Birds of Paradise by Oliver Langmead (top ebook reader TXT) 📕

“I won’t need them.” He swings himself upright, and the room whirls unsteadily.

“Sure.” She sighs. “I wouldn’t walk on that leg for a while, though.”

“I’ll be fine.”

Drying her hands on a towel, she frowns at him. “You were shot three times.”

Putting pressure on his leg causes a needling beneath his skin, but it’s no great discomfort. He takes a few steps to test it out and the staples hold; no red blooms through the white. He rolls his trouser down and stretches, rubbing the life back into his limbs. “Thanks,” he says.

“Don’t thank me. Thank your friend. He’s paying off my mortgage.”

“Where is he?”

“He said he was going to get some breakfast.” She shrugs.

At the door, he turns and glances back at her. She’s clearing away the bloody tools and disposing of the bullets. He supposes she was paid to not ask any questions, and that’s fine. Adam’s never been great at answering tricky questions. “Thanks,” he says, again, and moves out into the bright world outside.

Edinburgh Zoo is mostly empty. A layer of frost covers it, and animals shiver beyond the bars of their enclosures, hiding from the cold. There’s a drinking fountain beside the penguins, and Adam uses it to wash the blood from his hands. He finds a shard of skull embedded between two of his fingers, so he picks it out and lets it drop into the water, where it joins the red swirl and rattles away down the pipe. When the water runs clear, he uses it to splash his face, the shock of the cold sending a chill through him.

On his way to the dining area, he stops beside the tiger enclosure. One of them lopes over at the sight of him, breath steaming the window that separates them, and when Adam presses his hand against the reinforced glass the tiger rubs her flank across it. He can feel her voice vibrating the window as she chuffs in greeting, and he remembers other tigers, from another life. They were great, splendid cats, kept badly, and he recalls sneaking into their tent at night and letting them loose to wander, feeding them scraps of his dinner. He was the strongman at the circus, and just as exotic as they – forced to bend iron bars for audiences unused to the sight of dark skin. He remembers the death of a tiger so tired she could no longer perform, her execution by rifle, and he remembers taking her body from the rubbish heap and digging her a grave in the woods over the hill. He remembers shovelling earth over her and hiding her wonderful coat, and he remembers returning to the other tigers and mourning with them. They paced their small tent that night, searching the corners for their friend, and all Adam had to offer them was more scraps of food and useless comforting sounds.

It took Adam lifetimes to find all the pieces of Eden’s Tiger. When they took her apart, they made her coat into a banner, and then a cloak. Her teeth they used for tools, making axes and saws, and then pieces of jewellery, necklaces and earrings. Her whiskers they made into a harp, winding them around lengths of strong cedar, the sad noises a mockery of her living voice. Her bones they whittled into idols and knives, things to worship and things to murder with. Her claws they kept as trophies. Look how fierce the thing we killed was. Look at us, such mighty men. By the time Adam had gathered as much as he could, the original hunters had all died of disease or old age, so he killed their children instead. The gathered remains, he buried in Siberia.

Rain starts to fall as Adam finds the dining area, where there is still no sign of Magpie.

He goes to the birdcages, as if they might present some clue. Their sharp eyes watch him pass, and some call out to him, hopping across and stretching their wings, but there are no magpies among them. So, he goes over to where there is a small petting zoo and sits on a bench to wait. Huddled in their shed, the keyhole eyes of the goats reflect the grey sky, and after a while they trot across and nuzzle at his hands. An alpaca stands beside him and snuffles at his shoulder, and a pink pig waddles across and chews at the edge of his shoe. Surrounded by the warmth of the animals, Adam raises his face to the sky and feels the rain on his cheeks; lets it run down his scars as if they are riverbeds; lets it wash away the worst of his memories.

On his way to the car park, he spots a large magpie with a crumpled beak devouring the corpse of a grey squirrel. The squirrel is splayed out beside a tree, and looks as if it’s been dead for a while. “You took me to a zoo?” asks Adam, and the magpie pauses, tilting its head, glistening entrails dangling from its ruined beak. As if in answer, it immediately returns to devouring what remains of the squirrel. Adam leans against the tree and waits for it to finish.

* * *

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is in full swing, and fire jugglers, and magicians, and masked men on stilts stride among the red and orange and yellow leaves. The rain has stopped, and the streets have dried so quickly that it’s as if the sky never opened at all. The clouds overhead cast quick shifting shadows across all the performers and endless tourists. Adam makes his way down the long paths of the Meadows, carpeted in bright fallen leaflets promising marvels.

Perched on his shoulder is Magpie, who seems to be luxuriating in the attention he’s being given. Despite his damaged beak, he is a magnificent specimen. There’s something super-real about the quality of his feathers, and the sharpness of his claws, and the glint in his beady