The Peacock Cloak

with hundreds of thousands of others, amplified it and sent it back down again to Earth.
    “101011101001010010100010111010111010100101010010101000…” called down the satellite, high up there on its lonely vigil at the edge of the void. “…10001010100011101…” it called down to the busy surface of the Earth:
    “No thank you,” it was saying on Jenny’s behalf. “Please do not rush me my discounted bug-book edition of Even Detectives Cry. ”
    A satellite dish in Cape Cod picked up the signal, and sent it on its way.

    Richard looked down a little side alley and saw two foxes. They’d knocked down a pile of wooden pallets at the back of a restaurant, and were now rummaging for scraps of meat and fish. In the electric light of the city, they were pale and colourless and not at all like those foxes in story books with their merry faces and their cunning eyes. No one but Richard had noticed they were here.
    “Hey, look! Foxes!” he said out loud, stopping, and hoping that Jenny might turn and look.
    He’d picked up that she was worried and he thought the foxes might cheer her up. Women liked animals didn’t they? He was pretty sure they liked things like that.
    “Look at that!” called Richard again, “Two foxes! Right in the middle of a city!”
    Behind and above the foxes he also saw Jackal Head, the presiding spirit of dogs and foxes and other doggy creatures. Jackal Head regarded him with its shining eyes, but Richard looked away and said nothing. He knew from long experience that no one else could see the likes of Jackal Head, bug eyes on or not, so he concentrated on the foxes.
    “Two foxes!” he called out again.
    A man in a brown raincoat glanced at Richard quizzically but didn’t bother to look where he was pointing. You didn’t have to look at Richard for very long to realise there was something odd about him. His anorak was several sizes too big. His hair was lank. He had two days growth of stubble on his chin. He had no bug eyes.
    “Two foxes!”
    No one else took any notice. A sense of weariness and desolation swept over Richard. They were all so busy with their bugs, that was the problem, talking to people far away about things that he couldn’t understand, no matter how hard he tried.
    Then he noticed that Jenny was some way ahead of him – he could see her umbrella bobbing along above the crowds: pink with white polka dots – and he ran to catch up. He liked the feeling of being near her. She made him feel warm.
    “Jenny,” he said to himself, “Jenny, Jenny, Jenny.”
    And once again he laughed with pleasure, showing his gap teeth.
    “Jenny, Penny, Henny,” he said out loud.

    “ Zero , the only yoghurt with less than one tenth of a calorie per serving…”
    Jenny walked quickly, checking through in her mind the things she still needed to do before tomorrow. Ben would get cross with her if she ended up having to run around looking for things at the last minute. He hated disorder. He hated inefficiency of any kind. She herself was a very successful p.a. and spent all of her working days doing pretty much nothing but imposing order. But for some reason Ben made her feel bumbling and incompetent.
    “ Fateful Summer , the heartrending story of doomed love in the shadow of a global war…”
    Jenny’s bug eye provider knew she was twenty-eight, single and a member of the ‘aspirant middle-upper clerico-professional’ class – and it knew from her purchasing record that she liked low fat yoghurt and middlebrow novels – so it told her many times each day about interesting new diet products and exciting new books, as well as about all the other things that aspirant middle-upper clerico-professionals were known to like or be concerned about.
    “Is one pound a day so very much to pay for life-long security…?”
    “Single, childless and fancy-free? The best time to think about school fees! Talk to School Plan . Because life’s too short…”

    But if Jenny was ‘aspirant middle-upper clerico-professional’, what was Richard? He wasn’t even a typical member of the ‘chronically unemployed/unemployable welfare claimant’ class – a low-income class which nevertheless, in aggregate, constituted a distinct and lucrative market – for he’d been adopted at the age of one and had grown up in a well-to-do professional family, and had never associated with other claimants. (The ‘chronically unemployed/unemployable welfare claimant class’ lived, on the whole,