Yes Man

by Wallace, Danny

  It had all happened rather quickly, but now here I was standing in the middle of Picadilly Circus with a Virgin Megastore bag in one hand and my very own bunch of SAY YES TO PEACE leaflets in the other. Bloody hell! I had left the house a normal man. I would return as a peace activist!

  Katherine, Josh, and Mike were clearly very pleased that their numbers had increased to the tune of one, and were enthusiastically showing me how it was done.

  “Do you like peace, sir?” said Katherine, to one middle-aged man who simply strode past her, putting one hand up to bat away her leaflet.

  “Say yes to peace,” said Josh to a lady holding a phone in one hand and a shopping bag in the other, and who didn’t really look like she wanted to stop and chat about bringing about world peace. I imagine that kind of attitude quite literally wound Katherine right up.

  I managed to give a man a leaflet. I was quite pleased with myself and watched him walk away reading it, but then he stopped and turned around.

  “What does this bit mean?” he said. He pointed it out to me, and I read it.

  War is a state of the flickering human mind—fear breeding fear breeding fear, feeding back over and over throughout time, reinforcing myths of self-justification.

  I hmmed. The man looked at me. It wasn’t the snappiest of slogans. I read it again.

  “To be honest I’m not really sure what that means,” I said. “I think it essentially means that … war is bad.”

  He handed the leaflet back to me.

  “Deep,” he said with more than a hint of sarcasm in his voice, and I felt terrible for letting Katherine and the others down. My slogan was obviously rubbish. So I looked at the leaflet, and said, “Be the change that you want to see in this world!” and smiled. I wasn’t sure if I was doing this social acupuncture thing very well. Judging by the look on the back of the man’s head, he wasn’t either.

  “We’re going to chalk for peace in a bit,” said Katherine after ten minutes or so. “Up for it?”

  “Yes!” I said. “What’s chalking for peace?”

  “We get some chalk and write antiwar slogans all over the place,” said Josh.

  “Like where?”

  “Pavements, mainly,” said Katherine.

  “Does it work? “I asked.

  “Yes,” Katherine said matter-of-factly. “Of course it does.”

  “Got the chalk,” said Mike, striding purposefully into the group. “Here you go …”

  He handed out three pieces of chalk each. I got a red one, a white one, and a blue one. Perfect, I thought. The colours of the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes. Now I could really let those governments know how I felt.

  But what to write?

  Katherine, Mike, and Josh were already hunched over or squatting or sitting down, letting the world have it.

  “Katherine, what should I write?” I said, genuinely lost for inspiration.

  “Write what you said earlier.”

  “War Is Bad? I think it might be a bit too simple,” I said.

  “Well … I like writing Our New World Order Is Love.’”

  “Yes, that’s nice,” I said and then looked to see what the others were writing.

  Mike was writing “Anti Breeds Anti,” which sounded a bit too close to incest for my liking, and Josh was writing “We Are All Responsible.”

  “Just write what you feel,” said Katherine. “Look at the leaflet or something. We get a lot of our stuff from the Web site. We share our consciousness.”

  “That’s quite good,” I said. “‘Share Your Consciousness!’”

  Katherine didn’t look too sure.

  I thought about it some more. Write what you feel? What did I feel?

  I decided to write MAKE TEA, NOT WAR.

  It’d been hours since my last cup.

  Katherine crept up behind me.

  “That’s good,” she said. “’Make Tea, Not War.’ Tea is a conduit to conversation. It is a peaceful action. When we make tea, we make conversation and through conversation, we can stop war. Guys! Look what Danny’s written!”

  Mike and Josh jogged over.

  “‘Make Tea, Not War,’” said Mike.

  “Tea …,” said Josh. “War.” And then he smiled and nodded. “It’s a bit like ‘Make Love, Not War,’ but with tea.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s a more British version. A little less rude.”

  “What made you think ofthat?” asked Mike.

  “I … like making tea.” I shrugged. “And I don’t like … making war.”

  I don’t think I’d been quite meaningful enough for them, so I tried harder.

