I Think I Love You (3 page)

Sundays lowered the temperature in the rows of gray-stone terraced houses clinging to the mountain that rose steeply above our bay, and even the sea became a bit subdued. It always made me think it was a good day for Jesus to walk on the water. People shivered on the Sabbath and went upstairs to put a cardigan on and came down to watch the wrestling on TV, but always with the sound down, out of respect. It was really “whee yad” looking in through the windows as you ran down the hill toward the seafront, using your back shoe as a brake till you smelled the rubber, and seeing the big men in their leotards throwing each other about, silently bellowing and stamping their boots on the floor of the ring.

Going round Sharon’s house was like a holiday for me. She had an older brother called Michael, who teased us, but in a funny way, you know, and a younger sister called Bethan, who had a crush on little Jimmy Osmond, if you can believe it. (We called him Jimmy Spacehopper because he had these little bunny features stuck in the middle of a round face like a balloon.) Sha also had a baby brother called Jonathan, who sucked Farley’s Rusks in his high chair till he got a crusty orange mustache that you could peel off in one piece when it got hard, and there were visitors who dropped in for a chat and stayed because they were too busy talking to notice the time. As for Sharon’s mum, well, she was lovely, you couldn’t ask for a nicer person. She knocked on the bedroom door, really respectful, and came in and offered us squash and Club biscuits. Always remembered that I preferred the currant ones in the purple wrapper, not the orange. Mrs. Lewis said she liked our David posters and she told us she still had a book of matches and a cocktail stick from the night Paul McCartney dropped into a club in Cardiff—1964 it was. Sharon’s mum was absolutely crazy about Paul. Said she had hated Linda for marrying him.

“He was mine, you see.”

Yes, we saw.

My favorite thing was the David shrine on the back of Sharon’s door. She got it in a
Tiger Beat
her Auntie Doreen brought back all the way from Cincinnati, America. Four pictures fixed at mouth height so Sha
could snog him on the way out to school in the morning. Like she was saying good-bye to a real lover boy. In the first picture, David had that shaggy haircut and a naughty smile. The second was this look—you know. In the third, his lips were puckered up, and in the fourth, well, he just looked really happy and pleased with himself, didn’t he?

Over time, the four Davids became smeared and blurry with the Vaseline that Sharon used to soften her lips, a trick we copied from Gillian. Sometimes, Sharon let me have a go at kissing David Number 3. I wasn’t allowed posters on my wall at home because my mother believed that popular music could make you deaf and was really common and therefore appealing only to people like my dad, who worked down the steelworks and was a big Dean Martin man on the quiet—though that’s another story and I’m meant to be telling you this one.

Well, at the start of that year, several things happened. Gillian—she was never just Gill—lent Sharon to me as my special friend. I was really happy, you know, but I sensed the loan could be called in any minute if Gillian’s infatuation with Angela, the new girl from England, ever cooled. The uncertainty gave me this feeling in my stomach like I was on a ferry or something and couldn’t get my balance. Most nights, I woke with a fright because my legs were kicking out under the sheets as if I had to save myself from falling, falling. Another thing was, the headmaster told me after assembly one morning that I was going to play the cello for Princess Margaret when she came to open our new school hall. She was the queen’s sister, and the lord mayor and some people called dignitrees were coming. But the really big news was that David Cassidy had postponed his tour of Britain after having his gallbladder removed. Two girls in Manchester were so upset they set themselves on fire, according to the mag.

On fire! My God, the thought of the passion and the sacrifice of those girls, it burned in our heads for weeks. We hadn’t done anything that big for him. Not yet, anyway.

Another couple of fans wrote to David asking if they could have a gallstone each as a souvenir. Sharon and I pretended to be shocked and disgusted by the gallstones story.
Achafi!
Secretly, we could not have been more delighted. The blimmin’ cheek of it! Honest to God, where were their manners? It was in bad taste and unladylike. David, as any true fan knew, liked girls to act really feminine. We shook our heads
and crossed our arms indignantly, as we had seen our mothers do, resting them on the invisible shelf where soon our breasts would be. Asking for David’s gallstones!

Feeling superior to your rivals was one of the sweetest pleasures of being a fan, and maybe of being female in general.

We found out all about the tour cancellation and the gallstones from
The Essential David Cassidy Magazine
. It was brilliant, our Bible really. God’s own truth. At 18p, it was way more expensive than any other mag.

“Dead classy, mind,” Sharon said, and so it was with its thick, glossy paper, gorgeous recent pix and a monthly personal letter written by David himself actually from the set of
The Partridge Family
in Hollywood, America. You couldn’t put a price on something like that, could you?

From David’s letters, we collected facts like eager squirrels, putting them by for some vital future use. If you’d asked us what that use was, we couldn’t have told you. All we knew was that one day it would become magically clear and we would be ready.

“David writes lovely, mun.” Sharon sighed.

“David writes
well.
” I heard my mother’s voice correcting Sharon’s speech inside my head. She looked down on people with bad grammar, which was everybody except the lady who did the tickets at the library and the announcers on the BBC.

“Don’t talk tidy, please talking the Queen’s English, Petra,” rebuked my mother whenever she caught me speaking the way everyone else in town spoke.

But there in Sharon’s room, with the little heater filling the place with sleepy warmth and David on the turntable singing “Daydreamer,” I could tune out the voice of my mother and start learning how to be a woman all by myself.

The cancellation of the Cassidy tour at the start of 1974 was a bitter blow, but it also came as a relief. It gave me more time to perfect my
plan for meeting David when he came later in the year. Maybe autumn. He would call it the fall, which seemed perfect to me. I knew that somehow I would have to travel to London or Manchester, because Wales was so small it had no concert venue big enough to hold all the fans. I wasn’t sure how I would get there—no money, no transport, a mother who thought any singer who wasn’t Dietrich Fischer-Dishcloth shouldn’t be allowed—but once I got there and was safely outside the concert hall I knew that everything would be fine.

