The Peacock Manifesto (Peacock Tales Book 1)

by Stuart David

  I shook my head. ‘Forget it, pal,’ I told him.

  ‘Come on, Peacock,’ he said. ‘What was the song? Tell me the song.’

  I stood up. ‘For fuck sake,’ I said. ‘Okay. Come and I’ll let you hear it.’

  So we went back to the hotel, and I dug out the CD player. I gave him the headphones and when he’d put them on I sparked it up.

  I watched his face.

  I could hear the song playing faintly while he listened, but his expression didn’t change. Then, after about a verse had passed he took the headphones off.

  ‘How do I stop this, Peacock?’ he asked, and I showed him the button. He pressed it. Then he stood up and shook my fucking hand.

  ‘Peacock,’ he said. ‘You’ve done it, man. That’s… it’s genius.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ I said.

  ‘I’m serious, man. This is something. Glen Campbell—Jesus Christ! We’ve got to get this made, Peacock. We have to. How fucking hard can it be?’

  ‘Pretty fucking hard, apparently.’

  ‘Bullshit. We’ll…’

  He started scrambling about the room then. Opening drawers, closing them again. Looking in the cupboards.

  ‘What the fuck are you looking for?’ I asked him. ‘Get out of my fucking stuff, Bob.’

  But he kept going till he had what he wanted.

  ‘Here we are,’ he said, and he sat down on the bed with a copy of the yellow pages. He leafed through it and then tore a page out.

  ‘This is all we need, Peacock,’ he said. ‘This is our fucking ticket to success. Are you ready?’

  ‘Ready for what?’ I asked him.

  ‘Ready to go out,’ he said. ‘Come on, there’s a few things we need.’

  I didn’t tell the wife about where we ended up either. And I particularly didn’t tell her what happened once we got there. That would have driven her totally fucking up the wall. Where we ended up was in a music shop—and, right enough—that might not have bothered her too much. But what happened once we got in there was this:-

  I spent another four hundred fucking dollars. And, believe me, that wouldn’t have made her too fucking happy, I can tell you.

  ‘Okay, man,’ Bob had said to the guy behind the counter. ‘We’re looking to make a dance record. Tell us what we need.’

  And the guy had started talking. And talking. And Bob, the wee prick, he nodded and frowned as if he knew what was going on, as if he understood every fucking word. And the guy had kept at it, and Bob had nodded and frowned some more—until it had happened. Suddenly we’d bought this fucking… machine.

  Eight hundred dollars between us.

  ‘This is fucking madness,’ I said to Bob as we carried it back to the hotel room, but the wee man was fucking convinced. He was going to make a worldwide dance hit on this thing.

  ‘You heard the guy,’ he told me. ‘This is what they all use, Peacock. It’s going to happen.’

  So we unpacked it, and we turned it on. Then we just fucking stood there.

  Bob was grinning from ear to ear, practically skipping. He was rubbing his hands together and chuckling away, but I was just staring at it. It was a grey box covered in pads and nobs, with a screen up in the corner.

  ‘Now what?’ I asked him.

  ‘Now this,’ he said, and he picked up the manual. He took a quick flip through it and then handed it to me.

  ‘How much of this is in English?’ I asked him, and I looked towards the back—hoping for it to turn into French or Japanese after the first few pages. But it didn’t. The whole fucking thing was in English, all three hundred-odd pages of it. And there were all these fucking scientific diagrams and charts.

  ‘Listen, wee man,’ I told him, and gave the book back to him, ‘you come and get me when you’ve worked this thing out. Until then, I’ll be in the bar.’

  But I had to give him his due. I was only on my third pint when he came down to get me. And he was still fucking smiling.

  He looks like someone when he smiles. Someone from the films. I’ve been trying to work out who it is, but I can’t get a hold of it. I will though—I’ll work it out. And I’ll let you know when I do.

  ‘How did it go?’ I asked him as he sat down.

  ‘Sweet, Peacock,’ he said. ‘I’ve got it going. It’s easy. Come on up and we’ll try something.’

  ‘Let me finish my drink first, son,’ I told him. ‘Do you want one?’

