The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets (46 page)

I ordered chips and ice
cream and waited for Charlotte to arrive. The room was full of girls, some so
young that they were accompanied by their mothers, and many of them wearing the
Fan Club badges. The air was stifling hot — hot with steam and pots of tea and
chatter and anticipation. I remember having to force my lips inward to try to
stop smiling like a fool. The only thing that I could think was that
this
was it!’
This was the night I had been waiting for, and in less than an
hour, I would see Johnnie for real. The whole room seemed to breathe in when
Charlotte arrived looking like the only girl that Johnnie would ever want to
kiss. She wore a pale blue dress, belted high, and made demure by a sugar-pink
cardigan, and she was wearing her painted shoes, the gold and green spotted
pair that she had designed at Magna. She had shaken off the tired eyes and
weary shoulders of my last tea at Aunt Clare’s and was pure dynamite once
again, her long hair looking thicker than ever and lying loose down her back.
Since every other girl in the room had piled their hair on top of their heads
in a chignon of some sort, and no one had ever seen anything like the green and
gold splodges of paint on Charlotte’s feet, she was pretty well stared at when
she sat down. As usual, she looked entirely oblivious.

‘Goodness,
I’m too nervous to eat!’ she wailed, but her green eyes widened as my chips arrived.
‘Well, maybe I could squeeze in something,’ she conceded, and ordered a glass
of wine and a hamburger.

‘Where
are the tickets?’ she demanded and I pulled them out of my bag like pieces of
priceless treasure.

‘Do you
think everyone in this room is in love with Johnnie?’ I asked.

‘Of
course. But no one else has seats as good as ours.

I had never been to the
Palladium before. Charlotte had been once to see
Cinderella
with Aunt
Clare and Harry two years before, and had fallen asleep halfway through the
performance.

‘I only
woke up because Harry was making such a racket in the seat next to me. He got
the giggles over the man playing the pumpkin and that was that,’ said Charlotte
as we followed the stream of girls down the street towards the front entrance
of the theatre. I had never seen anything like the crowds, and judging by the
faces of the policemen, neither had they. There looked to me to be thousands of
us. The most electrifying thing was knowing that everywhere I looked, people
were there for Johnnie, and no one else; it was like meeting a long lost branch
of the family that one had always known existed, but had never actually
encountered in the flesh before. We stood in neat groups, grinning from ear to
ear because we just couldn’t
not,
and wondering whether the girls in
line ahead of us were prettier than we were, and if Johnnie would fall in love
with them, and not us. Just as we were nearing the entrance of the building, a
tall girl with thick spectacles standing just behind us whirled round and
hissed, ‘Papers! Over there!’

Charlotte
and I turned round, and sure enough, two men with cameras and another two with
thick notepads lingered at the edge of the throng, talking to two fans and
scribbling furiously.

‘Stupid,
they are, talkin’ to them,’ said the girl with glasses. ‘They’ll only make them
sound silly.’

He’s
just like no one else,
I heard one of the fans
saying to the reporters.
I won’t marry until I marry Johnnie.

‘She’s
in for a long bloody wait,’ giggled our new friend.

‘Everyone
knows Johnnie likes blondes.’ She had an unbelievable accent.

‘Where
do you live?’ I asked her, full of curiosity. ‘Lancashire,’ she said. ‘I
hitched my way here.’

‘Hitched?’

She
laughed at me. ‘Yes. Stuck out my thumb and hitched.’

I
opened my mouth to reply but there was a great surge forward and Charlotte and
I found ourselves propelled up the steps of the building and into the entrance
where we stood blinking for a moment, our eyes adjusting from the bright April
sunlight to the seasonless gloom of the foyer. Charlotte moved ahead of me,
taking me by the hand.

‘Follow
me!’ she commanded, and I surged forward again, my legs following
automatically. I have never held anything as close as I did those tickets. The
girls around me, while sweet as pie in their skirts and sweaters, had wild
glitter in their eyes. It was quite clear to me that they would steal, push,
punch, collapse and hitch for Johnnie — and I knew this because I would too.

Charlotte and I sank into
our seats and stared up at the ceiling then back at the crowd behind us, and,
giggling nervously, opened a bag of pear drops and listened to the low hum of
excitement growing more and more urgent. Several girls came right up to us and
asked how we had got such good seats and could they buy our tickets off us? One
girl, who looked no more than thirteen, asked if she could exchange her coat
and shoes for my ticket. I shook my head and she ran off and up the aisle
without another word, a crowd of her friends pressing around her and staring
back at Charlotte and me. There were boys there too (as there were wherever
there was pop music), but it was the girls who had the power, the girls who
defined the atmosphere that night, and we jittered for Johnnie’s arrival with
the blissful, magical urgency that one can only feel when one is young and
modern and full of desire. Desire! It was the only word for it. Occasionally.
an adult face swam into view — an usherette or someone selling ice cream — and
I felt the gap between us, the brilliant youthquakers, the teenmob, and them,
the sufferers and the forty-somethings, open up like a great chasm separating
one species from another. They might as well have been three hundred years old —
they might as well have been from another time entirely. They were nothing like
us.

By the
time the curtain rose for Johnnie, the excitement had reached fever pitch and
Charlotte and I had become creatures I had never known before. As the piano
became visible on the smooth blackness of the stage, the screaming accelerated
and I felt a wave of energy that had started in the soles of my feet rise up
through my body like mercury and set the tips of my fingers on fire so that I
had to throw my hands into the air as if they were separate from the rest of
me. I had no choice — it was simply happening, and I was watching and
following.

