by Stuart David
‘Pish,’ he said. ‘Utter pish. I don’t know who took the painting. We’ve established that.’
‘We’ve established that,’ I said. ‘But if I pointed out to McFadgen that he might be overlooking the obvious, he’d start snooping around you for a while to explore the possibility. He’d be paying you a visit or two, asking you some awkward questions. Mind you, maybe you’re as clean as a whistle, business-wise. Maybe I’m barking up the wrong tree. Maybe you’d be quite happy to entertain him round here of an afternoon. Is that the case?’
Was it hell as like.
‘You’re a slimy bastard, Peacock,’ he said, but I refused to let it get to me.
‘How long do you think it’ll take you to have a few names regarding the painting?’ I asked him. ‘If I drop in about two bells tomorrow afternoon, how does that sound?’
He never answered, but I knew his desire to know the names himself would have uncovered enough for me to be getting on with well before that.
‘I’ll see you about two, John,’ I said, and then I headed for the door. He called me something under his breath as I drew the thing shut behind me, but I’ll spare you the finer details of his habitual tendency to abuse the vernacular.
4
Once upon a time, probably five or six years past, I’d a pal by the name of Tam Bailey. Well, I say a pal – I suppose our relationship was really more of an enforced acquaintance. This was back when John Jack was big on putting teams together, and Tam happened to be part of one of those teams.
Anyway, that’s as may be, here’s the point: I gradually started to notice, during the five or six weeks I spent in Tam’s company, that whenever I’d been wearing a particularly eye-catching pair of shoes for a couple of days, or a sharp new shirt, Tam would pay me a compliment on the item in question and ask me where I’d got it. Then, lo and behold, he’d turn up one morning wearing the same thing himself.
I mean, what do you say to somebody in a situation like that? You’ve probably already gathered I take a particular pride in my appearance. I like to stand out from the crowd. But when the crowd starts copying your every move, it makes it harder and harder to achieve that objective. At the same time, you’re likely to come across as a bit of a bawbag if, when someone comes up to you and says, ‘What do you think of the shoes, Peacock?’ you reply to the effect that you – and only you – are entitled to be sporting that particular style of moccasin.
You see my dilemma?
It became a right puzzler for me. And it got thoroughly in about me until it reached the point where it was keeping me awake at night – tormented. I felt as if I was losing my individual identity. I felt as if I was fading away. Every time I found myself standing beside this clown, wearing the same kit I was wearing, I felt like I only half existed.
As an initial stopgap, I stepped up my rate of consumption – trying to keep ahead of the boy by acquiring a new outfit every few days. But he was totally up for that. It only worked momentarily, and then he changed his speed to match mine and I was back to square one again.
Part of the problem, if I’m being perfectly honest, was that Tam was hardly the shapeliest of fellows. He was more or less built like a brick shithouse and, in my own humble opinion, there were very few outfits he could actually carry off. And it started to affect my confidence, on top of everything else, wondering if that might be how I actually looked. Wondering if that might be how the gear actually looked on me.
But like I say, I’m an ideas man. If I let the back bit of my brain chew on a problem for long enough, it’s guaranteed to throw up a solution sooner or later. And in this particular instance I came up with a blinder, a real screamer. And it hit me just as I was waking up one morning, just at the very instant I was starting to get down about the prospect of tooling about the city with my doppelgänger in tow again, with every third passer-by doing a double take, wondering what the hell we were playing at.
‘Move it up a stage.’ That’s what the voice told me. ‘Take it to the next level, Peacock.’
And I knew instantly that it would work. I sprang out of bed like a new man, skipped breakfast, and made straight for Buchanan Street.
Designer labels, that was the answer – threads so outrageously expensive that Tam couldn’t afford to follow me. Six hundred quid shoes, shirts that cost the same as a week in Spain, a leather jacket worth as much as a secondhand car.
And it worked.
‘I like the jeans,’ Tam said that afternoon. ‘Where did you dig them up?’
And I told him. No problem. But the next morning he came in kind of ashen-faced, wearing the same pair of cords he’d had on the day before, and he asked about my tanktop instead.
