I Think I Love You

by Allison Pearson

  “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.

  The woman was carrying a baby girl who had damp ringlets stuck to her head and looked grumpy, like she’d just woken from a nap. Angela’s mum seemed surprised when I said why I was there.

  “Oh, sorry, love, the girls aren’t here. They’re over Gillian’s tonight. Bit of a party. Forget, did you?”

  I did forget something. I forgot to tell you my favorite David song. It wasn’t “Could It Be Forever,” not even with that gorgeous, sexy dangling but. It was “I Am a Clown.”

  The single made it only to number three on the U.K. charts, but it was always my personal number one tearjerker. I loved it because it was so sad, so soulful, so sensitive and deep all at the same time. Probably what I thought I was. David sang about being a clown in a circus sideshow. He had to keep smiling no matter what, even though it was killing him on the inside. The first time I heard “I Am a Clown” I got the shivers. Honest to God, I felt that he was speaking to me in code. David felt lonely and trapped in his pop-star life and only I could hear him. And you’d never have guessed it, but being able to feel a bit sorry for him was even better than thinking he was perfect. It was like noticing he had bad skin and not minding. (Which he did, as it happened, and I didn’t mind because David’s spots came up when he suffered with his nerves and all that makeup he had to wear for filming. It wasn’t acne or anything. He was just sensitive, that’s all.)

  If David could be pitied, it meant that he needed me. I had a role to play in his life. Despite all of his wealth and fame and all the millions of girls he could choose from, he needed me.

  David Cassidy was lonely. The thought was strangely thrilling. With me he would not be lonely anymore.

  That’s why I never revealed my favorite song to the other girls. If I told them, then they could copy my idea. It might cost me some crucial advantage when David and I finally met. He was going to be so impressed I hadn’t chosen one of his obvious hits, wasn’t he?

  “Gee, that’s amazing, Petra. You dig ‘I Am a Clown’? Wow. No one else ever noticed that song and it means so much to me. It happens to be my personal favorite.”

  And what would I say back to him?

  Believe me. You really don’t have to worry.
I only want to make you happy. And if you say, Hey, go away, I will. But I think, better still, I’d better stay around and love you. Do you think I have a case? Let me ask you to your face.

  Do you think you love me?

  I THINK I LOVE YOU.

  4

  Twenty to six, and Bill was staring at his second pint. They had only arrived at the pub, he and Pete, seven minutes ago, but already he had ordered and consumed a large, smeared glass of the usual. He didn’t know what the usual was; his own usual was whisky when he could afford it, or Guinness when he could not, or even, on a spring evening, with sunglasses on and no male acquaintances within ten miles, a gin and tonic. But now, in the Cat & Fiddle, not wanting to appear different, or to be mistaken for posh, he had listened to what Pete had asked for and carefully followed his lead. And the usual, it turned out, was most unusual: a pale, brackish draught of what appeared to be canal water, topped with a drift of industrial scum. He had forced it down, then more of the same to take away the taste. Each man was paying for his own; Pete had not paid for Bill’s, and Bill, slipping easily into the habit of meanness, had returned the lack of favor. He had, however, bought a packet of crisps, which sat between them, and into which Pete was now freely plunging his fist. He seemed worked up about something.

  “I mean, it’s bollocks. Just complete and utter bollocks.”

  He paused for effect. Bill, whose mind had been elsewhere, wondered if he was meant to lend support. “Well, it’s certainly—” he began.

  “Right. Total. And the worst thing is, they don’t even know they’re doing it.” His fingers rustled among the crisps. “D’you think it’s a girl thing?”

  “Well, it might—”

  “Has to be. I mean, the way they take one tiny detail and go completely mental over it. Like it’s life or bleedin’ death. You wouldn’t get a bloke doing that, would you?” Pete pulled his fingers out and licked off the salt. He had been to the Gents when they first entered the pub—too quick a visit, Bill reckoned, to have spent time washing his hands.

  “Oh, no, no,” said Bill, who had resolved to agree with everything his new colleagues said. As a strategy for fitting in it was imperfect, but it would do until he came up with a better one. They paused to drink in unison. Pete offered Bill one of Bill’s own crisps, which he declined. There were hardly any left.

  “You’re right,” Pete continued, as if he and Bill were in the midst of a constructive discussion. “It is just girls. They get the record home and play it like a million times, and then their dad comes in to tell them to turn it down, and when he slams the bedroom door the needle jumps, so that there’s this bloody great scratch across, I dunno, ‘Can It Be Forever’ or whatever—”

  “ ‘Could It.’ ”

  “Could it what?”

  “ ‘Could It Be Forever.’ That’s the name of the song, actually.” Bill was on safe ground. For a fraction of a second, he was appalled to discover in himself a sliver of pride: the righteous pride of a man who knows his special subject and is not afraid to correct anyone who doesn’t. In great haste he drained his glass, almost to the lees.

  “Sod off,” said Pete, without rancor, or not much. “Anyways, for about a fortnight they go totally spare, like somebody died, and they hate their parents and won’t eat. And then, this is the mad bit, they sit around with their girlfriends, who are just like them but worse, and they egg each other on, so they get their rockers in a twist—”

  “Knickers.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Knickers,” said Bill. “You get your knickers in a twist, you go off your rocker. They’re different things.” As he spoke, he could hear his voice growing smaller and starting to die. Pete must have heard it, too, because he leaned a bit closer and said: “It’s true, then.”

  “What’s true?” Bill smiled, trying to keep things light. He helped himself to a crisp.

  “What they said, that you’re one of them college wankers.”

