The Firebird (7 page)

Dr Fulton-Wallace, ready with my headphones, had said, ‘There’s no need to worry. You’ll do fine. We’re not testing you, really. This study is meant to explore what the sender does. There’s been a lot of debate and discussion within the field about the role of the sender, and whether a sender is needed at all, so we’re hoping our study will add something useful to that. Are you comfortable?’

Surprisingly, I was, despite the nervousness.

‘All right, then,’ she had told me. ‘I’ll leave you to it. You’ll hear some taped suggestions on the headphones first, to help you to relax, and then the pink noise will begin. Just try to verbalise whatever you’re experiencing.’

My grandfather’s warnings had swirled in my thoughts only briefly before I had pushed them aside as I’d settled myself in the chair and deliberately opened my mind to whatever might come.

The image had, in the end, risen as clear as a painting: a view of a bench by a pond in a park, with a pair of swans sailing serenely along in the shallows beneath a great willow whose branches wept down in a gentle cascade of pale green.

I did as instructed, and talked about what I was seeing, describing the park and the swans. When a young boy appeared with a toy boat in hand, I described him as well, and said what he was doing.

This went on for some time. The boy was just setting his sailing boat adrift on the pond when a curious thing began happening all round the image’s edges. They started to shrink inward, as though I’d taken a step back, and they went on shrinking until I saw not just the image, but the screen it was appearing on, and behind that a wall much like the wall of the room I was now in myself. As my view tilted slightly a few strands of hair blocked the edge of my eye and a hand that was not my own hand brushed them back and a voice – a male voice that I’d never heard – greeted me.

Hi.

I felt his awareness, his trace of amusement, but having never found myself in anybody’s head before I wasn’t sure of the correct response.

I’m Rob,
he said.
You’re new here?

This time I replied, a little hesitant, and told him, Yes.

The sailing boat was still drifting on the screen, but my view angled sharply down instead, away from it, and I found myself looking the length of a plain black shirt buttoned across a flat male stomach, a simple black belt and, stretched casually out in the chair below that, lean athletic legs covered in snug-fitting denim, and the scuffed and rounded toes of black Doc Martens.

His hands were laced, relaxed, across his stomach, and I saw the gold glint of a signet ring, a small one, on his right hand’s little finger. They were nice hands, square and capable. Nice legs, too, come to that.

My view came up again and focused on the little sailing boat and the willow and the swans. He told me,
You be sure now to tell Dr Fulton-Wallace what I’m wearing.

And with that, he very gently pushed me out again.

I don’t know what I looked like when they finished with the test, untaped my eyes and took the headphones off, but Dr Fulton-Wallace seemed concerned. ‘I thought you might have felt unwell,’ she said, ‘when you stopped talking.’

I reassured her I was fine. A little stunned, perhaps, and strangely tired from such a minor effort, but I dutifully told her, ‘I’m supposed to tell you what he’s wearing.’

She paused in the middle of tidily winding the cords of the headphones. ‘I’m sorry? What who’s wearing?’

‘Rob. The man in the other room.’

Setting the headphones down, she exchanged a quick glance with her assistant before giving me her full attention, warily. ‘What is he wearing?’

I described the clothes I’d seen and finished with the signet ring. She jotted all the details down, then taking out her mobile dialled a number. ‘George? It’s Keary, here. Who are you using at your end, today? Oh, right. And what’s he wearing?’ Here she paused, and briefly smiled at her associate’s reply. ‘Yes, that’s very funny, but my interest is professional. Just tell me what he’s wearing.’

As she listened, I could see her smile give way to incredulity. She said, ‘Do me a favour: take a picture of him, will you? Yes, again, very funny. Just please take the picture? Thanks.’

Shaking her head she rang off, but the tone in her voice was admiring. ‘The devil,’ she said.

It would be two more weeks before I met Rob face-to-face, both of us in the same room. I’d been heading down south for a weekend at home, and not ten minutes after we’d pulled out of Waverly Station my train unexpectedly stopped.

In the midst of the murmured confusion that followed, the elderly woman who’d taken the window seat next to me glanced out the window and said, ‘Oh, I do hope there’s not been an accident.’

I’d reassured her, ‘It’s probably nothing.’

