The Peacock Manifesto (Peacock Tales Book 1)

by Stuart David

  ‘Fuck me…’ I said, when I first noticed what it was doing. I didn’t even believe it could be happening at first. I thought it must just be some kind of coincidence.

  ‘Slow down,’ I told the wee man.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Slow down.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just fucking do it.’

  So he did.

  ‘Now speed up,’ I said.

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘Speed up.’

  ‘What the fuck are you playing at, Peacock?’

  ‘Speed up.’

  He sped up.

  ‘Now slow down.’

  ‘You’re fucking shitting me, man,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not. Slow down and listen to the stereo.’

  He looked at me with his eyes narrowed, then he slowed down.

  ‘And speed up and listen to the stereo.’

  ‘What the fuck is this shit?’

  ‘Listen,’ I said.

  ‘All I hear is you telling me to fucking speed up and slow down. What am I listening for?’

  ‘When the engine gets louder the volume of the music goes up. Automatically. When the engine gets quieter the volume goes back down again.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘It does.’

  ‘Does it fuck.’

  ‘It fucking does.’

  He gave me the narrow eyes again, but after a bit he started slowing down. Slowing down and speeding up. Speeding up and slowing down. Till even I was getting sick of it.

  ‘Fuck…’ he said in the end.

  ‘Am I right?’ I asked him.

  ‘You’re right, Peacock,’ he said. ‘You’re fucking right. That’s technology at its fucking peak. That’s awesome.’

  ‘Alright,’ I told him, ‘take it back to a steady speed now, son. You’re starting to make me fucking sea-sick.’

  * * *

  Portland. That’s where we’re headed. That’s where the studio is, in Portland, Oregon. Further up the west coast than LA.

  I unfolded the map while we were stuck in traffic on the way out of Chicago, and I had a look at how far we had to go. It was a long fucking way. I took the top part of my finger to be about an inch, and I tried to work out how many miles it was.

  ‘It’ll take us about three or four days,’ Bob said. ‘We should make it to somewhere near Minneapolis tonight.’

  ‘It’s quite a fucking country,’ I told him.

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Four days? To get from one town to another? That’s a big fucking place, son.’

  ‘It certainly is,’ he said, and then he asked me what highway we needed.

  ‘I’m going to head for Wisconsin,’ he said. ‘What should I be on?’

  I studied the map and worked it out.

  ‘Highway 90,’ I told him.

  ‘Highway 90…’

  It took us a long time to get out of Chicago. The traffic was fucking terrible. But once we’d made it we got going good, and the fields just flew by.

  ‘I’ll tell you something else that’s crazy about this country,’ Bob said then, ‘something you’re not going to like too much.’

  ‘What’s that, son,’ I asked him.

  ‘The state-lines,’ he said. ‘They can be awful. Security’s pretty tight on them sometimes, and they like to make it difficult if you’re not from the US.’

  We passed a sign that said: Wisconsin State-Line, 10 Miles.

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ Bob said, ‘they’re really going to give you a fucking nightmare of a time, Peacock.’ And before I knew what he was doing the volume of the stereo began to go down and he’d pulled onto the hard shoulder.

  He turned the engine off and gave me a sly look.

  ‘How about we smuggle you through,’ he said, and I asked him what the fuck he was talking about.

  ‘Come here,’ he said, and he opened his door.

  I followed him outside, and as we stood on the edge of the highway with all the traffic rushing past, he opened the boot of the car.

  ‘Do you think you could handle that, Peacock?’ he shouted at me, over the roar of the cars.

  ‘I can fucking handle anything, son,’ I told him.

  He slapped me on the back.

  ‘It’ll save us a lot of trouble,’ he said. ‘Otherwise we could be stuck there for hours. And then, of course, there’s the rubber glove…’

  I leapt into the boot of the car—or the fucking ‘trunk’, as he called it. I leapt in and I curled up on my side.

  ‘Keep your fingers crossed we can pull this off,’ he shouted, just before he slammed the boot shut, and I gave him a wee salute. Then it went dark. Pitch fucking dark.