  “And also, tea is a conduit to conversation. And conversation … can stop wars.”

  “Tea is a conduit to conversation,” said Josh. “Hence the tea ceremonies of ancient Japan or the tea gardens of seventeenth-century Holland.”

  I nodded and pointed at him, like that was exactly what I’d meant.

  Mike clapped his hands together a couple of times and said, “Brilliant,” and went straight off to write MAKE TEA, NOT WAR on the side of a wall. Katherine looked at me proudly. I suddenly felt like I was doing my bit.

  “‘Make Tea, Not War,’” said Katherine. “You’re good.”

  “I’m quite good with social campaigning,” I admitted. “I intend to one day write a song entitled ‘StOp the Mugging, Start the Hugging.’”

  “That’s really nice,” said Katherine, who I think may have been falling in love with me slightly. “Could I take your details?”

  Yep. She definitely was.

  “Because my girlfriend and I run regular songwriting workshops.”

  Oh.

  Katherine had been very thorough when she’d taken my details. She’d wanted to know my home address, home telephone number, e-mail address, mobile number, and whether or not I had access to a fax machine. I told her what she wanted to know. I trusted her and Mike and Josh. They seemed good sorts. Out to change the world, but doing it quietly and with chalk. And anyway, it wasn’t as if she was likely to try and use my details to burgle me. She’d be more likely to break in and replace all my vegetables with organic ones.

  “Thank you for your help today, Danny,” said Katherine.

  “That’s okay. I enjoyed it.”

  “You took to it very well. I suppose you’re always helping with things, are you?”

  “Not really,” I said, shrugging. “But you asked, and so I thought I would. Oh … hang on, though. There’s another man I’m helping at the moment. A sultan. Well, the son of a sultan.”

  The others looked impressed, and they were right to be.

  “He wrote to me to ask for my help. He needs to get forty million dollars out of Oman before he is murdered by his late father’s political enemies.”

  “Oh,” said Katherine, slowly.

  “Internet scam, is it?” said Josh, and Mike elbowed him in the ribs.

  “You’re always so bloody negative,” said Mike.

  “It’s not an Internet scam, actually,” I said. “It is a cry for help.”

  Mike put his hand on my shoulder and nodded sincerely.

  We were now in a pub called the Goose, a moment away from the Brixton Tube station, having taken the “Say Yes to Peace” campaign as far as it could go in Picadilly. Both Katherine and Josh (who, as it turned out, were flatmates) lived not far from here, and Mike, who’d only met them a couple of months before in this very pub, was thinking of relocating.

  “It’s too easy to say that the people in charge are morons,” Mike said, directing the conversation at me. “Too easy to say get out of government. Instead we say yes. To peace.”

  Mike got a packet of fags out and offered them around. Both Katherine and Josh took one.

  “It’s just the best way to do things,” said Katherine, topping off our glasses with a bottle of rather rough red wine. “Changing the world one person at a time.”

  Mike offered me a cigarette. Instantly my hand went up to indicate I was fi
ne, It was force of habit. But then I remembered who I was and what I was doing, and I said thanks and took one.

  “And positivity is the stronger message. It works. It’s the only way to fight a battle, if you …”

  She paused while Mike lit her cigarette, then Josh’s, and then mine.

  I sucked hard at it. I’d seen enough smokers to know the drill.

  “Anyway,” said Josh, cutting her off. “No is the most negative word you can say.”

  “Literally,” said Katherine, happy for him to take over.

  “And yes is the most positive word you can say. So we go from the doublenegative ‘No to War’ to the double-positive ‘Yes to Peace,’ and you can see how much better that sounds.”

  I was trying to, but my throat was burning. I had, up until this point in my life, avoided cigarettes. I coughed and passed it off as an energetic nod.

  “Yes, no … yes, no … I know which one I prefer,” said Josh.

  “’No,’ probably,” said Mike, and Josh told him to shut it.