  He shook his head. He was fucking itching to get back up there again, you could tell. So I drank mine down quickly and then we went up.

  The thing looked just as baffling to me as it had done before, but Bob set about hooking up my CD player to it, and then he pushed a few buttons. He started the CD and pushed a few more, and I heard the song faint again in the headphones. Then it stopped.

  ‘Alright,’ Bob said, ‘put these on.’ And he gave me the headphones. ‘Ready?’ he asked, still with that grin, and I almost got a grip on who he looked like, but it slipped away.

  He held one finger up in the air, above a button on the machine, and in an exaggerated way he let it fall down onto the button. Then the song started to play, from the machine, and Bob was rubbing his hands again.

  ‘How about that, Peacock?’ he asked me. ‘How about that?’

  ‘Aye, it’s a start, son,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, but watch this,’ he told me, and he pushed a few more buttons. Then he got himself confused and the grin disappeared.

  ‘Fuck…’ he said. ‘How did…?’

  He leafed rapidly through the manual, and came back to the machine. Again the exaggerated finger above the button.

  ‘Ready?’

  I shrugged, and down it came. The song started, and when it got to the end of the bit he’d recorded it repeated again. And again. It wasn’t too smooth, but Bob was up on his feet, skipping about.

  ‘Alright!’ he shouted. ‘All-fucking-right!’

  He dug into the Boston Ballet bag and pulled out a quarter bottle of whisky, and he went into the toilet and came back with the plastic cups for rinsing your teeth.

  ‘Let’s get to work,’ he said.

  ‘Aye, son,’ I told him. ‘I’ll get to work on the whisky, and you get on with the tune.’

  As it turned out, though, I pitched in with him pretty quickly. The whisky got me excited, and I could hear what he was doing coming through the headphones. We’d got a CD of drumbeats free with the machine, and he’d loaded all those in and he was hitting away at them.

  After about five minutes I found myself pulling the headphones off him and getting waded right in there myself. It was easy. It was a breeze, this music thing. And it was good fucking fun too.

  ‘Record this, Bob,’ I told him, when I’d worked a bit out. And somehow he knew how to do it. Then he had a shot again.

  We kept on like that for hours. One of us drinking while the other one worked. Then we’d swap.

  We sent down to the bar for a few more bottles, and we were pretty fucked up by the time we’d finished.

  I didn’t tell the wife about that.

  I phoned her just after we’d woken up the next morning. My head was fucking pounding. Bob had slept on the floor, and he was being sick in the bathroom when I phoned her. Sorry—the fucking rest-room. He was being sick in the fucking rest-room. I didn’t tell her that either. And here’s one more thing I didn’t tell her: I didn’t tell her how excitedly we’d got up to listen to what we did the night before, despite the hangovers.

  ‘Turn it on, Bob,’ I’d shouted at him, as he’d fumbled with the buttons. ‘Come on, let’s fucking go.’

  And on the lights came.

  He put the headphones on, but I pulled them off of him.

  ‘Spark it up, son,’ I told him, and it started. And I listened. And I looked at him. And it sounded shite. Absolutely shite.

  I passed the headphones to him and I shook my head. He put them on. He took them off. Then he ran off to the ‘rest-room’ to be sick.

  I’ll tell
you what it sounded like. One night, the guy who lives upstairs from us went mental. He started smashing things up there; throwing stuff at the walls, and smashing things on the floor. I had Glen on the stereo at the time. And that’s exactly how the thing we’d made sounded. Fucking chaos. Just all this clattering and banging while this one bit of the song we’d recorded played over and over, and stuttered and skipped at the bit where it repeated, like it was a record jumping and stuck.

  It was awful. Fucking Jesus awful.

  ‘We’re going to make a million.’ I told the wife. ‘Ten million. I’ll phone you tomorrow, hen.’ And I hung up.

  The wee man staggered back into the room.

  ‘Bob,’ I said. ‘We don’t know the first fucking thing about this. We’re fucked.’

  He sat down on the corner of the bed, rubbing his head.

  ‘The idea though…’ he said. ‘Let me make one phone call, Peacock. Maybe my guy knows another guy. There must be a way.’

