The Peacock Cloak

lectures on subjects like family planning, nutrition and the world revealed by science. At the far side of the village, Stephen’s landlady, Jennifer Notuna, had the largest house. A widow for some years, she topped up her income by letting out four rooms, the largest one to Stephen, the other three to Lutanian labourers working on an Agency housing project in the nearby town of New Settlement. (Less wealthy than Stephen, they slept two or three to a room).
    Jennifer and her assistant Lucia were hanging out sheets when Stephen returned. Jennifer was in her fifties, Lucia half her age, but they were both from the same Lutanian mold: big, brown, solid women, with tough faces and loud firm voices.
    “Good evening, Mrs Notuna. Good evening Lucia.”
    “Hey, Mr Kohl. You hungry? Chicken and corn for dinner tonight.”
    Stephen smiled. After his encounter with the indigenes, it was good to be back with people who were completely at home here in Lutania. (The Lutanian response to any reference to indigenes was invariably an irritated and dismissive snort. In remote areas beyond the Agency’s reach, goblins were still shot as vermin).
    “Mrs Notuna,” said Stephen suddenly, “when you’ve got a moment, I wonder if I could have a word?”
    His pink, curiously naked face reddened.
    “Yes okay, Mr Kohl. Is everything all right? A problem with the rent money maybe?”
    “No no, nothing like that. It’s… Well, to be honest, I could do with a little advice.”
    Jennifer and Lucia studied their lodger’s glowing face. They rather liked him, even if he was from the Agency. They appreciated the fact that he had learned to speak Luto, the settlers’ language. They liked the way he showed respect to Jennifer’s age and did not call her by her first name, as most Agency people did without even asking. They even quite liked the way he looked. Pink and spiky though he was, he was also big and broad-shouldered, and he stood nearly a head taller than the average Lutanian man. “I’d give him one, no trouble at all,” had in fact once been the verdict of Lucia, during one of their periodic sexual audits of their male lodgers. (It did not seem that way to Stephen, but Lucia was actually younger than him, though already a mother with three children.)
    “Is it a girl, maybe?” asked Lucia, “a girl that you’ll have to leave behind when you leave us?”
    The two of them had often speculated about Stephen’s personal relationships, worrying that he nearly always seemed to come straight back from work and spend all evening at his screen.
    “Or a boy, even?” asked Jennifer, attempting to accommodate to the strange cultural mores of Agency people.
    Stephen laughed uncomfortably.
    “Oh no, nothing like that. It’s just a few little worries, silly worries really.”
    “Well I’ll gladly help if I can.” Jennifer was actually rather flattered that an Agency person should think her advice worth seeking. “Just let me and Lucia get dinner sorted, and then I’ll make us some coffee and we can go over to the bench where it’s quiet.”

    Beyond the yard, on the far side of a low whitewashed wall, was Jennifer’s vegetable plot, part of the rich green patchwork of the Lisoba clearing. She and Lucia grew beans here, and peppers and corn and sweet potatoes. A wooden wind-wheel creaked and groaned in the middle of the plot, pulling up water from the huge natural reservoir that lay beneath the forest and dishing it out in spurts into a network of irrigation channels lined with clay that the locals scraped up out of ponds. Beyond the plot was a strip of cleared and slightly raised ground on which stood one of the village’s many wooden statues of the god Yava. (He was small and wiry, with a narrow and rather cunning face and a somewhat prominent phallus.) After that came the uncleared forest, into the edges of which the odd stray tomato or bean plant had crept. The Agency had put in a chain-link fence to mark the boundary, and prevent indigenes from wandering in and annoying the people of Lisoba.
    Jennifer’s bench was up there next to the carved god. Stephen had often seen her and Lucia sitting over there in the dark when the dishes had been put away, dim shapes, with the silent forest behind them, their voices rising and falling with the characteristic Luto lilt, and the faintly glowing tips of their cigarettes periodically flaring up and illuminating their faces. (The fact that the Lutanians had rediscovered smoking