The Firebird Read Online Free PDF

says they’re on their way back in, they’ll not be long, and if you’ve a mind to go down to the Sole she can give you a meal while you’re waiting.’
    I absorbed all this as best I could. ‘The Sole?’
    ‘Aye, the Contented Sole, down by the harbour. Just go down this road here, the Coldingham Road. There’s a church at the bottom. You keep to the left, it’ll take you right down to the harbour. The Sole’s at the far end of that, you’ll not miss it.’
    ‘Thank you.’
    ‘No problem. A word of advice, though,’ he said as I started to leave. ‘When you go into the Sole don’t use the same first line you used with me and tell them that you’re looking for a man.’ He flashed the friendly grin and said, ‘You’ll not get out again.’
    I didn’t actually see that many men about when I reached the harbour.
    Narrow and long, it still looked to be a working harbour, with several small fishing boats moored at the walls, but I remembered Rob telling me once that the fishing was done, or as good as; that government quotas and standards had killed off the whole way of life, and his father had sold his own boat to a big corporation and bought a much smaller boat so he could go for the lobster and crab, like the rest of the few men who’d clung to their trade here.
    The seagulls had not given up, though. They wheeled and shrieked everywhere, hopeful, although at this hour of the night with the dark coming on there were probably no scraps around for them.
    Even the long, covered building that must once have been the fish market had found a new purpose as part of a maritime centre which loomed overhead at the edge of the harbour and had been designed to look like an old seagoing frigate.
    I passed a white pub with a sign that proclaimed it the Ship Hotel, and at the door of the public bar two men
did
turn from their talk to regard me with curious interest as I walked by, but I carried on briskly a few buildings further until I caught sight of the Contented Sole.
    It looked much like the other pub – plain and pale-walled, standing square at the edge of the dark road with space for a few cars to park at the front, its windows spilling warmly yellow light across the pavement at the water’s edge.
    I’d nearly reached it when I saw a boat slip boldly through the breakwater that stood against the sea. About the same size as the fishing boats, this one was dark on the bottom but painted bright orange above and marked with the distinctive emblem of the Royal National Lifeboat Institute. More gulls had come in with it, fighting the wind as they cried their displeasure at not being fed, but the crewman who stood by the rail in the bow took no notice. Wearing his bright-yellow kit with a full life jacket harness strapped round it, he was readying the mooring rope, it looked like, as the lifeboat started turning to reverse into its berth along the harbour’s far side.
    I stopped walking. The wind blew my hair briefly into my eyes and then whipped it away again, stinging, but I didn’t move.
    The crewman stopped, too, with his back to me. Angled his head very slightly, as though he’d just heard someone calling his name. And then he looked straight back and over his shoulder, directly at me.
    ‘Hi,’ he said. He didn’t say the word out loud – there wasn’t any way I would have heard him at that distance – but his voice still resonated clearly in my mind as though he’d spoken. It’s a hard thing to explain to anyone who’s never carried on a conversation that way, but for me it came as naturally as breathing. It was how my grandfather had realised I’d inherited his ‘gift’, when at the age of three I’d answered him at table, ‘When I’m sleeping,’ and my mother, glancing up, had smiled and asked me what I meant by that, to which I had replied, ‘Granddad asked me if I ever would stop talking.’ I could still see their exchange of glances; still recall the silence that had followed.
    Now I met