The Peacock Cloak

with great branching antlers, trotting past the convenience store with its ads for bug card top-ups, past the silent pub, past the shop that sold discounted greeting cards and remaindered books, past the darkened laundrette. It had trotted past them and on, round the corner and out of his sight again.
    A solitary car had come by after that, way too fast, screeching its brakes round the corner, shooting across a red light and roaring off in the opposite direction to the deer. And then silence had returned again, and nothing had moved but the traffic lights, shifting every few minutes between green and amber and red.
    “It had a rider on its back,” Richard said out loud in the railway carriage, suddenly remembering this fact. “It had a….”
    Then he stopped, for Jenny had looked at him and smiled.

    It was a lovely smile, even when partially obscured by bug eyes. A smile of tenderness and delight.
    Richard laughed his gap-toothed laugh.
    “Hello sweetheart!” whispered Jenny to the 3D image of her boyfriend Ben, suspended in the space where Richard was sitting. “Have you had a good day darling? I am so looking forward to spending this time with you!”
    Of course Richard couldn’t see Ben frown back at her, and tell her he hoped she wasn’t going to be silly and girly and go over the top about everything.

    After she’d hung up, Jenny turned opacity right up to 95 and watched the new fly-on-the-wall documentary called Janey about the daily life of a young secretary like herself.
    “Just remember I’m on national TV,” Janey was saying to her boyfriend Ray. “All over the country people are watching me on their bugs. So now tell me the truth. Are you really going to commit ?”
    According to a recent poll, nine million out of eleven million bug viewers agreed that Ray wasn’t good enough for her, but tragically, heroically, crazily, she stayed with him anyway.
    Jenny thought about Ben and his sharp tongue. It really hurt her, it made her feel small and foolish and insignificant. Were they going to be all right in Jamaica? Was that even a possibility? Was there really any chance of it at all?

    Richard meanwhile was looking out of the window at abandoned industrial estates.
    “No one sees this. No one except for me.”
    He looked at ruined factories and warehouses and engine sheds.
    “I know who’ll show up now,” he thought with an inward sigh.
    And sure enough there was Steel Man, with its iron hands, suspended by magnetic forces in the orange city sky. And of course it spotted Richard at once, regarding him intently with its burning eyes.
    Richard turned away uncomfortably, like a child avoiding the gaze of an adult who had once told him off. He hunched down in his seat, with a wince and a tightening of his lips, and turned his attention determinedly to the smoke-blackened walls of Victorian tenement buildings, with buddleia sprouting from the chimney stacks, and to old billboards with their fading and peeling ads for obsolete products. (No one would ever again be bothered to paste up those wrinkly paper images. Any day now advertisers would be able to use the Urban Consensual Field to put pictures in the sky.)
    “If it wasn’t for me,” muttered Richard Pegg out loud, glancing at the opaque goggles that covered Jenny’s eyes and avoiding the gaze of Steel Man. “This would all just…”
    He broke off.
    A tear had rolled out from under Jenny’s bug eyes, a mascara-stained tear. Richard watched, fascinated and profoundly moved, as it rolled down her right cheek.
    Jenny flipped down the opacity of her bugs and began to fumble in her bag.
    But Richard beat her to it, retrieving a squashed packet of tissues from under the notebook in his right anorak pocket, and leaning forward to offer it to her.
    Jenny lifted her bugs right off her eyes, smiled at him, accepted the packet.
    “Thank you,” she said, pulling out a tissue and dabbing at her eyes, “thank you so much. That’s very kind of you.”
    Richard laughed.
    “It was an invisible man,” he offered.
    “Sorry?”
    “Riding on the back of that deer. An invisible man with horns.”
    He didn’t normally speak of such things, but Jenny he knew he could trust.
    “Wow,” Jenny exclaimed. “That sounds like quite something.”
    Richard laughed.
    “It was,” he said. “That’s why the Need woke me. It was an atomic truth.”
    Jenny smiled, handed him back his tissues. Then more tears came, and Richard handed the tissues back again