The Firebird

‘Yes. You also have to know – at least, you used to have to know – where you’d be staying. And not just the town or city, but the actual hotel.’

‘Is that a fact?’

I wasn’t wrong, I thought. The glance he shot me was defensive.

‘When,’ I asked him, ‘did you know?’

I half-expected him to use his standard line, to smile at me and say, ‘I’ve no idea what you’re on about.’ Instead, he gave an odd, self-conscious shrug. ‘The end of May.’

‘More than three months ago?’ I didn’t have a right to be upset, I knew. It wasn’t Rob’s fault he could see the things he saw, but even so, the knowledge that my life was such an open book to him, that he could know what I would do before I knew it for myself, was still unsettling.

He’d found his airline ticket, and seemed grateful to have something else to focus on, but as the minutes stretched, my silence brought his gaze in search of mine. I met it with a frown.

‘Just how much do you see?’ I asked. ‘How far ahead?’ I’d been so busy making use of his ability to see the past, I’d overlooked his other gifts.

He thought a moment. Then he said, ‘It all depends.’

‘On what?’

‘On who I’m looking at.’ His tone held the frustration of a person trying to explain in words a thing for which the language was inadequate. ‘Some people are more difficult. My father. You.’

‘But you still see my future.’

‘I see bits of it.’ He took a deeper interest in the writing on his airline ticket. ‘Bits of what it could be.’

I was tempted to explore what he might know about that future. What it could be. What it would be. Whether he was in it, anywhere. But part of me was too much of a coward to go down that road. The past, I thought, was safer.

There was one thing I’d been wondering for two years. So I asked him. ‘Did you know that I would leave, that night in Edinburgh?’

He didn’t answer straight away. I might have missed the nod, except he followed it with, ‘I was never sure, ye ken, on when. I’d only seen the part where we were walking in the rain, I’d no idea what the day would be.’

I struggled to adjust to this, to how it changed the meaning of my memories of our time together. ‘But,’ I asked him, ‘if you knew that I was going to leave, why did you stay with me so long?’

He raised his head and looked me in the eyes. ‘Because I wanted to. Because it was my choice.’

The chaos of the terminal around us shifted out of focus, blurring into one receding whirl of noise and colour, and the only person who looked clear and real to me was Rob.

‘And this is your choice, now,’ he told me. ‘If you’d rather that I didn’t come along, just say so.’

I could see that he was serious. He’d walk away if that was what I wanted, what I asked of him. He wouldn’t try to change my mind.

My choice, I thought. My firebird to follow.

I stood a little straighter, cleared my throat, and asked him, ‘Rob, would you come with me to St Petersburg?’

His smile, though it came slowly, nearly stopped my heart.

‘It’s all a bit last minute, like,’ he said, and dodged the smack that I’d have landed on his arm, ‘but aye, I think I can. There’s just one problem.’

‘What?’ I waited for it, then relaxed as Rob held out his hand, the glint of humour in his eyes restoring balance to my world.

‘They’ll never let me through security,’ he said, ‘without my passport.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

My efforts to teach Rob a few words of Russian were drawing some decidedly amused attention from the flight attendant and an older woman sitting just across the aisle.

We’d started with the basic phrases: How are you? Good morning, Thank you, things like that, and now I was writing the Cyrillic alphabet down for him on the paper napkin from my lunch tray.

Rob, while waiting, practised his new phrases on the flight attendant. When she cleared away his own tray, he smiled brilliantly and thanked her with, ‘Spa-CEE-ba.’

Smiling back, she said, ‘Pah-ZHAL-sta’, which was one of those great multi-purpose words that meant ‘You’re welcome’ in one context, ‘Please’ or ‘Here, this is for you’ in others.

Rob, encouraged, told the flight attendant, ‘Min-YA Za-VOOT Rob.’

I smiled to myself, not looking up, and said, ‘That’s good pronunciation, but you’re telling her they call you “slave”. That’s what “rob” means.’

The older woman sitting on the aisle tossed out a dry remark in Russian, about women having fantasies, that made the flight attendant laugh and bend to pat my arm. ‘With such a man,’ the flight attendant said to me, in Russian also, ‘so good-looking, you be sure to teach him how to say “I have a girlfriend”.’

Rob, who didn’t understand a word of this, sat patiently and waited till the flight attendant moved away before he asked, ‘So what’s my Russian name, then?’

‘It’s still Robert, just pronounced a little differently.’ I wrote it down for him: “Poбepт”. ‘RO-byeert. You see?’

‘So the “P” is an “R”.’

‘That’s right.’

Picking up the paper-napkin alphabet, he pointed out, ‘But there’s a perfectly good “R” down here. Well, it’s backwards, but—’