The Peacock Manifesto (Peacock Tales Book 1)

by Stuart David

  I could hear she was talking in there when the song finished, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. We didn’t have to wait long to find out what it had been about though. The band soon started up again, and this time she was singing.

  ‘Sugar Town.’

  She fucking loves that song. It drives me fucking mental, listening to it blasting at home—with her singing along badly.

  She wasn’t doing any better here either. It didn’t sound too good. Luckily it’s not too long a song, so it was soon over.

  ‘Alright,’ Gerry said then, laughing—and pressing his button down so’s they could all hear him talking through there, ‘that’s me ready to go, guys. We’re up and running.’

  The drummer stuck a thumb up, and then they all talked a bit more. I could hear Bev laughing, and the singer spoke into the microphone.

  ‘Gerry,’ he said, ‘let’s roll the tapes and we’ll put this down first, just to help everyone loosen up.’

  ‘Fine,’ Gerry said, and nodded to Spike.

  It took me a bit to catch on—it took me till they were playing again. Then I fucking got it.

  ‘Aww, Jesus Christ,’ I said to Bob.

  Three minutes later we had Bev singing ‘Sugar Town’ for fucking posterity. She kept waving to me through the glass while she was doing it, then closing her eyes to presumably put what she thought was some feeling into it. At each chorus she’d lift her glass and close her eyes—’Shoo-shoo-shoo.’ And up it would come.

  It was fucking brutal. And she didn’t even sing it as well as she had the first time. The whole thing was pretty ropey really. But she was fucking thrilled when she came back through. Chuffed to bits. Spike put it onto a CD for her and then went to get her another cocktail. She was practically floating about the room.

  ‘Alright, guys,’ Gerry said, with his finger on his button again, ‘let’s have a shot at what we’re here for.’

  And they ran through ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ for the first time.

  To be honest it was a long night after that, and most of it was pretty boring. The first time they ran through the song was fucking amazing, just because it sounded so good. It sounded fucking incredible. I couldn’t believe they were all just through there playing it like that, and I got a bit fucking emotional, thinking that’s what it must have been like to be there on the night Glen originally recorded it.

  But after they’d played it another three or four times, they all started packing up their instruments, and they got ready to go home.

  I thought it was all over then. I thought we were nearly finished, and I was amazed.

  ‘This is going to cost us a lot less than we thought,’ I said to Bob, but I was fucking wrong.

  When the musicians had gone we listened to the recordings with Gerry, and chose the best one—and after that it just seemed to go on and on.

  And on.

  He spent fucking hours listening to each instrument on its own, turning and twisting the knobs. Then he spent more hours listening to them all together—turning and twisting again.

  Bev went back to the hotel sometime around then.

  ‘I can’t take any more of this, Peacock,’ she said. ‘It’s driving me daft.’

  And making sure that everyone else could hear she said,

  ‘Is the limousine coming back for us or should I get a taxi?’

  ‘You should get a taxi,’ I told her.

  So Spike went and phoned for one.

  When it turned up I went out with her. Not out of any desire to be with her—I just needed to get away from the music, and all that fucking incessant twisting.

  ‘What room are we in, Peacock?’ she asked.

  ‘Two fifteen.’

  ‘What street are we on.’

  ‘Sunset Boulevard.’

  She climbed into the taxi, struggling not to spill a drop of her latest cocktail. And as the guy pulled off I saw her leaning forward, and heard her shouting at him to put her CD in the stereo.

  Poor fucking bastard.

  Chapter 18

  We came out of the studio straight into the LA rush hour, me and the wee man. The daylight hurt my eyes, and we were a bit drunk by then too.

  The last part of the operation had been the most tedious of them all. Gerry had been recording each instrument separately onto a tape for us, and in the end we’d just had to leave him to it, and go and sit in the lounge.

