The Peacock Cloak

stiffly acknowledged that he’d sometimes been unnecessarily abrupt. Then he downed a couple of full cups of wine, called out for everyone’s attention, and made a short and excruciatingly awkward speech in which, to everyone’s surprise and embarrassment, he apologised for having been such an unpleasant colleague.
    “You’re very nice people,” he said, “and I’m sorry I’ve sometimes been unfriendly and too taken up with my work.”
    Helen Fu had tears in her eyes. He had redeemed himself at last! But worse than the tears in her eyes, were the ones that Stephen noticed in his own.
    “I’ve not made the best of you all, I can see that now. But I’d like you to know that I have appreciated you in my own way, and I’ll remember you fondly.”
    He’d wasted these three years, he now realised, wasted them on all kinds of levels. And the sad part was that, though he would forget the last part of his time in Lutania, he’d always remember these wasted years and the many opportunities he’d failed to take. The forgetting wouldn’t begin, at the very earliest, until tomorrow morning.
    When the wine was gone, some of his colleagues suggested they all go over to New Settlement (where many of them lived) to carry on drinking together. But Stephen said he really didn’t mean to be unfriendly but he’d rather not.
    “This has been very nice,” he said. “But, if it’s okay with you, I don’t want my last memory of Lutania to be of me throwing up in some bar somewhere.”
    He even attempted a joke at his own expense.
    “And anyway, you know me and nights out in bars. A man can only change himself so much.”
    Everyone laughed. And then the women kissed him and the men shook his hand and wished him luck, and then they all climbed into the bus, several of them calling out jovial warnings to him to walk in a straight line and not wander off into the forest. They waved to him until they’d turned the corner. He knew that when they’d settled back in their seats, they’d spend a minute or two telling each other that Stephen had been a funny sort of fellow but he wasn’t so bad really, and then they’d forget him, pretty much for good.
    He could have made himself part of their lives, but in fact he hadn’t, and the moment for that had passed.

    Bright stars packed the sky above the road, as he walked through the caramel forest, stumbling a little. He didn’t see any indigenes, though once, in the distance, he saw a score or more of the vaguely pony-like creatures that the Lutanians called unicorns, emerging one by one from a pond and heading off through the trees in single file, faintly illuminated from below by the dim pink phosphorescence that came up from the moss at dead of night.
    About halfway back, he stopped for a dip in another pond not far off the road. The algal-type growth that lined the ponds was also slightly luminous, so that the water glowed a faint soft pink. When he dived down into it he could see the tunnels quite clearly and unmistakably, stretching and branching away in every direction through the roots of the trees.

    Jennifer and Lucia were sitting over on the bench.
    “Hey, Mr Kohl!” Lucia bellowed. “We didn’t think you’d be back till much later.”
    “Go and get some beer from the kitchen and come and join us,” hollered his landlady.
    They smelled pleasantly of fresh sweat and cheap perfume and cigarette smoke as they moved over to let him squeeze in between them. Their bodies felt friendly and female and warm. Jennifer opened up the flagon of beer he’d brought over from the house and passed it back to him to take the first swig.
    “Day 40, eh?” Mrs Notuna said, prodding him affectionately. “A big night for you, Mr Kohl.”
    “So tonight’s the last night you’ll remember?” asked Lucia. “Is that right?”
    “Not necessarily,” Jennifer told her knowledgeably. “It could be but it probably won’t. He might remember the next ten days. But after that, he’ll definitely remember nothing. Imagine that. Nothing at all.”
    “Yava save us,” said Lucia touching her forehead. She had been rolling a cigarette, and now she lit it, the flare of the match illuminating the carved god beside her.
    Stephen giggled.
    “You Lutanians are funny. You haven’t a good word to say about the indigenes and you’d happily shoot the lot of them if you could, but you worship a god who looks just like them.”
    “What? Yava? A goblin?” Lucia was not only shocked by