She was in her usual perch on top of the radiator, slender legs dangling down, sheer navy socks pulled up to her thighs, leaving only a few inches of pale flesh exposed. I tried not to look at the flash of white panties, which made me think of her new boyfriend and of what he might be doing to her. How I longed for those long socks of Gillian’s. My socks came to just below the knee and my mother insisted I wear garters to hold them up. The elastic burrowed into the skin, leaving an angry red bracelet round my calves. It took ages to fade. Sometimes, when I lay in the bath and looked at the marks on my legs, I liked to pretend I was a tortured saint. One who had courageously kept the faith and endured the red-hot irons of sadistic torturers with pointy beards, giving absolutely nothing away. Stigmata rhymed with garter.
“What’s so funny then about David singing ‘but’? I don’t get it,” Gillian demanded.
God had made Gillian perfect, but in His infinite wisdom He had left out a sense of humor. Maybe if you’re that pretty, He reckons you don’t need one. God probably thinks it’s worth giving a sense of humor only to those of us who have to laugh at all the rubbish bits that are wrong with us.
“It’s not funny,” I said, trying to silence Sharon with a pleading look.
She was supposed to be on my side, not Carol’s. When we were at her house doing our David scrapbooks, I felt we were getting really close, but at school I never quite knew whose friend she was. Sharon’s shifting loyalty stung more than Carol’s crude taunts.
“I was only saying ‘Could It Be Forever’ is David’s best song, like you said, Gillian,” I went on, hoping that saying Gillian’s name would make them stop. They were all scared of upsetting her, even Carol.
Gillian took a pot of Vaseline out of her bag and dabbed a blob on her bottom lip. She had this way of moving the jelly, flexing and rolling both lips to push it along and get even coverage without needing to use her finger. Like all of Gillian’s actions, it was seductive and mesmerizing. We all tried to copy her, but ended up with jelly on our teeth.
Gillian was looking at me as though I were something in a shopwindow she might seriously consider buying. For one brilliant moment I thought she was going to smile. Maybe even invite me round to her house to listen to records. Then she slid off the radiator, yanked down her skirt and said: “That’s the aggravating thing about you, Petra. You’re always agreeing, aren’t you?”
• • •
Our form room was out in one of the temporary classrooms next to the netball court. Better known as the Cowsheds. Freezing in winter, baking hot in summer. Walls so thin you could hear a chair being scraped back in the class next door. They called it the temporary block, but it had been there since the war.
On the way back to afternoon registration, Angela told us she had some news. I could tell from the little secret twitching smile on her face that she’d been saving it up like the last sweet in a packet. Her cousin, a girl called Joanna Crampton who lived in London, had phoned the night before. David was coming over to the United Kingdom to do two concerts at the end of May. It was for definite. Her cousin had read it in the Cassidy mag, which she got a week earlier than us because she lived in Hounslow. Everything took so long to reach South Wales. The whole world could have ended, London could be destroyed by a nuclear bomb and we’d still be stuck in Double Geography for all we knew about it.
The concert was on May 26 at a place called White City.
White. City. It sounded like a beautiful marble palace to me. Like the Taj Mahal maybe. I pictured the glittering paved road leading up to the turreted entrance and the sound of softly trickling fountains. The date was instantly imprinted on my brain like it was my wedding day: May 26.
“They’re saying it’s his last public performance ever,” announced Angela with a quiver of pride.
“He’s not coming again? Never! We gotta go then, Petra!” shrieked Sharon, slipping her arm through mine. “David’s gonna be looking for us, mun. We stopped biting our nails and everything. We got four hundred and thirty-nine photos of him and now he’s saying it’s his last concert. There’s gratitude for you!”
It felt so nice to hear our laughs twining round each other, her hiccupy soprano, my scratchy alto. I knew Sharon was sorry about Carol and the sexy but.
“If we want tickets,” Angela said, “we’ve got to get a move on and send a postal order. One pound each, it is.”
“I got one of them from my auntie for half a crown,” Sharon said.
“What’s a pound in the old money then?” someone asked.
