I Think I Love You

by Allison Pearson

  I told Sha I was afraid my plan for going to see David would never work. The small white lies I’d told my mother were already getting bigger and grayer. I had written the story I’d told my mum so far in my diary and put it in the hiding place under my bed so I could keep track of all the fibs. The thought of my mother finding out that I was going to a pop concert was as painful as the thought of not going with the others to the White City.

  Sharon said everything would be okay, she and her mum would cover for me. That was one advantage to my mother refusing to mix with any women in the town because they were all common and went out to the fish van in slippers with curlers in their hair. At least she couldn’t compare notes with the other mums.

  I loved it down there by the pier. My mother claimed the sea was depressing. Ach, always coming in and out, reminding you that it had been going in and out before you were born and would be going in and out centuries after you’d died. The sea was indifferent to human suffering, my mother said. But I found comfort in the things she hated. The sucking of the sea as it drew breath to come in and then the roar as it pulled back, dragging the pebbles with it. Nature’s lullaby, like a mother saying hush forever to a crying baby. Shhuuussssh. Shhooooossh. If you laid your head right back and molded your arms and legs into the pebbles, you could feel yourself disappearing. That was a good feeling; not being there anymore. I liked to do it in the summer when the warmth of the stones got into your bones.

  Every time we went down to the beach the sunset was different. Sometimes the clouds were so beautiful and crazy that if you painted them like they really looked, people would have said you were making it up. That evening, the sun was like a lozenge that had been sucked until it was so thin it was about to break.

  “Look,” I said to Sharon, “a Strepsils sunset.”

  I told my mother we were going to see Handel’s Messiah.

  I knew she’d approve. She liked high culture. In fact, she approved of altitude in general. High heels, high opera, highball glasses that she got from the Green Shield Stamps catalog and filled with lime and Cinzano Bianco and loads of crushed ice. “The poor woman’s cocktail,” she called it. Tall men in high places would have been my mother’s ideal.

  It wasn’t a complete lie about the Messiah. There would be singing and worship of a kind and we would need to take a train and money for something to eat. I had found the concert in the Forthcoming Events section of the South Wales Echo. Same night as David’s White City concert, May 26, only it was in Cardiff, not London. So it was perfect, really.

  Except this was the first big lie I’d told her in my life and I was scared from the start. If I hadn’t wanted to go so badly, I’d never have dared. My heart felt like a fish flubbing around in a net that was gradually being pulled tighter and tighter.

  “Handel is sublime,” my mother had said when I told her. “What is the choir, Petra?”

  “The Cwmbran Orpheus,” I said.

  “Not bad. Really not of the highest, but not szo bad,” she said, removing a leather glove and raking a hand through her wavy blond hair. “I am glad you make this effort, Petra. Your friends are nice girls, really I hope, good families and so on?”

  “Yes.” I tried to think of my mother meeting Sharon’s family, but my mind blanked at the prospect.

  We were standing in the narrow, stepped bit of land at the back of the house that my dad had turned into a fruit and vegetable patch. It was a garden to feed us. The only concession to decoration was a row of sweet peas along the brick wall that divided us from Mr. and Mrs. Hughes next door. (Even after seventeen years my parents were still not on first-name terms with their neighbors, and never would be, not in Wales.) The green stalks of the sweet peas twirled upward around wigwams made of bamboo. When they appeared, the flowers—in pink and white and violet—looked like the finest paper rosettes. Sweet peas were the kind of flowers fairies slept in. Carol told us one day that she didn’t believe in God. He had just been invented by old men to stop young people enjoying themselves. But, I ask you, why would Nature go to so much trouble to make something so pointlessly beautiful as the sweet pea?

  The scent was delicate and strong at the same time. Intoxicating. That was a word from “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power.” “Noun: intoxication, an abnormal state that is essentially a poisoning. The condition of being drunk. A strong excitement or elation.”

  My mother taught me to cut the flowers every single day of summer; if you did that, they kept coming back. She admired the sweet pea for its abundance, I think, but also for its determination not to let beauty die.

