I Think I Love You (44 page)

“I was at White City. You know, the awful night when that girl got crushed. I was right there. I saw the sparkly tie and everything. It was madness. Like a war.”

“But we were there,” Petra said. “We both were. We went with Gillian and Carol. And Olga and Angela.”

“Were they okay?”

“Well, Carol was lovely”—this was Sharon now, her accent strengthening and rising as the memory swept back—“but Gillian, she was a right bloody cow, wasn’t she, Pet?”

“Pretty girl, though,” said Petra, distantly. She looked at Bill again. “Were you really there? Did you stay for the, you know, the bit when it all collapsed?”

“God, yes, I was right there in the press enclosure beside the barrier. Had to help some girls over. Some of them looked pretty beaten up, I remember that. Funny, most of it’s a blur now. Must be my great age.”

“Of course.”

“The one thing I do remember is this shoe. Don’t know why. Just this clunky shoe, sort of reddy-brown. Wandering round with it in my hand, trying to find who’d lost it. Like that really mattered, when there were girls being squashed. Spot the idiot, trying to find a foot to fit a shoe.”

“Cinderella man,” said Sharon. Her shades were slipping down.

Petra was very still, staring hard into the past. Playing it frame by frame, then freezing it and trying to zoom in. The sensation of Sharon’s hand slipping from hers. The crowd’s monstrous thrashing, going down among the thousands of legs and spotting her. A bracelet of bright hair about the bone. Grabbing the hair, pulling with all her might. And Carol pushing the crowd back like the champion prop forward she was. Then she said, “I lost a shoe.”

She and Bill were like divers now, groping through the deep; each waving a hand in the dark, hoping to brush against the other. One boy with a shoe, and one girl without: it could be a scene from a fairy tale. They had been so close, once upon a time, and now they were so close again. Reason told them it was pure coincidence; not
that
amazing, anyway, if it were true—a pop star had put them in the same stadium, so why shouldn’t he wait twenty years or so and place them in the same hotel? But reason cowered before romance. According to romance, there was no coincidence. That was the word that nonlovers used, sad souls in the everyday world, to account for the workings of destiny.

We were meant to be here, thought Petra and Bill, both of us, right now. There are two of us. And we match.

“Told you,” said Sharon, who had left reason behind in Gower, with her husband and children, and was in no hurry to return. “Prince Bill.” She pushed the enormous sunglasses up her nose. “Magic, mun.”

“Mr. Finn?”

A Tiggerish young guy was bouncing toward them, hand outstretched. His smile was so bright it belonged in the jewelry case.

“Hi, I’m Edouard.” He pronounced it the French way,
Ed-warrh
, though neither Petra nor Bill had ever seen a more complete American.

“And you must be Petra,” he said to Sharon, who rocked him back with a guffaw straight from the Valleys.

“Fat bloody chance,” she replied graciously, and for half a second, Bill thought that Edouard’s smile might start to crack. Two of her first three words had set off alarms inside the boy’s head. Nothing bloody, and certainly nothing fat, had crossed his path in many, many years. But, like a pro, he came back strong.

“So you must be Sha-
ron
!” he exclaimed, pressing down hard on the second syllable, as if she were a part of the Holy Land, or an Israeli general. Sharon screamed. Her joy was unconfined.

“Sha-ron-ron-ron-ron,” she sang back.

The greeter, defeated by he knew not what, turned to Petra. “We are so honored to have you here,” he said, not risking her name, and holding on extremely tight to her hand, as if seeking protection from the madwoman at their side. “David could not be more excited. He is upstairs now, and, if you are ready, we’ll go right up!”

They moved, as a little group, toward the bank of elevators. Petra asked politely, “Does, um, Mr. Cassidy know why we …?”

“Oh, totally,” said Edouard, who was always happiest when asked to confirm something that he knew, or believed, to be true. “He just loves your backstory.
Great
backstory. Both of you,” he went on, with a nervous grin at Sharon. “He loves you.”