  I pressed on with my cigarette, although I now wasn’t really inhaling the smoke. I was just sucking it in, holding it in my mouth, and blowing it straight out again. Straight at people. As such I was creating an oddly smoky atmosphere. But I’ll tell you what—I felt strangely cool and grown-up. I probably looked a bit like James Dean, only with glasses and watery, weeping eyes.

  “But it’s so hard to interest the media,” said Katherine. “It’s a positive message, you’d think they’d be up for that.”

  “I put in a call to BBC Bristol the other night,” said Josh. “They said if we can assemble a large group there and chalk for peace, they’d probably cover it.”

  “That’s good,” said Mike.

  “Have you ever thought that maybe … you just need to simplify your message?” I said, and the attention of the group was mine. “I mean … I know War Is Bad’ is too simple, but I think maybe saying things like, you know, War Is the State of the Flickering Human Mind’ might put a few people off.”

  “We got that leaflet from the Infinite Possibility Web site,” said Katherine. “I actually think that’s a great message.”

  “It is, it is,” I said. “It’s just that I don’t really understand it.”

  “Well …,” said Josh. “Can you come up with something better?”

  I now had my challenge for the evening.

  Mike had bought another bottle of rough red wine and was now off playing the trivia machine. Katherine and Josh had been debating the ethics of the U.S. using oil as a wedge to gain political control over other countries, a debate I had tried to join in on until I realised that they’d both done some background reading while I’d only seen an episode of Dead Ringers.

  I’d been doing my best to come up with a punchy new media campaign to help this brave group of peace campaigners to victory. But inspiration just wasn’t coming.

  “Have a go?” said Mike, back from the machine and holding out what looked like a rubbish cigarette. It was a joint.

  “In here?” I said, looking around the pub.

  “Outside,” he said. “Not in here.”

  My God. This was a watershed moment. Could I really allow Yes to make me break the law?

  Yes.

  “Right,” I said. “I’ve got it. I’ve absolutely got it this time. This is brilliant.”

  I assembled my notes, which came in the form of a beermat and, as such, didn’t really require much assembling.

  “Okay … what are we aiming for?”

  “Peace,” said Katherine.

  “Yes, peace,” I said. “But what else beforehand?”

  “Media coverage,” said Josh.

  “Precisely. I have devised a new and original media campaign which will lead directly to the governments of this world laying down their weapons and picking up … I dunno … chalk, instead.”

  I had been outside the Goose, breaking the law with Mike, when it had happened. I’d looked up, seen a beautiful painting hanging from the front of the pub, and been transfixed. Utterly transfixed. The smoke had framed the painting for a moment, and it was then that the idea had struck me.

  “That’s it!” I’d said. “That’s the message!”

  “So what is it?” said Katherine.

  “This has to be catchy, yes? And it has to communicate a real, social message?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, how about we use …”

  I looked from person to person, anticipating their reaction.

  “Geese.”

  I didn’t get quite the reaction I’d hoped for.

  “Geese?” said Josh.

  “Geese,” I confirmed. “’Geese for Peace.’”

  I let the words hang in the air. No one said much.

  “Oh, come on. ‘Geese for Peace’—it’s brilliant!”

  Still no one said anything. I decided this might require further explanation. And despite the room appearing to spin slightly, I gave it a go.

  “What we do, right,” I began, “is we make tiny little signs saying, ‘Geese for Peace.’ And then we stick them outside geese farms and near geese in general. We then tip the media off that the geese are getting agitated about this whole war business and have started, against all the odds, to stage their own animal peace protests.”

  Katherine and Josh just nodded at me, openmouthed—clearly they were impressed. This was going well.

  “We get some photographers down there. We secretly tell people up and down the country to make their own ‘Geese for Peace’ signs, and quietly stick them in the ground in farms and zoos. The media will have a field day. People literally won’t believe it, Katherine! It will be like Mother Nature herself is rising up and saying no to war!”

  Katherine put her hand up to correct me.

  “Yes to peace”

  “Sorry. But it will be like the geese themselves are making a stand. Imagine it! Geese, the world over, saying yes to peace!”

