I Think I Love You (7 page)

“All right, that’s enough, class,” Mr. Griffiths snapped.

If the barking carried on when he tried to read out Steven Williams’s name, which came straight after mine, Mr. Griffiths began to change color. You could watch the blood travel upward from his shirt collar and suffuse his face as though red ink were being injected into his neck.

“I said, that’s enough of that. Let’s be having you. I said silence NOW, class.”

Mr. Griffiths was a nice man, but he was young for a teacher, and good-looking, with sideburns, pleading spaniel eyes and a floppy mustache, and I just knew it would be better if he was older and ugly so that his anger was scary instead of funny.

The barking wasn’t really my mum’s fault. My mother didn’t know that Petra was the name of the dog on
Blue Peter
, because we didn’t have a TV set. My mother didn’t agree with television.

“It is a box for idiots,” she said.

In fact, my mother claimed that scientists had proved that if you stared at a television set for long enough, rays from the inside could destroy your vital organs, even the kidneys, which are located at the back of your body beneath your waist. When I first told Sharon about the danger television rays posed to internal organs, we were in her lounge, sitting on the Lewises’ new mustard Dralon three-piece suite and waiting for
The Partridge Family
to start. We had our favorite clothes on. Well, we had to dress up for David, didn’t we? Barred by Mrs. Lewis from watching the show because of their disrespectful comments, Sharon’s big brother, Michael, and his friend Rob were outside the door, keeping up a sniggering commentary and threatening terrible violence against David.

“Hello, poofter, hear the song that we’re singing, / C’mon, he’s crappy,” the boys sang tunelessly to the
Partridge
theme tune.

“Shut yer face, yer only jealous,” Sharon bellowed back.

She laughed about the rays from the TV, but a few seconds later she went into the kitchen and came back holding two baking trays high in the air like they were cymbals. We both lay back on the settee with the trays covering our chests and stomachs.

“The trays will deflect the poisonous rays,” Sharon said in a metallic Captain Scarlet voice. “Don’t panic now, will you? Your kidneys are safe with me, Petra
fach
.”

The baking trays made us look like Roman soldiers who had died in battle.

In the lunch queue outside the hall, Jimmy Lo, whose parents ran the Chinese takeaway on Gwynber Street, shouted: “Petra is a German shepherd.” He pronounced
German
as “Jermin.” “Geddit?
Jermin
shepherd. Petra. Woof woof!” And then the boys with him—Mark “Tuggy” Tugwell and Andrew “Amor” Morris—started to sing:

(Years later, after I had gone to college in London, Lo’s Chinese restaurant was closed down by health inspectors for serving Alsatian meat in the chop suey. This is known as poetic justice.)

The Germans bombed our town during the war and people don’t forget something like that in a hurry. They had a display on the bombing in the central library, in the main corridor with old photographs the color of tea. Night after night, the planes came back to hit the steelworks and the docks. The explosions lit up the sea like a giant flash photograph, and you could see as far away as Ireland, people said. If the pilots couldn’t find their target, they just unloaded the bombs anyway so the planes would have enough fuel to make the journey home to Germany. I knew all about it because Mamgu and Tad-cu, my grandparents,
had a farm up in the hills behind the town, and they were shutting up the cows one night when they heard an incredible piercing sound.

“Well, ye Dew, Dew, you’d have thought the Almighty Himself was wolf whistling,” Mam always said when she told her grandchildren the bomb story. We knew it was true because the crater was still in the top field. It was so big you could fit a whole house in there.

I found it hard to believe that my mother was on the other side during the war, because our side was right and we won. In our house, it was my mother who was right and she always won.

When my grandparents, my dad and his two sisters, Auntie Edna and Auntie Mair, were running toward the byre in their nightclothes with buckets of water, the plane that caused the fire was already on its way back to the country where my six-year-old mother was sleeping. A pregnant cow lost her calf and, for five days after the bomb, the entire herd’s milk came out as cheese.

See, even before my parents met, they were already fighting.

In my favorite David dream, the register was being called when David opened the door and strolled into our classroom. It was always after the six Thomases and just as Mr. Griffiths said my name. David was wearing that white open-necked knitted shirt with the outsized collar and pearly buttons he wore on the album cover of
Cherish
.

My God, has he ever looked more beautiful? David Cassidy was the only human, male or female, who could make a feather cut seem insanely desirable. Looking out of that album cover, his gaze is so intense his hazel eyes are practically black; like the
Mona Lisa
, his eyes make you want to look and look and never stop looking.

