I Think I Love You (5 page)

The desirable central location turned out to be the groin of Tottenham Court Road, a junction where the whores competed for trade with the unlicensed minicab drivers. Both professions looked equally taken aback if a punter took them up on the offer of a ride.

It took him a while to locate the tall, narrow building because there was no number and the nameplate for Worldwind Publishing was a business card, taped between Bunnyhop Personal Services and Kolossos: Importers of the Finest Greek Cooking Oil. Where once must have stood an impressive Georgian door, there was now a flimsy hardboard replacement with a handle improvised from parcel string. Bill pushed the door gently and fell into a dark hallway. It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. There was one light fitting on the ceiling,
a crystal dome the size of a washing-up bowl, but such light as it shed was filtered through a gauze of dead insects. He spotted some stairs in the distance and set off in their direction, the carpet squelching underfoot. It was like walking on mushrooms. By the time Bill got to the sixth floor, his ears had popped and his lungs were banging noisily on his chest demanding to be let out, but, unbelievably, there was another set of steps to go. Ascending to the seventh floor, the staircase became so narrow that you had to spiral your torso in a sort of corkscrew motion to get round; there was a real danger you might end up holding your right hand over your left shoulder.

Once at the top, before entering the office itself, it was necessary to squeeze past a battlement of cardboard boxes. Some were open, and inside, spilling out, was a selection of magazines. They bore different headlines, but they all had the same girl on the front. Definitely not his type. A shy smile, shoulder-length mousy hair, hazel eyes, lashes you could wipe a windshield with. Bill heard a rasp of breath; some sort of office boy, who was either a wizened teenager or a perky pensioner but couldn’t possibly be anything in between, had come to hover at his side. It could do no harm, Bill thought, to be friendly.

“Not my type.”

“Who?”

“That bird there, on the cover.”

The rasp did something strange, writhing and wheezing into a cackle.

“I should friggin’ well hope not.”

“I beg your pardon?” Two minutes in, and Bill was already floundering.

“Cos that’s a fella.” The goblin was richly enjoying the moment, storing it up to recite at the pub round the corner: “So this nancy comes in for an interview and he thinks David Cassidy’s a bird …”

Bill leaned down to the open boxes. “Blimey.” A fellow it was, but only just. Certainly nothing that he would recognize as a man. The guy, whoever he was, had a waist smaller than Ruth’s. Bill’s own musical heroes were Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and the Stones. Before the interview he had riffled through his record collection and done a bit of homework. Nothing too ostentatious. Just enough to show them that
he knew his stuff. If he were called upon in his first week to conduct an interview with, say, Keith Richards, he would be ready. Mind you, there was a rumor of this
NME
journalist who had gone to talk to Keith in March and not come back till August.

The goblin, who turned out to be called Chas, ushered him through to what he called the innersanction. There was nobody there. Bill sat for ten minutes staring at the signed photograph of Tony Jacklin and two bottles of Johnnie Walker on top of the filing cabinet. Did he really want to work for a golf-loving dipsomaniac?

“Don’t think we’ve forgotten you, dear,” said a large, flustered woman who had clearly forgotten him. Her long gray hair was loosely pinned up in a bun and she wore a garment that could have been modeled on a teepee. She introduced herself as Zelda. After her came a man wearing the largest pair of glasses Bill had ever seen: they were like two TV screens soldered together, and they magnified the man’s eyes, which were as blank and beady as a blackbird’s. He stuck out his hand. “Roy Palmer,” he said, as if issuing a threat.

The Worldwind proprietor had slicked-back hair that was too black to be his original color and one of those rubbery comedian’s faces that immediately made you think he must be a friendly, likable guy. In this case, that was a mistake. Roy thought he was funny, but nobody else did.

Bill should have walked out the minute he discovered that the magazine he’d be working on was targeted at girls aged eleven to fifteen. He’d done puberty already and done it badly. He knew absolutely nothing about the female version of it, and that suited him fine. Once, searching the bathroom cabinet at home for shaving foam, he had come across sanitary equipment belonging to his sisters. Some sort of belt affair with hooks and a box of Tampax. There was a puzzling diagram of a girl standing like a stork on one leg. Bill read the word
insertion
, shut the door and never opened it again.

“Think of the teen-idol phase as a sort of corridor between girlhood and womanhood,” Zelda had said. “Our magazine’s role is to guide a girl on that journey.”

“Our profit,” Roy interjected, “comes from targeting the girl and her pocket money between the cute furry animal stage and heavy petting,
if you get my drift.” When he laughed, Roy’s mouth revealed a Stonehenge of ancient teeth.

While Zelda examined his CV, Bill studied the highly polished shoes he had borrowed for the occasion from his mate Simon, a trainee accountant in a firm with three lifts. Bill had taken a few liberties with his details and was almost certainly about to be found out.

“You seem to have done very well in your final college dissertation, William. May I ask what the subject was?”

He coughed and covered his mouth. “Er, ‘The Romantic Sublime—Voice and Desire in English Love Poetry, 1790 to 1825.’ ”

“Keep it clean, keep it clean,” snapped Roy.

