The Peacock Cloak

Atomic Truth

    Jenny Philips emerged from the revolving doors of Rigby, Rigby & Stile into the dirty drizzle and the glistening lights of a London November night. It was a Friday and she’d been working late, clearing her desk in preparation for a week’s leave. This time tomorrow she and Ben would be in Jamaica, dining under palm trees and stars.
    She badly wanted to call him now, to make some kind of contact. But she knew he was busy wrapping things up at his work and he’d specifically told her he didn’t want to be disturbed until he was done. Ben could get quite cross about things like that. He’d promised to call her as soon as he was through and she’d have to be content with that.
    Jenny looked up and down the busy street, judging the severity of the rain, turning up her collar, opening her pink umbrella and then, of course, putting on a pair of large hemispherical goggles. She was pretty, smartly dressed, twenty-eight years old, the p.a. to the senior partner in a City law firm. The goggles made her look like a fruit fly but this didn’t worry her because everyone on the street looked the same. Ocular implants were on their way, but there were still unresolved safety issues – a small but unacceptable percentage of laboratory animals were still going blind – and for the moment everyone wore bug eyes.

    Or almost everyone. In the burger bar next to Jenny’s office, Richard Pegg slid off his stool, pushed a dog-eared notebook into his pocket, zipped up a very large anorak which stretched down almost to his knees and pulled his woolly hat even lower down over his head. He was one of the few people in London under seventy who didn’t even own a set of bugs. Even the people who slept in shop doorways had bugs, even the beggars. But Richard still went out into the rainy street with a bare face and naked eyes. The truth was he didn’t need bugs to provide him with phantoms and visions and voices. He had to take pills, in fact, to keep that stuff at bay.
    Richard was twenty-eight, like Jenny, but he’d never had a job. He’d come up to town from his little one-bedroom flat in Surrey for one of his trips round the museums with his notebook and pencils. ‘Doing research’ was what he called it to himself, looking for the hidden meaning of the world among the fossils and the hieroglyphs, the crystals and the cuneiform tablets. He’d filled up another notebook with his dense scrawlings in three different colours about clues and mysteries and conspiracies, full of capitals and underlinings and exclamation marks.
    Emerging from the burger bar, Richard too confronted the drizzle and the electric lights: orange, white, green, red, blue. But while Jenny had taken the everyday scene for granted, for him, as ever, it posed an endless regress of troubling questions. What was rain? What were cars? What was electricity? What was this strange thing called space that existed in between one object and the next? What was air? What did those lights mean, what did they really mean as they shifted from green to amber to red and back again, over and over again?
    And unlike Jenny he also saw Electric Man. Four metres tall and outlined in white fire, Electric Man towered over the passing people and cars and stared straight at Richard with its lightbulb eyes, because it knew that he could see it, even if no one else could. Pursing his lips and hunching down into his anorak, Richard avoided its gaze as he headed off towards the station.
    “Atomic truth,” he muttered to himself, drawing together the fruits of his day’s work. “Atomic truth. Hidden by the world’s leaders. Hidden from the world’s leaders because none of them has atomic eyes. They can’t see it, not truth in its atomic form. Or not as far as I know.”
    He laughed loudly, opening his gap-toothed mouth. People turned to look at him. He ignored their bug-eyed stares.

    “Hi, Sue, it’s Jenny!” The slender woman waiting in front of him for the pedestrian crossing sign to change from red to green had taken the opportunity to put through a bug call to one of her friends, an older woman who she used to work with in a previous job. “Ben is too busy to talk and I had to phone someone. I’m so excited! But nervous too. Our first holiday together. Do you think it’s all going to be all right?
    Thanks to her bug eyes, Jenny could see and hear her friend right in front of her. Richard couldn’t see or hear the friend at all, of course, but he gathered