The Peacock Cloak

already over an active, commanding hand?
    He found linnets, he found skylarks, he found a mistle thrush, he found three different kinds of cricket, four kinds of spider and twenty-eight different species of flowering plant, and he wrote all the names down in his notebook, for no special purpose other than to mark the occasion. After about an hour he found a place to sit on the sun-warmed concrete of what had once been a plastic bag factory and unpacked his small picnic. He was munching his pork pie when he noticed a lark alighting not far off and put his binoculars to his eyes to try and see where it had gone.
    He never found the lark, though. In searching for it, he noticed something else for which there seemed no explanation. A small patch of ground began to shudder like a mirage, revealing the ground of Poppyfields not to be the solid thing that it might appear, but to be a membrane like a child’s soap bubble. Angus shuddered too and he felt as if he was on the brink of remembering something, some huge, obvious, world-transforming thing, something that was in fact obvious to him every night in dreams but which every morning he somehow forget in the process of waking up and adjusting himself the strange fact that of all people, of all beings in the universe, he had turned out to be Angus Wendering, a clerk in an insurance company in a provincial town in England.
    And then, right in the middle of this patch of turbulence, there appeared a glimmering girl.

    Universes divide like bacteria on the surface of a nutrient jelly: one becomes two, two becomes four, four becomes eight… moment by moment by moment.
    Somewhere in this broth of universes, in one of the countless worlds, someone had invented a drug that could take a person from a particular point in space and time in one universe to the exact same point in another. It came in the form of small translucent spheres that glowed in their cores like distant nebulae and were known by those who used them as ‘slip’ or ‘seeds’.
    The girl had taken one of these seeds in a small recreation ground in a housing estate called Thurston Meadows which, in her own world, occupied the same space that Poppyfields did in Angus’. The seed had made a sort of bubble in space and time. The bubble, with the girl inside it, had separated from the membrane that was her world, and the membrane had sealed itself together again over the space where she had been. With nothing of her own except the clothes she was wearing, the things in her pockets and a bag containing twenty more pills clutched tightly in her right hand, the girl had emerged in Poppyfields. Her name was Tammy Pendant. Uncared for by her parents, claimed by no one else, she had grown up in the care of the state. Restless, resourceful, trusting no one, she lived like an acrobat, skilfully balancing herself over a bottomless abyss of longing, never staying in one place, always moving on before the ground had a chance to give way beneath her.
    “Fucking hell,” she muttered, looking round at the sea of red flowers – and then retched.
    She got down on her knees and retched a second time, wiping the slime and the sweat from her face with the back of her hand. She had been a waif in her own world. Now she was doubly a waif. From a world where no one claimed her, she had come to a world where she did not even exist.
    Then she spotted Angus.

    At once, like a wild animal, she was on her feet, her eyes darting this way around as she weighed up the options for escape.
    “Don’t be scared!” called Angus. “I’m not going to hurt you!”
    She began to run. But Angus was very fit. In a short distance he had got hold of her, pinning her arms to her sides.
    “I’m not going to hurt you, all right?” he repeated. “Trust me. I won’t hurt you at all. I just want to help. You can’t get out of here without a key to the gate.”
    She looked up at him, narrowing her eyes. He was about twenty-five. He was a big man and very strong but his face with its blond lashes and thin blonde beard was almost painfully open, the sort of pink fair-skinned face that blushes at the smallest provocation. She had known a social worker once who was like that. Peter, the social worker was called. He worked in a children’s home but had been completely incapable of maintaining any kind of order. He longed to be of help to the children, longed for them to like him, but they had all despised him, and mocked him whenever they got the