I Think I Love You (12 page)

She snatched up a hoe and appeared to point the rusty tip accusingly at my dad, who was sitting on the top step smoking his pipe and just looking at her. The weather was his fault. Everything was his fault. He smiled and threw his hands up in surrender.

“It’s only a saying, Greta. Don’t take it personal, love. It’s May. There’s plenty of time for them to ripen.”

“Ach, but they will have no flavor. Only rain flavor.”

If he could have gone up to the sky and fetched the sun down for her on his back he would, I knew that. My father worshipped my mother, though he never found the right sacrifices to appease her. As far as she was concerned, he had won her by false pretenses, and she would never forgive him for it. When they met, Glynn Williams was the star of the town’s operatic society and my mother was a young soprano. Their duet from
Kismet
got a write-up in the local paper.

My mother made a mistake. She thought Dad was going up in the world, when it turned out he had just climbed a hill for a while to take in the view.

My father had a look of Clark Gable, or so Gwennie in the grocer’s told Mrs. Price the Post. I’d never seen Mr. Gable, so I didn’t know. Every morning, when Dad left home for the steelworks on his motorbike, I would stand by the upstairs landing window and watch him. The deal I struck with God was that if I watched my father till he got right to the end of the road, and never took my eyes off him for one second until he disappeared round the corner, then God would bring him back safe to me. It always worked, so I never dared stop looking.

The family on my father’s side were short and dark. In old wedding photographs you might take them for Sicilians. My mother mistook Dad’s stocky good looks for manly purpose, while he mistook her angelic blondness and full lips for sweetness. Her disappointment with him colored our days.

The story went that her parents had bought a passage from Hamburg to New York, but the boat docked at Cardiff one night and they got off in a hurry, thinking it was Manhattan. (Fog, tiredness, a baby crying at the wrong moment.) It was an embarrassing piece of bad timing for a celebrated family of German clockmakers. Growing up in four rooms over a watch shop in the High Street, my mother felt she had been cheated of her destiny. She craved a bigger stage, the one her face deserved. The life her beauty had been designed for was out there somewhere, ebbing away as the shop’s clocks ticked and tocked.

It’s so hard for a child to understand her parents’ unhappiness. Mine, if only I’d known it, were infected with the virus of incompatibility. Nobody died from it, but nobody lived, either. My mother stayed put and, well, you’d have thought she was a normal wife and mother, but her offended spirit got its revenge.

Anything could set her off. Me reading a book. Me not reading a book. Greasy hair, spots, which she regarded as self-inflicted although everyone got them, girls and boys. I used to wonder if I was an only child because I’d been such a disappointment.

There were so many times I wanted to tell my mother about the boys barking at me in class, but it would have meant mentioning Petra
the TV dog, and I knew how angry that would make her. She would suspect I had been watching the idiot box. Instead, one night after a really bad day at school, I asked her if I could please be called by my middle name, Maria.

She raised the palette knife she was using to free a cheesecake from its tin and swiped it at me, narrowly missing my cheek. “No, why are you asking this, you stupid, stupid girl? I told you Petra is a fine name, it was the name of my aunt, who was really a most elegant person in Heidelberg. If you ask me one more time you will be punished, you stupid girl, do you hear?”

When she went out, my dad liked to dance me round the front room. We weren’t allowed in there with our shoes on. There was a big black radiogram with mesh on the front with a gold surround and three cream Bakelite knobs. Normally, it was tuned to live classical concerts, but on Sunday mornings we were allowed to turn the knob to
Family Favorites
. My mother approved of
Family Favorites
because the show was sometimes broadcast from Germany. Soldiers stationed out there sent record requests for their loved ones back home.

Every Friday night, my mother took my father’s wage packet from him and gave him an allowance to go down to the club. “Your father, he can’t be trusted with money,” she said. He was always
my father
when she was angry. You should have heard him sing, though. Even in a land famous for song, Dad’s baritone stood out. “I’ve Got a
Cruuuussh
on You, Sweetie Pie.” That was one song he sang to me. One day, with Dean Martin crooning “That’s Amore” on the radiogram next door, Dad took me in his arms and whirled me round the kitchen. I imagined being in a hot place with my hair pinned up by a single red flower. I imagined being glamorous.

“Well, we are going to see the Messiah. Kind of.”

