I Think I Love You

by Allison Pearson

  “Look at Cyrano de Bergerac,” she went on. “He wrote love letters on behalf of a numbskull so that he could win the heart of a fair lady. The numbskull, that is.”

  “I know who Cyrano is, thank you, Zelda. And the whole point is that he loved the lady himself, but didn’t think he could make her love him back because of his enormous conk. His target audience was one. Roxanne was a pearl beyond price. Whereas I am writing to a million girls who wet themselves at the slightest opportunity. And I know you won’t believe this, but I do not love them from afar. Not one of them. And why don’t I love them? Because they are roughly as intelligent as that cardboard box. And how do I know that? Because they seriously believe that the rubbish I produce on my Smith Corona here represents the actual, sacred sayings of Saint bloody David bloody Cassidy. That’s what they’re like. They’re like peasants in 1321. You give them a bit of dead badger skull and tell them it’s the funny bone of the Blessed Virgin Mary and they fall down in a dead faint and give you everything they own, including the cow. I am writing for peasants.”

  There was a pause. Zelda smiled, as she would at a child who was nearing the end of a tantrum.

  “It means a lot to the girls,” she said quietly. “We provide a service. We are making them happy.”

  “But I don’t want them to be happy. I want them to fall down a mine shaft.”

  Zelda looked at the young man with the scruffy beard. He was tipped back as far as his chair could go, with a pair of what appeared to be coal miner’s lace-up boots parked on his overflowing desk. What was he—twenty-two, twenty-three? She couldn’t remember what he’d put on his application, but she did recall that his CV had suggested he could make things up from unpromising raw material, which was a perfect fit for the job. Roy said he was a stuck-up little ponce and didn’t want to hire him. A journalist of the old school, Roy was the proprietor of Worldwind Publishing, and he recommended the applicant make a visit to the barber to take several inches off his hair. It hung in a lank, dirty-blond curtain obscuring his face. Zelda thought it a rather wonderful face, but she would never have said so. In fact, when he forgot to be cynical, Bill had a rascally charm and a grin that reminded Zelda very much of that lovely young man she had seen only last week in some film at the Odeon. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. Anyway, Zelda had insisted they should give Bill a chance and she was right. In the three months he had worked as the chief—indeed the only—feature writer for The Essential David Cassidy Magazine, William Finn had shown a real flair for his work. The readers seemed to love him. Sales of the David Cassidy Love Kit had gone through the roof since Bill had tweaked the advertisement with some well-chosen, poignant observations about the many ways a fan could demonstrate her devotion.

  His exclusive story about how two fans in Manchester set fire to themselves after learning David’s tour had been canceled was touched with genius, although Zelda conceded that a certain poetic license had been applied to an incident that had involved a single poster and a box of matches. But consider the postbag. It was so heavy poor Chas could no longer get it up the stairs in one go. There was some quality in Bill that made the girls actually believe they had a direct connection to David. No, she very much didn’t want to lose the goose that laid the golden prose, so Zelda tried again in her best, soothing kindergarten-teacher voice.

  “Now now, William. You don’t really want to throw our lovely young lady readers down a mine shaft, do you?”

  He rewarded her with a smile of truce. “Okay, I want them to grow up strong and sane and to realize that they have wasted the best part of their youth having pointless dreams about a wanker in a cheesecloth shirt.”

  “All girls do something like this, William. They wouldn’t be girls if they didn’t. Fantasy is an important part of growing up. We can’t all sit around and read Shakespeare, you know.”

  “At least Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.”

  “If you say so.” Zelda narrowed her eyes, like someone thinking over a dark rumor.

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” Bill stared at Zelda. “You’re not serious. You don’t really—”

  “Bacon!”

  “Oh, come off it, Zelda, just because—”

  “On toasted white, please! With a dollop of brown sauce. And if they have any Twiglets. Thanks, Chas!”

  Zelda sang out her instructions to the office dogsbody, who did what he was told but did it with such unrepentant surliness that you ended up half wishing he would say no.

  “Bill?” He groaned the name from the narrow doorway to the stairs.

  “Um, turkey mayonnaise if they’ve got it. You know, the one that looks like sick. Thanks, Chas. Use the change from yesterday. And a drink.”

  “Cherryade? Passed your Corona fizzical yet?”

  “Bog off.”

  Chas turned and lumbered down the stairs. It sounded like a piano being moved.

  Zelda turned back brightly to Bill.

  “Where were we?”

  “You were about to make a complete ar—”

  “Thank you, William. All I was trying to say was that these girls you are so rude about have certain dreams and longings that we are able to fulfill. That is our business. The wish-fulfillment business. There are plenty of creative people who would leap at the chance.”

  “Creative.” Bill lowered his head in shame and stared at his boots.

  “Certainly. And I know you won’t accept a compliment, being too grand for the rest of us, Mr. La-di-da Bachelor of Arts from the University of Suffolk—”

  “Sussex, actually.”

