The Peacock Cloak

fragile hopes, and tried to notice me.
    She gave a strained smile.
    “Hey Juan. Well done. This could be it couldn’t it? This could be when our luck turns?”
    I brightened at once.
    “That’s right. Didn’t I always say something would come up?”
    I stepped forward to embrace her. Just for a moment she allowed herself to melt in my arms in the way that she’d done in the early days. But then little Maria began to cry.

    On a warm foggy morning five days later, Suzanne and Maria and I met Pham by Town Docks where the wide shallow-draft barges stopped off on their way up and down Thames Marsh between Oxford and half-drowned London. He had a little steam launch waiting for us there and we set off through the mist, flooded buildings and dead trees looming out of the greyness around us and disappearing back into it again. Pham paced restlessly all the time, sometimes bothering the taciturn skipper with anxious talk, sometimes peering anxiously into the obscurity ahead.
    Four or five kilometres west of the city we came to an old private hospital that sat on a hill above the Marsh. We docked at a makeshift jetty there and Pham put the rest of the money I was owed into Suzanne’s hands, along with letters on the headed paper of the Republic of Greenland, confirming our right to enter as alien residents. (I’m still puzzled by that. What kind of authority did Pham’s friends have to be able to arrange that for us in a single day? I hope to God those letters were real.)
    Anyway, then I said goodbye to Suzanne. It felt like goodbye too, even though, all being well, it would only be for less than an hour. Here, in the cold chemical atmosphere of the hospital, with that sharp sterile antiseptic smell that makes you think of shiny blades and neatly amputated limbs, she finally felt afraid for me, and cried. And then of course Maria cried too, my little Maria, stretching out her little hands to me to try and hold me back. All of this was a great comfort to me, buoying me up and making me feel, for a short time, like that noble knight that Suzanne had once seen in me.
    An Indian doctor came and took me into the scanner room. Pham, who’d been shifting about restlessly in the background all the while, went off somewhere to attend to the data transfer process that would transmit the configuration of particles that made up my body up to that old Chinese space station above the equator.
    The scanning machine was huge – it filled up most of a room that was five or six times the size of our entire bedsit in Walton Street – and it gave off a loud hum. I had to strip naked, be covered in clear jelly, and then laid down on a hard plastic bed where I was given the injections that would make me unconscious and keep me still while the machine did its work.
    As I sank under, I tried to avoid thinking about that one in three hundred possibility that I would never wake again, and instead concentrate on the fact that the overwhelmingly more likely outcome would be that I would be walking out of this place in an hour’s time with all that we needed to start a new life for ourselves in the temperate north.
    Greenland, Greenland, Greenland, I repeated to myself, and my last thoughts were of an emerald city, shining under a cool, clear, cloudless sky.

    I woke, feeling dizzy and nauseous, in a small, rather dirty room smelling of metal and oil and human sweat. I was lying naked on a bed, as I had been when I went under, but now I was covered all over in tubes and electrodes. And across the room two men in blue overalls were conferring in front of a large monitor.
    “I made it!” I yelled triumphantly. “Greenland here I come! Did you guys get your copy all right?”
    One of the men glanced round at me – a thin South Asian man with a small pointed beard – but oddly he didn’t answer, smile or even make eye contact.
    “Conscious!” he said to his companion, who was stocky and black. “That makes a change.”
    The black man laughed.
    “‘I made it!’” he mimicked, caricaturing my Spanish accent. “‘Greenland here I come!’ Wish I had a dollar every time they said that.”
    I tried to sit up but found that I was strapped down onto the bed with strong canvas belts.
    “Hey what’s going on? You said I could get up and walk as soon as I got through the scan.”
    The first man, the Asian, stood up and came over, casting his eye coolly over my body.
    “Looks pretty good,” he said. “Looks pretty functional to