The Peacock Manifesto (Peacock Tales Book 1)

by Stuart David

  ‘Go where?’ I asked him. ‘Where the fuck are we going to go?’ And that stopped him. No-one had any fucking idea where we were going now, and we just sat down there in silence. Staring at the fucking river.

  We sat in silence in the car for a while too, still parked up at the side of the road. It was Bob who finally had the first idea for what we should do—as he sat there dripping all over the seat. And it was him who had the second idea too, after the first one had come to fuck-all.

  To be fair they were both pretty much the same idea. The second one was just a slightly more desperate version of the first one.

  His first idea was to phone our guy back in L.A.

  ‘He’s bound to have it all backed up on the computer,’ he said, suddenly becoming all animated. He stopped shivering then, and I went off to make the call. But like I said, it came to nothing.

  I didn’t tell the guy what had happened, I just asked him if he still had a copy of the song, in case we needed it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘We don’t keep any of the clients material. We can back it up for you at the time, if you ask—for an extra charge. But space is limited, so otherwise we clear everything out.’

  ‘But you were in on this one,’ I told him. ‘You had a cut. We were more than fucking clients.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘You still don’t get it, do you, Peacock?’ Bev said, when I told them how it had gone. ‘You still don’t understand.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘All they wanted was as much money as they could get from you. They always knew it wasn’t going anywhere.’

  ‘Fuck off, Bev,’ I told her. ‘You’re still walking a thin line, hen. A very fucking thin line.’

  Bob’s second idea was to phone the studio where we’d recorded the original stuff with the musicians.

  ‘At least if we got that stuff we could rebuild it again,’ he said, and he went off to phone this time. And he didn’t look too unhappy when he came back.

  ‘How did it go?’ I asked him.

  ‘He’s gone to check,’ Bob said. ‘He thought they might have backed it up when they were putting all the tracks onto DAT for us. We’ve to call back in an hour.’

  ‘That’s fucking magic,’ I told him.

  ‘How about we try to find a hotel in the meantime,’ Bob said. ‘I need a shower and a change of clothes, Peacock. I’m catching my fucking death here.’

  So we went off and found a place. The wee man got himself sorted out, and within the hour he was at our door with some good news.

  ‘He found a tape with our name on it,’ he said. ‘I told him it was an emergency and he’s sending it by courier. It should be here by the morning.’

  I slapped him on the back.

  ‘We’re back on, wee man,’ I shouted.

  So we phoned the guy in Washington and told him the car had broken down. We told him we’d be another day or two and he seemed okay with that.

  ‘Will we be able to find a place here that can remake the thing?’ I asked Bob.

  ‘Are you shitting me?’ he said, and for some reason then he tried to do an impression of me. A pretty fucking awful impression.

  ‘This is the world capital of techno, pal,’ he said.

  * * *

  I phoned my guy back at home.

  ‘There are a few final bits of polishing we need to do,’ I told him, and I offered him thirty-percent for enough to finish it. He said he’d take fifty. I managed to get him down to forty-five, and I went off in search of a fax machine to send him another fucking agreement.

  ‘I’ll wire you the money the instant it arrives, Peacock,’ he said.

  ‘Aye, aye—pal,’ I muttered. ‘I know how it goes.’

  And once I’d found the fax machine we all went down to the hotel bar, and we got totally fucking hammered.

  Chapter 31

  So we’ve been back in Glasgow for a couple of weeks now, me and the wife. It took some getting used to at first, after being away for so long. It took a while to get used to being in the same place all the time, stuck in the fucking rain. But it’s already starting to feel now like we’ve never been away.

  It doesn’t take long, eh?

  How about this, though; I had a letter from the wee man this morning. A fucking letter.

  Eh?

  ‘Dear Peacock…’

  Fucking nutcase.

  He said he could still feel the hangover from that night in the hotel bar. He said he still felt a bit like he had the morning after that, and a lot of his letter banged on about that morning.

  I’ll tell you, we were all fucking struggling that morning. We all had fucking belters, and things had seemed pretty grim. But the tape had turned up at the front desk, and the money had turned up too. So we’d phoned round a few studios till we’d found one that could do what we were looking for, and then we drove out there.

  The wee man claimed that it was all down to him getting that fucking pendant back. He claimed that was what had put us back in business.

  ‘If I’d lost this,’ he said, ‘we’d never be doing this, Peacock. It’s brought all the good luck back with it.’

  All the same, I was holding on pretty fucking tightly to that envelope with the tape in it, just in case Bev decided to go mental again. And when we got to the studio I took the DAT out of it and gave it straight to the guy.

