The Firebird

I took the advice of Rob’s mother and ran a hot bath and sank into it gratefully, letting it soothe away some of my swirling, confusing thoughts. Rob was a part of the life I’d deliberately put in my past, and I had the irrational sense that it should have been somehow more difficult, this reconnection.

It seemed half-surreal to be here in this house he’d grown up in, with his mum and dad drinking tea in the kitchen, and everyone simply accepting my presence as easily as they accepted the things I could do – things my own family virtually never discussed, or acknowledged. It had me off balance, a feeling that lingered long after the bathwater cooled.

When I finally ventured back along the passageway and into the bedroom that I was to sleep in, I found Rob’s mum setting a water glass down at the bedside. She turned as I came in, and smiled.

‘Those pyjamas all right for you, then?’

I assured her they were. They were navy-blue flannel, a little too large, and too long in the legs and the sleeves, but I’d rolled up the cuffs.

‘They were Robbie’s,’ she told me, ‘when he was a teenager.’

He must have had the shoulders even then, because they hung from mine with loads of room to spare. I felt a sudden urge to hug the flannel to my skin, but I resisted it and simply said, ‘They’re comfortable.’

‘Oh aye, they were his favourites,’ Jeannie said. ‘I had a mind to make a quilt of them someday, ye ken, with some of his old T-shirts. Someone did that in a magazine I read once at the doctor’s – that’s what gave me the idea. But I’ve never yet got round to it.’

A good thing, I decided. They were very warm pyjamas.

And this room that she’d prepared for me was obviously Rob’s old room. Not kept the way it would have been when he was living here, of course. They’d used one corner of the room for storage – there were boxes neatly piled along the wall, and stacks of clothes that wanted sorting. And a sewing machine, bright and purposeful, held court across from the bed on a large sturdy table with patterns and fabric scraps tidily organised down its long surface.

The bed, though, was still a boy’s bed, with a bookcase built into the headboard and brown-and-white ships sailing over the coverlet. He would have taken all his treasures with him when he left, but there were still a few framed photographs of Rob at different ages smiling from the bookcase shelf. One was a formal police portrait of him in uniform, smart in his jacket and cap, deadly serious but for his eyes. There was one showing him and his father in front of a red-painted fishing boat, standing near its moorings in the full sun of the harbour.

‘That’s the Fleetwing,’ said Jeannie, when she saw me looking. ‘That was Brian’s boat. And that,’ she added, nodding at the photograph beside it, ‘is what Robbie looked like as a lad.’

He’d have been about eight when the picture was taken. All elbows and knees, with a bright smile and freckles and big blue inquisitive eyes, kneeling down with his arm round a black-and-white collie with one ear flopped over.

I leant in more closely. ‘That looks just like Jings.’

‘Aye, that’s Kip. Jings’s great-granddad. He was like Robbie’s wee shadow, was Kip – always followed him everywhere. They couldn’t bear to be parted. We buried him out in the field, when he passed. Robbie thought he’d be company for—’

She had caught the words, glancing at me as though wondering how much I knew, so I finished the thought for her.

‘Rob’s Roman ghost?’

‘Aye, the Sentinel. He’s introduced you, then?’

‘Well, in a way.’ To her curious look I explained, ‘I can’t see ghosts. I feel them sometimes, but I don’t see or hear them. I’m not quite as … gifted as Rob.’

Jeannie smiled at me. ‘Neither,’ she said, ‘is my Brian, so whatever mischief he got up to earlier, likely that’s all he can do. If he tries it again, you’ve my blessing to belt him with something, all right?’ Looking round, she inspected the room one last time and asked, ‘Now, d’ye have all you need? Right, then give me your clothes and I’ll just bung them into the washer.’

Like Rob, I could tell there’d be no point in protesting, so I complied. But I rescued Rob’s watch from my jeans pocket first, and when Jeannie had left me I propped the watch up like a clock on the shelf of the headboard so that I would hear the alarm in the morning.

I hadn’t really looked at it too closely until now, that watch, but suddenly it struck me that it looked just like the watch that I had given him two years ago – only that watch had just been a joke gift, a throwaway, bought off the counter at Boots when he’d turned up late one time too often. I’d said to him, ‘There, now you have no excuse,’ and he’d laughed as he put it on.

Surely he wouldn’t have kept it, a cheap watch like that? He’d have chucked it away when the battery died, when the plastic strap broke. But it did look the same.

I picked it up, feeling the weight of the watch strap of durable leather, and folding my fingers around it I closed my eyes, seeking not a vision, but a memory.

CHAPTER SIX

I remembered it was early in the evening. I’d been standing at the counter of the Boots on Princes Street, with my collection of small purchases: some nail varnish remover pads, a hairslide and a toothbrush, and the watch. I’d found it last of all, that watch, reduced to £4.99, and with a smile I’d picked it up.