The Peacock Cloak

the classroom itself, and at least twenty years old. It seemed familiar, and yet simultaneously it seemed strange. He felt pretty sure that it wasn’t the same book that he’d laid there at the beginning of the class. For surely that had been a new book, recently published, with a shiny blue and white cover?
    “Now where was I?” he said, playing for time, in as hearty a voice as he could manage.
    And then the bell went. As the children rushed out he turned out of habit to wipe clean the whiteboard and then remembered that the school had never had whiteboards.
    “It’s as if I’m in two places at once.”
    The book of English history fell into three pieces when he picked it up. So he stacked them together again and placed the battered volume carefully back into his briefcase. The heat and humidity was pressing down on him. His head was aching, and he felt a faint twinge of nausea. He felt he had been travelling for miles and miles. Yet this was just Ely and he had only driven the few miles in from Sutton as he did every morning.
    What was I thinking about back then? he asked himself. What was it that I remembered?
    As he stepped out of the classroom a Logrian helicopter gunship was passing low overheard.
    A Logrian helicopter?

    He was momentarily surprised by the age and shabbiness of his car, but by the time he’d got inside and started it up, he was no longer asking himself questions. It didn’t seem unusual to him that the roads of this Fenland city were crumbling, nor that a pervasive smell of burnt rubber hung over the place. He didn’t wonder why the famous cathedral tower was pockmarked with bullet holes. It didn’t strike him as odd that from time to time he passed a heap of rubble where a house had once stood or that a tank squatted by the road out of town with its gun trained at the passing cars. And he knew without thinking about it that the initials “BCL” stencilled on the tank’s turret stood for Byddin Cenedlaethol Lloegr , the National Army of Logres.
    Under the bored eye of two Logrian soldiers lounging against the tank – a tall black man and a Latin-looking woman – he pulled over outside a house on the outskirts of town, honked his horn and got out of the car. The black soldier ran his tongue over his lips and put his hand to his gun strap.
    “Just letting my friend know I’m here,” Thomas called out to him in Brythonic, without wondering how or when he’d learnt this Celtic tongue.
    It’s always best to let the soldiers know what’s going on , he said to himself. When people were edgy and jumpy and sometimes trigger-happy, it was best not to keep them guessing or to spring things on them.
    He took a square of rag out of his pocket and wiped his shining face. His wife had cut up the rags, he suddenly remembered with a complicated mixture of painful emotions. He had a wife called Jenny and a son called William who was twenty-one. Jenny had weary, bitter eyes and she filled her time up with repetitive money-saving tasks like cutting rags into handkerchiefs. William mostly sat in the living room and watched TV.
    “ What you said?” called out the black soldier in broken English.
    “It’s my friend Richard,” Thomas called back in Brythonic. “I’m just honking my horn to let him know I’m here. I’m giving him a lift home.”
    The soldier just perceptibly nodded.
    “Ah, here he is!” called out Thomas again, as Richard Duckett emerged from the house where he’d been working all day, a big, sturdy man with a round, open face.
    Richard lived in Sutton too. He had a son called Harry who was a friend of Williams, and a wife… Thomas felt a stab of grief… Richard had a wife called Liz who was Thomas’ first and only love.
    Richard was accompanied by a stocky stranger with close-cropped hair.
    “Hey, Tom!” he called, giving a quick angry glance at the BCL. “Mind if Jack here comes too? He’s been helping me out today.”
    “No that’s fine,” Tom said. “How do you do, Jack?”
    “Hello mate,” Jack said. His accent immediately identified him as one of the refugees from Birmingham who lived in the Churchill Camp. “Thanks for the lift. Appreciate it mate.”
    The two of them climbed into the car in a hot blast of plaster dust and sweat, Jack in the back and Richard in the front. Characteristically, Richard reached forward at once for the knob of the car radio.
    “It’s no good, Richard,” Thomas told him as he started up the car. “It doesn’t work