The Peacock Cloak

went off on my own?” he muttered crossly as he began to chip loose cement of out the wall. “What did they think they were rescuing me from?”
    And why was he letting them rule his life anyway? They were delightful people of course, but they knew next to nothing. Neither of them had been further than Porto or New Settlement. Neither had a reading age of more than seven.
    “And let’s face it,” he muttered, “they’re so pig ignorant here they worship a goblin and don’t even know it.”
    He laughed, but then he checked himself.
    “Come on,” he distinctly heard himself say, “it’s still only Day 30. All this is for later.”

    That scared him. The rest of the day he worked hard, and reminded himself regularly how kind Jennifer and Lucia had been to him, and how unusually content he had been these last nine days, and how much better and more rewarding (and how much less boring) this Day 30 had turned out compared with the one he’d spent back in that wretched seaside resort, playing screen games and watching movies alone in his room.
    That evening, while Lucia and Jennifer were washing up the dinner, he took a bottle of beer and went over to the bench to wait for them.
    The village was settling into evening. The sun had sunk once again below the treetops, electric lights shone here and there across the settlement, and the sights and sounds of the village took on a completely different quality from the sights and sounds of daytime. Things were closer, more intimate, more self-contained.
    A cockerel crowed. Someone banged on a metal pan. A mother shouted to her children. Mr and Mrs Roberti ate out in their yard, silent but for the chink of cutlery on plates. Mad Gretel called something out and laughed. Mr Zorrona and his sons hacked and chipped away stubbornly at a new irrigation channel, though they were only vague silhouettes in the dusk. A moped emerged into the clearing, its headlights sweeping across the wooden wall of a barn on which YAVA SEES ALL was painted in Luto in large red and white letters.
    It was all so familiar and so small.
    “Mummy’s boy,” said his own voice suddenly inside his head.
    Stephen started. It took him a few seconds to locate the indigene in the dark, but the creature was actually directly behind him, just outside the boundary fence. It was squatting with its left shoulder pressed up against the chainlink, absorbed with some object it was holding right up close to its face and turning this way and that in its hands.
    “Go away, you nosy thing,” growled Jennifer, coming over to join on the bench. “Get away with you!”
    She chucked handfuls of dirt at the creature. When that didn’t shift it, she went up and kicked the fence.
    The goblin stood up. Smiling, or seeming to smile, it held out the object it had been playing with, almost as if it intended to taunt them with a treasure that it possessed and they didn’t. But the object itself was a small empty pod, such as could be found all over the forest floor, and perhaps the gesture had no real meaning at all.
    “Mummy’s boy. Tee hee.”
    “Horrid creatures,” muttered Jennifer as it skipped off into the forest.
    She settled herself onto the bench with a weary but contented sigh, and took out her tobacco and papers from her apron pocket. Then she turned to him and smiled.
    “All well with you Mr Kohl?”
    It was odd. He had to force himself to meet her friendly gaze.

    On Day 29, Jennifer and Lucia arranged a party for Stephen to mark the last day that he might possibly still remember after he returned home. Everyone came to eat their food and to drink Stephen’s health: Mr and Mrs Zorrona and their boys, Mr and Mrs Roberti, Lucia’s handsome husband Luis and their children, Jorge Cervantes and his two wives, the other lodgers, even Mad Gretel, who the villagers thought was possessed… Everyone in the village came, and everyone listened to Lucia and Jennifer telling the tale yet again of how they’d persuaded Stephen to stay on and help them rather than go away and be alone during his final days in Lutania.
    “He’s never been so happy in his life,” they told everyone proudly, after they’d made the traditional chicken sacrifice to Yava, “he’s told us so himself.”
    The villagers had heard this before, many times over in fact, in various versions both at first and second hand, but they gladly heard it again, and gladly repeated it yet again to one another, for it gloriously vindicated the simple