The Peacock Cloak

digital heavens answer them. Incessantly, like the love of God, data pours down.
    Snap. There were moving advertisements in trains then, pictures shifting constantly through ten- or twenty-second cycles. Over the window opposite me, above my own reflected face superimposed on sooty tunnel walls, one of these moving pictures was showing a hurricane sweeping through some Caribbean town. I did a little video clip of it, look. The palm-trees bend down, lay their coconuts neatly on the ground in rows, bend back up again… A slogan comes up: ‘What are you doing to cut your carbon emissions?’
    Was that what my father meant, I wondered? Were we going to have to turn off the lights in Piccadilly Circus maybe, or turn them down so they weren’t so bright? Was that what he was talking about? I knew there was a problem and we were going to have to do something . Everyone knew that. Everyone knew that we all had to do our bit. My mother was very into all that. She made us recycle just about everything. She had low-energy lightbulbs all through the house. She planted a tree in the garden each time she flew off across the world with her latest fancy man. I can tell you, we had quite a forest going on out there, though many of the trees had died.
    Snap. Here’s Clarrie again. Look, she’s insisted on sitting apart from my father and me, on her own, in a different part of the carriage. She’s on the edge of her seat, excited, revering the moment as only Clarrie ever could, taking in the wondrous magical metropolis with all its reckless light and motion. I loved her desperately, that little sister of mine. I loved her more than anyone in the world.

    Snap, snap. This is just off the street near my dad’s flat: a side alley where people left their rubbish: food scraps, boxes, plastic bags, tons of the stuff, to be scooped up every fortnight into big trucks and taken out of the city to be piled up in the low seagull-infested artificial hills that you found near every town. Look, here are a couple of foxes looking for scraps. Can you make them out?
    They had red fur really, but they look grey and ghostly in the picture because of the streetlights. If you had bug eyes on, even on low opacity, you’d probably not notice they were there. It was like that in those days. It was as if the non-human world was slowly leaching away. One day we’d wake up and it would all be gone: the deer and the foxes and the hedgehogs and the pigeons, finally become so nebulous and pale that they’d ceased to exist, unable to compete with our TVs and bug eyes and our shining lights.

    My father’s flat was as sterile as a hotel room. It was a serviced apartment. Someone from the service company came in to clean it every morning and make his bed, a Russian, a Filipino, a Nigerian… At that time British people worked on computer screens or not at all. They dealt with digitised information. Work that involved the physical world was always done by migrants, who were nearly as invisible as those foxes.
    My father had pushed the boat out for us this time. It wasn’t a supermarket ready meal that night. He’d paid one or other of his cleaners to put something together earlier that day that he could heat up for us in his microwave. It was lasagne, I remember, a rather leathery lasagne. We ate it in virtual silence, sitting round his shiny empty wooden table, with the fake flames dancing about in his fake fire.
    Pretty soon afterwards he put Clarrie to bed, reading her a story from an old book whose archaic language she didn’t understand, and whose attempts at humour went completely over her head. (Dad never seemed to notice things like that.) I was allowed to stay up another hour in deference to my advanced age. Dutifully I loaded the dishes into his little dishwasher while he finished reading to Clarrie.
    “Where do you put your bottles Dad?” I asked him when he returned.
    “What do you mean?”
    “For recycling…”
    He laughed at this.
    “Recycling? Oh Tom, Tom, it’s a bit late for that.”
    I wasn’t sure what he meant.
    “They’ve already picked the glass up for this week, have they?”
    “No, no. I mean it’s a bit late to try and save the world by recycling bottles… That would be like… That would be like trying to stop the tide with a teaspoon.”
    He laughed a bit more.
    “A glass of wine Tom?” he then asked me. “I think you’re old enough for a glass.”
    I hated the stuff actually, but I didn’t like to reject