Olga did the calculation while the rest of us were still counting on our fingers. She had a fantastic head for figures, did Olga.
Before we went decimal, it used to be twelve pennies to the shilling. Three years later and I was still scared of the decimal point. Put it in the wrong place and you could be out by hundreds. My thirteen-year-old brain clung stubbornly to pounds, shillings and pence. I particularly mourned the passing of the threepenny bit, which felt heavy and hot in your hand and had a really satisfying bumpy edge. It was definitely the best coin to play with in your pocket if you were nervous.
“Ach, typical British. Only they would really be counting in twelves in the first place,” my mother said. Evidence of the backwardness of her adopted homeland was one of her favorite things.
Gillian announced that she had twenty-five pounds in post office savings. A small fortune, it made us gasp. Carol said she could nick a load off her dad, who ran the amusement arcade down by the pier and always had a big bag of change.
“So we’ve got a tidy bit already. Problem is, we have to think about the train fare now and the Underground the other end,” Olga said, appointing herself treasurer of the trip, though she didn’t have many rivals for the post.
As the girls added up the money they had, plus the money they thought they could get, I felt panic rising within me, a salty tide that reached the back of my mouth and made me feel my lunch was about to come up. This couldn’t be happening. I’d always felt there’d be plenty of time to see him. Every cell in my body was getting ready for that meeting. He’d wait for as long as it took, I knew. Until the spots across my oily T-zone were gone. Until my breasts were worthy of a proper bra. (Playtex trusted intimate apparel for the Woman You Want to Be. Pink, underwired. Page 78 of the Freemans catalog.) Until I had gotten the Bach cello suites exactly how they were supposed to sound. Pain and joy braided tightly together, like my mother plaiting my hair until my scalp squealed for mercy. Pain and joy, pain and joy. One day, I planned to play my favorite pieces for David. Even if words failed me, music never would.
But now there were no more untils. David’s final concert in Britain was less than a month away. After that, he was never coming back. I’d be like that girl in the play we were doing in English. She never told her love but let concealment like a worm in the bud feed on her cheek. That’s exactly what it felt like. Something gnawing away at your insides. I knew more about David than anybody. All of my preparations could not go to waste.
Somehow, I would get a ticket and go to him at the White City.
There were things my mother didn’t know. My mother didn’t know that she had chosen a really bad name for me, because Petra was also the name of a famous dog on children’s TV. She didn’t know that whenever our teacher called the register and got to me, the whole class started barking, or at least most of the boys did.
My name came next but one to last, so I always had a couple of minutes in which I pretended I was too busy to care about what was coming up. Fitting a new cartridge in my pen, carefully wrapping the old one in blotting paper, searching my satchel under the desk for a sharpener I knew perfectly well was in my brown furry pencil case.
First Mr. Griffiths had to get through the Davieses, including poor Susan Smell, all the Joneses, one Lewis (my Sharon), one Morgan, mad Gareth Roberts, then all the Thomases—
“Karen Thomas?”
“ ’Ere, sir.”
“Karl Thomas?”
&nb
sp; “By’ere, sir.”
“Siân Thomas? Susan Thomas?”
There were six Thomases altogether, including two cousins who looked like speckled brown eggs. Their dads were identical twins who took turns working the ham machine down at the Coop wearing nets over their sandy hair so the dandruff didn’t fall in the meat. After the last Thomas, there was a pause that always felt like an eternity in hell to me before …
“Petra Willi—?”
“Woof! Woof! Awooooo.”
“Petra Williams. Quiet! I said, QUIET!”
The class became a kennel. Yapping, snarling, barking. In the back row, Jimmy Lo threw his head back and howled like a wolf under a full moon.
My new friends in Gillian’s group shot me quick, encouraging smiles. The smiles said they were really sorry and embarrassed for me. Mostly, though, I think they were just glad it wasn’t them who had the name of the TV dog.
“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:
Hitler has only got one ball,
Göring has two but very small,
Himmler has something sim’lar …
(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 Susa
n 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.
I Think I Love You Page 5