Once he was in our classroom, David would introduce himself to Mr. Griffiths, smile his gorgeous, easy Keith Partridge smile and say, “Hey, Petra. What a cool name! I really dig it.”

That would shut them up. They would be so impressed that a world superstar had turned up at our school. And David, being American, wouldn’t know Petra was a TV dog. He’d think Petra was just a name like any other, maybe even a pretty name. When I was older I
would live in America in a canyon and no one would bark at me ever again.

My friends never spoke about the barking. It was probably hard to think of what to say. Only two people mentioned it. One was Susan Davies.

I was coming out of a stall in the toilets this break time, right, and Susan was over by the paper towels; she’d folded one of the towels in this really clever way to look like a dove and she stood there working the wings so they opened and closed. We were alone.

“Mustn’t let them get you down with that barking, must you?” Susan said, almost to herself.

“No,” I said, turning on the tap and pumping the button on the soap dispenser. You always tried to get a drop even though the hard pink bubblegum gunk over the spout stopped any coming out. Susan’s unmistakable odor—the smell-shock of her that forced you to breathe through your mouth when she was near—merged into the sweet stink of the toilets.

“There’s lovely your hair’s looking with you, Petra,” she said.

I glanced up and saw her face in the mirror. If you forced yourself to withhold judgment for a few seconds, it was possible to see that a girl with thickly lashed brown eyes and sweetheart-bow lips was under that disastrous pockmarked mask. Susan’s own hair was fair and shiny like in an advert and so long she could sit on it. The hair was her only claim to beauty and I knew in that moment, when she praised mine, how well she took care of it, how it was lovingly conditioned and brushed every night so it would be perfect for school in the morning. If you saw Susan Davies from behind and you didn’t know, you’d be waiting for a real looker to turn round. I wondered what that would be like, to turn to acknowledge a wolf whistle with a Silvikrin swish of your long flaxen hair and to see the shock and disgust in a boy’s eyes.

“Your hair’s—” I began, but the door to the toilets slammed open like a cowboy was coming into a saloon for a gunfight. Carol. She ignored Susan, pulled her pants down, plunked herself on a toilet and didn’t even bother to lock the door as the pee sluiced into the pan and she let off a squealy, pressure-relieving fart.

“They’re dead stingy in that cafeteria,” Carol said, addressing the
toilets as if it was just the two of us. When I turned round, the only evidence Susan had been there was a paper dove perched on the top of the bin. I pushed it down under the other towels. I didn’t like it, Susan acting like we were both in the same boat. I didn’t want her pity. What did it make me if I was being pitied by Susan Smell?

“You bin talking to Susan Davies, then?” Carol said.

“Gerraway with you,” I said, holding my nose and pretending to faint at the imaginary stink.

Carol honked her approval.

Unpopularity was like a germ you could catch. It was better not to get too close.

The only other person who mentioned the barking was Steven Williams. It was that same afternoon we decided to get tickets for David’s concert, and everyone was charging in a mad bundle out of the class after registration when Steven came up and handed me a copy of
Twelfth Night
.

“Hi-ya? Think this is yours,” he said.

Steven was tall and he stooped slightly when he spoke to me. I knew he was one of the rugby boys and a mate of the evil barking Jimmy Lo. He had a scratch on his cheek beneath his right eye, which was the same blue as warm summer sea. The width of his shoulders was amazing close up. I felt like a Barbie doll next to him.

It wasn’t my copy of the play, I knew that. Mine was in my bag. I’d seen it when I was hiding my red face in there during registration.

“Thanks,” I said, and took it.

“Sorry, like, about the barking,” Steven Williams said. “Boys’re a bit mental, that’s all.”

I nodded.

“Rose-red city, is it?”

“What?”

“Petra. Rose-red city, half as old as time.” He spoke the words clearly as if he were an actor reciting a poem.

“Dunno,” I said.

Why? Please God, why? I’d never said “dunno” in my life before.
Dunno
was common.
Dunno
was the vocabulary of morons. My mother could drop down dead in the street if she knew she had a daughter who said “dunno.” The woman who devoured
Reader’s Digest
’s “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power” could not have produced a child who said “dunno.”

“Remember your manners, Petra, for Gott’s sake,” my mother would chide.

“Thanks a lot,” I tried again and nervously cracked a smile.