I was bulletproof. Back to my old self. A one-off on the city streets.
Granted, I just about bankrupted myself. I had to take a chunk of equity out the flat to meet the next few months’ expenses. But Tam was back where he belonged, consigned to the grey masses, dicking about with the pigeons in his jeans and his sweatshirts.
But here’s the long-term damage that’s resulted: once you’ve tasted that stuff, you can never go back. Once you’ve strutted about in Versace and Armani and Dolce & Gabbana, you’re hardly going to go back to the high street. It’s like moving on to heroin – a few aspirins in a can of Coke can no longer do the job.
So to cut a long story short, I’m now a junkie for the designer rags. On occasion, some vintage item’ll still more or less do it for me, but barring that I’m a slave to the names. Which has taken me to the edge of financial ruin on more than a few occasions. It’s an expensive habit, no doubt about that.
And directly after leaving John Jack’s office, as I made my way through the town to my lunch date with the wife I fell prey to temptation yet again. I was making good time, all set to reach the point of rendezvous before Bev was likely to arrive, when I saw a cracking-looking suit in a window on Buchanan Street – the very thing that would be ideal for this upcoming wedding. Olive green, with pink cuffs and a pink collar, patterned with dark green and red swirls – the whole shebang courtesy of Prada.
I’ll tell you, I was like a moth drawn towards a light bulb. I clocked it from fifty yards away, and it pulled me across the cobbles at high speed, careering into passers-by without even noticing they were there. And I stood with my nose pressed against the glass, bewitched – practically salivating.
‘Treat yourself,’ a wee voice in my bonce whispered. ‘This wedding’s a big celebration for you. The start of a new life. Go for it, pal.’
So I nipped inside and had a look at the price tag. Fucking astronomical. Catastrophically expensive.
Still, I couldn’t see any harm in at least trying it on. And I did. And it looked good. I was just experiencing the familiar sweats, struggling against the impulse to bankrupt us again, and wondering how I would explain it to the wife, when I suddenly remembered I was meant to be with the wife that very minute. I consulted the watch and realised I was on course to be a good ten minutes late now, if I didn’t make a sprint for it, and that was enough to get me to ditch the shopping spree for the time being.
‘You can come and try it on again when Bev’s back at her work,’ I told myself as I returned it sadly to the racks. Then I belted up Sauchiehall Street and found her sitting in the designated eatery with a face like fizz.
‘You’re fifteen minutes late,’ she shouted, before I’d even reached the table. Conversations came to a halt all over the restaurant; folk swivelled in their chairs to get a right good look at me. ‘What are you playing at?’ Bev carried on. ‘I’ve only got forty-five minutes left, Peacock. I told you not to be late. Where the hell have you been?’
I nodded and pulled up a chair. ‘I’m sorry, hen,’ I said. ‘I got held up looking at a . . .’
But that was as far as I got. Apparently it was a rhetorical question, and she fired a menu across the table at me, disrupting the arrangement of napkins and cutlery that had been laid out at my place.
‘Just pick s
omething quickly,’ she said. ‘The first thing you see. No way am I missing out on the breadsticks and chocolate dip for dessert, Peacock. I told you that’s how I wanted to come here. Now I’m going to have to bolt my main course just to have any chance of getting them in time. Have you found something? I’m having the linguine with the mushroom sauce. What are you getting?’
I’d barely had a chance to open the menu, never mind peruse the options. And I’ll be honest with you, the couple of things I’d managed to take a swatch at hardly filled me with much enthusiasm.
‘Is there a roll and fried egg on here,’ I said, but she was looking past me, signalling to a waitress to come and serve us. ‘I could murder a roll and fried egg, Bev.’
‘I could murder you,’ she said. ‘Don’t you dare embarrass me in front of this lassie. This is a classy place, Peacock. Get the fusilli. I had that when I came with Janice. Tomato and garlic sauce. It’s gorgeous.’
The menu was starting to blur.
‘Hi,’ the wife said, all sweetness and light now. The waitress had appeared, and she started running through her spiel about specials and dishes of the day, but the wife cut her short.