‘Debris on the line,’ said the young man just over the aisle from us, his quiet voice certain. ‘We’ll not be here long.’

It surprised me that I hadn’t noticed him earlier. I usually didn’t miss noticing good-looking men. And on top of it all, he’d been reading a book, and a man doing that didn’t often escape my attention.

He sent us a friendly look, lifted his book and went on reading.
The Dead Zone
by Stephen King. I felt my mouth curve. The story of a man who has the curse of seeing visions of the future life of anyone he touches. Rather the reverse of my own curse, but I could sympathise.

The young man reading seemed to like it well enough. He looked absorbed, his dark head bent so that one wave of hair fell just beside his eye, his jeans-clad legs stretched out as much as possible in that cramped space, one foot edged slightly out into the aisle. He was wearing black Doc Martens, and on seeing them my first unguarded thought was,
Oh God, wouldn’t it be great if
he
was Rob.

The thought just hung there for a moment, then incredibly he raised his head and looked at me and grinned, and I turned twenty shades of red.

‘I’m Rob McMorran,’ he said, lowering the book again and holding his place with his thumb while he held out his right hand, the hand with the narrow gold signet ring on the last finger.

I slammed my defences in place before braving the handshake, and kept it brief. ‘Nicola Marter.’

And that was the start of it. By the time the train got underway again I’d learnt that he was a police constable, coming up on six years in the force, and that he didn’t live in Edinburgh but journeyed up from Eyemouth in the Borders; that he drove most times, except his car had broken down two days ago so he’d been forced to use the train, a minor hassle since the train didn’t actually stop in Eyemouth. ‘The nearest stop’s Berwick,’ he’d told me, ‘in England, and then you get into a taxi, turn round and come over the border again.’

‘Well, at least it’s not a fortified border,’ I’d consoled him, ‘with guards and wire.’

‘It should be.’ His tone had been dry, but his eyes had been mischief. ‘They’re nothing but trouble, the English.’

‘We are not. We’re wonderful people.’

‘Oh, aye? Will you prove it, then? Give us a len of your mobile.’

‘I’m sorry?’

He’d held out his hand and rephrased. ‘May I borrow your mobile? Mine isn’t working.’

‘Oh.’ I’d handed the phone over, and Rob had dialled a number that set off an answering ringtone from one of his own pockets. Calmly ringing off, he’d passed my mobile back across the aisle. ‘Thanks.’

‘That’s a sneaky way of getting someone’s number.’

‘What?’

‘You could have asked.’

He’d looked at me, all innocence, and said, ‘I’ve no idea what you’re on about.’

And looking at those eyes I had agreed with Dr
Fulton-Wallace,
that he
was
a devil. But I’d missed him when he’d left the train at Berwick.

Ten miles out, my mobile had chimed out the tune that meant a text message had just arrived. ‘Am safely back in Scotland,’ it had told me. ‘Where are you?’

We’d texted back and forth for the next three hours, my whole way down to London. I had asked him later why he’d gone to all that trouble, typing all those texts, when he could simply have reached out to me with thoughts. He had the skill.

He’d told me, ‘You weren’t ready for it, then.’

I’d slipped my hand in his and said, ‘I’m ready now.’

But I’d been wrong.

I set Rob’s wristwatch on the shelf beside the pillow of the bed and curled myself into the blankets, staring dry-eyed at the dark.

I didn’t want to think about the rest of what had happened on that evening after I had bought the watch for him, after we’d walked out holding hands into the rain-slicked street, with all the street lamps coming on. I’d played that evening over in my mind enough times since that I could run it forward like a film at will, and feel that I was back there; feel the dampness of the air, the rising chill that made me glad of Rob’s more solid warmth beside me as he held the pub’s door open so that I could go ahead of him.

The pub was crowded, but with patience we found two stools at the bar together, and when Dr Fulton-Wallace turned up a short while later, Rob gave up his seat to her and stood behind us, close against my shoulder so the three of us could talk.

‘Thanks for coming,’ she said, getting to the point: ‘I’ve been looking at both of your scores on this latest psychometry study, and I’d like to have your permission to film you.’

‘Oh aye?’ said Rob.