  It was alright in there. There was a TV and armchairs, and—most importantly—you couldn’t hear any music coming from the studio. We had Spike bring us a few beers in there, and we watched some of the crap they put on TV in the middle of the night. Then a bit later Bob found a channel showing a recording of an old American football game—so we watched that for a while.

  It’s a fucking strange game, American football. In a way it’s a lot like their TV shows; as soon as it starts to get going they stop it. You can understand it a bit more with the TV programmes, cause they want to show you as many adverts as possible. But fuck knows what it is with the football. Mind you, it’s a bit like the country itself; you drive for a thousand miles and see fuck all. Then—suddenly—you see something unbelievable, something totally fucking spectacular. You get all excited, and then it’s gone. And it’s another thousand miles of fuck-all again.

  While we were watching the TV in there I started hatching the idea that they’d had to invent adverts by necessity, cause they couldn’t take too much of anything at once, and they needed a reason to keep stopping the programmes. Maybe they should have gone the whole way, I thought, and just made it exactly like the country—just have a blank screen and silence for the length of time the adverts took up. That would be more fucking like it.

  Still, I made an effort to understand the game. I kept asking Bob questions about it, and trying to grasp it.

  He didn’t like me calling it American football though.

  ‘What the fuck is with that, Peacock?’ he kept saying. ‘Why do you call it that? It’s football. Just football. No American—just fucking football.’

  ‘It’s not football to me, son,’ I told him. ‘Anyway, they fucking carry the ball most of the time. Feet hardly come into it. It’s more like fucking rugby. Except for the armour.’

  ‘When you’re here, Peacock,’ he said, ‘call it football.’

  ‘I can’t, son. This isn’t football. This is American football. Football’s a great game. This is all fucked up.’

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Fine. American football.’ And he started trying to explain what I’d asked him about originally, but I still didn’t have much of an understanding of the game when it finished.

  So we drank some more and watched some more crap, and finally Gerry came to tell us he was done.

  ‘It’s been a long night, guys,’ he said.

  ‘You’re not wrong, son,’ I told him, and he took us into his office.

  We gave him a thousand dollars there and he gave us a tape.

  ‘You’ve got the full song on there first, guys,’ he said. ‘Then a test tone, and all the individual tracks are after that. I’ve written it all on the case, and I’ve burned you a CD of the full song too, so you can listen to it at home.’

  He gave us that and we shook hands.

  ‘I think you’ll be happy with it,’ he told us. ‘It sounds good.’

  ‘Cheers, son.’ I said, and we left.

  Taking a taxi in their rush hour was a bit like watching their football and their TV programmes. Something would happen for a few minutes and then nothing; we’d just be sitting there again. And it was a lot more expensive than watching their sports or their TV.

  ‘What did you think of that?’ Bob asked me, as we sat stranded again.

  ‘It almost drove me mental,’ I told him, and he laughed.

  ‘It was good while the musicians were there though,’ he said. ‘That was alright. It might be an okay life, being one of those guys.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But I wouldn’t want to be Gerry. That would fucking
kill me.’

  We’d taken some beers away with us, and Bob opened them up—but the driver was way ahead of us.

  ‘You no drink in here,’ he shouted. ‘No allowed.’

  ‘Aww, come on, pal,’ I shouted back. ‘We’ve been working all night.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We’ve been working all night.’

  ‘I no hear you. What you say?’

  ‘Aye, alright—alright, pal. We’ll keep them.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Bob said, ‘we’ll keep them. We’ll take them back to the hotel.’

  ‘Okay. Okay,’ he said.

  And he started driving again. For about fifteen seconds. Then we came to another stop.

  It got so that I couldn’t bear to look at the meter. We were almost at the point where it would have been cheaper to hire a limousine. But when we got close to the hotel Bob leant over and whispered to me.

  ‘Take a drink,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Take a drink from your bottle. Go on.’

  So I did. And while I was drinking he put his thumb over the top of his and started shaking it.

  ‘Keep drinking,’ he told me, and he pulled his thumb back so that his started spraying about.

  The driver slammed the breaks on.