Steven picked up his red-striped Adidas sports bag and slung it over his shoulder as if ready to go, but then he stayed where he was, moving his weight from one foot to the other.

Was it a trap? I looked around to check if Jimmy and the other boys were lying in wait, but they were already a hundred yards down the path, booting their bags into the mud and falling on top of them.

“Thought you’d like to know—about the other Petra, like.”

“Thanks. I didn’t. Know. Rose-red city.” Which was the color of my cheeks by then, of course. The blush traveled faster than the feeling that was driving it; a feeling for which I did not yet have a name. One of the most powerful feelings in the whole wide world.

“So long, then,” Steven said, gesturing with his free arm to show me he needed to catch up with the other boys. He raised his eyes from the floor and smiled. The smile said the barking wasn’t going to stop, but that he didn’t agree with it.

“So long, then.”

I think we’d just had our first conversation.

“What did Steven Williams want with you, then?” Gillian demanded when I caught up with the girls in Needlework.

She put the emphasis on the
you
. As though I were the last girl in the world any boy would want to talk to.

“He had a book of mine by mistake,” I said.

I hated Needlework—or, rather, Needlework hated me. I’d been trying to put a zip in a midi-skirt for three lessons and Miss kept telling me to unpick it and try again. Each time I gently depressed the foot pedal on the little sewing machine I felt like a rodeo rider forced to ride
a giant bee. Just the faintest touch on the pedal and the needle went crazy.
Bbbzbzzbbzzzzz
.

“Steven Williams can get between my covers any day,” Carol smirked, raising herself half out of the chair and making thrusting motions with her hips. Olga rolled her eyes at me. Unlike me, Olga actually wore her glasses in school and could see.

“Good-looking boy, fair play to him, keeps himself tidy,” Sharon said, licking the end of a piece of cotton before threading it through a needle. She began to maneuver a sleeve into place in the bodice of a pink satin bridesmaid dress that she would wear at her auntie’s wedding in August. It already had darts on the bust, an assortment of pin-tucks and an invisibly stitched hem. The long puffed sleeves, lying like amputated limbs on the table ready to be sewn in, had perfect crimped-pastry tops. What I am telling you is that Sharon’s dress looked like a
dress
. A feat more astonishing to me than writing a symphony or docking a spaceship. That dress was so professional Sharon could have sold it in a shop.

“Anyway, that Steven Williams is a terrible kisser. Bethan Clark ’ad him,” confided Gillian. “Spits in your mouth, he does.”

We were walking down the street, arm in arm, our group. Gillian was in the middle and that Saturday she allowed Sharon and Angela to link arms with her. The second favorites got to hold the arms of the girls holding onto Gillian. I was on the outside, but oddly exhilarated and grateful to be part of the lineup at all. Because the pavement was narrow, I had to let go of Olga’s arm every time we came to a lamppost, step into the gutter, then quickly hop back onto the pavement and grab her again. The conversation moved on, so I was always a beat or two behind. In my hurry, I failed to notice the dog mess.

“
Ach-a-fi
, Petra, is that you? Got something on your shoe? For God’s sake, girl.”

Gillian said I could catch them up once I’d gotten the poo off my shoe.

“Come up my house after, okay?” yelled Angela without looking round. My friends moved off, not breaking formation, their backs like a wall.

I found a lolly stick in the hedge and started to flick out the claggy orange shit from the sole. It took ages because the smell kept making me gag; the last bits were stuck deep in the rubber criss-cross pattern, and I tried to rub them off with a dock leaf. God, my hands really stank and I didn’t have any tissues. It was okay, though, because I could wash them at Angela’s house in her downstairs cloakroom. I ran my fastest up the hill to catch them up and I got a stitch; the pain ripped into my left side and I had to sit on a wall for a while till it died down: then I picked the wrong turning, didn’t I, and I had to go back to the main road again to get my bearings. I was so late. The pungent, gritty smell of melting chip fat started to come from the houses where the women were putting dinner on. The girls’d be worrying and thinking I’d gone home or something. Eventually, I found the horseshoe-shaped close of detached houses where English Angela lived. It was lovely, really new with all these young trees planted in circles of soil cut in the front lawns. The trees were just sticks tied to a post really, with a single branch of pale pink blossom like the kind of feather boa I always wanted. Angela’s place had a patio and a cloakroom and everything. Lucky I remembered the number. I was so relieved and happy that I knew which house was Angela’s I almost started crying when her mum opened the door.