‘I’ve been doing this twenty years now, and I’ve never seen anyone who can do what you can do, Rob. And both of you working together – I think it would really inform the community, if we could properly document it.’

I felt a cold flip in my stomach.

Rob said, ‘Well, I’d have to apply for permission to take part in something like that – we’ve got rules in the force about public appearances – but if ye send me the details I’ll certainly ask.’

I kept out of the whole conversation that followed. If Rob even noticed he didn’t let on; he was talking enough for the two of us anyway, and Dr Fulton-Wallace was too focused on the details of her project and the good that it could do to be distracted by my silence.

The big man behind her who only a moment before had been talking and joking along with his mates had gone silent as well, leaning closer as though he were listening. And when she finished her last drink and thanked us and wished us good night and went out, he made some comment thickened with whisky and expletives that made his friends burst out laughing.

‘Did ye ever, in your whole life, hear a bigger load of shite?’ he asked them, and they all agreed that they had not. Then more loudly, so everyone round us could hear, he announced, ‘This lad here and his girlfriend, they’re reading our minds.’

‘Freaks,’ said a lanky young man with a shaved head who stood on the fringe of the group. ‘Go on, then.’ He stepped forward and faced Rob, belligerent. ‘Read
my
mind. What am I thinking?’

Rob answered him calmly, ignoring the looks we were drawing. ‘You’re wanting to fight.’

The big man prodded Rob like a bear-baiter. ‘And are ye seeing a fight in his future, then, laddie?’

Rob said, ‘I am, aye. But not with me.’ Tilting his head to one side he looked quietly at the young man with the shaved head a moment, then told him, ‘Your mother …’

‘Right, here we go!’ someone predicted, to more scattered laughter.

Ignoring them, Rob said, ‘She’ll be home from hospital soon. And you’ve nothing to fear, it was never her heart.’

In the moment of nearly stunned silence that followed, he finished his pint, set the glass down, and looked at me. ‘Ready to go?’

Feeling colder than ever, I went with him, hearing the talk and the comments beginning again at our backs.

Freaks
.

Outside it was starting to rain again, lightly, the street lights and headlights reflecting and running together the way all the colours had done in a painting I’d once seen deliberately ruined by acid. A beautiful picture destroyed.

And it wasn’t Rob’s fault, but I turned on him anyway. ‘How can you not let that get to you?’

‘I’m a policeman. That’s not the first drunk in a pub I’ve come up against.’

‘No, I mean everyone pointing and whispering, saying you’re different.’

He shrugged. ‘I am different,’ he said. ‘So are you.’

‘I don’t want to be different.’

He slanted a thoughtful look down at me. ‘Aye, but you are. Were you thinking to hide it your whole life?’

I didn’t know how to reply to that. But I did know I could never take part in a film of my psychic ability, baring my secret to strangers and sceptics alike who’d be watching me, judging me.

Rob stopped me there on the pavement and turned me to meet his eyes. ‘Hiding the person you are,’ he said, ‘won’t make you happy. I never hide who I am. What I am.’

Freaks
.

I’d nodded. We’d gone out to dinner. He’d walked me home afterwards. And at the door, when he’d kissed me goodnight, he’d done something he’d never done.

Always before when we’d kissed, though there hadn’t been that many times, he had kept his thoughts closed to me. This time the wall had been very decidedly down. I’d been slammed by the force of his feelings, a flood of sensations that caught me and tossed me around like a turbulent river and knocked the breath out of me, so when he’d lifted his mouth from my own I had felt like I’d just escaped drowning.

I’d thought at the time he was showing me how things could be with us, if I could get past my own reservations. But now, looking back, I felt certain that Rob, with his gifts, would have already known what was going to happen, which meant that his kiss was intended to say something else, though I didn’t know what. Goodbye, maybe.

Aloud, he’d said only, ‘I’ll see you, then.’

‘See you on Monday,’ I’d said.

But I hadn’t. I’d closed the door after him, run up the stairs, and I’d gone right on running.

‘You’re quiet this morning,’ Rob said. He was driving, his eyes on the road as he swung round the first turn at Old Craighall Junction and onto the Edinburgh bypass. It was just after nine and the traffic was easing a little but Rob’s car still had to contend with the lorries. He’d been rather quiet himself.