  To anyone else, I suppose it wouldn’t have looked like much of a garden, but I loved being out there with my dad. It was our place. He would smoke his pipe and, when it went out, I ran back indoors to fetch his matches. He had a pouch for his tobacco, and we would sit on the top step behind the compost while Dad scraped out the sticky black stuff from the pipe with a match, then he would take ages pressing the new stuff in, tamping the brown leaf down till it was like a nest. Dad said I was clever like my mother, because I could read music and got all the grades. But he was the clever one, I’m telling you.

  When Dad was my age, he taught himself the tonic sol-fa and he could play anything he liked. Bought the piano in our front room out of the wages he’d saved until he was eighteen. I didn’t think it was right that when my father was a boy he went down the pit and had to crawl on his elbows and knees to get the coal. But Dad said they were champion days.

  “Best men in the world, cariad, you couldn’t ask for better.”

  He was sorry when he had to come back to the surface, a job at the steelworks, on account of his bad lungs. Six syllables. New mow cone ee owe sis. It was the longest word I knew. Pneumoconiosis. Occupational hazard.

  Out in the garden, where we wouldn’t disturb my mother, my father would warm up his voice: “Doh, ray, me, fah, soh, lah, te, doh.” You had to breathe from the diaphragm, see, give each note its full weight.

  At the bottom of the garden steps, there was a small brick outhouse that was a toilet before they took a corner of one of our three bedrooms and made it into a bathroom. When I was small, Dad used to carry me out there at night, hitch up my nightie and sit me on the wooden seat. I tried to hold the pee in and let it out quietly because I didn’t want to wake the spiders. The spiders were huge and their webs festooned the brick walls like net curtains for ghosts.

  Climb to the top of our path and you got the most incredible view. The sea was spread out like a glittering cloak all the way across to Pendine Sands, where a man set the world land speed record. You could always tell when a storm was on its way in. The sky over the sea was the color of a saucepan and the clouds turned a sinister yellow, as though the sun behind them was sickening for something.

  “Quickly, please. Hold this bush while I tie it, Petra.”

  The black currant bushes were threshing around in the wind the Saturday before we went to White City. My mother got me to hold each bush while she fixed it with a small piece of twine to a cane. The twine was kept in the front pocket of her suede jerkin and she cut it with a knife. Even when she was gardening my mother appeared chic. That morning, she was wearing some Land Girl–type jodhpurs, which would have made any other woman look like a water buffalo, and a man’s shirt tucked in under a belt that was two shades darker than the trousers. A paisley scarf was loosely knotted at her breast. She looked as dashing as Amelia Earhart standing next to her airplane.

  “Right as rain,” my mother shouted at the sky. “What is so right about rain? Why are the British saying this? Fruits, they need sun.”

  She snatched up a hoe and appeared to point the rusty tip accusingly at my dad, who was sitting on the top step smoking his pipe and just looking at her. The weather was his fault. Everything was his fault. He smiled and threw his hands up in surrender.

  “It’s only a saying, Greta. Don’t take it personal, love. It’s May. There’s plenty of time for them to ripen.”

&nb
sp; “Ach, but they will have no flavor. Only rain flavor.”

  If he could have gone up to the sky and fetched the sun down for her on his back he would, I knew that. My father worshipped my mother, though he never found the right sacrifices to appease her. As far as she was concerned, he had won her by false pretenses, and she would never forgive him for it. When they met, Glynn Williams was the star of the town’s operatic society and my mother was a young soprano. Their duet from Kismet got a write-up in the local paper.

  My mother made a mistake. She thought Dad was going up in the world, when it turned out he had just climbed a hill for a while to take in the view.

  My father had a look of Clark Gable, or so Gwennie in the grocer’s told Mrs. Price the Post. I’d never seen Mr. Gable, so I didn’t know. Every morning, when Dad left home for the steelworks on his motorbike, I would stand by the upstairs landing window and watch him. The deal I struck with God was that if I watched my father till he got right to the end of the road, and never took my eyes off him for one second until he disappeared round the corner, then God would bring him back safe to me. It always worked, so I never dared stop looking.