  “I like it,” said Mike, who was clearly on my level although I couldn’t help but suspect he was a little stoned. Lucky I wasn’t, or we wouldn’t have “Geese for Peace.”

  “But why geese?” said Josh.

  “It rhymes with ‘peace’!” Mike and I said, in near unison.

  “Ohh,” said Katherine, obviously finally realising the brilliance of my scheme.

  And then—quite out of the blue—I had another excellent idea.

  “Hey, Mike,” I said. “Imagine this … What if there was a shop called Pizza Hat … and all it sold were hats shaped like pizzas?!”

  And then Mike started to giggle, and then so did I, and then we couldn’t stop ourselves, and we laughed like mentals, and I hit my hand down on the table and nearly knocked over the wine, and Mike laughed even more, and we both started to virtually cry with laughter at the thought of hats shaped like pizzas.

  “Pizza Hat!” Mike exclaimed. “Hit the Hat!”

  Yep. He was definitely stoned.

  And then we talked about my brilliant “Geese for Peace” idea a bit more.

  An hour or so later as I stumbled home, I realised that maybe the effects of the little disco cigarette I’d had with Mike had affected me in more ways than I’d previously thought. Fair enough; it’d had nothing to do with “Geese for Peace,” because that was blatantly a very strong concept, but it was what happened next that concerned me.

  I’d made it home and decided that a nice cup of tea was what I needed most in this world. So I started to make one. It took a lot longer than it usually did, and I found the plume of steam that rose from the kettle so fascinating and beautiful that I must’ve watched it boil three times before even trying to find a tea bag.

  When eventually I did, I got the milk out the fridge and found a spoon, which I promptly dropped. It clattered on the floor.

  As I stooped to pick it up, I suddenly realised this was it. This was my invention.

  A spoon you couldn’t drop!

  A spoon … that hovers!

&nb
sp; That’d be amazing! But how would I make it hover?

  Tiny fans, maybe?

  Yes, that’s it! Dozens of tiny fans attached to the underside of a spoon.

  I ran to my desk and started to make some rudimentary sketches. I was buzzing. I had just invented the hover spoon! Oh, how the offices of the Patent & Trademark Institute of America would stop and applaud when news of the hover spoon spread! And best of all we could do spin-off spoons … teaspoons, table spoons … even a huge, hovering ladle!

  I phoned Ian.

  “Hello?”

  “Ian, it’s Danny!”

  “How’s it going?”

  “Not bad—listen. What would you say if I told you you could have a spoon”—I paused to allow him time to picture a spoon—“that could hover!”

  Ian didn’t say anything. Well, clearly, he had some pretty big thinking to do. Ian always thought he knew where he was with spoons, but I’d just messed with his preconceptions. The boundaries of cutlery had been given a severe kick into the future, and I think Ian knew that. I was a revolutionary, passing on my insight and vision to, well, a normal person. I mean, you’re a normal person. What would you do if a visionary like me phoned you up and told you he’d invented the hover spoon?

  And then I realised Ian had hung up.

  I decided that my so-called equal, Ian, was just too caught up in convention. He was still living with a very 1990s view of spoons (and cutlery in general to be honest), and if you ever meet him, I’d like you to promise me that you’ll point that out to him.

  Moodily I switched my computer on and checked my e-mails.

  Omar had written to me again. And he sounded antsy.

  DEAR danny

  BUT WHAT IS THE ACCOUNT DETAILS. I MUST HAVE THE DETAIL SO I CAN GIVE YOU THE MONEY. WHAT ARE THE ACCOUNT DETAILS. GIVE THEM TO ME.

  IT IS GOD’S WILL!

  OMAR

  I made a “harumph” sound, I drank my tea, I ate an inexplicably large amount of toast, and then I went to bed.

  “You’re going to do what?” said Ian, slamming his pint down on the table.

  It was the next day, and I was seeking his advice.

  “I’m going to give Omar my bank account details.”

  “You’re going to give him your details! Oh, brilliant! First the hover spoon, now this. Two of the worst ideas in the world in just twenty-four short hours …”