The Firebird

I caught up in a rush. ‘You thought I was going to tell her what I saw?’ I read the answer plainly in his eyes. ‘Oh, Rob, I’m sorry. Really sorry. But I can’t, you know I can’t. Besides, there isn’t any need to, like I said. I can convince her it’s a forgery without all that.’

‘Convenient.’ There was bitterness in that one word I hadn’t heard from Rob before.

I said, ‘This isn’t like you. You’re supposed to understand.’

‘Aye, well, I thought I did. I thought I understood, last night.’ He exhaled hard. ‘You’re right, you can be difficult to read sometimes. I got it wrong.’

‘That isn’t fair.’

‘I’m done with fair.’

‘I’d lose my job,’ I told him bluntly. ‘All the clients, all the people that I work with, and Sebastian, they’d all think that I was lying, or they’d think I was a—’ I bit back the word, but Rob supplied it.

‘Freak.’ The hard twist of his mouth was nothing like a smile. ‘Was that the word that ye were wanting?’ When I didn’t answer, he went on, ‘Ye ken this for a fact, then, do you, that they’d all react so badly?’

‘I can’t take that chance.’

‘Aye, you can. It’s a choice. We choose most things in life, ye ken. Whether we live it or watch it go past. Even whether we’re happy.’

I looked down. ‘It’s easy for you.’

He gave a hard laugh. ‘Because this is so easy.’ He threw his unfinished ice cream in the bin at the side of the bench, and asked, ‘If I had some other ability, if I could sing, or put a football in the net, would you have been ashamed of that, as well?’

‘I never was …’ Words failed me for a moment, and I focused on the sparrows that had gathered round our feet until my voice returned. ‘I’m not ashamed of you.’

‘You’re feart that I’ll embarrass you,’ he said. ‘That’s why you’ve kept me hidden from these people that you work with here, because you’re feart I might just be myself, and read a mind or two in public.’

He’d hit close to home with that, and I could tell he knew it when he saw my face. I turned defensive.

‘Would it really be so hard,’ I asked, ‘to hide what you can do? To keep it private?’

Rob looked down at me. ‘Short term? Like this? No, not so hard. But over time? Aye, then,’ he said, ‘I’d find it near impossible. It’s what I am.’ He held my gaze. ‘It’s what you are, as well.’

‘I hide it.’

‘Aye,’ he said, ‘and look how well that’s working for you.’

Round our feet the sparrows hopped and chattered, all oblivious to what was going on between us. For a moment Rob looked down at them in silence, too, and when he spoke again there was no anger in his voice, nor even bitterness, but just the smallest hint of something sad.

‘If we cannae be what we were born to be, the whole of it, we die a little on the inside, every day we live the lie. I’d die for you in every other way,’ he told me, quietly, ‘but not like that. I’m sorry, Nick.’

I thought that I’d known every kind of pain, until I watched Rob walk away from me. He didn’t touch me, didn’t kiss me, didn’t say goodbye. It would have been a touch of melodrama if he had, I guessed, since we’d be flying home together on the plane tomorrow. But I knew he’d left me, all the same.

The whole world blurred. I felt the searing heat of tears and closed my eyes as tightly as I could so that they wouldn’t fall, and out of nowhere I was struck by a deep stab of anguish answering my own, yet not my own.

I thought at first it might be Rob – that his control had slipped enough to let me in for that brief instant. But it wasn’t him at all. The pictures rose and raced by in a blur behind my eyelids, stopping of their own accord and widening so suddenly the bright light left me blinded, till it flared and settled into the warm sunlight of a summer afternoon.

I was above the Strelka, wheeling like a bird upon the wind that smelt of salt and sea and ship timbers and canvas sails. Below me lay the Custom House, the line of merchants’ warehouses, the long and broad expanse of the exchange, and to the west the row of Colleges. Between them, in the dusty square, the people walked in pairs and threes. A carriage drawn by four matched horses, with a little dog that ran behind it, swung by jauntily and passed a heavy wagon, moving slower with its creaking wheels and plodding team of oxen.

And as always, there were soldiers in the square. As I gradually came down to their own level I could see them clearly, many standing guard around the Custom House, and others strolling on patrol, and one lieutenant talking to a younger woman who stood very still and straight amid the chaos, in her black paduasoy gown.

Anna held herself with care. ‘Charles, it is not true.’

His eyes held sympathy, but they were sure. ‘I had it from a man who had no reason to invent it. He was there.’

It was a strange thing, Anna thought, how her world could so completely shatter in the small space of one brief heartbeat, and with sunshine warm upon her shoulders, and the flow of people all around, uninterrupted. She tried to hold the broken pieces in their places, as though willing it could make it whole. ‘He often is accused of things he did not say or do. You know he is.’

Charles said nothing to that, only looked at her as though he wished there were some way that he could have spared her what kindness and duty had bound him to say.