Sharon cracked up. She thought the alibi I had given my mum for where I’d be on May 26 was brilliant.

We were sitting with Gillian on the grassy bank just above the rugby pitch, talking about our plans for White City.

“Genius, Pet,” Sharon said. “David is a god to us and you can wear
your Sunday-school clothes to go out the house and after you can get changed into your gear round mine. Then you can stay the night when we get back so your mam’ll never suspect, will she?”

Sharon’s Uncle Jim worked on the railways, in the signal box at Port Talbot, so he’d given her the time of the late train coming back. It was specially for people who went up to London for the shows. We were sure we could get the 11:45 p.m. if we left the concert the minute it ended.

“What are you two wearing to London?” Gillian asked. Her blue eyes were fixed on the game below, where Stuart was acting captain of the school team.

Sharon let out a groan. “Oh, God help us, just think what Carol will wear to meet David.” Puckering her lips into a familiar sink-plunger pout, Sha gathered her small breasts in both hands and pushed them up until they were like two blancmanges wobbling over the top of her school blouse. She stood up and started strutting around with her chin jabbing forward and her bum pushed out in imitation of Carol’s stroppy cockerel strut.

“She’ll wear a blimmin’ bikini and get us all arrested,” I said.

We both laughed, not unkindly, at the thought of our sexy friend. Gillian ignored our fooling. She was doing that ladylike poise thing she did whenever there were boys around.

Down on the pitch, the game was turning nasty. Our team, in red and white, was playing a school from the Valleys. Great hulking brutes, they were. The ruck was peeling apart and one ox came bellowing out from the tangle of limbs and lashed out at our prop, till both had blood on their mouths.

Suddenly, the ball was free and one of our boys got a hand to it. He hugged it to his chest, sidestepped the ox and put on a burst of speed. God, he was fast, mind. The guys who hurled themselves at him looked like they were diving at thin air. For a moment, in the thick of the action, the boy somehow made time for himself. It was magic, the way he seemed to be running in slow motion inside his own private bubble while the other players flailed around him. He got over the line, lightly touched the ball to the ground and turned round, a grimy grin splitting his fair face. Steven Williams.

“Hey, he’s waving at you, Petra,” Sharon said.

“He’s waving at
us,
” said Gillian, who was on her feet, clapping and cheering.

All my life I would remember that try. See Steven running down the wing, making a mockery of the blundering beasts around him.

Some things never die.

I
t’s you. You are David Cassidy.”

Zelda was standing next to Bill’s desk in the office, holding up a sweater. It was sleeveless, knitted in stripes of red and white wool, with a row of buttons down the front that winked silver in the light. Around the hem was a strip of wobbling blue, with small stars uncertainly picked out in white. “And look at the back.” She flipped it round to reveal a large capital
D
in silver satin, stitched somewhere between the shoulder blades. “Stand up,” said Zelda, and Bill, feeling ten years old, did so without hesitation. What power did this majestical woman wield over him, he wondered, that he should rise at her call? She pressed the sweater against his chest. Bill had the second button of his shirt unbuttoned, like someone in an aftershave commercial, and for a second he could actually feel the hairs on his chest stick to the silver
D
. It was not a pleasant feeling.

“And it fits, Billy!” she went on. “Like I said, it’s just you.” Billy? Nobody had called him Billy since a boy called Newsome in the third form, who had veered away with a nosebleed.

“Don’t call me Billy,” he said, in a low voice. “Please.” He could see Pete the Pimple, at the far end of the room, working up a smirk.

“Sorry, William dear,” said Zelda. Everything bounced off her, including slights and hurts of every description, whether given or taken. She shook the sweater. “Look at it glitter, though. And have you realized how the stars and stripes are meant to look like the American fl—”

“Yes, I did notice. Though it’s sort of upside down.” Together, they marveled at the wondrous object. Here, at last, was proof that knitwear could ruin your eyes. It had arrived that morning in a brown box, plastered with 1p stamps. The box sat now at her feet. “Who’s it from?”

“Clare Possit.” Zelda put down the sweater and produced a rose-pink envelope from some concealed pocket of her floor-length tangerine dress, which looked like it came from Marrakesh and jingled as she moved. “Clare Possit, 47 Lucknow Road, Shrewsbury. Aged fourteen, brown hair, twenty-seven posters, one rabbit called Partridge.”

