The Peacock Cloak

already spent most of his adult life by choice in a tiny space not so very much bigger than a Little Earth prison cell. All that had really been taken away from him was the prospect of anything different at the end.
    And truthfully he’d never been able to conceive of doing much more with his money than spending it in some sort of up-market version of New Vegas, with better and more realistic puppets, and whiskey that tasted real. His imagination didn’t stretch much further than that. And nor did his shrivelled heart.

Poppyfields

    It had once consisted of a run-down industrial estate, an abandoned shooting range and a council landfill site. Now it was going to be a new housing project called Poppyfields. Contractors brought in bulldozers and diggers on the backs of trucks, put up high fences and uncoiled springs of razor wire along the top. Then the diggers began to dig and the bulldozers began to grub out bushes and knock down the remains of the firing range and the empty factory units, leaving only the concrete floors.
    But when a digger started to excavate footings in the part of the site that had once been landfill, there was an unexpected development. There came a sort of malodorous fart from beneath the earth and the digger sunk into the ground to two metres’ depth. The landfill site, it seemed, had not been properly impacted or biologically stabilised. Beneath the surface anaerobic bacteria were blooming in a rich marsh of old cereal packets and crushed chicken carcasses and leftover oven chips. It was in a state of ferment, seething with methane which bubbled up through the mush and collected in pockets as high-pressure, inflammable bubbles.
    An argument broke out between the engineering contractors, the housing development agency and the city council, who were the former owners of the land, about who should bear the cost of sorting this out. Negotiations failed. Independent arbitration could not be agreed. The contractors took the housing development agency to court. The housing development agency issued a writ against the city council. The diggers and bulldozers came to a standstill. The Poppyfields site stood empty, seeds settled on the earth and red flowers bloomed over this legal battleground as they once bloomed over the trenches and shell-holes of the Somme. Poppyfields became a poppy field.
    And presently larks made their nests on the ground. Rabbits burrowed under the fence. Field mice slipped through the chain link. Tussocks of wild barley appeared, and bindweed and vetch crawled up its stems. Tiny seedlings of hawthorn and brambles sprouted here and there that, given time, would have gradually turned the place from a field into a jungle, to be superseded in turn by oak forest. But Poppyfields did not care about the future.
    Poppyfields lived its own life behind the razor wire. When it rained the water dripped from Poppyfields’ leaves. When the wind blew, Poppyfields’ grass and flowers bent back and forth like waves in the ocean. And when the August sun shone down at midday, Poppyfields’ larks twittered, on and on, in the big blank blue of Poppyfields’ sky, while mirages shimmered over the concrete slabs which had once been the floors of the industrial units but were now the home of lizards and wolf spiders, with buddleia sprouting in the cracks.
    Poppyfields asked itself no questions. Poppyfields did not concern itself about its place in the world. Poppyfields did not wonder about the source of the energy beating down on it from the centre of the sky, powering its multifarious life. Poppyfields lost no sleep over the fact that, in due course, the County Court, or the High Court, or the Court of Appeal would make a decision, after which the houses and roads and recreation grounds would come and cover Poppyfields all over with tarmac and little boxes of brick. Poppyfields did not worry. But it lived, it lived anyway, secretly, on its own, behind the fence, feeding on the light that came to it from a nearby star.
    Poppyfields lived and yet, at the same time, it was insubstantial. Not only Poppyfields but the entire universe that contained it, was really only a film, a membrane, thinner and more fragile than a child’s soap bubble, stretched across a void. It was one of countless such membranes, countless millions of them, for universes are more numerous than Poppyfields’ crickets and they are packed closer together than the grains of sand in Poppyfields’ earth.
    This was