  Then he got up and, quite methodically, he started packing the machine back into the box. Replacing all the polystyrene chunks and stuff. And when he was done he looked around the room.

  ‘Fuck,’ he shouted. ‘FUCK!!’

  Chapter 5

  It wasn’t a friendly thing I did, but it had to be done.

  I pushed the wee man up against the wall, and lifted him up off the floor—just a couple of inches. I had one hand on his throat, but that wasn’t how I held him up. I didn’t want to kill the wee bastard. My other hand was on his belt, and I held him up by that. The hand on his throat was just to steady him.

  Still, I gave it a wee squeeze all the same—just to keep him scared.

  ‘Do you understand me, son?’ I shouted, loud—leaning in close to his face. ‘Do you fucking understand what I’m talking about?’

  He had his eyes closed, but he nodded.

  ‘Cause I’ll fucking kill you,’ I whispered. ‘If you disappear and I find out someone else has made this record, I’ll fucking find you.’

  I let him down then, but I kept him up against the wall. He opened his eyes.

  ‘Do you understand me?’ I asked him again.

  ‘I understand, Peacock,’ he said. ‘I understand. Fucking hell.’

  So I let him go and I shook his hand.

  ‘Just as long as it’s clear,’ I told him.

  ‘It’s clear,’ he said. ‘It’s fucking clear.’

  ‘Alright. Alright, wee man. Go and straighten yourself up and we’ll take this thing back to the shop.’

  He’d made a phone call just before that, from the room. He’d phoned his guy, and it turned out his guy knew a producer out on the west coast; someone with a studio who he thought would be able to do the job we were looking for. Apparently the producer owed Bob’s guy a favour, so he said he’d fix it up and we were back in action again.

  We hatched a plan to take the machine back to the shop and use the money to hire a car—and Bob said he’d drive us out there. I knew I was stuck with him then. I don’t have a licence, and without his contacts I was fucked. I didn’t know a soul in the whole fucking country. So we made an agreement—if we managed to get the thing made we’d split everything fifty-fifty. And all that was left for me to do then was give him that wee warning. I could picture myself waking up one morning in some motel, and the fucker would be gone. Off to the west coast with my idea and there would be fuck all I could do about it. So I had to make things clear to him. It wasn’t a friendly thing to do, and I’m getting to quite like him. But it had to be done.

  Just so’s he knows.

  * * *

  We had quite a carry on at the music shop, trying to get the money back on the machine. For a start I’d lost the receipt.

  ‘Come on, man,’ Bob said to the guy. ‘You remember us, don’t shit me.’

  ‘I remember you,’ the guy said. ‘But I need a receipt.’

  Then he wanted to know why we didn’t like it.

  ‘This is our most popular sampler,’ he told us. ‘We’ve never had any complaints about this machine before.’

  ‘Oh, it’s a good machine,’ Bob said. ‘It’s not the machine we have a problem with. It’s us. The machine’s fine, but I’ll let you in on a secret.’ He lowered his voice. ‘We stink,’ he said. ‘We tried, but… You would have died if you’d heard what we came up with. Tell him about it, Peacock.’

  ‘It sounded like someone killing themselves,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It was a fiasco.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ah, fuck off…’ Under my breath again. And again the tool understood it perfectly.

  ‘Get out,’ he shouted. ‘I don’t need this shit, guys. Get out of here.’

  ‘Okay, okay…’ Bob said. ‘Peacock…’ He put his hand on my back. ‘Wait outside, man. Wait outside.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said to the guy. ‘He didn’t mean that. He gets… frustrated. Let’s see if we can sort this out.’

  I went outside, shaking my head. Americans and their fucking guns. I had a feeling that’s what was coming next—just like the guy in the fucking taxi. So I went outside.

  Bob came out about ten minutes later, waving the money.

  ‘We’re set, Peacock,’ he said.

  ‘What did you tell him?’ I asked.

  ‘I told him a few stories. Just a few stories.’

  So we went and got the car. Bob took the hairnet off for that and smoothed his hair down, then he left me outside with his jacket.

  I couldn’t believe it when he drove back out. I couldn’t believe what he drove back out in.

  ‘What the fuck is that?’ I shouted as he stopped and rolled the window down.

