipes the crumbs from his face with a napkin. “Before I go, though, I have a gift for you.” He slips an envelope onto the table. “A souvenir,” he says, with a wink.

The envelope is small, but heavy. Adam tears it open and pours the contents out. Silver crowns tumble onto his palm: molars and incisors, and even a couple of canines. Half a mouthful of teeth. He sifts through them with his thumb as he might seeds – as if trees might grow from them. Maybe he can plant them in the greenhouse vault, he thinks, before realising that he still has questions he was meaning to ask. But when he looks up, Magpie is gone.

Adam remains in the café while his tea cools and the butter turns greasy in the warmth. He waits for his thoughts to still before pocketing the crowns, and then begins to consider the shovels again. The metal shovel was a decent weight, he thinks, but the wooden shovel was covered in a good quality varnish that would prevent it from splintering for a few seasons. Before he takes his leave, Adam goes to the counter and buys a few jars of jam: strawberry, and raspberry, and blackcurrant. Crow will appreciate them, he thinks. She likes sweet things just as much as her brother does.

* * *

Adam tends to the garden.

Days and weeks pass, and from time to time Rook arrives with someone new. The first is Kingfisher, whose whirring colours serve only to accentuate the sumptuous brightness of the garden. Then there is Lynx, who emerges from Eden’s reconstructed forests every night and slumbers curled up beside Adam, rumbling his ribs with her purr. When Crane arrives, she casts her broad shadow long over the garden. So, too, come so many others, until the vault is noisy with their calls. Yet each time Rook returns with someone new, Adam finds that he is disappointed. And as weeks turn into months, he begins to examine his disappointment. The problem is that he keeps expecting Eve to arrive, he thinks. And yet… somewhere deep inside him, he knows that she never will.

One day, after a lot of thought, he emerges from the green-house.

The valley outside has been transformed by spring. All the seeds Adam planted over winter have started to sprout, filling the basin from edge to edge with green. Tall grasses have consumed the worst of the shattered greenhouses of the farm, and Adam wades through them towards the upturned shape of the yacht. The ruined craft has been transformed, as well: it now resembles a kind of shack, covered in a layer of moss, with grasses sticking from the cracks in its hull. Lying outside it on a deckchair is Crab, soaking up the sunshine as bees buzz around him.

“You’re living out here?” asks Adam.

“Aye, lad. I’ll be around a small while longer, I reckon, then I’ll be gone.”

“You’re not staying?”

“You ain’t got nothing but a pond in there, lad. What’s a pond compared to the open sea?”

“Fair enough.” Adam has brought a box with him, and inside it is the rose planted in a small amount of soil, its petals pale and resplendent in the sunlight.

“What’s that for?” asks Crab.

Adam considers his answer. “Do you still have your boat?” he asks.

“Aye, lad. There’s a river across the way.”

“Can you take me up north? To Eve?”

Crab’s stormy brows rise. “I can,” he says. “If that’s what you want.”

It’s hot enough that Crab wears only a pair of beaten jeans along with some sandals, and in the bright sunlight his coarse skin is slowly reddening. He steers his little tub of a boat gently along, north and upriver through Scotland, towards the glens at the country’s heart. Spring is everywhere, and Adam watches it pass by – the fresh leaves unfurling on the branches of all the trees.

“You remembered, then?” rumbles Crab, eventually.

“I think I always knew,” says Adam. “Something Rook said just threw me off for a while.”

“Aye,” says Crab. “He reckons it’s kinder on you to let you forget.”

For the past few weeks, Adam has been gently probing the cause of his broken memories. And what he found there surprised him. It was a rose – Eden’s own white rose. All his thorns of grief belonged to an enormous, overgrown rosebush. “I don’t remember the details,” he says, “but I know where she is. How long ago did it happen?”

“Oh,” Crab frowns, thoughtfully. “Centuries ago, now.”

“How did it happen?”

“You sure you want to know?”

The rose is so light, in its box. Adam turns it around, filling his mind with the wonderful shape of it. He knows all too well the power of ignorance, but it’s time, he thinks, that he confronted the rosebush binding his memories. “Tell me,” he says.

“It was you, lad. You did it.”

“I killed her?”

“She asked you to.”

Adam remembers, then, the weight of the knife; the strength it took to push it between her ribs and into the heart caged within them. He remembers her breath against his neck as it stilled, the wetness of her blood across his knees, and the way her hands slowly lost their grip on his as she died. “I killed her,” he says. There were bees, because he had been keeping bees at the time – his skin too tough for their stingers – and they filled the air with their humming. There were dandelion seeds, as well, drifting with the breeze. Yet, for all the bees and seeds and winds, there was such a stillness.

“I won’t be gone,” she had told him. “My heart will still beat in your chest.”

Except, she was gone.

It had taken her centuries to weather down the granite of his resolve with