The Peacock Cloak

anything from him, because I saw him so rarely, and because I didn’t want him to doubt, even for one moment, my devotion. He poured me dry white wine, and I sat at his table and sipped it manfully. He downed his first glass almost in one and poured himself a second.
    “I didn’t like to say it in front of Clarrie, Tom,” he then said, “but things are looking pretty bleak.”
    His voice was very tight as if he was stifling anger or tears or illicit excitement. I couldn’t tell which.
    “What? The lights? They’re going to have to turn them off?”
    “Turn off the lights? What on Earth are you talking about?”
    “In Piccadilly Circus.”
    He banged his glass angrily down on the the table.
    “Oh for goodness sake, Thomas. Do they teach you nothing in that appalling school of yours?”
    He might as well have whipped me with razor wire. Tears of shame came stinging into my eyes. I hung my head, with self-loathing blasting through me like an icy gale. Yet I had no idea what I had said wrong. I was only eleven years old after all.
    For something to do I picked up my camera, fiddled with it. Snap, the flash went off. (Look, here is the picture I took by mistake. Here is my right foot and my father’s blue serviced-apartment carpet.)
    “Oh for goodness sake, boy, stop fiddling with that thing!”
    I laid the camera down. My father snatched up the wine bottle and poured himself another glass.
    “It’s not a question of a few lights, Tom, as you should know perfectly well by now. Equilibrium has disappeared beyond our reach. Four or five major positive feedback loops are now accelerating out of control, each one amplifying the others: arctic methane, water vapour, the loss of ice cover to reflect the sun, dying forests…”
    He downed the second glass, again in one, and reached for the bottle
    “A while back a couple of our scientists did a little experiment. A breeding pair of rats was introduced to an obscure rock in the Atlantic which had previously been inhabited by nothing but millions of seabirds. The rats ate eggs and baby birds and they prospered and multiplied. Soon there were hundreds of them. But there were millions of birds, so that some time went by without the rats making any appreciable dent in their numbers at all. They just kept on breeding and breeding and breeding, eating birds and eggs to their heart’s content.”
    He was pouring himself yet another glass.
    “But a moment came when the entire system reached a point of no return, a point where collapse was inevitable, because the bird population was no longer capable of reproducing fast enough to replace the eggs and babies eaten by the rats. You might think that some visible sign of the approaching famine would be apparent to the rats, but no. Even when the point of no return had been reached and passed, there were more rats than ever before and they still had plenty to eat. In fact if you were a rat you might have thought to yourself that you’d never had it so good. You might feel as happy and as cheery and as prosperous as all those silly people milling round Piccadilly Circus with their ridiculous goggles on, shopping and going to shows and talking about Christmas and next year’s holiday. ‘There are lots more nests,’ a rat might think, if it were capable of thinking, as it gobbled up the contents of one nest and moved on to the next. ‘There are nests all over the place,’ it might say to itself. And it would be quite right. It’s just that this time round the rats weren’t eating a small percentage of the eggs, they were eating them all. Once those nests had gone there would be nothing left.”
    Again he downed his wine in one gulp. Even at eleven years old I knew this was pretty fast drinking.
    “Well, that’s how it is with us. The critical moment has been and gone. We can recycle bottles and build windmills to our heart’s content, but it’s too late. The moment when we could do anything about it passed about ten years ago.”
    He gave a bark of humourless laughter and said nothing for a while, turning his empty wine glass back and forth in his hand. After a time he poured himself yet more wine, offering me a top-up which I declined.
    “Can you keep a secret Tom?” he asked.
    I nodded, though I dreaded what he would say next.
    “This is an Official Secret, Tom, do you understand? You mustn’t tell anyone, no one at all, not even your mother.”
    Again I nodded, not because I wanted him to go on – I really