The Peacock Cloak

into the trees. “I need you out of the way so I can get ready for the visitors. We’ve hardly got enough time as it is, let alone with you two getting under my feet.”
    “Honestly Paula,” David whined. “I can’t win. You keep saying how bored and lonely you are. I thought you’d appreciate the company.”
    “Yes, David, but it was just stupid to invite people to come to dinner at six o’clock, when you knew that we ourselves would still be two hours’ drive away at three.”
    Cassie tensed. She dreaded her parents’ quarrels.
    “And anyway,” Paula went on, “my idea of company is people who might be interested in talking about things that I like talking about. Not two of your workmates who will just talk shop.”
    She sighed.
    “And one of whom you obviously fancy, incidentally,” she added, “judging by how often you mention her name.”
    “For god’s sake, Paula. What was I supposed to do? They called me. They said they’d be passing our way. They asked if we’d be around.”
    “You could have said we were doing something else. You don’t seem to find that hard to say that to me.”
    “Let’s sing some songs,” Cassie said firmly to her brother.

    The bungalow sat in the middle of a wide bare lawn, surrounded by a two-metre chain link fence to keep indigenes and animals at bay, with floodlights on poles at regular intervals. The lawn, rather startlingly, was green, a colour entirely absent from the surrounding forest.
    Juan, the caretaker, sat outside his hut cleaning a gun. He laid it down and limped to the gate to open it for them, nodding, but not smiling, as they passed through.
    “Bo da, senar senara,” he greeted them with small stiff bow. He could speak English well enough but usually confined himself to Luto.
    Cassie organised a game outside in which Peter was a dog called Max, and she was the dog’s owner. Peter was five. She was ten.
    “Woof! Woof!” said the dog.
    All around them was the silent forest. It had a strong sweet smell, like caramel, but with a faint whiff of decay.
    “Woof! Woof! Woof!”
    “Quiet now, Max, I can’t hear myself think.”
    It was odd. The one thing Cassie did not want to hear was the sound of shouts or sobs from within the house, and if she had heard them, she’d had covered them up at once with noisy play. Yet she couldn’t help herself from listening out for them: listening, listening, listening, all the while glancing down the road back into the forest on the far side of the chain link fence, willing their visitors to arrive.
    But the forest, that silent, waiting, spotlit stage, was still. Nothing made a sound. Nothing moved except for yet another floater drifting through the trees.
    “We’re on an alien planet,” Cassie informed her dog Max, who was too young to remember anything else. “This is Lutania. We come from Earth, where the trees are green like this grass, and there are no goblins or unicorns, and none of the creatures can talk to you inside your head. One day we’ll go back there, across all that huge huge empty space. Imagine that.”
    Was that a sound from the house? She held up her hand to tell her brother to be quiet. But no. It was just something banging in a gust of breeze in the garden of the other house behind hers, the empty house, which, apart from Juan’s hut, was the only other building in the vicinity. They were on their own out here. It was five miles to the next human settlement, and that was a Luto village, the one where Juan’s family lived, with no Agency inhabitants at all. School was another ten miles beyond that.
    “Come here now Max and eat this bone. If you’re good I’ll stroke your head.”
    “Woof!” said Max, crawling obediently across to her.
    “Oh, wait a minute,” she said. “Here are the visitors. You’d better be Peter again.”

    Every single night, through the thin wall of her room, Cassie heard her mother crying.
    “I hate this place…” she’d hear Paula sob, “I hate this stinking forest…”
    “Ssssssh!” her father would hiss.
    Or, after half an hour of muffled sobs and murmuring, she’d suddenly cry out:
    “Of course the kids don’t bug you when you’re away all the time.”
    “Shut up,” Cassie would mutter, on her own in the dark. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”
    She’d try and distract herself by thinking about the immense tracts of space between Lutania and Earth. If she could only understand how big that was, she felt, this little house, and this