  ‘You get out,’ he shouted, and Bob put his mouth over the spray and started drinking too. ‘You get out of my car. Look at the mess you make. You get out. You both get out.’

  ‘But we’re almost there,’ Bob pleaded. ‘It’s only another few blocks. Please. We’ll stop drinking.’

  Then came the gun.

  ‘You get out,’ he screamed. ‘You get out my car. Lunatics. Get out.’

  ‘Go,’ Bob said, and we got out and ran. Then we stopped.

  Bob was cracking himself up.

  ‘How about that?’ he asked me, panting and laughing. ‘How about that, Peacock? Eh? That fare would have sent his kids to college.’

  ‘You’re a genius,’ I told him.

  ‘I impress me sometimes,’ he said, and he started cracking up again.

  ‘Still,’ I told him, ‘you’ve wasted a perfectly good bottle of beer there, son.’

  He held it up and looked at it sadly.

  ‘There is that,’ he said. ‘There is that.’

  Bev was still sleeping when I got back to the room. She was snoring away in there, and it was as dark as night-time with the curtains closed, so I felt around for my CD player and got into bed beside her.

  I was fucking knackered, but I put the headphones on anyway and had a listen to the CD Gerry had made. Then I had a listen to Glen’s original. Glen’s still had that extra magic, but ours sounded good. Ours sounded alright.

  Bev started to move around a bit then, so I turned the volume down and watched her till she was settled again. Unfortunately though, Glen’s CD had run on from ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ to ‘Marie’ by then, and as Bev snuggled into the pillow I started to feel glad she was there.

  It always fucking gets to me, that song. Especially when I’ve had a few drinks. And before I lay down I kissed her on the forehead.

  ‘Peacock?’ she muttered.

  ‘Aye, hen,’ I said. ‘Go back to sleep. It’s still early.’

  ‘Alright,’ she said.

  I won’t tell you what I said to her then, and I fucking hope she never heard me either. That bastard song. It’ll be the fucking end of me one of these days…

  Chapter 19

  It’s totally mental when you think about it. In New York, Bob says, there are thousands of places where we could have got all this done. I could have flown straight there, met him at home, and got the thing made in no time. But instead, because he took a girl out to dinner once or twice, we’ve travelled fuck-knows how many hundreds of miles, and been through fuck-knows what.

  Still, if we’d tried to do things that way we’d never have made the money we made from our wee DJing job, to pay for the fucking thing in the first place. And more importantly we wouldn’t be looking at this chance of a record deal we’re looking at now, if we can sort ourselves out. So I suppose we have the wee man’s romantic skills to thank for everything.

  It works both ways.

  You should have seen our guy’s face when we took him the tapes and played him the song. We didn’t tell him what it was before we played it—we just sparked it up, and you should have fucking seen him.

  To begin with his face just froze, then the eyes went wide. And by the time he looked up from his desk he had a huge fucking grin on.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said, shaking his head. Then he was up on his feet.

  ‘Guys,’ he said, ‘this is fucking genius.’ He started laughing and shaking his fists.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said again. ‘I love it. Love it.’

  He was so excited he wanted to get to work on it straight away, but we had find out how much it was going to cost us first, cause we knew we didn’t have too much money left.

  ‘How much would you want?’ Bob asked him, and it just about killed us when he told us the price. It was way more than what we had left, and we knew we’d fucked up, cause he had the idea for the song now, and if we didn’t get it done there there was nothing to stop him doing the same thing himself.

  ‘How much can you guys stretch to?’ he asked us, when we told him we couldn’t afford it, and we let him know. We were pretty much down to five hundred dollars. He’d asked for two thousand.

  He looked down at his desk.

  ‘This is hard,’ he said. ‘I really think this could work. And on top of that, I know a guy in D.C. who’d put this out if you took it to him. He’s got a label, and he’d kill for this. But…’

  He rewound the tape and started playing it again. The grin came back.

