The Peacock Cloak

phone and remind him of the love he had declared, the extravagant promises he had made. She had changed from his heart’s desire to a dangerous stranger. And he was to live in fear of her, for days and weeks and months.

    “Who is Tammy Pendant, Angus?” Judy demanded.
    It was nearly a year later and Angus was in the spare bedroom painting the window frame.
    Angus started, banging his head hard against the top of the window cavity.
    “I don’t know,” he said. “Why do you ask?”
    She held out a card. It was an ID card of some sort, with a photograph of Tammy looking out.
    “Where… where did you find it?”
    “In my magazine rack in the kitchen. Stuck in the middle of the magazines.”
    “Perhaps it fell out of one of them.”
    “It didn’t.”
    “Perhaps we had a break in.”
    “A burglar who takes nothing but leaves a calling card?”
    “Well it beats me then.”
    He turned hastily back to his painting.
    “Don’t you dare turn away, Angus! You know something about this. It’s written all over you.”
    Angus was trembling.
    “Okay,” he said, “I’ll tell you. I didn’t tell you before because I knew you’d be angry. I went birdwatching down at Poppyfields that Friday you went to your mum’s last August. She was there. She didn’t have anywhere to go. She cried. She begged me to put her up for the night and I felt sorry for her and put her up for the night. In here of course. In the spare room.”
    “I should bloody well hope in here. She’s only a kid!”
    “She… she said she had nowhere to go.”
    “Good God, Angus, I’ve always known you were weak willed and easily manipulated. But can anyone pull your strings?”
    The Mr Right project had hit one of its lowest points.
    “I’m going out,” he said.
    Her anger was a like an icy gale blasting through every crevice of Angus’ being. And he had no resistance to it, no way of warding it off.
    “No you don’t! You don’t just run away when I’m talking to you.”
    “I’m going out,” he repeated, pushing past her.
    He picked up the car keys in the tiny hallway. Judy had followed him downstairs and now followed him into the garage.
    “Don’t be a baby, Angus.”
    And then: “Angus, you are not to go !”
    He got into the car, backed it out onto the street. Judy came and stood in front of him so he roared off in reverse, lurching up and down the kerb, and then dived down a side road. He drove at random through the suburban streets until at last he found himself driving along that bleak road that passed between Poppyfields and that bleak little park. He stopped, got out and peered through the Poppyfields fence.

    It was a building site now. The court dispute had been settled a month ago. The city council and the housing development agency were to go fifty-fifty on the costs of stabilising the underground marsh. The bulldozers had returned. Some of the footings for the new housing estate had gone in and even the skeletal frames of some of the little box houses, where one day people would do their gardens and watch TV and wash their cars, were starting to take shape. Poppyfields the wilderness had already almost gone, churned up by the tracks and wheels of the contractors’ powerful vehicles.
    As to the underground marsh, a specialist company had been brought in. They had identified the trouble spots and treated them, rather as a nurse might treat an infected wound, pumping down a powerful sterilising fluid into the fermenting patches and then pouring a special kind of liquid concrete in to hold everything in place. There would be no more sinking diggers, no more marsh gas bubbles, no embarrassing earthy farts.
    But though they could stop the bubbles of methane and cover the skin of Poppyfields with brick houses, and drive out the larks and the poppies and the mistle thrushes, it came to Angus that there was one thing they couldn’t change or stabilise. They couldn’t alter the fact that Poppyfields itself was a kind of dream. No one could stop the bubbles that rose up not from buried marshes, but from other worlds.
    “I will leave Judy,” Angus decided. “I will go back and tell her now. It will be awful but in five minutes it will be over.”
    Terror and exhilaration are physically almost indistin-guishable. He couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. And he had no idea what would happen next. But he had made up his mind.

The Peacock Cloak

    Grasshoppers creaked, bees hummed, a stream played peacefully