‘We’re in a bit of a hurry, unfortunately,’ she said. ‘Owing to this one turning up half an hour late. But I really want to make it to the breadsticks and chocolate dip for dessert. Have you got the breadsticks today?’
The waitress was a tad rattled at being interrupted mid-flow, but she put a brave face on it and assured the wife they had breadsticks and chocolate aplenty.
‘Brilliant,’ the wife said. ‘Just bring me the linguine then, honey. No starters. Will it come quite quickly? I’ve only really got about forty minutes till I need to be back at work. I shouldn’t really even be eating the breadsticks. I’m supposed to be on a diet – amn’t I, Peacock? I’m a bridesmaid at my pal’s wedding in a couple of weeks, and I was trying to lose weight for the occasion. Then I got a sneak preview of the dress I’m supposed to be wearing. Holy moly. What’s it like, Peacock? I’ll be a right state no matter how much weight I lose. So the diet’s immaterial – I’m going for the breadsticks. How long does the linguine normally take to come, sweetheart?’
The poor wee lassie hardly knew if she was coming or going. ‘Eh . . . just about ten minutes, I think,’ she said. ‘You should make it in time for the breadsticks. I’ll tell them to be as quick as they can.’
The wife was satisfied, and the waitress turned her attentions to me. I was still doing battle with the menu, getting nowhere.
‘What about yourself, sir?’ the lassie said. ‘Are you ready to order?’
‘Of course he’s ready,’ Bev chipped in. ‘What are you having, Peacock? The fusilli?’
‘What about a wee roll and fried egg?’ I asked the waitress. ‘Could you stretch to that? With a dod of brown sauce on the side?’
‘Eh . . .’ she said.
‘God almighty!’ the wife said. ‘Of course they haven’t got a roll and fried egg, Peacock. I swear to God, I can’t take him anywhere, hen. I’m really sorry. You’re embarrassing the life out of me here, Peacock.’
‘We’ve got a pizza with a fried egg on it,’ the waitress said. ‘I could get you that.’
‘A pizza?’
‘Aye, with a fried egg on it.’
‘That’s sounds manky,’ I said.
‘It does not!’ the wife said. ‘You’re an ignoramus, Peacock Johnson. Bring him that, darling. That sounds lovely.’
She handed her menu to the waitress, and the waitress looked at me questioningly – almost pleadingly.
‘Fair enough,’ I said, just to put the poor soul out of her misery. ‘Bring me that. Whatever. And a wee beer. Have you got beer?’
She nodded, and made a break for it, no doubt deeply relieved to have escaped the madness that is the Johnson experience.
‘How come we never just met up in the Pancake Place, Bev?’ I said. ‘I could have got a roll and fried egg in there, no problem. That would have done me nicely.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Aye, how?’
‘Because, Peacock, the Pancake Place closed. Five years ago.’
‘How come? That was a great place. What did it close for?’
She took a deep breath. ‘I think I’ve got a bit more to worry about right at this minute than why the Pancake Place closed down, Peacock. Don’t you?’
‘Like what?’
‘The wedding,’ she said. ‘That dress. Have you even been listening to me? I swear to God it’s like talking to the wall sometimes. What did you think I was talking about?’
My immediate impulse was to say, ‘When?’ I could have sworn for the life of me that all we’d been talking about was my fried egg roll, but I let it go. I knew from past experience the ‘When?’ would lead me nowhere, so I just told her to carry on.
‘I was telling Claire about it in work this morning,’ she said. ‘She thought I was winding her up till I showed her the picture on my phone. She says . . . You know Claire, don’t you?’
‘The one that lost her rabbit?’
‘That was Wendy. Claire’s the one with the stepson. You met her at Liam Grant’s barbecue. She’d a blue jumpsuit on.’
‘Aww.’
‘Or maybe that was another time. Never mind. I’m sure you’ve met her somewhere. She’s got a stepson. Alfie. Or maybe he’s called Craig. I think it’s Craig. He’s seven or eight. I’ve been talking to her about this dress all morning. I think it’s on the verge of giving me a nervous breakdown, Peacock, I really do. Claire says . . . Oh, wait till you hear what happened to her. You’re not going to believe this. It’s really awful.’
