The Firebird (6 page)

Even as I blocked him in surprise, he grinned and turned to Rob and said, aloud this time, ‘That’s very interesting. Keeping it a secret, were you?’

Rob’s expression didn’t change, but from his eyes I guessed that he was saying something choice in private to his dad.

‘All right, all right.’ The older man held one hand up, amused still, but apologising. ‘No offence.’

I sensed that Rob was trying to say something to me, too, but I had blocked them both out, still unsettled by the unexpected contact. Not once had it occurred to me that Rob might have inherited his psychic talents, as I had my own. I viewed his father with new eyes as he glanced back at Rob with an expression half-resigned and half-impatient, as though he were being lectured.

And he very likely was, if Rob’s slight frown was anything to go by. Still, I felt the strong affection binding one man to the other, too – a deep affection that would not be shaken by small differences.

The kettle boiled. Rob’s father made the tea, and said aloud, as though repeating something he’d been told to say, ‘I’m sorry, Nicola. I won’t do that again, I promise.’

Setting my tea on the table in front of me as a peace offering, he gave me a swift charming smile as Rob’s mother, just coming in, asked, ‘Won’t do what again?’

She was a lovely-looking woman, feminine and small but with an air of capability. Her soft cheerful face seemed more freckled than lined and the highlights of grey in her chestnut hair might have been done for artistic effect by a stylist, they looked so attractive. But it was her smile that I noticed the most, it was so like her son’s.

She came over to welcome me, toning her rich accent down in the way many Scots did when speaking to outsiders. ‘Nicola, is it? I’m Jeannie. We’re so glad to have you. Now, what has my Brian been doing to bother you?’

Both the men had adjusted themselves to her presence. Rob quietly brought his chair back from its tilted position to rest in the proper way, with all four legs on the floor, while his father, too, made an attempt to look innocent.

I said, ‘Nothing at all. He’s just made me some tea.’

Her eyes danced. ‘Never defend him, you’ll only encourage him.’

Rob’s father grinned. ‘Robbie’s brought home a bird of a feather,’ he told his wife plainly. ‘He met her while doing those tests up at Edinburgh. I did a test of my own, that’s all. Reckon I gave her a bit of a shock. And your son,’ he informed her, ‘has already torn me a new one, there’s no need for you to do likewise.’

Rob, at the end of the table, said quietly, ‘Nicola doesn’t like using her gifts. Or discussing them.’

‘Well, then,’ his mother remarked, ‘enough said.’ And she cheerfully shifted her husband aside on her way to the Rayburn. ‘Now, who’ll have a biscuit?’

I could tell, before another half an hour had passed, just who was at the heart of the McMorran family. For all the affection I’d felt between Rob and his father, I sensed that what bound them together most strongly was Jeannie McMorran herself, with her quick easy laugh and her genuine warmth.

I’d have had to have been carved of stone not to like her.

And she made amazing ginger biscuits. Rob ate four of them, but even with all of that sugar and coffee to bolster his system he wasn’t a match for the after-effects of his time on the lifeboat, and what must have been a long day. When he yawned for a third time, his mother said, ‘Och, away home with ye, Robbie. You’re dead on your feet.’

‘I am not.’

‘Away home, or I’m fetching the pictures of you as a bairn to show Nicola. I’ve got those good ones of you in the bath …’

Rob conceded defeat with a grin. ‘Right, I’ll go.’ He stood, stretching, and said to me, ‘Don’t let them push you around. I’ll be back to collect you at eight.’

‘All right.’

‘Eight in the morning?’ his mother asked. ‘Never. Let her waken when she wishes, and I’ll give you a phone when she’s finished her breakfast.’

Rob knew better than to argue, from the look of it. Instead he bent his head and took an interest in his wristwatch. I walked with him to the door.

‘You’ll need your coat,’ I said, lifting it from the back of my chair to give to him.

He took it with a question in his eyes.
All right?

His father was watching us. I gave a nod.

Rob unbuckled his watch strap and passed me the watch.
The alarm’s set for seven.
He smiled and stepped out, letting cold in behind him.

