The Peacock Cloak

worry. I’ll certainly try my best.”

    Jacob went back down to Vegas, with its colourful lights and its jolly music (honky-tonk outside the Saloon, the Can-Can outside the Gay Paree, ‘Molly Malone’ outside Clancy’s). He bought a snack at Mr Wu’s and made a couple of circuits of Main Street, accepting enthusiastic greetings from all the friendly animatronic characters: Mr Wu, Officer Murphy, big Momma Jackson, Ol’ Pop Johnson in his rocking chair.
    “Howdy there, Captain Stone. You on your way again soon, I guess?”
    Their folksy cheeriness would turn to stillness and silence as soon as he’d rejoined his ship, and Main Street would plunge into a darkness that might be unbroken for weeks or even months, but now they behaved like they’d spent the whole four years since Jacob’s last visit talking about him fondly, chuckling over his wry remarks, and looking forward to his return.
    “I often smile to myself when I think about what you said to me last time,” said Officer Murphy. “‘How can a cop catch bad guys when his feet are fixed to the floor?’ That’s what you said, you sly dog. Good one Captain, good one. Still makes me smile.”
    But Jacob was bored with Main Street – the illusion of companionship was thin from the outset and it didn’t last – and he settled for a bit of drinking instead. He had a ‘whiskey’ in Clancy’s, a ‘cognac’ in the Gay Paree and a ‘bourbon’ in the Good Ol’ Little Earth. All the drinks tasted vile and all pretty much the same, but they contained the prerequisite amount of ethanol. He followed them up with a chaser in Yoko’s, a nightcap in the Wild West Saloon and one for the road at Mrs Morgan’s gloomily watching an animatronic stripper gyrating round a pole. (She had one finger broken on her right hand. It dangled limply on a piece of wire.) Then he returned to the Rio Quinto to try and sleep.
    He was not at ease though. He was agitated. The normal, sluggish, barely conscious flow of his life had been disrupted. There was something he needed to do to put it back in its regular channel but he couldn’t think what it was. Only as he was lowering himself onto the crumpled sheets of his berth (as usual neglecting to remove his clothes or clean his teeth), did inspiration finally came to the drunken brain of Captain Jacob Stone.
    He smiled grimly, sat back up again, and went to his toolbox to select a fine-pointed awl.

    Jacob turned on the big hold lights and made his way slowly and unsteadily down the gangway between the containers of samarium, his breathing loud and laboured inside his helmet. He headed straight for the specially adapted container that held the thirty tardies, and then wobbled along between the rows of seats until he reached the two newlyweds on their single seat at the end.
    “Hey there my beauties,” said Jacob. “Hey there my pretty lovebirds. Old Daddy Stone has a little surprise for you when you get to Little Earth.”
    He leaned forward, peering into their delicate, empty, transparent faces, examining first the male, then the female and then the male again, patting the awl gently against his left hand all the while, as if he were an artist trying to decide the final brushstroke on some great masterpiece.
    “Which one of you, eh? Which of you little lovebirds wants to be the one that wakes?”
    Finally he made a choice.
    He knelt, awkwardly and with much wheezing, in front of the dry shell of the young wife, reached behind the hollow bubble of her head, and pressed his little awl against the hard but fragile surface until it broke through into the small dried lump against the back of the skull that he surmised, correctly, to be her desiccated brain.
    “Like the guy said, there’s often one or two of you that wake up and then die. People expect that. There’s often one or two.”
    He hauled himself, wheezing, back onto his feet, then stood for a moment, swaying, to admire his handiwork.
    “A neat job though I say it myself,” said Captain Stone.
    He leaned forward into the empty transparent face, which was like a sculpture made out of blown glass.
    “What do you think sweetheart?” he asked it. “Done you proud, wouldn’t you say?”
    He laughed wheezily.
    “Certainly done you anyway.”
    He looked round and gave the husband a little avuncular pat on the head.
    “Never mind, my dried-up buddy. Fuck ’em and forget ’em, that’s old Daddy Stone’s advice.”
    He laughed again at that, but when he