And off she went into a story about this Claire body, which as far as I could ascertain involved a golf course, a coupon off the internet for a cheap night in a hotel in Dunfermline, and a welly boot. How it all slotted together I couldn’t even begin to tell you. I think I slipped in and out of consciousness at least twice, and I got caught up in trying to remember if I’d ever been to a barbecue, with anybody, when I should probably have been giving my full attention to how the hotel coupon and the welly boot had come to be in the same story.
If, in fact, they were part of the same story.
To tell the truth, I was starting to feel as if I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown myself as the thing progressed. There even seemed to be a meerkat involved at one point, but I’m perfectly willing to believe that was an image I retrieved from a dream as I slipped in and out of my coma.
‘Is that not terrible?’ Bev said in the end. ‘Can you believe that? How can that even happen to a person? I didn’t know what to tell her. What would you have told her to do?’
Thankfully, the waitress reappeared at this point, heavily weighed down by our respective orders. She plonked the pasta in front of Bev, and Bev started cooing indulgently.
‘Oh my!’ she said. ‘Look at that, Peacock. Does that not look gorgeous? Thanks very much, honey. Oh, that looks amazing.’
It was more than I could say for mine. To me, mine just looked like a waste of a good fried egg. Not to mention downright weird. It was definitely a pizza, no doubt about that – but the fried egg was just sitting there bang smack on top of it. Right in the middle of the thing.
‘Parmesan?’ the waitress said to the wife, and the wife nodded big style. She was obliged to nod owing to the fact that her mouth was already stuffed full with the linguine, and the waitress started shaving cheese into the bowl with the wife still grabbing mouthfuls of the stuff round about her.
‘For you, sir?’ the waitress said, but I gave it a by. I’d a notion that cheese scraped onto the fried egg would only add to the chaos.
‘Can I get anything else for either of you?’ the waitress asked, and Bev chewed furiously.
‘Just line up those breadsticks ready,’ she said. ‘We’ll be finished in a jiffy. This pasta is absolutely delicious. I’ll be making short work of this.’
‘I’ve already got the breadsticks laid o
ut in the kitchen,’ the waitress said. ‘Enjoy your meals.’
And then she sauntered off, leaving us to it.
As manky as the pizza looked, I couldn’t help but feel I owed it a debt of gratitude. Its arrival had managed to move the story about Dunfermline, and the request for my response to it, right off the agenda. And as I poked at the egg yolk with my knife, to test how hard it was, I decided to kickstart the next segment of the conversation myself, in case we inadvertently drifted back to Claire and her internet coupon again.
‘How come you don’t just tell her?’ I said.
‘Who? Tell who what? What the hell are you on about, Peacock?’
‘Wilma,’ I said. ‘The bride. How come you don’t just tell her?’
‘Tell her what?’
‘That you don’t like the dress. Just tell her you don’t want to wear it. What’s the problem, Bev?’
‘Oh for God’s sake,’ she said. ‘Grow up, Peacock. Are you mental? A couple of weeks ago I told her I wasn’t too sure about the font she’d used on the invitations. She burst into tears and it took me an hour and a half to get her out the bathroom. Then when I asked her who recommended the caterer she’s using – quite innocently, mind you – she accused me of trying to sabotage her big day, out of jealousy. Can you imagine her reaction if I tried to criticise her choice of bridesmaids’ dresses? She’d probably hurl herself off the Kingston Bridge. Or hurl me off it. Her sanity’s hanging by a delicate thread, Peacock.’
She looked at her watch. ‘Get a move on with that pizza. The clock’s ticking here. I’m nearly finished mine and you’re hardly even started. Come on, chop chop. Your late arrival better not hamper my appointment with those breadsticks, I’m telling you. What kept you anyway? You promised me you wouldn’t be late.’
‘I lost track of the time,’ I told her. ‘I was looking at a suit for the wedding. I think I need your help there, Bev. It’s way out of the price range, but I’m finding it hard to . . .’