The Peacock Cloak

heart keeps its secrets even from you, until it’s quite sure they’ll never be found out.”
    She took a few last thoughtful drags on her cigarette then tossed he butt end onto the ground. Suddenly she clapped her hands.
    “That’s it , isn’t it, Mr Kohl?” she exclaimed. “That’s the thing that bothers you. You just don’t know .”
    “Yes,” said Stephen. “Exactly. That’s why I wanted to carry on working. So I’d have something to do and people to watch over me.”
    Lucia laughed.
    “Well if that’s all it is, it’s easy to fix. Stay with Jennifer and me. Don’t go away from here until it’s time for your transmission. Jennifer will find you work to keep you busy, won’t you Jennifer? And we’ll both watch over you and see you behave yourself. It doesn’t matter to us what you remember or what you forget, and when you’ve gone, we’ll never see you again.”
    “Yes of course,” Jennifer said. “If you really want work, there’s plenty to be done round here.”
    “Well… Wow. Thank you. That’s great. If you’re really sure, of course.”
    Stephen’s relief was so palpable that Lucia laughed and kissed him again.
    “That Agency of yours is really stupid,” Jennifer said, “telling you to say goodbye to everyone and go away on your own, when anyone can see that what you really need at a time like this is other people around you. Other people can be Yava’s eyes for you, even if you don’t believe in him. And then it doesn’t matter if you remember or not.”
    Lucia nodded.
    “You know what the trouble is with you Agency people? You try and work everything out in your heads. You try and do it all with words and ideas. And when they’re gone, you think nothing’s left.”
    “Yes,” said Jennifer. “A person’s more than the thoughts that go through their head, and whether they remember them or not.”

    On Day 39 Stephen got up early in the morning. His head was throbbing from the night’s drinking, but he worked all morning for Jennifer Notuna, feeding the pigs, weeding the bean patch, and mending an old shed door. And all that afternoon, after eating lunch with Jennifer and Lucia, he worked on dismantling the remains of an old pigsty, carefully chipping the mortar off each baked brick, so it could be stacked and used again. By dinnertime, both his hands were bleeding and his back was aching, but he felt very cheerful and content, and the dinner tasted like the food of paradise.
    On Day 38 he began laying foundations for a new sty, to replace the pen in which the pigs now lived. He spent most of the morning digging holes at the four corners of the new structure, right down through the soil to the matted substrate of dense tangled roots, as he had seen local builders do. (Jennifer laughed at this and reminded him it was a pigsty he was building, and not a two-storey house). Then in the afternoon he bought some bags of cement from one of Jennifer’s neighbours, mixed it with gravel in batches and poured it in. There was still time after that, while the cement was setting, to go into the edge of the forest to fetch some fuel for Jennifer’s stove.
    After dinner, he helped Jennifer wash up the dishes (it was Lucia’s day off), and then sat with her on her bench while she had her evening smoke.
    “It’s a shame I may not remember any of this,’ he told her, ‘because I honestly don’t think I’ve ever been happier in my life.”
    She beamed at him proudly and patted his knee.
    “Well write it in your diary if that bothers you so much. And I’ll write down that it’s true. We can see the change in you. It’s like you’ve become a different man.”

    Day 30 came, the day that he had an 87.3% chance of forgetting. He fed the pigs in their new sty. He let the chickens out of their new coop. He went and checked the wind pump with its new and improved wooden mechanism. He was walking over to the yard where he planned to repair and repaint the wall, when something shifted inside him, and he admitted to himself for the first time that he was beginning to feel a little bored. It wasn’t severe, it wasn’t something that he couldn’t easily shake off, but deep within him a tiny worm of boredom baulked for a moment at the idea of another day of chores, another day of Jennifer and Lucia proudly clucking over him as if they personally had saved his soul, another day of inhabiting this humble and dependent new persona.
    “What did they think I was going to do if I