  ‘This is class,’ he shouted back. ‘Get in.’

  It was quite a car. Some kind of green sports car. I sank into the passenger seat. He pulled away and it hardly made a noise.

  ‘How about this?’ he asked. ‘I told them to give me something compact. I told them to give me something budget. This is what I got.’

  ‘It’s fucking comfortable,’ I said.

  ‘It needs to be. We’re going a long way.’

  Back at the hotel I phoned the wife again, to tell her we were moving on. And since the wee man was out of earshot, taking the bags down to the car, I told her about having him up against the wall. That gave her a laugh. I told her his hairnet had slipped off and that cracked her up. I thought I’d told her about his hairnet before, but I hadn’t. It cracked her up.

  ‘Why does he wear a hairnet?’ she asked.

  ‘He says it’s what they wear in New York when they come out of prison,’ I said. ‘He wears it all the time.’

  Then I told her we were moving on. The line went silent. It was silent for a good few seconds. Then she asked where we were going.

  ‘Out to the west coast,’ I told her. ‘He thinks the idea’s too big to work on here. We need a more professional studio. He works with a big producer out there, so we’re taking it to him. It’s going to be huge.’

  Silence again. Then she told me to fly her out there.

  ‘Come on, Peacock,’ she said. ‘It’s freezing here. I want to see the sunshine. Come on, Peacock.’

  I told her I’d see what I could do. I told her there’d be a record company involved on the west coast pretty soon and then we could afford it. I told her I’d sort it out.

  ‘Don’t let me down, Peacock,’ she said. ‘And don’t take a detour through San Francisco with that wee jessie in his hairnet. Get me out there, Peacock. I mean it.’

  I hung up then. I’d had enough.

  Chapter 6

  Let me tell you a wee bit about the wife. Jesus Christ.

  Let me tell you.

  First off, I know why it is she wants me to get her out to the west coast. I know why that is. She’s hoping she’ll get to see Hollywood. Fucking Hollywood. That’s her dream you know. She’d fucking love that.

  I’ll tell you what she’d have been doing when I phoned her thi
s morning. It was raining and cold there, so I didn’t have to ask her—I already knew. She’d be doing what she always does when it’s raining and cold.

  The first thing is a stupid big colourful cocktail. Bright green, or some unnatural neon blue, in a big fucking triangular glass. That’s the first thing, but it’s not the main thing. The main thing is what she’d be watching on TV, and there’s no doubt about that. It would be black and white, from the forties or fifties—and more often than not staring Audrey Hepburn. Or that other tumshie. Humphrey Bogart.

  Whenever it’s raining or cold, there she’ll be—in the mid-afternoon—with her feet up on the coffee table, and her nuclear cocktail sitting on the arm of the chair.

  I’m always telling her they only put that shite on in the middle of the afternoon because no-one watches TV at that time of the day. So there’s no point in them paying to make proper programmes that no one’ll see.

  But she sits there glued to it. Totally fucking transfixed.

  And her dream is to go to Hollywood, to see where it all came from. I’m always trying to explain to her about that too. It’s a tacky shite-hole, I tell her. Everyone knows that. Even I know that and I haven’t been there. But she doesn’t listen. She won’t hear a fucking word spoken against it.

  ‘If I ever got to go to Hollywood,’ she says on some of those afternoons, when the cocktails have started to turn her brain. ‘If I ever got to go there, I’ll bet someone would discover me, Peacock. I’ll bet someone would put me in a film like this.’

  ‘They don’t make films like that anymore,’ I tell her. ‘It’s all fucking Tom Cruise and digital fucking technology. They hardly even use actors anymore. It’s all virtual computerisation.’

  ‘Ach…’ she says, and closes her eyes—fucking swimming in alcohol.

  I don’t know what she thinks they’d discover about her either.

  She’s a fucking looney.

  So there you are. It’s going to be a challenge thinking up reasons for why I can’t bring her over, and trying to change the subject every time she brings it up on the phone. But at least I’ve got something to tell her about next time—to keep her off it. Wait till you hear about this. Wait till I tell you about the fucking stereo in the car. It’s incredible.