  It turned out to be a bad idea. A fucking bad idea. I don’t know what speed he was doing with me in there, but I fucking bounced up and down till I thought every bone in my body was broken, and it felt more like fifty miles we’d travelled before the car stopped. Not ten.

  I heard Bob’s voice outside then, and I hoped the wee shite gave them the right answers. I got myself so tense I thought I was going to have a fucking heart-attack lying there, waiting for the boot to open and some yank guard to stick his gun in my face.

  It was a relief when the car started moving again, but not for long. Those first ten miles had seemed like the longest trip of my life, but the next bit was worse. Much worse.

  I bumped about so much my side would slam off the boot above me, then I’d slam back down and the other one would whack off the floor. I thought I was going to end up in hospital. And then I became convinced the air was running out.

  Just before we stopped we seemed to be going round in tight circles and figure eights forever, and when Bob finally opened the boot I was lying all crumpled up in one corner.

  The light was blinding at first.

  ‘We made it, Peacock,’ he told me. ‘We fucking made it.’

  ‘You might have made it, son,’ I said. ‘I’m fucked.’

  But he was laughing as I scrambled out of there.

  ‘What’s so fucking funny?’ I asked him.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I’m just happy, Peacock. I’m just happy we got through.’

  We’d stopped outside a diner on a road that was just diners and fast-food places and petrol stations, and Bob wanted to go in and get something to eat.

  ‘Are you coming?’ he asked me.

  ‘Aye, just give me a minute, son,’ I told him. ‘Just let me sort myself out first.’

  I tried to straighten up my clothes, but they were a fucking mess. I don’t like that. It gets me agitated when my clothes don’t look good.

  There was some kind of dirt from the boot on my trousers, and there were fucking wood shavings on my vest. I knocked off what I could, and then I went to comb my hair in the wing-mirror of the car.

  ‘Come on,’ Bob shouted. ‘You look fine. Let’s get something to eat, Peacock.’

  I walked up closer to him.

  ‘Listen, wee man,’ I warned him. ‘Don’t ever tell me I look fine when I don’t. You might be happy to look like a fucking junkie-faggot, or whatever you call that look you’ve got. But I take a pride in my appearance, so just give me a fucking minute here, son.’

  Eventually we went inside. I still looked like a dog’s fucking dinner, but I’d done what I could.

  Still, it made me feel jumpy all the way through the meal.

  ‘Where are we?’ I asked Bob. He was eating what was supposed to be a grilled cheese sandwich, but it just looked like a fucking explosion to me. I hadn’t taken any more chances. I’d ordered some bacon and some toast and made the fucking thing up myself.

  ‘We’re about ten miles into Wisconsin,’ Bob said. ‘I wanted to drive far enough that no-one would see you getting out.’

  ‘What’s this town?’

  ‘It’s not a town. It’s just a rest stop.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ I said to him, ‘I’m going to phone that idiot who put us together at my end, and I’m going t
o tell him he can forget his twenty percent, considering he put me together with the wrong fucking guy.’

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ Bob said.

  ‘No offence,’ I told him. ‘You know what I mean though, and there’s no sense in paying an arsehole. I’m just feeling a bit jumpy just now, I just need to go off at someone. I’ll go and see if I can find a phone.’

  I was wishing I’d got my times wrong again, so’s I could wake the tit up at four in the morning, but he sounded pretty fresh.

  ‘Peacock, man. How are you? How’s the record going?’

  ‘How am I? I’ll tell you, you fucking prick. You’ve hooked me up with some numptie who knows as much about making a record as I do. Another guy with another idea, who came to Chicago under the impression that I could make his idea into a record. What the fuck are you playing at? You owe me fucking big time. And I’m going to kill you when I get back. You owe me for the flight, you owe me for hotels, and now I’m out on some fucking road trip—trying to find a guy who can help us make a record. And I’ll tell you what, pal—you can forget about any twenty percent when we do make one. And I’m going to fucking kill you. You owe me for a shite drum-machine box too. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do to you when I get back. I’m going to…’

  And then I stopped. Frozen. I dropped the phone, and from where it hung on its chord I could hear the wanker shouting,

  ‘Peacock? Peacock? Are you there, pal? We can talk about this. Peacock? Are you there?’