Swiftly, Bill changed the subject. “So what exactly would I be doing here?”

“Well, dear, think of a thirteen-year-old girl in Manchester or Cardiff,” Zelda said brightly. “What are the things she wants to know as she lies in bed and stares longingly up at the posters of David on her wall? That’s where you come in with your romantic poetry and creative writing.”

He did not hide his astonishment. “I’m supposed to make it up?”

“Oh, not all of it. The record company PRs will provide certain materials of course. If D.C. comes over in person there’ll be a big press thingummy, you can go along and ask some questions, bring back as many facts as you can. Stock up the larder so to speak, then pad it out for the next few months. I think you’ll find it starts to write itself after a while, once you get the hang of the voice. And the desire.” Zelda smiled encouragingly.

“Will I have the opportunity to speak to Mr.—David?”

“Heavens, no, dear, but we can get all kinds of nuggets from his people in Los Angeles. They’re awfully helpful, though you have to call them at funny times of day. Then it’s up to you. All the kinds of things girls like to know about boys, you know.”

Bill nodded. He hadn’t got a clue. The job was an insult. He wanted to be a rock journalist, not a girly-boy impersonator. Anyway, there was something sick about mucking around with little girls’ dreams. You would have to be some sort of desperate pervert to even consider it. The salary was £2,750 per annum plus luncheon vouchers.

He started the following Monday.

Within a fortnight, Bill had begun to familiarize himself with David Cassidy’s family history. There was a charismatic stage-actor father who, despite the Steinway grin, seemed to be not entirely enraptured by his son’s overnight superstardom. David, Bill guessed, had wanted to impress the old man who had walked out on him as a kid, but such shattering success probably only made matters worse. Bill thought of his distant relationship with his own father. At twenty-two, the age Bill was now, Roger Finn had not been struggling to thread a new typewriter ribbon through the miniature horns of a Smith Corona. He had spent his days in the sky over the South Downs fighting the Battle of Britain against the Luftwaffe. There may be more daunting men to have as a dad than a Spitfire pilot, but when you were trying and failing to rearm a typewriter it was hard to think of one. Once, and only once, his dad had mentioned the war, taking Bill and his sisters on the train to an air museum. In one hangar, suspended from wires, was an actual Spitfire. So heroic and indomitable had the plane become in the boy’s imagination that he was unprepared for this frail craft. It made him want to cry. It was like a sparrow made from tin.

In a desperate bid to look professional, Bill popped out one lunchtime and purchased three books in Foyles, one on California, the other on Hawaii, where the star had a house, and the third on horses, which were his hobby. It turned out David had weak eyes as a kid and needed an operation on a squint. Bill himself suffered from color blindness, invariably confusing green and brown. It must have been tough having to wear corrective glasses and an eye patch, especially for a boy who looked like a girl.

Honestly, it’s amazing the things you can know about someone you don’t know.

O
f course, I dreamed about him all the time, but I didn’t tell the others that. You have to keep some things back for yourself. Just like I never told them the truth about my favorite song. When Gillian said “Could It Be Forever” was David’s best record, I said she was absolutely right. So fabulous. So romantic. The way that David kept you dangling and waited a whole stomach-flipping beat before slipping in that final “But.” And his voice just
melted
that word. I swear you can hear him smiling as he sings it. He must have known he had us exactly where he wanted us and he kept us waiting until we screamed and pleaded for him to say it … “But?”

We tended to chew these things over at lunchtime, which was spent huddled round the big old throbbing radiator in the science-lab corridor. When it was wet, anyway, which was most of the year where we lived. In spring, Gillian’s group moved its center of operations outside under the horse chestnuts at the far end of the playing fields. I was still new to the group, a recent substitute for Karen Jones, who had offended Gillian after Stuart Morris slow danced with her at the
Christmas disco. I mean, danced with Karen, not Gillian. Fair play to Karen, Gillian never let on she fancied Stuart before she saw them dancing together, so Karen couldn’t have known, could she? Cried her eyes out when Gillian called her a slut in the carpark.

Compared to David, boys of our own age seemed like pathetic cretins.

“Look at him, he’s just a kid, he is,” Sharon would jeer if one of them dared to approach.

Experts in romance, we had never been kissed. We just knew David was a gentleman who would never try any of that stuff the boys did at the Starlight disco on Saturday nights. Grabbing a feel before they even got you a Pepsi. But Stuart Morris was three years older than we were and in the lower sixth. He was acting captain of the school first XV while Gareth Pugh’s knee was on the mend. Rugby was the local religion, so that made Stuart a god. Without needing to be told, almost as if we were born knowing it, we had grasped a key mathematical proof of the female universe: the more desirable a boy is, the less chance you have of getting him. The less chance you have of getting him, the more desirable he becomes. Therefore, boys who like and want you are not desirable. QED.

Anyway, Gillian was going with Stuart now and Karen was out and I was in, or almost. I was so desperate to keep in with them I needed to make the right impression without having a clue how.