Peacock feather on an upper arm

"Anything to declare, Mr Aske?" "Only the mandolin," he said, nodding at the case in the back. "And that." "Feathers need a form." I already had the clipboard in my hand, though I knew the rule by heart: a bird product from outside the zone, a stamp, a signature, and a long wait while someone in an office decided whether it was dangerous. Peacock feathers are not dangerous. I have never once in eleven years seen one cause harm to anyone but the person who tried to sell it dishonestly.

He told me it had been his sister's. She kept birds at a park in the north, and the peacock had moulted the whole spring and left feathers in every corner of her caravan. He wanted to take one to their mother, who was too ill to visit the park any more. He said the eye was the part she liked. I reached for the feather and found I didn't want to lift it, the way you hesitate at a doorway when someone has just finished speaking in another room. Outside, the rain started all at once, the way it does before a storm, and my grandmother's voice came back to me saying a peacock on the farm always screamed an hour before the weather turned.

I stamped the form and handed it back without the feather being touched. He drove off towards the motorway with his wipers going and the blue eye still catching the lights through his rear window.

At home, shaking out my coat, I found a single green barb caught in the wool at the cuff, its tip gold and its eye still whole. I didn't pull it out. I left it there, and I went to bed listening to the rain.