  I ran back to the table where Bob was sitting, and I grabbed him.

  ‘Get up,’ I said. ‘Get up.’

  The wee man looked bewildered, but he put some money on the table and got up. I dragged him to the door, and then to the car.

  ‘We’ve got to go back,’ I told him. ‘We’ve got to go back.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Come on, drive Bob. We’ve got to go back.’

  He started up the car, but he didn’t get going.

  ‘What’s happening, Peacock?’ he asked.

  ‘The song,’ I said. ‘The fucking song. We left it on that fucking machine before we took it back to the shop.’

  He laughed. ‘Come on, Peacock…’ he said.

  ‘Come on, what? We left it on the fucking machine. Some fucker’ll buy that and steal the idea. We’ve got to get it off there.’

  ‘But it was terrible. No-one will even know what it’s supposed to be.’

  ‘It’s enough to put the idea in their head. I’m not arguing about it, Bob. We’ve got to go back.’

  He shook his head. He looked at me. Then he started driving.

  Once we were back out on the highway he shook his head again.

  ‘How the fuck are we going to get it off the machine?’ he asked me.

  I shrugged.

  ‘You don’t even know? This is insane, Peacock. I’m turning round.’

  ‘Keep going. We’ll think of something.’

  ‘We’ll have the record made before anyone buys that machine.’

  ‘We can’t take that chance. Come on, keep going.’

  I got him convinced in the end that we had to do it, and then it was just a matter of working out how. We considered breaking in at night, but that would take time to plan. What we came up with was just as complicated in its way, but it would be quicker.

  First of all we’d take the car back—say we’d changed our minds about the trip and get a refund. Then we’d use the money to buy the machine again.

  Once we’d erased the song we’d take that back one more time—with the receipt—and then we’d hire the car again.

  ‘It’s a fucking nightmare plan,’ Bob said, when we had it sorted.

  ‘It’s a disaster,’ I agreed, ‘but it’ll work. Just as long as we get the same machine back. And just as long as we get this same car. We need this stereo.’

  I relaxed then. I sat back in the seat, reclined it a wee bit, and put my hands behind my head. But I didn’t stay like that for long. About a minute it must have been. Then I shot back up.

  ‘You fucking prick,’ I shouted at Bob. Or screamed. And I hit him so hard that he let go of the steering wheel. Then he screamed.

  ‘Peacock! You fucking maniac,’ he shouted. ‘What the fuck are you doing? You’re going to fucking kill us.’

  ‘I’m going to fucking kill you,’ I told him.

  ‘What the fuck for?’ he said. ‘What the fuck’s going on?’

  The car had swerved pretty drastically, and I heard a lot of breaking going on around us.

  ‘We’re back in fucking Illinois,’ I shouted.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So where the fuck was the security on the state-line? We didn’t even notice the fucking state-line. You made that whole thing up.’

  He looked around him till he saw a road sign.

  ‘Shit,’ he said.

  ‘What the fuck was the idea?’

  ‘I don’t like to be fucked with, Peacock,’ he told me. ‘That was for attacking me in the hotel room. You were going to be in the trunk across every fucking state-line for that—all the way to fucking Portland.’

  He took his eyes off the road and started at me.

  ‘Now you know how I work,’ he said.

  And then he hit me back.

  Fucking hard.

  Chapter 7

  The wife found it fucking hilarious, the idea of me in the boot. I told her: the idea might well be hilarious, but the reality of it was fucking hell.

  I still can’t believe the wee man would stoop to that.

  Still, you’ve got to give him credit for having the balls to pull it off.

  I looked fucking hellish when we got back to the hotel in Chicago. On top of the mess my clothes were in, I had a bruise on my cheek where he’d hit me, and I had to get changed as soon as we checked in. I just can’t stand looking like that.