‘Johnnie!’
yelled Charlotte, the word lost in the greatness of the noise from the crowd
behind us.

‘JOHNNIE!’
I screamed, really screamed. It was like shouting against the roar of a tidal
wave but we couldn’t stop. For there he was, beautiful, unreal, skinny as a
rake, trembling as if he had been shot through with electricity — Johnnie Ray.
He smiled, and we felt weak; he spoke to us and we nearly collapsed. He started
to sing ‘The Little White Cloud That Cried’, and I would not have been
surprised if the roof of the Palladium had caved in under the strain of such
need for him. I looked at Charlotte and saw her cheeks soaked with tears, and
she looked at me and we both yelled with laughter for neither of us, for all
that we had longed for this evening, could have prepared for the way that we
felt at that moment. All around us, in the great velvet womb of the Palladium,
girls stood up and screamed as if possessed with a religious fervour; if Elvis
was to become the King, then here was our John the Baptist, wailing and
proclaiming on the stark wilderness of that stage, honey, locusts and all. He
held us in the palm of his hand, and there was no place in the world that we
would rather have been. When Johnnie stood on top of the piano and beat the
keys like a madman, unleashing his demons and driving us on to want more, more,
more
— I closed my eyes and framed the image for ever.

Charlotte
turned to me at the end of the song. . ‘Bloody amazing!’ she said.

‘Oh
help, I love him.’

‘I
know,’ said Charlotte. ‘Isn’t his suit divine?’

(To be
truthful, I had barely noticed what Johnnie was wearing — it simply wasn’t
important to me — but Charlotte’s eye for detail had missed nothing. She even
remarked on the colour of his shoes on the way home — why on earth she spent
any time studying his footwear instead of his glorious face, I do not know.) As
he started ‘Whisky and Gin’ and the cheering and the shrieking filled my
senses, I thought of Mama, shattered and torn by the war and Papa’s death, and
I wished with all my heart that she could understand how it felt to be us that
night — how it felt to feel eighteen and unbeaten, eighteen and alive.

‘He’s
coming down!’ yelled the girl behind me, and sure enough, halfway through ‘Walking
My Baby’ Johnnie descended from the stage and the noise grew so great that for
a moment I felt almost afraid. Charlotte and I stood, transfixed, hands halfway
up to our faces, waiting to see what he would do next. He came closer to us,
closer and closer, until he was right beside us, then, without warning, he
leaned down and kissed me on the cheek.

‘Hey,
kid,’ he said, smiling. I said nothing, just stared, my mouth wide open, while
all around us the crowd roared and girls fell over each other trying to get to
him, ripping the place apart with their screams.

‘JOHNNIE!’
filled my ears and my chest, and he smiled at the girls behind us, winked and
then, just as quickly as he had come down and spent that split second inside my
life, breathing my air, being
my
Johnnie, he was back up on the stage
again, wailing into the microphone, wringing his hands and shuddering with the
emotion of the song.

‘It
happened!’ Charlotte muttered, over and over again. ‘He found us! He kissed
you!’

‘I don’t-believe
it!’ was all I could manage in reply.

‘Harry
must have
known,’
said Charlotte. ‘He must have known that these seats —
well, that’s why all those girls were so desperate to sit here …’ She trailed
off.

I knew
she was right. Harry had known all along that if we sat where we sat, Johnnie
would come right over and kiss us. He arranged it for us. It was then that the
oddest feeling came over me. Johnnie started to sing ‘Cry’ and my head was
suddenly filled with the oddest, most jumbled up feelings I had ever felt, and
the more they jumped around inside my head, the more I struggled to join them
up to make a proper picture.

On the way out of the
theatre, much to my astonishment, I heard someone calling my name.

‘Hey!
Penelope!’ I turned round to see Deborah and Sarah, two of the girls from the
episode on the village green.

‘Oh!’ I
said. ‘Hello!’

Charlotte
raised her eyebrows at me questioningly. ‘We’re going to hang around and wait
for him,’ explained Deborah in a low voice. ‘You want to come too?’

I
opened my mouth and Charlotte spoke. ‘Yes.’ She stuck out her hand. ‘Pleased to
meet you. Charlotte Ferris.’

Deborah
glanced down at her shoes. ‘Are you the girl who makes the dresses?’

‘Yes, I
suppose so.

They
looked at her with new respect.

‘Come
on,’ ordered Sarah.

Chapter
20

MY
AMERICAN HEROES

We stood outside the stage
entrance for what felt like an hour, but in fact was no more than about ten
minutes. There were a large number of girls out there with us, all of whom
looked as if they had done this sort of thing a million times before; some had
78s and posters for Johnnie to sign while others were just singing his songs
and swaying, smoking and giggling in groups. Johnnie had fired everyone up;
some of the girls actually pushed through the barriers and a number of
policemen appeared and pulled them away. I stood back, my mouth slightly open,
amazed. Johnnie had unleashed something wild in us, something that had been
there all along but had been squashed down by the war and our parents. He made
us unafraid. All of us girls made a curious collection that night — all of us
dressed up to the nines in what we imagined Johnnie would like best, filling
the city night with the smell of cheap scent (Yardley’s Fern on forty or so
girls was asphyxiating beyond belief) and even cheaper lipstick — all of us
desperate for something that we didn’t know all that much about, a man, and
love, and to feel grown up and beautiful. Every so often the door would open
and some unfortunate sound engineer or stagehand would venture out prompting
hopeful yells followed by wails of disappointment.