Where we lived, girls had Up Top and Down There. You don’t want to let a boy go Down There, but sometimes he was allowed Up Top, if you’d got anything there, like.
Skinny is always being late for hockey and being made to run five times round the games field because you keep your blouse on until the others have left the changing room so they don’t see your sad little girl’s vest. A vest with a single shaming rosebud on the front.
The magazines told us to identify our good points. Mine was eyes. Large and gray-blue, but sometimes green-blue flecked with amber, like a rock pool when the sun is shining on it. But my eyes also had these liver-colored smudges under them that no cucumber slices or beauty sleep could ever cure. I never stopped trying though.
“Petra’s dark circles are so bad she could go to a masked ball and she wouldn’t need a mask,” Gillian said, and everyone laughed, even me. Especially me. Be careful not to show her what really hurts or she’ll know exactly where to put the knife in next time.
My worst feature was everything else, really. I hated my knees, my nose and my ears—basically anything that stuck out. And I had pale skin that seemed even paler because of my dark hair. On a good day, I looked like Snow White in her glass coffin.
Expertly, my mother took my face in one hand, chin pinched between thumb and forefinger and tilted it sharply toward the bathroom light. She squeezed so tight my jaw ached. “You are not unattractive, Petra,” my mother said coolly. “Bones really quite good. If you pluck the brows when you are older, here and here, like szo, revealing the eyes more. You know, you are really not szo bad.”
“It’s too bad, Mum, not so bad. I don’t look too bad.”
“That is exactly what I am saying to you, Petra. Relax, please. You are not szo bad for a girl at her age.”
My mother believed she spoke perfect English and my dad always said now was not the time to tell her she didn’t. Did I mention my mother was beautiful? She had a perfect heart-shaped face and eyes that were wide open yet sleepy at the same time. I’d never seen anyone who looked like my mother until one Saturday night I was round Sharon’s house and there was a show on TV. This woman was sitting on a high stool in a dress made of something that shone like foil with a white fur cape draped around the shoulders. She looked glamorous and hard, but her voice was like a soft purr.
“That’s all woman, that is,” Sharon’s dad said, which made me wonder what the rest of women were. Were they halves or quarters? Marlene Dietrich didn’t look like she had kids, but then neither did my mum. Put my blond mother in a gathering of my father’s dark, stocky Welsh relatives and she looked like a palomino among a herd of pit ponies. Guess which side of the family I took after?
“Got it! Knew it was here somewhere.” Sharon was grinning in triumph. She had found the legs to match the torso. Jackie was giving away a free life-size David poster, but it came in parts over three weeks. Last week was jeans and cowboy boots, this time it was the body. They always saved the head till last.
“So you got to keep buying the mag, isn’t it? Do they think we’re blimmin’ stupid or something?”
I couldn’t see Sharon’s face, but I knew she was frowning and funneling her tongue as she lined up David’s belly with his jeans. This was the hard part. Once she’d gotten them in position she flipped the shiny pages over and I handed her the strip of Sellotape, ever the dutiful nurse to her surgeon. We both stood up to get a better view of our handiwork. It wasn’t a typical David pose. Among the thirty or so posters on Sha’s walls there wasn’t another quite like it. His thumbs were tucked into his waistband, the top button of his fly was undone and the jeans wrenched apart so you glimpsed that inverted V of hair that the zipper normally hid. I tried to think of something funny to say, but my mouth felt dry and oatmealy. The absence of his head was definitely a problem. We urgently needed David’s smiling face to reassure us about what was going on down below. I felt a flicker as a tiny pilot light ignited in my insides and a warmth like liquid spread across my stomach and trickled down into my thighs.
Sharon had seen a penis, but it was her brother’s so it didn’t count. Carol was the only girl in our group who had touched a real one—Chris Morgan’s, in the tree house down the Rec where the boys went to look at dirty mags. Carol said the penis felt like eyelid skin. Could that be right? For weeks after she told us, I would brush a finger over the skin above my eye and I would marvel that something that was made of boy could be so silky and fine, like tissue paper.
When we went through the mags, Sharon and I always flicked past the bad boys. Mick Jagger and that David Bowie, he was a strange one. We sensed instinctively that those stars were not for us. They might want to come down off the posters on the wall and do something. Exactly what they would do we didn’t know, but our mothers would not have it.
“It’s really weird,” Sharon said, contemplating the headless, semi-naked David.
“Weird,” I agreed.
It was our new favorite word, and we used it as often as we could, but it really bothered me that we weren’t saying it right. When David said it on The Partridge Family, it had one syllable. Whirred. Our accent put the stress in the wrong place somehow. However hard I tried, it still came out as “whee yad.” On the cello, I could play any note I liked. I knew if it was wrong the same way I knew if I was cold or hungry, but controlling the sound that came from my own mouth was different. Funny thing is I didn’t even realize I had a Welsh accent. Not until our year went on a school trip to Bristol Zoo and some English girls in the motorway services mimicked the way I asked for food.
“Veg-e-tab-ils.”
I pronounced the e in the middle, but English people didn’t.
They said “vedge-tibuls.”
Why did they bother putting an e in there, then, if you weren’t supposed to say it? So people like me could sound twp and they could have a laugh.
Sharon and me were doing our top rainy-Sunday-afternoon thing to do, listening to David’s Cherish album and flicking through magazines for any mention of him. After Sunday school, which lasted for two long hours, there wasn’t much else to do in our town on the Sabbath, to be honest with you. Everyone abided by some unwritten law that people should stay indoors and keep quiet. Even if you didn’t go to chapel, which we always did because my father was the organist, it felt as though chapel had come to you. My Auntie Mair never used scissors on a Sunday, because God could see everything, even the wax in your ears and the dirt under your nails. You could grow potatoes under there. Achafi! Disgusting. And you didn’t hang your washing out on the line because of what the neighbors would think. The judgment of the neighbors might not be as bad as that of the Lord Thy God, Dad said, but you knew about it sooner.
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, we
ll, 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.
“Nothing in the world could bother me
’Cos I was living in a world of make-believe …”
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.
Dear Luvs,
I guess I’m like everyone else. I just dig getting letters! I like to know who you guys are. That’s why I’m totally thrilled when I get a letter and YOU tell me something about yourself—your favorite color or where you live. Pretty soon, I feel like we’re old friends. That’s so nice.
I reckon I should return the favor. Well, you probably all know what I look like by now … But the thing is I’m sitting in my trailer in between takes of The Partridge Family. It’s a real home from home, with family photographs and all my favorite sodas.
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.
Luv,
David
2
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.
Love you loads,
Loads of love,
Loadsaluv,
Lvu—
“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.
I Think I Love You Page 2