  There was an iron in the room too, so I pressed up my fresh clothes to get rid of the suitcase creases. Then I started to feel better.

  The wee man took care of getting a refund on the car, and buying the machine back. From what he told me the guy wasn’t too keen to sell it to him again.

  ‘What kind of game are you playing here?’ he asked him.

  ‘No game,’ Bob replied. ‘We just decided to give ourselves another chance. I think we were too hard on ourselves the first time.’

  When he got it back to the hotel he opened it up and tried to pretend to me it was a different machine, but it was the same one. Our song was on there, or our mess I should say.

  We wiped off every last stinking note of it.

  ‘So are you on the west coast yet?’ the wife asked me.

  ‘We’re back in fucking Chicago,’ I told her. I said something had gone wrong with the car, and we’d had to bring it back to get fixed.

  ‘Let me fly out and meet you on the west coast,’ she said.

  I told her to fuck off.

  ‘We’re going to Portland, hen,’ I said. ‘It’s further away from Hollywood than Glasgow is from Paris. I told you, once we get set up with a record company and this record’s a hit there’ll be no problem, but I haven’t got the money just now.’

  She went quiet. It fucking serves her right for laughing at the idea of me in the boot.

  Fucking unbelievable.

  * * *

  So the wee man somehow managed to return the machine and get the car back. He looked pretty knocked out when it was all done.

  ‘How did you manage it?’ I asked him.

  ‘You don’t want to know, Peacock,’ he said, and flopped down on the bed.

  I would have been more surprised he’d got it done so quickly before the incident with the boot. But I was starting to see now that he didn’t have that name for nothing.

  ‘Let’s get something to eat, Peacock,’ he said.

  We’d decided not to set off again till the morning, so after some dinner we went down to the beach. It was on a lake apparently, Lake Michigan, but it looked more like the fucking sea to m
e. I mean, there are some pretty big Lochs in Scotland, but even then—you can always see the other side. This thing had a fucking horizon.

  Still, it was fucking gorgeous, and it was a gorgeous evening too. It felt like the middle of summer, but it was only March.

  ‘I read in the paper it’s a freak heat-wave,’ Bob said, as we walked a path along the edge of the lake. ‘It’s brought them all out of hibernation anyway.’

  The place was fucking packed. Packed with joggers and speed-walkers and idiots like that. One guy passed us pushing a baby in a pram while he jogged.

  ‘You’re a freak,’ Bob shouted at him, as he ran past. ‘Yes, I mean you. Hey, buddy, you’re a freak.’

  The guy turned round and Bob started laughing. Then another one, a speed-walker passed by, and Bob leant forward and shouted right into his ear-

  ‘Freak! You’re a freak, man.’

  That guy didn’t turn around. He picked up his walk to an even faster pace, but Bob was cracking himself up. He moved out into the main flow of them all; cyclists, folk on roller boots, the joggers and the funny walkers, and he spread his arms out like wings—and started turning round slowly. I stood and watched the chaos he was causing, as everyone tried to flow round about him and avoid each other.

  ‘Freaks!’ he shouted. ‘Freaks.’

  Then he started pretending he was trying to grab people as they went past, and he started laughing even harder.

  Eventually he staggered out of there and flopped down onto the grass, gasping for breath as he laughed.

  ‘Freak,’ he shouted at one more guy, and then he stood up and brushed himself down.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I enjoyed that. Freaks! Freaks. What a life, huh? Come on, Peacock. Let’s go and find a drink.’

  We looked for bars all the way between there and the hotel, but there wasn’t a single one. So we ended up back in the bar at the hotel.

  Bob started laughing again as he sat down with the drinks. ‘That was a riot,’ he said, and he pushed my beer towards me.

  ‘There you go, Peacock,’ he said. ‘It’s party time.’ And he asked if he’d told me about his first real job.

  ‘You told me you were with the Boston Ballet,’ I reminded him.

  ‘Ah, but that wasn’t my first job,’ he said. ‘I worked there, but my first job was as a professional party boy.’