Sharon started singing again. Bill and Petra stood next to each other, waiting, and stared silently down at their shoes.

Sharon was kneeling on the floor of the bedroom. David was smiling up at her.

“No, it’s better like that,” she said. “Fits better. What d’you reckon, Pet?”

Petra considered. “No, that one goes better in the middle. Then he’s with both of us, together.”

They had a sheaf of pictures, and Sharon wanted to make an album right now, before they even got on the plane. There had been a proper photographer when they went with Bill to meet David. A burly, beaming man from a local company called Cyclone Images, with a picture of a tornado on the back of his shirt.

“How d’you do?” said Sharon, shaking his hand.

“Hi, I’m Cy,” he said.

“Oh my God, like the clone!” she shrieked. Cy looked confused. He set to work, arranging the tripod and lights, so that when David came in they would be, as he put it, ready to roll.

And when they were done, and the roll was over, and David was chatting with Petra and Bill in the corner, Sharon asked Cy—cheeky, mind, him being a pro and everything—if he would take some extra ones with her new camera. For her collection. And, for once, it went according to plan: Cy did as he was asked, and David posed a few times more, with each of them in turn. Sharon kissed the photographer as he left, saying, “Thank you, Cy,” as loudly as possible, to see if she could make Petra giggle. And when they had said good-bye to David, who was due at a sound check for the evening show, Sharon had gone—no, she had run—out of the hotel to the camera shop across the street.
They could do them in an hour, but you had to pay more. She paid more, refusing Petra’s offer to chip in. It was as though, if Sharon didn’t get the photos printed now, the memory of the morning would fade in her head, and with it the proof that it had actually happened; she would have nothing to show that she had ever been here, with him, hand in hand. He had given her a hug. Three decades, waiting for a hug.

“God, he’s lovely, isn’t he? Brilliant. The whole thing.” Sharon sat back and admired her handiwork.

“Yes,” said Petra. She had been thrown, for a second, by vertigo. Not space vertigo, although their hotel room was number 2147, twenty stories up, with a view down over the Strip; more like time vertigo. A sudden plunge, which she wasn’t expecting, and could hardly cope with—back through the years, almost violently, to something … that matched where they were now. Where had that been, and when? Something about the carpet under her fingers now, rich and scratchy, as she knelt beside Sharon; and in the air—not this air, Vegas-parched, air-conditioned air, but wafted in, on the air of the past—the weirdest smell. Like you get from burned hair, with a cheap hair dryer; a smell so sharp that it hit you between the eyes, and behind the nose, and stayed for a while, and everything in you reeled. And then it was gone.

“Sorry?” she said to Sharon, who had spoken while Petra was in a dream.

“Hello,
twp
face, I said I could die happy.”

Petra smiled. “Live happy. Better for you,
bach.
”

“Yeah, you’re right. And cheaper. Better chips. You don’t get decent chips when you’re dead. What do they call them here? Fries.”

They bent over the photos again.

“I like this one of you and me,” said Sharon. “See how young we look.”

“Camera never lies.”

“And I like this one of me and David and Bill, although Bill’s got this kind of goofy look. This is better of him, just with David. Oh, and this one’s even better. You and Bill. This is the best.”

Petra was silent.

“D’you know what David said to me, when you and Bill were posing for Mr. Clone?”

“Don’t tell me.”

“He said—looking at you two, right?—he says to me …”

“What?”

“He says, ‘I think she loves him.’ ”

Petra laughed. “David Cassidy did not say that.”

Sharon hesitated, then wrinkled her nose and laughed back.

“No, but he could have, couldn’t he? Just because I made it up doesn’t mean it’s not true, does it?”

“Well …”

“And it
is
true, so there. You do love him.”

“Who? Who do I love?”

“And David Cassidy brought you two together. That’s his, what you call it. His destiny.”

“Whose? Now I’m really confused. Sorry, there’s too much loving going on round here.”

At once, Sharon started to sing. “There’s a whole lotta lovin’ goin’ on, in my heart …” She reached out and gave Petra a hug. “More for me,” she said.