  “But I happen to think, William, that you have a certain knack for writing these letters of Mr. Cassidy’s. I would go further than knack. I would say a gift.”

  “Gift.” His head sank lower. His nose was level with his navel. There was a stain on his trousers the shape of Venezuela.

  “Absolutely a gift. I would kill for such a talent. As it is, I am left to lay out the magazine and paste it together and arrange picture credits and all the other things that you would consider beneath you.”

  “I never—”

  “Oh, I’m not complaining. I enjoy my work, which is more than you ever seem to do. All I’m saying is that you have proved yourself surprisingly good at pretending to be somebody else. You could have been an actor. Or a spy.”

  “Or a contender.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Nothing.” Bill heaved himself up in his chair, looked up at Zelda and smiled. “Sorry. I know I should be grateful. But really, Zelda … like I say, it’s not just the writing, it’s who I’m writing for.” He stuck a hand into the heap of loose papers on his desk and pulled out a sheet of A4, light pink in color and stained with what he hoped were meant to be tears. A stale yet aggressively sweet metallic smell rose to Zelda’s nostrils.

  “Charlie,” she said.

  “Who’s Charlie?”

  “Charlie the perfume. The ones who really love him tip their favorite scents on the letters. There’s one girl from Truro who writes eight letters to every issue—”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yes, I suppose she’s trying to wear us down by sheer force of numbers.”

  “Like carpet-bombing.”

  “Sort of, except it doesn’t work.”

  “Like carpet bombing.”

  “What?” Zelda wrinkled her nose. The wider world was offensive to her, like a blocked drain.

  “Forget it. So does this Cornish girl get her stuff in?”

  “Once, and that was enough. My mistake. It only encouraged her. She sent sixteen more by the following Tuesday. And they really stink. Gallons of Old Spice. We think she gets it from her dad.”

  “Could be worse. Could be Hai Karate.”

  “Or Tabac.”

  “No,” said Bill solemnly. “That would burn through the paper.” He seemed to lose his thoughts for a moment, as if following the memory of old aromas. Then he shook his head, to clear it, and held up the pink correspondence. He gave a cough, and read o
ut loud:

  I want to let you know I care.

  So much I find it hard to bear.

  I see your photos on the wall,

  But I know you’re not there at all.

  I think about you night and day,

  And all the time I hope and pray

  The day will come when I shall see

  Your own eyes, David, look at me.

  They say you have no actual zits

  And no desire to feel my tits.

  Zelda gasped in shock and put a protective hand to her own ample bosom. She had gone the same color as the letter.

  “I made up that last bit,” said Bill, with modest pride.

  “Mmm, sometimes,” she said at last, gulping the word out, “I wonder if—”

  “I mean, don’t they realize, these daft kids, I don’t even own a cheesecloth shirt, let alone a necklace made from puka shells. What kind of sea creature is a puka, anyway? Look at me. I’m wearing the bottom half of a brown suit from John Collier that cost eleven quid. I don’t want to wear a suit, but you keep telling me this is a proper job. I want to wear jeans, except that my jeans aren’t like David Cassidy’s. I don’t unbutton the fly at the top so you can see my pu—”

  “William!”

  “Well, I don’t. I do it up properly. And I’m not sure I even have any eyelashes, let alone long ones. He looks like a Jersey calf. And I don’t have mirrored shades because I would look a total spaz and because it’s always dark here anyway, unlike sunny bloody California, and because people would take the mickey and look into the mirrored bits and try to brush their hair. The only thing I can do like David Cassidy is sing. I was in the school choir and I did a solo on ‘Morning Has Broken.’ My aunt made me sing it into a tape deck afterward. Christ almighty.”

  “All of which proves what a good mimic you are. My point in the first place.” Zelda had recovered her composure. “Anyone who can make a girl sit down and write a poem as heartfelt as that must be doing something right.”

  “Heartfelt? Zelda, they don’t have hearts. They have a bucket of raging hormones and a need to follow whatever their friends are doing and not fall behind, whether they want to or not. They think they’re in love, but it’s just a projection. They’re like … like illusionists, deceiving themselves.”

  Zelda was out of her depth here. She felt the conversation slip its moorings and drift from her grasp, into areas where she had no experience and even less wish to go. Almost three decades in the magazine business had taught her what worked, and that was that. The year she started as a typist on Picture Post, thousands of bobby-soxers had gone crazy for a new kid called Frank Sinatra at the New York Paramount. The girls refused to leave their places between shows, even to go to the lavatory. “Not a dry seat in the house,” one reporter joked. That phrase had stuck in Zelda’s mind, witty yet strangely animal and unpleasant. What did it tell you about the young female that she was prepared to wet herself in order to deny another girl the chance to get near her hero? Poor William was a bit of an intellectual. He hadn’t woken up to the power of what he was dealing with. She would have to send him to a Cassidy concert, where he could observe the little lionesses when their prey came into view. The February concerts had been canceled because David had to have an operation. Roy was furious, of course, what with having a whole vanful of memorabilia to unload. Now he’d have to store it in a lockup on York Way till spring, when there were two concerts penciled in. One for Manchester, one for Wembley.