“Christ.”

“Yes, well. Likes toasted sandwiches and knitting. Hence this lovely sweater. Would like to be Mrs. David Cassidy when she grows up.”

“If she grows up. If
he
grows up.”

“Now, now. Clare has been very busy, I’d like you to know. As well as a sweater she encloses a woolly hat, for Manchester you understand.”

“Of course. In May.”

“And also a pair of socks.” Zelda delved into the box and held them up gingerly, away from her, as you might a pair of poisonous caterpillars. Bill leaned closer, genuinely interested.

“That one says ‘
CHE
’ on it,” he said. “Like Guevara. Is Clare Possit a Maoist? Does Mrs. Possit know about it? Do they even do Cuban liberation in Shrewsbury? I never knew.” He paused, and his face fell. “Oh, I see.” Zelda was holding up the sock’s sad twin. It bore the legend
RISH
.

“Together,” said Zelda, brightly, “they spell out—”

“Yes, I geddit.” Bill considered the socks. To his surprise, he had not yet ceased to be surprised by the madness of Cassidy love. David was still basically a kid, and the likelihood of his ever being allowed to become a man seemed slimmer by the day; either he would be torn
asunder by his fans, like a stag among hounds, or else he would be frozen in eternal youth, the way that rich Californians had their corpses stowed in dry ice. And he couldn’t sing—not like Jagger, anyway, or Bowie, or any of the grown-up gods. Next to Cassidy, even Marc Bolan was a proper adult male, and he wore eye shadow, for God’s sake. And a feather boa. But—and the thought of this niggled Bill, and wouldn’t go away—you had to hand it to the Cassidy guy: he could stir up love. He was like a witch with a cauldron. Bill had fancied, at college, that he knew a bit about love—not as a condition of the heart (God help him), but as a tactic that poets and painters used, an artist’s strategy for getting women into bed, or getting yourself into their heads. But this boy, this American pansy, he could manufacture an emotion out of nowhere, out of nothing, and sort of squash it into a song, like Clare Possit’s cramming socks into that brown box. And when the girls unwrapped it at the other end—when they heard it, alone in their bedrooms—they not only believed it, they believed he had believed it in the first place; they even believed it was directed specifically at them.

The fools, the uncountable fools. Shakespeare had his Dark Lady, maybe a bloke on the side, but how many could David win over with one verse, one yelp of that watery voice, one sideways nudge of the bum? Millions of them, tens of millions of Clares and Judiths and Christines, all utterly convinced that they were cherished, both che’d and rish’d; that they were in love, as you might be in Shrewsbury or Wigan or Weston-super-Mare, but also, in return, that they were loved. Pop ruled the world. Poets were left for dust.

“Zit city.”

He came out of his reverie with a start. For an instant, his head spun. Pete was beside him, pushing a picture into his frame of vision. Where was Zelda? While Bill was dreaming, she must have sailed away.

“Look at that.” Pete poked at something with his finger, which was gray with graphite at the tip; he had flecks of white in the nail, too, which Bill’s grandmother used to say was evidence of a bad diet. Well, she got that right. Two days ago, Bill had seen Pete force a Kit Kat into the hollowed-out crust of a Cornish pasty, and then eat the whole thing. Had he already eaten the meat and veg from the middle, or simply
scooped them out with his slaty fingers and thrown them away? And here he was, bent over, rich of breath, showing Bill a photograph. No, two photographs.

“Before and after,” he said. “Like one of them weight wanker ads.” He sniffed hard and rubbed his nose with a knuckle. “Normally I wouldn’t take a copy, you know, just tart up the one. But this was so good I thought you ought to see the original, before I got to work. You being new and everything.”

For all Bill knew, that may have been a kindly offer, wise counsel from an old hand, but somehow it came out sounding like an insult. So did everything that dripped from the lips of Pete.

“Afters first.” It was a black-and-white head shot of David Cassidy; his back was to the camera but he had turned round, coy as a deer, glancing over his shoulder to tell the world’s females to come hither. Or, if they were minded, just to come. Sex must get in there somewhere. His lashes, with their graceful curve, were absurdly long—could they be forever?—and his skin was as flawless as a saucer of milk.