  “Who said?” Bill asked in genuine curiosity, but Pete just sniffed. The crisp tasted damp. There was salt on his gums. Not for the first time he felt the full horror of being English: sitting in a packed pub, drinking swill, with someone you don’t care about, being quizzed about your social class. He asked himself—again, not for the first time—what it was like for David, living in California. Even if it was only a tenth as good as the songs made out, only a hundredth as sunny and relaxed as it looked in the films, it had to be better than this.

  He reached for his pint, downed the dregs and used them to rinse his mouth. As he did so, he shook his head, as if trying to rid himself of a thought, like a cow with flies on its eyes. Here I am, he reflected, a graduate, an adult, more or less, and I am jealous of David Cassidy. In his first three months of employment at Worldwind Publishing, Bill had devoted most of his waking hours to studying the life and style of David Bruce Cassidy—or, as Bill had described him to Pete, “that lucky sonofabitch.” The curse sounded false coming out of Bill’s mouth, he knew that. He had to take a run up at it, like a horse attempting a four-bar gate.

  Sun-nuv-vuh-bitch.

  You really needed the proper twang, like someone out of Dirty Harry or The Dirty Dozen—a dirty movie, anyway—to get the full effect, and Bill’s version of a twang was worse than useless. He had never been able to do accents, and his American was especially pathetic; he sounded, and indeed looked, like a man trying to dislodge a shred of meat from a back tooth with his tongue. But, for all that, and despite the fear of making a fool of himself, he loved sonofabitch. He loved it because, for a second, even if it didn’t make him come across as American, it made him feel American. And that was obviously better than being a twat from Tolworth, two stops down from Wimbledon.

  “Sorry, go on about the record,” he said, trying to restart. He could see Pete struggling between the urge to tell his story and the well-worn need to pick a fight. Eventually, he sighed, brushed the empty crisp packet onto the floor and carried on. The fight could wait.

  “Like I said, there’s this scratch, and they decide that’s an omen. Like it means something. Didn’t people used to look at guts to tell the future, Greeks and that?”

  “Absolutely,” said Bill, who let his neck slacken so his heavy head nodded and nodded like one of those toy dogs in the back window of a car. Who on earth had the strength for a fight on a Friday evening, with your spirit sapped by a week of slog at the premier David Cassidy fanzine? Pete could have denied the moon landings, at this moment, or the Holocaust, and Bill would have nodded along.

  “So, they decide that the scratch, which was only caused by her dad, is a message from Cassidy.” Pete would have broken his beer glass and chewed the shards rather than call a pop star, any pop star, by his Christian name. They weren’t friends, him and Cassidy. He didn’t know the bastard. Didn’t have him round for tea. And it wasn’t just pop stars, nancies like that. It was any fella. Surnames, all the way. To Pete, the tragedy of James Bond had come the previous year, when Connery had given way to Moore. The Aussie bloke didn’t count.

  “And because the scratch is on that song, the ‘Forever’ one,” he went on, “it means that Cassidy is striking it out, or some crap like that, or changing his mind. Instead of Can It Be”—he glanced at Bill, daring him to a challenge—“it means, sod the question, It Will Be. You Will Be Mine. You, you girls, sitting there with your purple hot pants and your stupid gonks.” For Pete, this was rhetoric enough, and he made a swiping motion, one hand across his face, as if to brush away the blame. “I read it,” he explained. “In that bloody rag we put together.”

  “And in Amsterdam,” Bill said, firing back, “he wore this stupid red stuff along the edges of his suit.” He thought it was a good idea to borrow some of Pete’s outrage, even though he couldn’t feel it himself. What Pete took as an insult—to England, to his manhood, to his certain knowledge of women—Bill treated as mildly intriguing. But he couldn’t admit as much, so he pretended to be picking up the thread. “He had on th
is white catsuit”—Pete reacted to the word with a vigorous air show of mock masturbation, the other hand gripping his glass—“and it was trimmed in scarlet. And I promise you, we had more letters about that—what’s it called? Frogging?”

  Finally, they both had something to laugh at. Bill was warming to his theme, surprising himself in the process, and he went on.

  “And these letters told us what the red meant. One girl had taken the photo we had and traced it, on greaseproof paper, and she sent us the tracing to prove that he was actually trying to spell out her signature in red braid.”

  “Christ.” Pete was bent low, for some reason, as if grieving at all this female folly. His nose was almost touching the beer mats.

  “And another thought that the frogging, the stuff on Cassidy’s suit, was a dragon.”

  “What?”

  “She thought the pattern looked like a dragon’s head.”

  “What?”

  “And that was meant to signify the Welsh dragon.”

  “What?”

  “And she was from Pontypool, so she thought Cassidy’s catsuit design was aimed at her.” Bill waited for Pete to reply, like someone hitting back a tennis ball, but even Pete was flattened into silence. Swiftly he finished his drink, slipped from the bar stool and made for the door. Bill shrugged and followed him. They stood outside the pub, on a slender one-way street, where the air was no more breathable than within. Traffic fumes spilled from the road and met the yeasty waft of beer. Bill could barely move.

  “ ’Lo, mates.”

  A bent figure was suddenly by their side, grinning up at them. It was Chas, the ageless office boy, scampering and talking through his teeth. He looked like an old English elf from the cover of a prog-rock album.

  “Bin in the pisser?”

  That was the office nickname for the pub, derived from rhyming slang. Bill had been stumped for a while, and Pete had had to spell it out for him, wearily, as if explaining a sum to a child. “Cat & Fiddle, piddle, pisser. Jesus, I thought you were s’posed to be the clever clogs.”