  Zelda smiled. Imagine William standing like Gulliver with all those teenies surging around him. She loved the idea of the pretend David coming face-to-face with the real one. Wouldn’t mind being there herself actually.

  “Chas will be back with the sarnies,” she declared, and moved away from the features area, in stately fashion, heading for the safe haven of her desk, which indicated its superiority to the rest with a partition made of potted plants. In its bottom drawer was a pack of John Player Specials and half a bar of Old Jamaica, for after the bacon sandwich. Nice cup of Nes. All would be well.

  Bill had not wanted the job with Worldwind Publishing, but when Roy Palmer made him the offer even he could see that he didn’t really have a choice. Eleven months after leaving college with a degree that was lower than his abilities but still far better than he deserved—given that he had spent his final year honing his pinball skills in the arcade on Brighton pier—he had pretty much reached the end of the road. That long, glittering road marked Graduate Opportunities. After that, he stumbled onto the potholed, dusty path where the unchosen have to accept that, instead of a career, they will be lucky to end up with a paycheck.

  The closest Bill had gotten to an occupation worthy of his potential was being shortlisted for a traineeship with one of London’s top advertising agencies. He had endured a two-day assessment at a hotel in the Cotswolds with fifteen ruthless individualists all competing to show how well they worked in teams. Bill had shone in the copywriting exercise, but during the product pitch he had become insanely irritated by a girl called Susie. You could actually see the agency’s directors watching Susie and writing down adjectives like bubbly and warm.

  After a brand-recognition exercise for a disgusting new fruit cordial, one of the directors said, with unfeigned eagerness, “Susie strikes me as being a real people person.”

  It was the first time that Bill had come across the expression, and he hated it on sight. What other kind of person was there for crying out loud? A scorpion person?

  It was bad, obviously, that Bill had spoken these thoughts aloud, and even worse that the meeting room had fallen into a silence colder than church on Christmas Eve. So it was probably inevitable that he would be sent home early, deposited unceremoniously at Banbury station with his overnight bag and a complimentary bottle of Jungle Qwash, because he was not enough of a people person. On balance, Bill thought that he was ready to sell his soul, but it turned out he wasn’t prepared to suppress everything that made him who he was just to flog an orange drink that burned the roof of your mouth and made you thirstier than a beaker full of bleach.

  Not long after the advertising fiasco, there was a promising interview for a local radio station. He pictured himself at the microphone, preferably in the late slot, playing a roster of obscure but addictive songs to sobbingly grateful listeners. He would wear headphones the size of boxing gloves. He would become a cult. Instead of which it was made clear, by a claret-nosed station manager named Dodge, that Bill’s gifts would be dedicated entirely to filing—to the plucking of discs, not of his own choosing, from the station’s record library, and their careful replacement after airplay. He was offered the job on the spot, with an extra five pounds slapped on to the weekly pay packet “if you don’t mind a bit of cleaning,” which he did, actually. “Pride comes before a fall,” his mother used to warn. It was not a saying that Bill had ever understood, but at that moment, as he refused the offer with alacrity, he felt both proud and fallen. He remembered looking back at the figure of Dodge, who stood in reception, unsurprised, blowing his nose and staring long and hard at the contents of his handkerchief.

  There were some rewards. Over the barren weeks of applications and rejections, Bill had time, at least, to improve his fingering on the guitar. He also grew a small experimental beard, which he hoped would be construed by those in the know as an affectionate tribute to Eric Clapton, but which was described by his sister Angie, whom he ran into just off Denmark Street, as “seaweed clinging to a rock.”

  It was around this time that his girlfriend, Ruth, started to lose patience with him. When they first met, in his final year at Sussex, Ruth thought she had a catch. She thought she had bagged herself a boyfriend who was going places in the world, and those places clearly did not include the Camden dole office.

  As the weeks dragged on, Bill had time to develop a theory of jobs. He reckoned you could get an accurate measurement of how far your prospects had dived by the number of stairs you had to climb to the interview. Great j
obs came with lifts. Banks of lifts standing to silver-buttoned attention like the guardians of an ancient citadel. Lifts that arrived with a geisha’s sigh and opened with the delightful ching of money. And beside them there were receptionists, who asked you to please take a seat and Mr. Porter would be right with you. He still dreamed about one receptionist, an Ali MacGraw brunette in a tight red merino wool sweater, who had offered huskily: “Tea and two sugars all right, William?”

  One by one the jobs with lifts slipped from his grasp. He had just reached the basement level of despair when, sitting with a pot of tea and a round of toast in a Chalk Farm café, he spotted a small ad in a corner of the London Evening Standard: “Publishing opportunity for self-starting graduate. Knowledge of pop music an advantage. Lively writing style essential. Desirable central London location. Perks.”

  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.