The Peacock Cloak

peasant way of life which the Agency was always nagging them to change, and from which their own young people were increasingly prone to flee.
    Stephen was not at ease. He hated the way the villagers prodded him and poked him and plied him with drinks. He hated the sense of himself as a prized exhibit.
    “I’m very tired,” he told Jennifer and Lucia towards midnight. “I think I’ll head off to bed.”
    The three of them were sitting on the yard wall under the stars, Stephen beside the two women. Neighbours sat around them on kitchen chairs and wooden boxes, watching and listening minutely.
    Stephen cleared his throat.
    “I’ve decided to go away for a bit in the morning,” he told the two of them, feeling the hot blood prickling round the roots of his hair. “I think I’ll go over to Balos. May as well check that out before I say goodbye to Lutania, even if I won’t be able to remember it.”
    There was an audible collective sigh of surprise and disappointment, and then the neighbours all turned to Jennifer or Lucia to observe how they received this news
    “But we thought you were going to stay until the time for your transmission!” said Jennifer.
    “Yes but, like my boss said, when you think about it, it’s really not such a bad idea to grab the chance of a vacation.”
    “You can take your vacation here. Stop work and put your feet up here in Lisoba. That’s fine with us.”
    “Balos is a big bad place, Mr Kohl,” said Jorge Cervantes. “It’s not somewhere to go for a holiday.”
    The rest of the little audience agreed. People began to tell stories about folk from Lisoba and the neighbouring villages who’d gone to Balos and come to harm. Mr Roberti told of a girl who became a drug addict and ended up in prison. Mrs Zorrona of a boy who’d worked for a whole year on an Agency building site, and then lost everything he’d earned in a single night’s gambling in Balos. And two or three people mentioned the well-known case of a young woman called Susan from Porto who had gone to Balos less than a year ago, and ended up being raped and killed.
    “She was all cut up apparently,” said Mr Zorrona..
    “Cut wide open,” said Mrs Roberti with a certain grim satisfaction, “and all her insides taken out. And it wasn’t done by foreigners. They were village boys, as Lutanian as she was.”
    (The stories might be exaggerated, but, in spite of its University and its Academy of Science, Balos really was a lawless place, full of bewildered Lutanians trying to be city people when their whole culture had evolved for small villages like Lisoba, where everyone knew everyone else, and countless iterations of Yava were always present to watch over those few moments that neighbours overlooked.)
    “I appreciate your concern,” Stephen interrupted after the sixth or seventh story, “but you do need to remember I’m not some naïve peasant. I grew up in a big city. Really big. You’ve no idea. Balos might seem big and scary to you but it’s a quiet little backwater to me.”
    They all stared at him. If Balos was a backwater, what did that make Lisoba?
    Stephen rubbed his hands over his burning face.
    “I know I should have given you notice,” he told Jennifer, “and of course I’ll pay you the full rent up to the day of my transmission.”
    He made himself meet her eyes for just one moment. He could see how hurt she was, how humiliated in front of the village. Then he turned quickly away.
    None of this really mattered, he told himself. It was past midnight. Day 29 had gone.
    Turning away from all of them, he looked out into the dark and smiled.

Our Land

    “The Romans sir,” said a girl with pebble glasses at the front of the class.
    “Yes. Yes, that’s right, Jessica, the Romans,” agreed Thomas Turner.
    He was a history teacher, and he was teaching history to class 7G.
    “Well done, Jenny,” said Thomas belatedly, remembering that Jenny was not very bright and needed encouragement.
    He was feeling rather strange, rather distant, as if he was looking out at the world from the end of a long tunnel.
    “The Romans. Exactly so, Jenny. And who lived in these parts before the Romans?”
    It was a hot day, he supposed, a hot stuffy day and he was tired. From outside the open window he heard, with pleasure and some surprise (for he’d never heard one so close to the school), the lovely song of a skylark.
    “The Brythons,” said a boy at the back called Edward – and for some reason