Petra pulled back. “What d’you mean?”

“Well, now you’ve got Bill—”

“Excuse me, I have not got anyone—”

“Now that you have, Pet, well then. David’s mine now, isn’t he? Fair play. He’s all mine.”

Petra moved to embrace her friend, and as the smaller woman’s fine blond hair floated sideways onto her blouse it delivered a familiar shock.

“All yours.”

P
etra sat at her kitchen table, quite still, holding a mug of coffee in both hands. She watched the steam rise from it, in the morning light. The day was still young; their flight had landed not long after dawn.

She took a sip, then frowned at something. Her suitcase, in the doorway, airline tags attached. Just waiting for Molly to go tripping over it when she came in.

Petra rose and carried the case upstairs, bumping its bulk on every step, then swung and heaved it onto the bed. She breathed out, and was about to leave the room, to go downstairs and finish her coffee. She paused. Better hang her new linen jacket up before it got too creased. She went back to the bed, and clicked the two clasps on the case.

It opened, she swung back the top, and stopped. Her first thought was that she had taken the wrong suitcase at the airport. But no, there was the jacket, neatly folded, and the edge of her mother’s blouse underneath. But on top was something that was not hers. Yet it was meant for her, because her name was on the front.

Petra took the envelope and looked at it. The flap was not stuck down, just tucked in. She opened it, and slid the letter out. She read it for the first time in her life. Then she read it again to make sure.

Petra put the letter in her pocket and went downstairs. Passing the hall table, she noticed a jug of sweet peas. The scent was so strong, intoxicating. On a Post-it note stuck to the wall, she spied Molly’s girly, looped handwriting: “I picked them. Told you!!!”

Petra smiled. The daughter, unlike her mother, was going to lead a three-exclamation-marks kind of life. She thought of Molly, obeying the request to pick the sweet peas while Petra was in Vegas, to keep the flowers coming, an instruction Molly’s mamgu had issued more than thirty years ago to Petra herself, and, who knows, maybe Greta heard it from her own mother in Germany. Things being passed on; habits, scents, beloved melodies, a heart-shaped chin: motherhood and memory forging a slender handrail to cling on to down the generations.

She wondered what Greta and Molly would think of Bill. It took a second to remember that one of those meetings would never take place now. Too soon, she thought. It’s
too
soon. And yet, we cannot choose those moments when two people are suddenly wide open and the merest glance has the power to console or heal.

In the years to come, the only thing they would find it hard to agree on was whether they had actually met at White City. Petra always said they must have because she loved the perfect symmetry of it. Bill was the first man to take her in his arms and, if life was kind to them, then he would also be the last.

Bill, who had made up the story that brought Petra to him, was perfectly happy for his darling wife to write whatever ending she liked best.
Cariad
was the Welsh word for darling. This Petra taught him, along with so much he had never known before.

She was so tired that morning she got back from the Cassidy trip, but old habit and new desire sent her into the living room. She bent down and flipped the catches on the case. Bill’s letter was in her pocket. Pulling the cello to her, she answered it. Urging the music on. Each note like a pearl. Each phrase like a string of pearls. One little phrase, and so many ways to say it.

In 2004, I was asked by the
Daily Telegraph
Saturday magazine to interview David Cassidy. As I prepared to travel to Florida to meet my teen idol, several unexpected emotions crowded in. Panic about what to wear was high on the list. Should I go dressed as the fan who had worshipped him so ardently from afar or as the wife and mother of two I now was? I felt like a time traveler. If David was still twenty-four in my heart, how old did that make me?

While I was packing and unpacking my suitcase, my husband sat on the bed and sang an aggressively tuneless version of “Could It Be Forever.”

“Why on earth would you want to
meet
him?” he asked. “David Cassidy sang flat and, let’s face it, he was basically a girl.”

I defended David, exactly as I had defended him thirty years earlier from the taunts of the boys at school. Just as I would always defend him.