The Peacock Cloak

sign. Here is the statue of Eros: the god of love. Those things there are buses and cars. They ran on tanks full of hydrocarbons extracted from the earth. Imagine that: each one of them, burning litres and litres of the stuff every day! It came in great ships from across the sea. The ships burned hydrocarbons too. And look at all the lights: lights in the shopfronts, lights on lamp-posts, lights at street corners that changed from red to green to tell them when to stop and when to go…
    Hydrocarbons were burnt in power stations up and down the land to keep those lights shining: millions of years-worth of carboniferous forest going up in one great glorious blaze.
    Clarrie pushes between my father and me, makes each of us take one of her hands, tries to encourage us to give her a swing. And then, encountering indifference from both of us, she abruptly shakes herself free with a cross little toss of her head and rushes forward to the gateway of the underground station with its shining icon: red, white, blue.
    “I want to go first on the sclator!” she cries, glaring back at me. “You are not to hold my hand, Tom!”
    Snap, snap. These are just some strangers, some passers-by who I photographed when they weren’t looking. You see they are wearing hemispherical goggles over their eyes. Those things were called bug eyes. They were all the rage back then. They were the next big thing after mobile telephones and hand-held computers. People wearing them could have their own personalised visual field imposed over their view of the world around them. They could have the colours enhanced or switched round. They could have purple trees and yellow sky. They could have black light and white darkness. They could have pop videos or pornography or sport or celebrities moving in shadow form over the physical world. They could see the faces of friends and talk to them. They could buy things and sell things as they walked.
    The clever goggles could sense the movement of your facial muscles and construct a picture of your face without a camera. All around us people were prattling away to unseen people that only they could see. We were already letting go of the physical world. Without even knowing it, we were already letting go.
    “Careful on the steps, Clarrie,” I commanded as we descended to the yellow cave below the ground.
    We’d always looked out for each other, the two of us. Mum wasn’t at all like Dad in most ways but she was just as self-absorbed.
    Look at this pair. Another two strangers I snapped before we disappeared under the earth. They’re young lovers, lovers together in the very presence of the god of love, but they both have their bug eyes on and are gabbling away not to each other but to friends not physically there at all but perhaps on the far side of the city or even on the far side of the world. Rockets fuelled with hydrocarbons blasted satellites into space to carry our chitter-chatter back and forth. Giant transmitters powered by electricity beamed out our chitter-chatter to the silent stars. We loved our toys back then, our bright lights, our screens, our shining trains rushing out of black tunnels into brightly lit caves that were filled with giant images of the things that we could buy.
    “Hmm,” says my father, sotto voce , for my ears only, as we descend into the hollow spaces below Piccadilly Circus. “Might be the last time you see all this I fear,” and he gives a gesture that takes in the lights and the cars and the buses and the crowds.
    I look up at him to ask what on Earth he means, and he gives a little significant nod towards my sister to say ‘not in front of her’, as though the four years between my age and hers have somehow made me old enough to deal with anything.

    Snap, snap. Here we are in the train, look. Everyone has their bug eyes on but us, everyone but us and that weirdo in the corner who is mad and can escape to his own private world without the benefit of technology. Nobody else really sees him. He is muttering and chuckling to himself, sometimes scribbling urgently in some kind of notebook. People turn the opacity of their goggles up to the max. The outside world is all but shut out completely for them. Wireless routers in the train ensure that, even entombed down here in the cold London clay, the passengers are not forced to relinquish their comforting streams of pictures and words and sounds. Like Jonah in the belly of the whale, they call out from the depths and the