  The family on my father’s side were short and dark. In old wedding photographs you might take them for Sicilians. My mother mistook Dad’s stocky good looks for manly purpose, while he mistook her angelic blondness and full lips for sweetness. Her disappointment with him colored our days.

  The story went that her parents had bought a passage from Hamburg to New York, but the boat docked at Cardiff one night and they got off in a hurry, thinking it was Manhattan. (Fog, tiredness, a baby crying at the wrong moment.) It was an embarrassing piece of bad timing for a celebrated family of German clockmakers. Growing up in four rooms over a watch shop in the High Street, my mother felt she had been cheated of her destiny. She craved a bigger stage, the one her face deserved. The life her beauty had been designed for was out there somewhere, ebbing away as the shop’s clocks ticked and tocked.

  It’s so hard for a child to understand her parents’ unhappiness. Mine, if only I’d known it, were infected with the virus of incompatibility. Nobody died from it, but nobody lived, either. My mother stayed put and, well, you’d have thought she was a normal wife and mother, but her offended spirit got its revenge.

  Anything could set her off. Me reading a book. Me not reading a book. Greasy hair, spots, which she regarded as self-inflicted although everyone got them, girls and boys. I used to wonder if I was an only child because I’d been such a disappointment.

  There were so many times I wanted to tell my mother about the boys barking at me in class, but it would have meant mentioning Petra the TV dog, and I knew how angry that would make her. She would suspect I had been watching the idiot box. Instead, one night after a really bad day at school, I asked her if I could please be called by my middle name, Maria.

  She raised the palette knife she was using to free a cheesecake from its tin and swiped it at me, narrowly missing my cheek. “No, why are you asking this, you stupid, stupid girl? I told you Petra is a fine name, it was the name of my aunt, who was really a most elegant person in Heidelberg. If you ask me one more time you will be punished, you stupid girl, do you hear?”

  When she went out, my dad liked to dance me round the front room. We weren’t allowed in there with our shoes on. There was a big black radiogram with mesh on the front with a gold surround and three cream Bakelite knobs. Normally, it was tuned to live classical concerts, but on Sunday mornings we were allowed to turn the knob to Family Favorites. My mother approved of Family Favorites because the show was sometimes broadcast from Germany. Soldiers stationed out there sent record requests for their loved ones back home.

  Every Friday night, my mother took my father’s wage packet from him and gave him an allowance to go down to the club. “Your father, he can’t be trusted with money,” she said. He was always my father when she was angry. You should have heard him sing, though. Even in a land famous for song, Dad’s baritone stood out. “I’ve Got a Cruuuussh on You, Sweetie Pie.” That was one song he sang to me. One day, with Dean Martin crooning “That’s Amore” on the radiogram next door, Dad took me in his arms and whirled me round the kitchen. I imagined being in a hot place with my hair pinned up by a single red flower. I imagined being glamorous.

  “Well, we are going to see the Messiah. Kind of.”

  Sharon cracked up. She thought the alibi I had given my mum for where I’d be on May 26 was brilliant.

  We were sitting with Gillian on the grassy bank just above the rugby pitch, talking about our plans for White City.

  “Genius, Pet,” Sharon said. “David is a god to us and you can wear your Sunday-school clothes to go out the house and after you can get changed into your gear round mine. Then you can stay the night when we get back so your mam’ll never suspect, will she?”

  Sharon’s Uncle Jim worked on the railways, in the signal box at Port Talbot, so he’d given her the time of the late train coming back. It was specially for people who went up to London for the shows. We were sure we could get the 11:45 p.m. if we left the concert the minute it ended.

  “What are you two wearing to London?” Gillian asked. Her blue eyes were fixed on the game below, where Stuart was acting captain of the school team.

  Sharon let out a groan. “Oh, God help us, just think what Carol will wear to meet David.” Puckering her lips into a familiar sink-plunger pout, Sha gathered her small breasts in both hands and pushed them up until they were like two blancmanges wobbling over the top of her school blouse. She stood up and started strutting around with her chin jabbing forward and her bum pushed out in imitation of Carol’s stroppy cockerel strut.