I would be hit by a car. Not a serious injury, obviously, just bad enough to be taken to the hospital by ambulance. David would be told about my accident and he would rush to my bedside. Things would be awkward at first, but we would soon get talking and he would be amazed by my in-depth knowledge of his records, particularly the B-sides. I would ask him how he was enjoying the fall and if he needed to use the bathroom. It would not be at all weird, it would be cool. David would be impressed by my command of American. Jeez. He would smile and invite me to his house in Hawaii, where I would meet his seven horses and there would be garlands round our necks and we would kiss and get married on the beach. I was already worried about my flip-flops.

Yes, it was a kind of madness. It didn’t last all that long, not in the great scheme of a life, but while I loved him he was the world entire.

The next day was school. I hated Sunday nights, hated the melancholy hour after getting home from Sharon’s warm funny house, hated having to study for the Monday-morning French test.

I love, I will love, I was loving, I have loved, I will have loved.
J’aurai aimé
. Future perfect.

The only thing that made it bearable was reading the David mags I kept under a floorboard by my bed and listening to the Top 40 in a cave beneath the sheets.

My mother’s voice drifted up the stairs: “Petra, finishing your homework, at once, and then cello practice.”

“I’m
doing
my homework.” And so I was. Lying on the brown candlewick bedspread, reading by the light of the bedside lamp, I studied that week’s words and committed them to heart.

Hey! I’ve just caught sight of the amount I’ve written—and this was supposed to be just a short letter! I guess I must have had so much to say to YOU that I got carried away.

See the effect this has had on me? I never used to like writing letters and I used to have to stretch my literary efforts to get them to seven or eight lines. Now I can’t wait to make contact again next month. Till then.

“God’s
bollocks.
” Bill pulled the paper out of the typewriter as hard as he could. It made that sound he always thought of as writer’s hiss, halfway between a rip and a zip. He balled the paper up and hurled it at the wastepaper basket, or, rather, at the cardboard box that was all the
office could afford.
WAGON WHEELS 184 PKTS
it said on the side. Bill’s aim was untrue, like many things about him, and the missile struck Zelda amidships. She turned very slowly, and her paisley kaftan billowed like a sail.

“Now now, William. Don’t despair. Man has to suffer for his art,” Zelda said. Bill had never understood the word
chortle
until he heard the noise that his editor made when she was amused, preferably by the misery of others.

“What’s art got to do with it? I am making up absolute rubbish to put into the mouth of some cretinous pretty boy who can’t sing, probably doesn’t shave yet and certainly couldn’t write a letter to save his own grandma.”

“It’s a perfectly respectable branch of fiction,” Zelda replied, unperturbed.

Bill sometimes wondered what she would do if—as seemed increasingly likely—he climbed up onto his desk, took off his tie and hanged himself from the ceiling in the middle of work. First she would wash the teacups, then empty the pencil sharpener clamped to the edge of her desk and finally, with everything in order, she might consent to call the police and ask them to take away the remains.

“Look at Cyrano de Bergerac,” she went on. “He wrote love letters on behalf of a numbskull so that he could win the heart of a fair lady. The numbskull, that is.”

“I know who Cyrano is, thank you, Zelda. And the whole point is that he loved the lady himself, but didn’t think he could make her love him back because of his enormous conk. His target audience was one. Roxanne was a pearl beyond price. Whereas I am writing to a million girls who wet themselves at the slightest opportunity. And I know you won’t believe this, but I do not love them from afar. Not one of them. And why don’t I love them? Because they are roughly as intelligent as that cardboard box. And how do I know that? Because they seriously believe that the rubbish I produce on my Smith Corona here represents the actual, sacred sayings of Saint bloody David bloody Cassidy. That’s what they’re like. They’re like peasants in 1321. You give them a bit of dead badger skull and tell them it’s the funny bone of the Blessed Virgin Mary and they fall down in a dead faint and
give you everything they own, including the cow. I am writing for peasants.”

There was a pause. Zelda smiled, as she would at a child who was nearing the end of a tantrum.

“It means a lot to the girls,” she said quietly. “We provide a service. We are making them happy.”

“But I don’t want them to be happy. I want them to fall down a mine shaft.”

Zelda looked at the young man with the scruffy beard. He was tipped back as far as his chair could go, with a pair of what appeared to be coal miner’s lace-up boots parked on his overflowing desk. What was he—twenty-two, twenty-three? She couldn’t remember what he’d put on his application, but she did recall that his CV had suggested he could make things up from unpromising raw material, which was a perfect fit for the job. Roy said he was a stuck-up little ponce and didn’t want to hire him. A journalist of the old school, Roy was the proprietor of Worldwind Publishing, and he recommended the applicant make a visit to the barber to take several inches off his hair. It hung in a lank, dirty-blond curtain obscuring his face. Zelda thought it a rather wonderful face, but she would never have said so. In fact, when he forgot to be cynical, Bill had a rascally charm and a grin that reminded Zelda very much of that lovely young man she had seen only last week in some film at the Odeon.
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
. Anyway, Zelda had insisted they should give Bill a chance and she was right. In the three months he had worked as the chief—indeed the only—feature writer for
The Essential David Cassidy Magazine
, William Finn had shown a real flair for his work. The readers seemed to love him. Sales of the David Cassidy Love Kit had gone through the roof since Bill had tweaked the advertisement with some well-chosen, poignant observations about the many ways a fan could demonstrate her devotion.