  ‘You really think he’d put it out?’ Bob asked.

  ‘I know he would,’ the guy said. ‘He’d love it.’

  He picked up a pen from the desk and played around with it.

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said, ‘maybe I could do this for a bit less. Maybe I could manage it for fifteen hundred. How does that sound? Could you guys raise that kind of money? I’ll do it for fifteen hundred if you can cut me in for ten percent of whatever you make on the record.’

  So we told him we’d see what we could do. It sounded good, but we knew we’d have to raise enough to get us to D.C. too. Five hundred was all we had, and that wasn’t even enough to fly me and Bev home from there—so we knew we’d have to fucking go for it. It was the only way. And I knew that if we could get it done and get to D.C, everything else would sort itself out.

  All we needed was a plan.

  * * *

  ‘You wouldn’t have believed it, Peacock,’ Bev said. She was just back from her film-studio tour, and she wouldn’t stop banging on about it. ‘I can’t even explain properly how it felt,’ she said. ‘Just to stand on the same spot where all those films were made. It was…’

  We’d taken her up to the street with the stars on it before we’d gone to see our guy, and when we left her she’d gone off on this thing. It had cost a fucking fortune, but I couldn’t let her know that was a problem. She still thought we were signed with some record company.

  ‘There was something the tour guide said to us,’ she told me. ‘He said one reason film-stars are called stars is because by the time you see them on the screen they’re already gone. And with the real stars, the legends, you’re watching them after they’ve been dead for years and years. Still shining. Just like the stars in the sky do. I’d never thought of that before, Peacock. I just love it here. I never want to leave.’

  ‘We might be leaving soon,’ I told her. ‘Me and Bob have to take this thing to Washington when it’s done.’

  ‘Aww, Peacock,’ she said. ‘But I only just got here.’

  ‘I know, hen. But I told you before you came, we’re here to work. It’s not a holiday.’

  ‘Can I stay then? Can I fly back home from here later on? After you’v
e gone.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ I told her. ‘We’ll see how the money is. Forget that just now though, I’m fucking starving. Let’s go and get the wee man and we’ll find something to eat.’

  She’d found a place earlier in the day that she was desperate to go to. Somewhere called Oscars or something, where they had film stills on the wall, and a fucking man-sized Oscar trophy in the corner. It was tacky, but she loved it, and she started banging on to Bob about the reason why film stars are called stars.

  I had to give the wee man credit—he managed to sound a lot more interested in her tour than I’d been able to. That whole side of the town was starting to get to me. The street with the stars on it had just about driven me mental, and in here the menu was full of stuff like Hollywood Burgers, and Brando Steaks.

  I couldn’t really listen to Bev going on about it anymore, but the wee man was doing alright. He was doing fine.

  ‘Why do they call you Evil Bob?’ Bev asked him, and he grinned.

  ‘Oh, he can be bad,’ I told her.

  ‘I’ve got a worm inside me,’ he said.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A worm. It makes me do things. I can’t get rid of it.’

  ‘Yuck,’ Bev said. ‘That’s disgusting, Bob. Suddenly I don’t feel so hungry anymore.’

  ‘I told you he could be bad,’ I said, and Bob laughed.

  But she soon got over it, when her Sinatra Salad arrived—and she was off again, nudging me and whispering that she thought the two guys opposite us were film directors, talking about their latest films.

  ‘It’s just so exciting here,’ she said. ‘Don’t you just love it, Bob? It’ll break my heart to have to leave. I’ll tell you what you should do. You should stop wearing that hairnet, and then you might get mistaken for the guy you look like. Someone might put you in a film by accident, and then we could all live here on your money forever.’

  ‘What makes you think he’d share it with us?’ I asked her.

  ‘He’d have to,’ she said. ‘We’d be the only people who knew who he really was. We’d know he was really just the wee mad-man. And if he didn’t pay us we could let the cat out of the bag.’

  ‘You’ve got it all figured out, eh Bev?’