  “She’ll wear a blimmin’ bikini and get us all arrested,” I said.

  We both laughed, not unkindly, at the thought of our sexy friend. Gillian ignored our fooling. She was doing that ladylike poise thing she did whenever there were boys around.

  Down on the pitch, the game was turning nasty. Our team, in red and white, was playing a school from the Valleys. Great hulking brutes, they were. The ruck was peeling apart and one ox came bellowing out from the tangle of limbs and lashed out at our prop, till both had blood on their mouths.

  Suddenly, the ball was free and one of our boys got a hand to it. He hugged it to his chest, sidestepped the ox and put on a burst of speed. God, he was fast, mind. The guys who hurled themselves at him looked like they were diving at thin air. For a moment, in the thick of the action, the boy somehow made time for himself. It was magic, the way he seemed to be running in slow motion inside his own private bubble while the other players flailed around him. He got over the line, lightly touched the ball to the ground and turned round, a grimy grin splitting his fair face. Steven Williams.

  “Hey, he’s waving at you, Petra,” Sharon said.

  “He’s waving at us,” said Gillian, who was on her feet, clapping and cheering.

  All my life I would remember that try. See Steven running down the wing, making a mockery of the blundering beasts around him.

  Some things never die.

  6

  It’s you. You are David Cassidy.”

  Zelda was standing next to Bill’s desk in the office, holding up a sweater. It was sleeveless, knitted in stripes of red and white wool, with a row of buttons down the front that winked silver in the light. Around the hem was a strip of wobbling blue, with small stars uncertainly picked out in white. “And look at the back.” She flipped it round to reveal a large capital D in silver satin, stitched somewhere between the shoulder blades. “Stand up,” said Zelda, and Bill, feeling ten years old, did so without hesitation. What power did this majestical woman wield over him, he wondered, that he should rise at her call? She pressed the sweater against his chest. Bill had the second button of his shirt unbuttoned, like someone in an aftershave commercial, and for a second he could actually feel the hairs on his chest stick to the silver D. It was not a pleasant feeling.

  “And it fits, Billy!”
she went on. “Like I said, it’s just you.” Billy? Nobody had called him Billy since a boy called Newsome in the third form, who had veered away with a nosebleed.

  “Don’t call me Billy,” he said, in a low voice. “Please.” He could see Pete the Pimple, at the far end of the room, working up a smirk.

  “Sorry, William dear,” said Zelda. Everything bounced off her, including slights and hurts of every description, whether given or taken. She shook the sweater. “Look at it glitter, though. And have you realized how the stars and stripes are meant to look like the American fl—”

  “Yes, I did notice. Though it’s sort of upside down.” Together, they marveled at the wondrous object. Here, at last, was proof that knitwear could ruin your eyes. It had arrived that morning in a brown box, plastered with 1p stamps. The box sat now at her feet. “Who’s it from?”

  “Clare Possit.” Zelda put down the sweater and produced a rose-pink envelope from some concealed pocket of her floor-length tangerine dress, which looked like it came from Marrakesh and jingled as she moved. “Clare Possit, 47 Lucknow Road, Shrewsbury. Aged fourteen, brown hair, twenty-seven posters, one rabbit called Partridge.”

  “Christ.”

  “Yes, well. Likes toasted sandwiches and knitting. Hence this lovely sweater. Would like to be Mrs. David Cassidy when she grows up.”

  “If she grows up. If he grows up.”

  “Now, now. Clare has been very busy, I’d like you to know. As well as a sweater she encloses a woolly hat, for Manchester you understand.”

  “Of course. In May.”

  “And also a pair of socks.” Zelda delved into the box and held them up gingerly, away from her, as you might a pair of poisonous caterpillars. Bill leaned closer, genuinely interested.

  “That one says ‘CHE’ on it,” he said. “Like Guevara. Is Clare Possit a Maoist? Does Mrs. Possit know about it? Do they even do Cuban liberation in Shrewsbury? I never knew.” He paused, and his face fell. “Oh, I see.” Zelda was holding up the sock’s sad twin. It bore the legend RISH.