Then Jeannie McMorran was there, spreading warmth. ‘You must be needing your sleep as well, after your travels. Come, let’s get you settled.’

The cottage was not large – the kitchen, a sitting room with a piano, and two bedrooms, one with the door standing open and welcoming. Rob’s mother told me, ‘The bathroom’s down there, at the end. Take as long as you like – we’ve a lovely deep tub if you’re wanting a bath, and I’ve found you a pair of pyjamas.’

She’d done more than that. In the bathroom, I found a thick stack of soft towels, and new soap and lavender bath salts, a hairdrier, toothbrush and toothpaste, all laid out with no questions asked, as though having young women show up on the doorstep with only the clothes on their back were an everyday thing here.

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.

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.

He didn’t own a watch. He used his mobile to tell the time with when he thought of it, and since he rarely thought of it he usually was late. He was late now – that was why I’d come in here to kill some time while I was waiting. In the weeks that I’d been seeing Rob, I’d learnt there was no need to wait in full view on the pavement. He would find me when he did arrive, and I would know the moment that he did. I’d feel that sudden tingle of awareness, as I felt it now.

I turned, and thought again that I would never tire of watching him approach like this: his easy stride, his boyish smile, his blue eyes warm and seeming to see only me. His voice as well, that deep Scots lilt, was something that I’d happily have listened to all day. He said, ‘I’m sorry to be late.’

‘What was it this time?’

‘Inattention. I was reading.’

‘Well, there,’ I said, and handed him the newly purchased watch. ‘Now you have no excuse. It has an alarm you can set, see the button?’

He laughed as he took it and put it on, buckling the cheap plastic strap with one hand. ‘Thanks. That may be the best gift a girl’s ever given me.’

‘Get them a lot do you, presents from girls?’

With a serious face he assured me, ‘Oh aye. It’s continual.’ But those incredible eyes told me differently. He glanced at the items I held in my hands. ‘D’ye have everything you need, then?’

I had everything I needed in the fullest sense, but all I did was nod and Rob said, ‘Right, we should be on our way. We don’t want to keep Dr Fulton-Wallace waiting.’

I rolled my eyes at him. ‘So it’s all right to keep me waiting, is it, but not her?’

‘I’ve no idea what you’re on about.’ He raised his wrist and turned it so that I could read the digital display. ‘Can you not see the time?’

I called him something rude, then, and he grinned and caught my hand in his and out we went together to the street where the day’s rain had finally dwindled to a windblown spray that made the pavement gleam beneath the lights just coming on against the gloom of a mid-January evening.

My hand in Rob’s felt warm. I’d been so hesitant at first to let him touch me. I’d been nervous, given how intensely we’d connected without any touch at all the first time we’d been thrown together; without even being in the same room, for all that.

I’d been nervous then, as well. My very first week in the study at the Emerson Institute, and I’d been sitting in a soundproof room, reclining in a soft upholstered chair while Dr
Fulton-Wallace
gently taped halved ping-pong balls across my open eyes to mask my normal sense of sight.

The test, she’d reassured me, was a simple one. The ‘ganzfeld’, she had called it, was a traditional procedure meant to test whether my mind could ‘see’ an image sent to me remotely by a person in another room. That person, whom I’d never met, was sitting somewhere else within the Institute and similarly soundproofed, though with eyes and ears left open and aware.

The test’s design was basic. In that other room, the isolated ‘sender’ would be shown a video clip that a computer had chosen at random, and for half an hour he or she would sit and concentrate on watching that, while in my own room I remained immersed in my state of partial sensory deprivation, with headphones playing me filtered white noise – known as pink noise – and a red light shining down at my face to produce an unvarying glow through the translucent ping-pong balls. All that I needed to do, in that time, was to talk – make a running report of whatever I felt, and whatever I saw. At the end, I’d be given four video clips to watch, and I’d be asked to rate and rank each on how closely it matched what I’d ‘seen’ in the ganzfeld procedure.