The Peacock Cloak

button on a pager.
    “No. On reflection, Juan, I think we should let you go in any case. The new applicants will have a rather more positive attitude, I think, to the salary we are prepared to pay.”
    “Please…” I began, but then broke off.
    One of the college porters, summoned by Dr Das’ pager, appeared across the quad. In one hand he clutched a nightstick, in the other a fat automatic pistol. Bukowsky, he was called. Ugh! He was an Old Brit of the worst kind, his skin red and leathery, his belly hanging over his belt, his grey eyes cruel and icy with a cold and bottled-up rage.
    “Fuck you, Das,” I said. “Fuck your stupid job. Fuck your stupid college. In a couple of years’ time, my friend, you will all be wading around in salt water. Yes and fuck you too, Bukowsky. And as for that creep Thach Pham, fuck him as well.”
    Bukowsky pointed the heavy gun at me.
    “Shove it, dago,” he growled.

    Out on the High Street, two policemen in a pedal car were passing by in front of the water-logged Botanic Gardens, from whose broken greenhouses so many exotic plants had burst out and spread across the city. Like all cops and soldiers, they were Old Brits. Paunchy and middle-aged, they wore ridiculous little blue shorts that revealed flabby hairy legs, working the pedals in unison. Sweat trickled down their red faces as they forced their way through the treacly hothouse air, nudging between hustlers and beggars and past that old man on his box, still singing that patriotic song.
    In theory almost everyone there was breaking the law just by being in the country, but in practice the machine gunners on the coast were the last serious attempt made by the Old Brit state to hold that particular line. Get past that and you were in, though without the protection or the privileges of citizenship. You worked in the black economy. You negotiated, as best you could, your own relationship with the network of protection racketeers that regulated life below the threshold of the law. You survived or not. To the Old Brits illegal immigrants were just ‘beachrats’, outside of justice, a sort of vermin. So, for us, gangsters provided the only authority that we could turn to. It was their summary justice that ensured a harvest of beachrat bodies for the corpse-fishers, themselves invariably beachrats, to pull out of the marsh every morning.
    No job again . I had to fight down panic. Each time it happened it got harder, as the population grew and the resources of the country shrank. How would we eat? How would we pay the rent for our one lousy, mildewed room on Walton Street? How would we stop little Maria from getting seriously ill with her asthma and coughs and wheezes?
    But more than anything else, the question I asked myself was: how will I face Suzanne?
    She had changed so much. There had been a time when her first unthinking reaction when she saw me was to break into a smile. Now, even at the best of times, there was no smile and her first word was almost always a complaint or a grievance.
    I can’t return with no work, I decided. I’d rather just walk away, walk away and never see her or Maria ever again.

    And for a moment there, Dr Brennan, I really did think about it. It would have hurt them both if I’d left. In fact it would quite possibly have killed Maria, for how could Suzanne pay the rent and buy the food and provide care for a sickly child all at the same time? But if I walked away, at least I would be spared the shame and misery of witnessing all that. The world being as it was, I could lose myself easily, put myself beyond the reach of Suzanne and everyone that we knew, and simply start again without that burden. I was a non-person, Suzanne and Maria were non-people. And, in a strange way, that’s what we were even to one another . It wouldn’t be so long – or so it seemed to me in that brief moment – it wouldn’t be so long before they had no more substance in my mind than some old dream.
    “Hey! Juan!”
    I turned round. It was Thach Pham, the Magdalen physicist, running after me, dodging passers-by.
    “Juan! Juan, I’m… I’m so sorry,” he gasped as he tried to catch his breath. “Das has just told me he’s let you go. I did everything I could!”
    “Das said you did nothing at all. Like you did nothing at all about that technician job.”
    “Well, I… It’s difficult, Juan. You don’t understand. I would have spoken up but these days even a second-generation migrant like me has