  ‘Spark this up, pal,’ I told him. ‘Let’s get on with it.’

  My head was fucking splitting, and I wasn’t in the mood for any hanging about. I had this feeling, too, that if we didn’t get on with it quickly the whole thing would somehow disappear again. So I got him to fire the tape into the machine and he pumped up the speakers.

  And…

  Are you ready for this?

  It was Bev’s fucking song that started blaring out of there. Her singing ‘Sugar Town’.

  It was like a fucking nightmare.

  I pushed past the guy and hit the fast-forward button, but there was nothing else on the tape all the way to the end. Nothing.

  The wee man ran off to be sick, and I went off to use the phone.

  And on the way out of the room, I heard Bev asking the guy if it would be possible for him to put her song onto a fucking CD for her.

  Needless to say, they had fuck-all else of ours at the studio in L.A. That was the full extent of what they had backed up. Her fucking tune.

  When we got out of there Bob pulled off his Elvis pendant and threw it as hard as he could out into the street.

  ‘Fucking jackasses,’ he shouted.

  And then there was nothing else left for him to do but drive us out to the airport.

  * * *

  So she’s not allowed to play that thing when I’m in the house, that’s the fucking rule. And I’ll tell you, she’s been pretty fucking meek since we got back here. She knows how badly she fucked up.

  I know she’s glad it was her who ended up with her song back, rather than us who ended up with ours, but she’s feeling fucking guilty about it too, and she’s been treating me well because of that. In fact, I don’t think she’s ever treated me this well before. And I’m onto a fucking winner, cause the truth is I’ve made my peace with the whole fucking thing. I’m hardly fucking bothered about it anymore. But there’s no way in hell I’m going to let her know that. There’s no fucking chance. I’m going to ride this thing for all it’s fucking worth.

  But I might tell the wee man what happened to get me over it, if I ever write him a letter back.

  ‘Dear Evil…’

  Fucking hell. Letters.

  Jesus Christ.

  It was sad to see him go at the airport, all the same. I had a fucking lump in my throat. And Bev was in fucking tears.

  I took out the money that had been wired over and gave him enough to get back to New York.

  ‘It’s been a blast, Peacock,’ he said. ‘Fuck knows what I’ll do when I get back. I’ve forgotten how to do anything but drive.’

  ‘G
ive that guy of yours a good kicking from me,’ I told him.

  ‘I’ll do more than that,’ he said.

  He wrote in his letter that he drove for another week after he got to New York, till the lease on the car was up. Drove up to New Hampshire and fucked about.

  You won’t believe what he’s doing now though. He got a job out in Long Island, painting millionaire’s yachts.

  How about that?

  And that’s not even the whole fucking story.

  One of the guys he’s working with turned out to be a musician, and Bob was talking to him about our wee adventure, and telling him how much he’d envied all the musicians we worked with. He started spouting all that shite he’d spouted to us, about how he wished he could do that sort of thing, but how this fucking worm held him back. And guess what the guy told him.

  He said:

  ‘Man, music is the best way to get all that evil shit out.’

  So now the bampot’s learning the saxophone. The fucking saxophone. Can you believe that?

  Fucking mental.

  So I might write him a letter back sometime. I fucking hate writing, especially letters, but I want to tell him about this dream I had on the flight home.

  It was a fucking corker.

  I must have fallen asleep about ten minutes after we took off, and I dreamt we were sitting further down the plane than we really were, maybe in first-class. Bev was on one side of me, nattering away as usual, and even in dreams it was starting to get on my nerves. So I turned round to see who was sitting on the other side of me, and it just happened to be the big man. Glen Campbell. In the full fucking outfit; Stetson, cowboy shirt, boots—the lot. And it wasn’t Glen as he is now either, it was the young Glen.

  ‘I’d like to thank you, Peacock,’ he said to me, when I turned round. And he shook my hand.

  ‘Thank me for what?’ I asked him.

  And he said he wanted to thank me for leaving his song as it was.

  ‘That’s how it should be,’ he told me, and then he was gone. I woke up, and that was that.

  But ever since then I haven’t felt so bad about what happened.

  I’m still fucked off about all the money we could have made, but I’m glad now that we didn’t ruin the song. I’ve decided there’s already enough of that shite in the world as it is.

  And like I say, the wife’s treating me like a fucking king now, so as far as I’m concerned I’ve won a fucking watch.

  And at least I didn’t end up lying crippled on the bed like my uncle Tam.

  Eh, pal?

  Eh?

  Ha Ha…